So the Motte struggles to productively engage with ideas that are usually held and advocated by the types of people who are a poor fit for the culture here, is that right? Sure, I can believe that.
In general, the Motte is a very male social group that is structured around creating conditions for a masculine "fair fight". The rules are all about structuring an environment where people openly challenge each other, state their position and opposition plainly, and have a battle of wits, skill, and knowledge. The roles of popularity, status, and broader coalitional politics of the people involved are supposed to be temporarily suspended. Some kind of analogous form of this kind of competition occurs throughout the animal kingdom, but almost entirely between competing males, and it's more common as intra-group competition. The outgroup may be regarded more like dangerous animals that need to be eliminated by any means necessary.
Feminized social spaces don't tend to have much time even for the concept of a "fair fight". In fact, for women (or feminine males), the very notion of a fair fight is foolishness. Female social competition is much more about misdirection, subtefuge, and ambush. You should never challenge an enemy openly and square off against them; there should be no declaring a time and place or choosing your weapons. The goal is to wait until your opponents' back is turned and strike, or even better get someone else to strike for you. The roles of popularity, status, and coalitional politics are front and center, and even the very means by which the battle is waged.
This is essentially why too many women in academia is ruining science and related fields. Once there are enough relatively ordinary women, they shift the culture away from the "fair fight" model of science, and so science is now more about popularity, status, and coalitional politics and the battle of ideas is engaged by way of back channels. I recall recently listening to an interview with a philosopher lamenting the terrible influence that critical theory has had on the philosophy profession, and how it has all but taken over without seeming to have won any arguments. Infamously, such people do not engage in debates, i.e. "fair fights", but rather they use indirect, institutional, and social power to defeat their enemies often without even giving them a chance to defend themselves.
In my experience, advocates of veganism (as opposed to all vegans) tend to disproportionately belong to the latter group, and so they aren't going to feel comfortable and competent at interacting with the Motte. Sometimes people like these will actually stumble upon good ideas, and those ideas will perhaps not get a fair hearing on a forum like The Motte because their advocates usually don't fight fair. This could undoubtedly cause a blind spot. There is no solution. White nationalist types tend to be rather masculine in their disposition, and so they usually intuitively and more comfortably engage with the fair-fight culture.
The welfare state can never give people status, but it can reduce the status of low skill men who are more inclined to be providers and caregivers. Without the welfare state, lower class women have to make a trade-off between sexy bad boys and dependable good guys. With the welfare state, they don't.
I can't really see how the "rationalist community" can be such a thing when it's utterly compromised. Progressive wokism, or whatever you want to call it, is the preeminent irrationalist philosophy of modernity, and the "rationalist community" is one of its vassals--all too often a willing one at that. From the outside, they're so absurd. Maybe they'll evolve into something worthy of their name eventually, but I see little sign of that. They would have been eugenicists 100 years ago.
nomenym
9mo ago
If the position is that people shouldn't perceive others flaunting their sexuality as a sexual display, then I'm not sure what kind of sensible argument there is to be had. I don't even think anyone actually believes that.
This is one of those arguments that is useful in some contexts but will be immediately abandoned in others. It's not a principle or rule, but a tool that is brought out to achieve a particular job and then shelved when it's no longer useful.
In the next breath, we'll be told how it doesn't matter what the speaker meant but rather how it was perceived by the listener that made if offensive.
With this degree of incoherence, it worries me even more that they're pushing sexuality on children, because there is no principle holding that back from going in any direction with it. It's like introducing an uncontrollable pitbull to a room full of toddlers. Sure, he might just play gently with the children, or he might not. Better to keep him from the children in the first place.
This kind of insane idealism can be worse than malice.
nomenym
1yr ago
Male sexual satisfaction is an infinite pit that one should never set as a goal. See blueberry porn and homosexuals.
nomenym
1yr ago
There was a brief moment when "alt-right" just meant anyone broadly right-wing but outside of the Republican establishment, and it included a lot of dissident right figures from social media that are still going. However, the broader meaning didn't last long.
nomenym
1yr ago
So what you're saying is that London is clean and polite, except for the assholes.
nomenym
4mo ago
Always was, but less so. It's all on the margin, as the economists say. It's not like men were always honorable, but they could at least sometimes be held to that code of honor. It sometimes worked, and that was usually enough. Now it's mostly gone.
The competency of men vs. women is a complicated issue; female social norms don't scale as well but work better in some contexts than others. Science loses much when the "fair fight" model is rejected in order to be more "welcoming" to people who shouldn't be there. Women also tend to bring down the status of professions, because a large part of what makes a profession high status is that it makes men desirable to women, but the reverse is rarely true. It's one of the reasons why high status seems so frustratingly elusive for many women; they do the same things as the men but don't enjoy the same results.
