naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
I would also posit that many a cat-caller does it not just because they think someone is hot, but because they enjoy the fact they get to flex "power" over someone by making them uncomfortable with no recourse against them (dovetails nicely with everyone's discussion about lower class men, they don't get to flex power often).
I'm not especially sympathetic to the "sex as a power trip" narrative, but assuming it is basically correct--isn't women dressing in revealing clothing also often an opportunity for them to enjoy flexing their power over men? I think maybe part of what leads you here--
I'm unconvinced cat calling should be an indictable offense, but comparing it to skimpy clothing is ridiculous.
--is a background Western assumption that men have power, and that power is what men have. I occasionally see feminists (especially, "sex positive" feminists) move past this decidedly mid-20th century "Second Sex" narrative into a more postmodern, Foucaultian "women's power is different" narrative. Men may dominate physically, but women dominate socially; men may gatekeep the levers of action, but women gatekeep the levers of status. Occasionally in these "catcalling debates" women will decide to flip the script and start catcalling men; this never works out because men love this shit. Not the truly aggressive and negative stuff--honking at pedestrians, shouting insults--that might well get you punched in the face! But "CHECK THE GUNS ON THIS GUY" is going to put a smile on his face for days.
Putting on a skimpy swimsuit is the psychologically female equivalent of a man looming over someone and saying, "hey, you wanna feel my muscles?"
And sure, you might not find this totally persuasive, but I think it's a long way from ridiculous. Except in the sense that ridicule itself is a way of socially signaling; countenancing the idea that women may have just as much power over men, as men have over women--just in different ways and contexts--is very low status, at present! It's the kind of thing you might expect to hear some "beta cucks huffing as copium," in the parlance of the iPad youths.
Finally, while I agree that society is teaching and reinforcing women to be far more paranoid than is warranted, the Venn diagram between "is willing to break social norms by cat calling" and "is willing to go for a cheeky bottom pinch or other form of personal assault" has overlap, there is a small but credible possibility of violence from that person. The Venn diagram of "has ass out in Lululemon" and "will grab your dick through your shorts" is 0, unfortunately.
The Venn diagram between "is willing to ask you out" and "is willing to rape you at the first opportunity" has overlap, too. Women are wise to be cautious of men! That's clearly true, and surely of importance in this discussion. One of the reasons I started it is because, like other posters have more explicitly suggested, I think there is a kind of person who will feel unsure about the Surrey stings until they see the color of the perpetrator's skin! Or two kinds, if we want to separate them out--people who will only be mad if this is enforced against non-whites and immigrants, and people who will only be mad if it is enforced against native whites outside otherwise-criminally-problematic neighborhoods. As an anti-identitarian I think both of these perspectives are avoiding a real substantive issue, namely, the regulation of interpersonal behaviors in public spaces shared between individuals with diverse and not entirely compatible interests. Likewise, treating women's interests in public space interaction as weightier than men's interests in the same, is identitarian rather than appropriately considerate of all the issues involved.
(One solution some cultures implement is to simply segregate the disparate interests; men from women, white from black, whatever. That is a workable solution in many cases but the West has rejected it, and as a liberal myself I think it is both possible and desirable for people with disparate interests to share public spaces without significant conflict. So I set this solution aside, but I know not everyone does.)
Somewhere downstream from catcalling is a slightly different thing: the cold open. Most people here are not old enough to remember the Clinton years, but a phrase that got kicked around a lot (with direct reference to Clinton's own behavior) was, "it doesn't hurt to ask!" Meaning: the First Amendment protects men asking women if they'd like to go out on a date--or even have sex! Even if those women are strangers! Even if 99.995% of women are going to say no!
We don't seem to actually live in that world anymore; we punish men for even asking, in almost any setting, and so they have in many cases just stopped asking. Norms are forcing these conversations out of almost every environment, onto dating apps that optimize for something other than flourishing. All in the interest of preventing women from ever being put in an uncomfortable position in public--while allowing them to put men into uncomfortable positions through comparable, albeit not identical, practices, like dressing provocatively* while immune from any kind of interpersonal or societal response.
*I here leave aside the tiresome conversations about what counts as provocative, as of course different cultures will have inculcated different views on the matter; as a rule, people know what "sexy" clothing is for people in their sociocultural environment, even if they try to ignore the actual biological implications of the word "sexy."
naraburns
nihil supernum
28d ago
Please remember that this is not PoliticalCompassMemes; pointing and laughing in the style of Nelson Muntz invites only heat, not light.
naraburns
nihil supernum
28d ago
I think it's more an active vs passive thing.
