naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
26d 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
26d 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
27d 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
27d 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
27d 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
28d 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
1mo 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.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
This is a direct refutation of your "read" on Rowling
No it isn't.
Remarkable how quickly you drop to a motte-and-bailey doctrine here. Here is what you said, emphasis added:
she is clearly against social transition, and all forms of adult transition, as well
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:
it is entirely congruent with my read of Rowling as willing to tolerate transition in certain narrow cases, but not actually in favor of it
I no longer regard you as engaging honestly in this conversation, so I guess that's the end of it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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.
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.
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