Yes, frequently. I live embedded in a very poor region of the deep south. In fact, by the standards of most people here, I am a poor lower class blue collar guy.
nomenym
1yr ago
The problem here is that Twitter has rescinded the bluecheck as a form of punishment against users they disapprove of and seemingly denied it to many others for similar reasons.
nomenym
1yr ago
Nobody thinks she's black. She's black in the same way that you ain't black if you don't vote for Biden. It's more of an honorific than a description, and the charges of racism are transparently cynical. To assert that she is black is to signal tribal allegiance and dare anyone to point out the madness. This is a very real case of see deer, say horse. It is perhaps fitting that your trans colleague would insist on doing so the most strongly.
This is happening because incentives. We now have established that "hate speech" is an exception to free speech everywhere but the upper courts and The Motte (for now). Only one side can effectively wield this hate speech exception, so when an event like this happens we get each side trying to blame the other. While the left might lose a smidge of credibility when the facts turn against their narrative, the right will be subject to ever encroaching bans and censorship. The right, therefore, will collectively sigh with relief when it turns out the latest murdering lunatic didn't watch Tucker Carlson. However, this ratchet only goes in one direction (Elon Musk notwithstanding), because the hate speech exception almost exclusively applies to right wing values and beliefs only. The activists, whether by Machiavellian cunning or just authoritarian instinct, see an indirect (but obvious) causal link between the utterences of their ideological opponents and these types of mass shootings, and they see an opportunity to cast a wider net for the hate speech exception. This strategy been working quite well for them, and the right doesn't really have a counter.
It's really bad news when one of these shootings really does turn out to be some gun-toting Trump cultist, and I am relieved when it is not. Because when it is, the ratchet will move again, with more institutions enacting incremental bans and censorship of ever more ordinary right wing views and opinions, because their words are literally killing people. It doesn't happen everywhere all at once, but is rather just a slow grinding down of free speech. Once these rules were established, the game to disown violent radicals on your own side, particularly if your on the right, and to try and pin it on the other side, is the correct and only sensible move
The accusations of Aparthied are so revealing. It's been a long time since the end of Aparthied, and how has that been going? Jews should not want to end up in a position like white South Africans, and frankly that would be on the wildly optimistic side of my expectations for what would happen. Even assuming that their situation is like Aparthied, the response would be "yes, and?"
nomenym
1yr ago
In practice, it's pretty close.
It's not just the superficial transformation, because it's usually accompanied by a kind of religious conversion, and the transition is like a "born again" experience, with the old identity becoming a "deadname". Moreover, if you question or resist this along the way, you will cast as a villain in the ideological grand narrative. There are so many ways this can either ruin your child or ruin your relationship with them, and in the end they are no less likely to commit suicide anyway.
The kinds of people on death row usually deserve a fate worse than death. I don't think they should be tortured, but not because they don't deserve it. I am not especially concerned with minimizing their suffering beyond a point. When I hear about a botched execution where the executed has a couple of minutes extra pain and suffering, I just don't give a shit. They're the kind of people who make me hope hell actually exists (a common sentiment among both the faithful and faithless). Why should I care about them suffering for 60 seconds before death when I'd sleep soundly knowing they are suffering for an eternity in hell? Articles like this are largely just culture war.
Of course, it doesn't disprove anything. It just adds another wrinkle to the defense, but wrinkles accumulate until an idea starts to look old and haggard. Each wrinkle reduces the explanatory power of the hypothesis, since there are more and more exceptions, caveats, outliers, and improbabilities piling up around the thing meant to be explained. In the extreme, you reach a point where the argument is essentially that of Descartes' demon--P is true despite appearing for all intents and purposes to be false. That is, P has no functional role in explaining anything happens, but it is nonetheless asserted to be the true hidden cause of everything. That is, it ceases to be an explanatory hypothesis.
I would say this is approximately where feminists are with patriarchy, or where racism-mongers are with white supremacy, and so on. Unfortunately, the wrinkles don't seem to have much diminished their power and influence. The explanatory power of hypotheses seems to bear little relation to their political power, at least so long as societies are wealthy enough to offset their costs. In fact, it seems as though the political power of a hypothesis is actually diminished by too much explanatory power, since the latter makes it specific and inflexible and disallows easy picking and choosing of its application.