I think you're definitely supposed to think about it this way, in connection with women's dress at minimum, but I also think this simply doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Catcalling is no more active a choice than wearing a bikini, especially with the intent to wear it somewhere conspicuous (i.e. not at the beach, although even at the beach a bikini can be pretty damn conspicuous). You are no more forced to listen to catcalls than you are forced to look at someone in a bikini--though you may not be able to initially prevent yourself from hearing the first or seeing the second, you can always respond to either by plugging your ears or closing your eyes. The idea that catcalling is somehow more "intrusive" doesn't make any sense; we're talking about people sharing public spaces, and finding the proper balance allowing that space to be used by everyone for the activities they prefer. Why does a man's preference for catcalling rank below a woman's preference against it? The answer can't be "intrusiveness" because we actually often want intrusiveness to be a feature of shared public spaces--for example, political protests are deliberately intrusive, and lose their effect when they are not at least somewhat intrusive.
(I think the most likely answer, as others have noted, is probably just "public hetero male horniness is a low class signal," and nobody wants to speak for the interests of horny low class males, who are also often criminal elements, undesired immigrants, the uneducated, the antisocial, etc. Plus I suspect that many men who can keep their mouths shut would like the catcallers to stop, simply because living in a culture where women regularly go out in public half naked is something many heterosexual men prefer, and quietly enjoy.)
Part of this may be a "noncentral fallacy" problem, too--honking your car's horn at a pedestrian when there's no actual danger is a very obnoxious thing to do quite regardless of whether it is part of "catcalling" someone. Whereas wolf whistling is not coded as threatening (though some women take it that way, and seem to think every woman should, even though this is actually fairly paranoid on their part). To use some other examples of obnoxious public behavior, carrying around a protest sign with graphic imagery of aborted babies is gross. It's surely as "intrusive" as someone yelling sloppy compliments in your direction. "Well you don't have to look at it" doesn't really acknowledge the depth of discomfort many people experience when seeing such imagery.
naraburns
nihil supernum
28d ago
It just seems like pointless horniness.
But then again, I also don’t see the appeal of a strip club so maybe there’s a whole psychology of looking but not touching I don’t share.
Yeah, I don't know. But to try to steelman it, maybe--imagine you're an audience member at a beauty pageant or a fashion show. (Yeah, I don't get beauty pageants or fashion shows, either, but they're definitely a thing!) You see all the work these models have put into their poise, their dress, their movements, their facial expressions... so you cheer! Cheering is surely a thing at beauty pageants (I admit I'm assuming here). You're expressing your appreciation and admiration. Indeed, isn't it perfectly natural, even polite, to express your appreciation and admiration for someone like that?
Well, some people just... aren't that smooth with their cheering!
Or to take it up another level, have you ever deliberately tried to provoke a smile from someone? Maybe an angry child, or a grumpy friend? Maybe you took it as a kind of personal test, a self-imposed challenge of sorts... so maybe catcallers are thinking, maybe unrealistically, "I bet I can get a smile out of that girl." And in some cases, should they fail, they might feel ashamed by that, and lash out instead--"oh, too stuck up for a smile, girl?"
These are surely not the most artful approaches, I'm trying to steelman and I'm still not coming up with highly sympathetic actors, here, but I think there are many analogous behaviors out there. I don't really understand catcalling but there's a lot of irrational human behavior I don't understand (professional sports!) and most of it doesn't get you a dressing down from your local Bobby.
naraburns
nihil supernum
28d ago
In essence, though, whether we're talking about catcalling, or panhandling, or various other things associated with homelessness, what we're really talking about is obnoxious behavior that occurs in public, and the right to be obnoxious in public.
I agree. I think in some of the conversation downthread this is getting teased out further. Actual physical contact is (generally) an easier line to draw; when it comes to things like offensive clothing, nauseating smells, vulgar music, horrifying imagery, etc. people often have very strong but not very consistent opinions about what should or shouldn't be allowed, and what constitutes an appropriate response or deterrent.
naraburns
nihil supernum
28d ago
With catcalling, it seems to me pretty unreasonable in 2025 to imagine catcalling might be welcome, so even if a given catcaller wishfully thinks it will be taken as flattery, British society has (arguably) reached a point where the only response to this is 'Give me a break, pal'
I think this is probably close to correct (obviously from these articles, there is a meaningful percentage of British society that presumably hasn't reached this point, as they still engage in catcalling), but is rather my point about being in psyop territory. Convincing everyone to believe that catcalling should be perceived as negative seems to be the actual goal of these "stings," not because it was democratically decided that catcalling is in fact negative, but because certain people genuinely don't like it and they don't want anyone else to like it, either, or be subjected to it as a result of others liking it.
As I suggest in my original post, I don't really understand catcalling and regard it as at best inconsiderate. But I also don't like it when the government and news media collude to nudge people's values around instead of having an honest conversation about controversial-but-not-to-everyone behaviors.
naraburns
nihil supernum
29d ago
It's just harder to establish an intent
Right, so, one of the things I allude to in my original post is that this bit is really vague in UK law, as best I can tell. Sometimes it seems like "harassment" under UK law requires specific and directed intent, but sometimes not. And even when intent is required, the kind of intent is usually something like "intent to cause distress or shame." But of course screaming "NICE GAMS," while it might very well cause embarrassment to the admiree, is perfectly consistent with intending to make a woman feel good about herself, rather than to cause distress or shame. So when you say--
The catcaller is manifestly trying to get a specific woman's attention and prevent her from going about her business undisturbed
--this seems at least half mistaken. The catcaller wants to get someone's attention to pay her a compliment, albeit perhaps a compliment she'd rather not receive. (Is it also "catcalling" to yell putative insults at a woman, e.g. "whore" or "slut?" I think maybe this also would qualify as catcalling, but then the vulgarity and more aggressively threatening content of the speech seems to more clearly establish hostile intent.) Disturbing her "business" does not seem to be a necessary (or indeed generally intended) aspect of catcalling.
Likewise, UK law seems to think that you can direct harmful intent without a specific target in mind--for example, using PSPOs to forbid people from protesting near abortion clinics. Merely holding a sign that says "abortion is murder" near an abortion clinic need not be done with any intent to impinge on any specific individual. Likewise, wearing a diaphanous string bikini to walk around a busy pedestrian area need not be done with any intent to impinge on any specific individual, and yet a reasonable person might well find it an alarming sight--and doubt that it was done with anything less than mischievous intent.
naraburns
nihil supernum
29d ago
I'm not sure whether this is your point, but if I were the kind of person to take that particular Biblical edict seriously, I would likely be in favor of laws that discouraged other people from behaving in ways that might tend to inspire rebelliousness in my extremities.
I guess I can imagine being of a puritan mindset where I would want to suppress feelings of being attracted out of shame, or out of a strong moral view on female virtue, and therefore would prefer form-fitting clothing be kept away from me wherever possible. Is that where you're going with this, or something else?
The example I provided was a picture of women in full niqab. My experience with men from countries where niqab is common is that they are often extremely distressed by the comparatively immodest dress of Western women. Traces of that remain in most Western regimes, too, though usually limited to the exposure of genitals (and sometimes breasts) being treated as legitimately "distressing" to display.
(Fun fact: Australia used to require protruding labia to be removed from pornographic displays, so even in contexts where it was legal to display female genitalia, it was not legal to do so with complete anatomical accuracy! I have seen it argued that this may have contributed to the rise of cosmetic labiaplasties.)
I do think there is highly significant asymmetry of discomfort between a woman being catcalled and a pious man seeing some legging-clad ass
This seems super culturally mediated, though--I'm not sure I'm in a good position to just tell a pious Muslim or devout Amish that his feelings about bikinis simply don't count the way that a modern woman's feelings about wolf whistles does.
a fairly significant difference between actively getting into someone's space by catcalling them and just being seen by them as you go about your own business
I'm not sure I see how catcalling "actively get[s] into someone's space," which is why I noted that provided the 18 arrests were made for actual assault rather than mere catcalling, there's less to complain about here. The realm of "offensive speech" and unwilling audiences is a fascinating one for legal theorists precisely because what counts as "invading" someone's "space" in public is really tricky. Our bodies are an easy place to draw a line: unwanted physical contact is bad! Our senses are much more complicated. How is dressing provocatively any different from speaking provocatively, from the perspective of the unwilling audience? Are our ears more important than our eyes, somehow? "You can just look away!"--or--"you can just plug your ears!" There seem to be a lot of unstated assumptions in the assertion that there is a "significant" difference between catcalling and parading around in provocative clothing.
("But you shouldn't think of something like exercise clothing as sexually provocative!" "No, you shouldn't think of something like catcalling as provocative!" Etc.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
29d ago
I know that several Mottizens are American attorneys--have we got any solicitors or barristers about?