Sometimes I fear that successful rational criticism of popular political ideas can be counterproductive, since it often has the effect of merely reducing their explanatory power while actually increasing their political utility. It kind of refines and purifies them, alerting them to potential soft spots and weaknesses that need to be patched over. The end result is an idea that means less and has more to say, an idea that can account for everything and demand anything. In other words, and ideal ideology for political action. Science sure as shit doesn't keep this in check, but the economic costs and dead bodies do tend to pile up eventually.
I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this, but I think I may be accidentally arguing against the entire purpose of this forum.
That's my impression too. The important thing in this instance was not allowing the opposing team to score a point.
nomenym
1yr ago
It's a strategic relativism. They use relativist arguments to "deconstruct" and undermine opposing views and "structures". Relativism is a weapon, and you use weapons against the enemy, not yourself.
nomenym
4mo ago
There are low status and low income men who aren't especially criminally inclined and are relatively more stable and dependable. There may be relatively fewer of them than historically, but they still exist. Welfare makes them less desirable, and on the margin incentivizes more short-term mating preferences and competition from everyone.
nomenym
1mo ago
Dr. Louise King, an OB-GYN and bioethicist at Harvard Medical School, agrees. "It's really important to dig down into this," she says. "Maternal deaths may be related to poor health coming into pregnancy, but that's still on us."
This is my favorite part. She says "that's still on us". So it's on OB-GYNs that people of pregnancy don't arrive at the hospital obese and diabetic? How do you stop that? How is that your responsibility? Where are the limits of your authority here? Imagine if your plumber decided if fixing your pipes wasn't enough, but rather he had to get to the root causes of why you allowed your pipes to burst in the first place, and why you neglected to do proper maintainance or care, and so it was necessary for him to infiltrate and influence your life in all kinds of indirect ways so as to bring about a circumstance where you were statistically less likely to have broken pipes.
On the other hand I disagree with that. Liberals do still have those values in there, and can express them just as strongly if not stronger than Conservatives. They just need an unusual nudge to do so. Covid was one of those moments where Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity values dominated Liberal moral decisionmaking.
I'm inclined to agree with this. I actually see a lot of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity in progressive politics, but it tends to come out in strange and indirect ways. These moral foundations often manifest like Freudian neuroses; they are seemingly repressed but then force their way through in ways that are often unconscious, perverted and vicarious.
I think Haidt is onto something, but his error is that modern progressives are psychologically more like old conservatives, except they have been raised in a tradition of progressivism. Older progressives were a self-selecting group of outliers, but modern progressives are just normies who grew up with that stuff. In any case, the upshot is that old fashioned expressions of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity have been tabooed. Essentially, the tenets of the progressive faith are all couched in the principles of Care and Fairness, and so when the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations bubble up to the surface, they do so dressed up in a guise of Care and Fairness. This is why modern progressivism seems to be taking on more a religious flavor, and it's often reinventing old customs but using new language to legitimize them.
I fear the success of this movie amongst the wrong sorts of people may actually be detrimental to future efforts to fight child sex trafficking. Opposition to pedophilia will become a right-wing boogeyman, mostly disinformation, and, in any case, even if it is real, we will soon learn why it's actually a good thing. We can already see how expressing concern here is being interpreted as a dogwhistle for Qanon. Unfortunately, too many people will be far more horrified by the thought of being mistaken for a Trump supporter than they would at the possibility of indirectly aiding child sex traffickers. Sure, they may quietly, and in private, express their revulsion for pedophilia, but in public one would not want to say too much less the inquisitors get suspicious.
This movie presents an incredible opportunity for actual pedophiles, especially those among the Zeitgeist's activist class.
Perhaps this is uncharitable. No, it's definitely uncharitable. However, if I had made similar claims 20 years ago about transgenderism, then that would have also been uncharitable. Is there are bridge to far? Everyone says that there is, but then many of those people don't seem to have ever seen a bridge they didn't immediately run across, while dragging as many people along with them as they could. Sometimes being uncharitable is the only way to avoid being scammed, again.
God I hope my fear is misplaced.
nomenym
2mo ago
It's just a few crazy kids on college campuses. In a few years, when they're out on the real world, you'll see, then they'll have to stop with all these shenanigans. Nothing to worry about.
This seems connected to the more recent idea that competency isn't real, and that all jobs are rewards/punishments that grant privilege/status and nothing more. The idea is that we can just redistribute status by just giving members of oppressed groups prestigious jobs to do, and that will work out fine because nobody is more competent than anyone else at anything. It's not even believing that people might have equal capacity for competence when brought up with equal privilege, but that they actually do have equal competence regardless of their life history. There is no need to improve or work hard to earn something; we just need privileged people to get out of the way.
More options
Context Copy link