This week I've seen a couple of articles about Surrey policewomen posing as joggers to catch men harassing women out exercising. This is ostensibly to combat "violence against women," and this particular article's subheading reads:
Undercover female officers deployed in pilot scheme to tackle catcalling, resulting in 18 arrests.
As an American, my instinct was that this had to be sloppy (or deliberately misleading) reporting. For an expressive act like catcalling to rise to the level of unlawful harassment in the United States would require either a severe single incident, or (more often) a pattern of unwanted behavior and either actual or constructive ("a reasonable person would know") knowledge on the part of the harasser that the behavior was in fact unwanted. I know the UK lacks anything like the protection afforded to Americans by the First Amendment, but they aren't entirely without speech protections. Sure enough, the article seems to suggest that most men do just get "educated" (I assume a stern talking-to, maybe a pamphlet?) while the 18 arrests are for something more like actual assault. But attempting to ascertain the state of "catcalling" law in the UK sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole.
According to one article, the "first London fine for catcalling [was] dished out after undercover operation" in 2022. This was an application of a "Public Space Protection Order" (PSPO), which makes "certain anti social activities within a mapped area prosecutable"--including such diverse things as noisy supercars, protesting near abortion clinics, and "kerb crawling." Anyway this fine (£100) was issued to a man for making a "sexually suggestive remark to a woman in a late-night takeaway."
So, neither apparently severe nor an established pattern of unwanted behavior! With specific regard to harassment, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (PDF) suggests that any "unwanted behaviour directed at an individual with the purpose or intent of humiliating, disrespecting, intimidation [sic], hurting or offending them" qualifies, even if it is a single incident. The laws I was able to find use slightly different language, suggesting that harassment is anything a reasonable person thinks harassment is, plus "alarming the person or causing the person distress"--but also suggests that a "course of conduct" must include "at least two occasions in relation to that person" or "on at least one occasion in relation to each of" two or more persons in a group. But all of that may be moot, if these PSPOs are not specifically dealing in harassment law, but instead are more general mandates against whatever "antisocial" behavior local politicians can be convinced to be concerned about.
This is of course related to a common hack in "Common Law" jurisdictions with "reasonable person" standards: if you conduct a successful campaign to shift people's attitudes, you can actually change the law without ever changing the law. And people's attitudes are apparently changing! After the 2022 London fine, other parts of the UK took up the cause and expanded the penalties; the £100 fine was presumably deemed insufficiently punitive, and in 2024 the city of Bradford boasted of seizing four cars in a "catcalling crackdown."
Not everyone is impressed with this use of police resources. But what brought me up short, personally, was the asymmetry of it all.
I don't really understand catcalling, in approximately the same way I don't understand smoking, or aggressive driving--that is, I know that some people's preferences run that way, but I'm pretty sure it's because those people are to that degree some combination of stupid and inconsiderate. Particularly when a woman is on foot and her, uh, admirers are in a car, it is unequivocally terrifying to be abruptly shouted (or worse, honked) at from a moving vehicle. Wolf whistles from men on foot are less immediately terrifying but can portend a different sort of danger, and England has certainly had its share of sex assault scandals. So I rather see the objection to such behavior!
But in drawing the line between "inconsiderate" and "criminal offense," it feels like the UK has opted for an approach that caters primarily to outrage merchants and the terminally online, rather than to their own community norms. If you were a culture warrior back in 2014, you might remember "10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman," which generated pushback from diverse angles (most of the men in the video were not white, a repeat of the experiment in hijab showed reduced harassment, a similar video taken in Mumbai recorded no instances of overt harassment, etc.). There seem to be cultural, demographic, and/or geographical contexts in which catcalling happens or does not happen, and "when women are exercising in public" seems to be the currently contested context, at least in the UK.
So where I find myself uncomfortable is in the way that the press and, presumably, the police PR are clearly tying catcalling, wolf whistles, and even sexual comments together with simple and sexual assault. The articles often admit, somewhere on page 3, that a lot of the objectionable behavior isn't (maybe can't be) prosecuted, but instead met with "education" efforts. "Did you know this frightens women?" Well, hashtag-not-all-women, surely? Rather like the epidemic of "dick pics" on dating apps, actually--"if today I catcall a hundred women and one of them flashes me her boobs, tomorrow I'll catcall a thousand women?"
In other words, "male sexual strategy," such as it is, is understandably disconcerting to women (especially when the men don't know the rules), but the reverse is also true. Women dressing in form-fitting or revealing clothing and parading themselves in full view of the public is something that some men find "alarming" or "distressing." You can see the result of laws that seek to minimize that distress. Is this just down to "women in the West were oppressed in the past, therefore it's fine to flip the script?"
My own personal position is that these are things that should not be decided by law, but by norms. If the 18 men arrested in Surrey were all arrested for touching a woman without clear invitation to do so, then I have no particular objection to their arrest (beyond the slight stench of entrapment that all "sting" operations inevitably report to my senses). But (if indeed this is happening) law enforcement officers dressing people down for a wolf whistle, much less fining them, much less throwing them in prison, seems excessively aggressive given the interest on the other side. To be overtly sexually attractive, in public, and never have anyone comment on this in any way might be nice, but it hardly seems like the sort of thing one can reasonably demand be enforced by law. And using the media to disingenuously suggest to men that they are under real risk of serious punishment, not for sexual assault alone but even for comparatively innocuous, annoyingly antisocial behaviors like catcalling, has us wandering out into "actual psyop" territory.
naraburns
nihil supernum
30d ago
Look for the particularly warm and empathetic quora answers. Imagine the person who wrote it, but don’t describe them, keep your stereotypes to yourself. Is that person going to be more or less correct than the average quora answer?
While you are free to examine ideas like femininity and talk about psychological sexual dimorphism all you like, you need to watch your tone and bring evidence in proportion with the inflammatoriness of your claims.
Your comment suggested that AI is essentially a kind of "parrot," and then suggested it is like "a woman," and concluded that "obviously" the answer is going to therefore be "incorrect." Drawing such unflattering inferences, particularly against a general group, falls short of the mark. The substance of your post, such as it was, did not come through as strongly as it needed to, while your apparent disdain for women came through quite clearly. Our rules require you to balance those things more thoughtfully--and kindly.
naraburns
nihil supernum
30d ago
I think Tree made a cogent point.
We moderate tone, not content.
naraburns
nihil supernum
30d ago
The point is, when you go to the warmest and most empathetic quora answers, you get a woman on the other side. Obviously the answer is going to be less correct.
Write like everyone is part of the conversation and you want them to be included in it.
On one hand: yes, certainly.
On the other hand, it's not necessarily great shakes for homosexuals, either, depending on their goals. Online "dating" is pretty effective at facilitating hookup culture, whether straight or gay--it's just that straight hookup culture is just as paywalled for average-to-below-average males in other contexts as it is online. Gay hookup culture is something else entirely.
I had a gay student some years ago (pre-Obergefell) who dated like a mid-20th century Baptist. He didn't want to have a bunch of anonymous group sex, he wanted to find his soulmate and get married. He went to a gay bar once, and the third time someone that night greeted him by grabbing his crotch, he left and swore never to return.
I have no idea what the actual ratio of "just the sex, please" men to "approximately the sociosexual desires of a rural church girl" men is, in the gay dating pool. But it seems clear that online dating is much, much easier for the former than the latter. The ratios are presumably different in the heterosexual scene, but the shape of the problem seems about the same.
This is the exact observation that, twenty years ago, cost Larry Summers his position as President of Harvard. It is called the "greater male variability hypothesis."
Interestingly, although many of the "greater male variability hypothesis" charts I find online "illustrate" the bell curve differences by showing a flatter but equally-centered curve for men (lower in the middle, higher at the edges), the only clear male-to-female comparison I can find (PDF warning, also cited here) that uses hard numbers shows male curves that are both slightly flatter, and also shifted higher (i.e. centered more to the right).
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
She thinks it's a bad thing that young women are transitioning in larger numbers:
Let's look at the quote in context, shall we?
I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility.Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.
Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed.
These are all just facts about the way the world is--and the way the world has suddenly changed. Expressing concern about that is not plausibly "anti trans."
She believes that women can't have penises.
Well, adult human females don't have penises, by definition. But the actual link there is to a complaint about the language law enforcement uses in its reporting. This seems relevant to Rowling's interest in protecting women, insofar as that language resulted, in some cases, in male rapists being put into female prisons, which does seem like a pretty terrible idea to me. Does it not seem like a terrible idea to you?
She believes trans kids don't exist.
Again, let's check the context of that link....
There are no trans kids. No child is 'born in the wrong body'. There are only adults like you, prepared to sacrifice the health of minors to bolster your belief in an ideology that will end up wreaking more harm than lobotomies and false memory syndrome combined.
This gets into some complicated metaphysics, but I'm inclined to agree with Rowling, here, that it doesn't make sense to suggest that a child is ever "born in the wrong body," as if the mind at the body could be so casually separated like that. But if by "anti trans" we just mean "pro Cartesian dualism" or something, then... I'm at a loss. I don't think this is what anyone really means, outside perhaps of a small number of boring philosophers.
She's not anti trans in the sense that she doesn't think that they should be discriminated against
Yes. This seems like an open-and-shut case to me, right here: she's not plausibly "anti trans."
but that's not what anti trans means these days
Aaaaand here we get to the motte of the argument. What, then, does "anti trans" mean "these days?" Why?
I ask because people are running rampant in the bailey. If all that is meant by "anti trans" is "someone who does not wholeheartedly endorse the reification of gender stereotypes through government imposition of the dubious metaphysics of gender essentialist trends in transsexual political activism" then the term is a deliberate ruse.
Imagine claiming that someone must be anti-Semitic because they do not subscribe to the metaphysical commitments of Judaism. This would clearly be absurd, an abuse of the term in furtherance of some tribal aim. The discourse on transsexuals and the transgendered today is often exactly this absurd, approaching dissent and disagreement with reductionism and ostracism of exactly the kind deployed against Rowling.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
I wish that was hyperbole. I wish I was exaggerating. That is literally what they think, and any pushback will get you banned fairly quickly.
To apply some boardgaming lingo, here, this strikes me as a good example of how the American culture wars are being waged asymmetrically. (As is so often the case, Scott Alexander noticed years ago.) Although I don't actually know of any, I'm sure there are places on the Internet where (say) criticism of Donald Trump will get you banned--but they are explicitly "right wing" spaces. Whereas places you might naturally suspect to be politically neutral--hobby websites, for example!--are routinely very much not. BoardGameGeek and NexusMods are the two hobby sites that I know technically "ban" politics, but apply that ban selectively in exactly the way "Conservative Versus Neutral" implies. Reddit has a site-wide rule against calls for violence and often bans accounts for using certain right-coded no-no words, but I don't think a day goes by that I don't see at least one comment calling for the literal extermination of Trump voters, conservatives, etc. Is that nut-picking? Maybe! But if so, there are an awful lot of nuts to pick, and no one in my outgroup suggesting they chill. (And probably some of those posters are AI/actual Chinese psyops, but still.)
Having Trump in office hasn't really changed this, though it has perhaps limited some of the more egregious examples in the federal bureaucracy, higher education, and corporate world. The "alt right" inverts left wing identitarianism and adopts some of its methods, but they don't noticeably control a bunch of putatively "neutral" spaces. Politics moves in cycles, and eventually the Republicans will be the minority party again. If Sweeney and CGE is what we get when Republicans have control of the federal government, what can we expect when that changes? I do not think "a cooling off of the culture wars" is on the Democratic agenda!
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Unrelated, and yet somehow related: board game publisher CGE criticized for publishing a Harry Potter themed board game.
Specifically, some (though by no means all) well known game reviewers have declared they will stop publishing reviews of any CGE game, as a result of CGE publishing a Harry Potter themed version of "Codenames." This, on grounds that Rowling uses her money to
directly fund organisations attempting to strip trans people of their rights.
The organization in question, of course, does not phrase it that way, claiming instead to
offers legal funding support to individuals and organisations fighting to retain women’s sex-based rights in the workplace, in public life, and in protected female spaces.
In other words, Rowling says "I want to protect specifically female rights." Her critics must regard the protection of female rights as logically equivalent to transphobia; certainly they treat the statements as logically equivalent. This seems like a mistake to me; it seems to me pretty easy to imagine a society that both protects uniquely female rights and spaces and grants total legal protection and even subsidies to the gender nonconforming (indeed--for the most part, in practical terms we in the United States appear to live in approximately that society now).
CGE did publish a bit of an open-ended maybe-apology? The Bluesky userbase (should they rebrand as Bluehair?) seems about as mollified by that as the redditors in /r/boardgames, which is to say, not very. In fact the reddit thread is the first time I've actually encountered "no ethical consumption under capitalism" deployed unironically in the wild, to explain why it's cool to definitely not boycott major companies like HBO, or Lego, or Visa/Mastercard, etc. over Rowling connections, while insisting that it is a moral imperative to destroy this particular brand in response to a business connection to a woman who has dedicated her wealth to fighting for women's rights.
Now, @FtttG suggests below,
The difference is that there's no longer any expectation for normies to play along.
Fair enough, and the mainstream fandom of Harry Potter is clearly large enough that the game will sell well. But the board game community is often rather short on normies, and for some reason also quite high on drama, with "boycott this publisher" being a somewhat common refrain.
A Harry Potter boardgame is small potatoes compared to the Sweeney thing, but I offer it for comparison. It never fails to astonish me, the vitriol and frankly falsehood leveled against Rowling on this matter. Rowling is very much not anti-trans. She's totally down with people dressing, speaking, and acting however they want, to a degree that no sex or gender conservative would ever approve. All she wants is for sex-segregated women's spaces (restrooms, prisons, changing rooms, shelters) to remain sex-segregated for all the safety and comfort reasons that have always underwritten that segregation. This seems like a pretty minor heresy, given the larger Leftism to which she unquestionably subscribes.
But of course, it's often Freud's narcissism of small differences that really underwrites "outgroup" identification. And since Rowling is financially and culturally insulated from direct attack, it is only her smallest, most vulnerable business partners who get targeted by her critics. "No ethical consumption under capitalism" becomes the excuse for picking-and-choosing popular outrage for maximum strategic benefit. There's less friction to identifying with a viral movement if doing so bears only the strictly social cost of alienating anyone who disagrees. For the movement, alienating your friends and family who don't fall in line is a feature rather than a bug.
This is where I want to push back (only a little) on @FtttG's response. The Sweeney thing is just one especially notable case among many. Calls to boycott or "show the door" this or that person or product are a dime a dozen, a standard play in the political playbook. But every single one is both a trial balloon and a substantive nudge. The tide is not completely unrelenting, and has receded somewhat since Trump's re-election, but here we have a couple of stray waves lapping the shore, outrage peddlers beginning to nibble at the edges...
You are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic. I am responding with a modhat but this is not a warning and will not be noted on your account, even though your past posting history weighs against you on this.
The reason this is not a warning is because you are plausibly making an effort to understand something, which is good.
The reason I am responding with a modhat is because we have a growing problem with posts like this, namely, posts that begin with the framing that "the Motte" can be helpfully or usefully addressed collectively in connection with particular ideological commitments. I believe this is mistaken as a matter of substance, but even if it weren't, it would be a violation of the rules:
Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible.
Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity.
The paradigmatic consensus-building post is "I'm sure you'd all agree..." Lately I have seen too many people approach that from a position of disagreement instead--as here:
I am under the impression that most posters here who care about American politics would 99% endorse this statement
You've couched this in sufficiently perspective-taking language that it's not an egregious violation of the rules, but it is nevertheless not the way to approach questions like this. You could (and should) have written your entire post as a clear question without reference to a monolithic Motte: "what do you [whoever is reading] think about these ideas, or this claim?" You don't need to accuse your readers in advance of being wrong about something; if you have a question about what people believe, ask them, don't tell them. If there's a specific ideological position you want to address, address the position, not the people you imagine to be holding it.
"This place" is a website
for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.
That's all. You may see some people in other parts of the Internet characterize this as a site catering to some particular ideology, but those people are wrong, often maliciously so, and they tend to spread misconceptions about the community that are harmful to the community. I can't do anything about that in other spaces, but I do what I can to try to stop it from happening here.
(And that is actually kind of an answer to your question, if "the Motte" is what you are interested in understanding: the foundation generally manifests as individualistic and meritocratic, because individuals (not groups) post here and individuals (not groups) get upvotes or downvotes, AAQCs or warnings or bans. But individuals here have many different views on meritocracy and individualism, I'm sure, and honestly I'd be surprised if even 60% of participants here held the beliefs you have, entirely without evidence, attributed to the entire group.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
He said the interview included discussion of "niche online communities," which it does appear to include. That is nominally "places like TheMotte," but you're right that the actual discussion is quite non-specific.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
I genuinely can't.
I genuinely believe that you can. It's not about your experiences, it's about your insistence that your experiences are sufficiently bad to excuse inflammatory rhetoric, boo outgroup posts, writing like you actually do not want everyone to participate in the conversation, and so forth. Don't write angry posts! Don't write screeds! Don't come here to vent your spleen. This is a place for discussing the culture wars, not waging them. And yeah, we're kind of bad at making that happen. But we're trying, and I genuinely think that you can succeed, too, if you're willing to try.
At least two moderators have broadly recused themselves from even bothering to moderate you, because they are just fed up with your antics. I'm a much less active moderator than I used to be, but there's a very good chance that if you do get perma-banned, I am the one who is going to have to write the mod message. I don't want to write that message. At minimum, it's likely to require a bunch of effort I would rather put into writing things people enjoy reading instead.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you really just... cannot... open yourself to the possibility that you are in some way mistaken about your outgroup and the views you have developed as a result of your experiences. Or maybe you just can't stop yourself from expressing it in maximally vitriolic ways. But if that's right, then--for all your many quality contributions--maybe this space is, in the end, a poor fit. That's a possibility. But I will be sad about it, if so.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
That's not how you get a reputation. This is a reputation economy. If you contribute valuable things to it, that will increase your credibility. What is valuable in this reputation economy? Lots of stuff! Insight, novelty, effort. Original research, eloquence, reasoned argumentation. Steelmanning, deep dives, critical self-reflection. And yes--the beating heart of this space is the Culture War thread, where we discuss the culture wars--but, at our best, refrain from waging them.
We also have quiet lurkers! If that's more your jam, that's fine. Even there, you can contribute through meta-moderation and user reports.
What we don't need is more people trying to characterize this space, to place it within the culture wars rather than to keep it outside of them. We don't need more accusing mods of thumbing the scales one way or another, complaining that there are too many bad posters, too many bad comments, too much left wing content, too much right wing content, whatever--we already have entirely too much of that. The best--often the only--thing you can do to make this place better, is to write good posts.
To be blunt: I am skeptical that you "FoundViaTwitter." Right now I would guess at about 30% odds that "you" are a Turok alt. You don't write as if you are unfamiliar with this space; you write as if you are someone who has already been banned previously. But I've been wrong about this sort of thing before, and quite possibly I'm wrong now, so instead I'm trying to treat you like a new user who just found this space.
We welcome your effort, insight, etc. on whatever topics you care to write about, provided you do so within the spirit of the foundation and the intention of the rules that support it. We are less interested in having yet more off-base aspersions cast on the mod team or the site.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
What exactly is objectionable about his post?
Primarily, it's "boo outgroup."
Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
BC's post does not even pretend to do the very patient work of contextualizing or steel-manning the position. Rather, the substance of the post is "damn, America sucks, and Americans suck for not revolting." This is also tinged with an edge of consensus building or recruiting for a cause, albeit in a nonspecific way. The parting sentence is particularly inflammatory:
Perhaps after the end of Trump, the USA will be in a position where it can apply for readmission to the human race...
I decided against modding it because I don't think it's a significant enough violation of the rules to warrant a permaban, and BC's moderation history has reached the point where other moderators are saying "we should probably permaban next time." But self_made_human decided to go ahead and just add another tempban (proportioned to BC's post history), which seems like a good call to me.
it doesn't seem very different in style and tone from other things I've read over the last week. It's just left-wing and not right-wing.
Assuming you are actually new, I'm going to invite you to not make this a hobby horse. We ban right wing posters for the same sorts of tonal problems, as you and I have discussed. To be blunt, you do not have enough of a reputation here in the community to be credibly assessing its norms. You'd be well served to stay out of the meta, at least initially.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Our legal system (England) is the most imitated in the world, almost all of the Commonwealth uses something deriving from it.
I mean, in some sense we're all just derivatives of the Romans, or maybe the Greeks. But you complain about American "sovereign immunity" while living in a country that still has a King, and lacks meaningful protection of some very important basic rights. That seems relevant. As I suggested, your post would have been much better to simply focus on the perceived failings of the United States government (which many Americans would agree are many!). Taking the position that the UK government exhibits moral superiority here was an overreach at best, both undermining your point and your credibility.
It feels to me like 1985 all over again.
Thanks to a legal system that often fails to draw (and often fails to even attempt to draw) a distinction between children who have been kidnapped by strangers, children who have voluntarily run away with strangers, and children who have simply been moved by a responsible adult but in violation of a custody order, it's nigh impossible to say for certain how many pedophiles are out there snatching kids... but "run rampant" does not appear supported by the evidence. I am... skeptical, let's say... that the people "working for free to rid their platforms of predators" should be allowed to do that, because I suspect there are many, many more vigilantes (and aspiring vigilantes) out there doing real and serious harm, than actual child-snatching pedos.
Of course we needn't get all the way to child-snatching; simply exposing children to various forms of degeneracy probably has long-term psychological impacts that are worth considering. But the research on this seems to be hopelessly muddied by culture war matters; moral panic over children's media exposure reaches all the way back to Plato (at least!). I expect we are all shaped by the media we consume, but not always in the most obvious or expected ways.
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