urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
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User ID: 226
I would call it something like "proleanime" or "e-prole." They're not pretentious, they don't want to hide behind many layers of irony, and they're not educated enough to even understand postmodernism. They want something simple and affordable which they can enjoy, heavily based online since that's where they spend their time. Also, they want to express their sexuality free from the constraints of modern feminism, which is often "performatively" sex-positive but "practically" sex-negative for anyone who isn't gay or trans. And sure, some of them are obese or ugly because lots of people are, but some of them are traditionally attractive too (like the girls who get super into cosplay).
It strikes me that this aesthetic is much more related to the old scene subculture than goths (as is e-girl subculture). e-prole sounds about right.
I know the type. The "they live in flyover country and have bleak economic prospects" thing strikes me as quite real. When rainbow hair colors started going big, I thought it was really strange -- around here that's only associated with the e-prole type, CVS worker, down on their luck, demoralized. There's a lot of hopelessness in flyover country, which competes with the hopefulness of family and faith and confusingly messianic-hope that "Trump will fix this broken country" and, of course, drugs. But there's a lot of hopelessness and a lot of drugs on the coasts, too -- I just don't know what hopefulness competes with it.
But I'll challenge that this is principally sexual. Or that cosplay is. Hell, the cosplayer I dated briefly in college turned out to be asexual, which made her the second woman I've dated that turned out to credibly claim asexuality and the fourth such woman I've had a crush on. Obviously neither relationship lasted long or went very well. (Women I've dated have turned out to be either sexless or more sexual than me, I still don't know why.) One of the latter two is someone I thought of when I read the description of the dinergoth.
I think it's fairly true that these folks are mostly politically disengaged, but in flyover country the type runs consonant with being a political leftist. But I'd describe the type as "politically disengaged because they believe the Democratic party is full of rich people who don't want to help people like them," or "politically disengaged because they believe the only solution to America's problems is gay space communism established through the revolution," which they fantasize about while standing dead-eyed at the CVS checkout counter.
I don't know that this is the default youth culture, but it certainly is huge. I'm an elder zoomer -- this is the end-fate of a lot of people I went to school with. The Asians and the gays went to elite colleges, the Christians went to <evangelical_school>, and the dorks, who I hung out with, often tried to go to college, dropped out, and ended up listless and hopeless.
Apparently I'm pessimistic tonight. I don't mean to be. I'm actually very proud of where I grew up and the school I went to, despite their problems. But there's real hopelessness out there, and everyone of my generation I speak to almost identically tells me they have no real hope for the future and almost feels humiliated in spite of their achievements. Even if they're married, have a good job, a house, friends...
That said, the author of this particular piece is far too pretentious, and far too apt to see the elements of flyover country he's noticed as meaningfully distinct from their coastal cousins. I see confluence between the e-proles and the coastal progressives -- a lot of it. In some ways it feels like he's just now realized the existence of social class in America, and is astonished to find that lower-middle and lower-class people in flyover country exist, and live different lives from coastal strivers, overfitting this astonishment to the particular problems of young people who struggle with mental illness. I know the type, "I have OCD and ADHD and major depression, I live with my parents", I know the type. But I'm not convinced this type doesn't exist on the coasts; just not in the upper-middle-class social communities that the author lives in.
By and large, these are depressed, poor people who see gaudy self-expression as one of their few remaining possibilities of mattering in the world. If anything, their existence says more about the hopelessness of modern America than about its objective economic decline.
urquan
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3d ago
The reason they do that is due to being closeted or nervous about being seen on what appears to be a date with a man in public. The relevant term is "DL," for "down-low." It's not so much a skill gap as it is evaluating the risk of public exposure as worse than the risk of private catfishing.
That said, I suspect like a lot of the rough edges of gay culture, it's an inertia thing. They developed the "no meeting in public" culture at a time when public suspicion of homosexuality could be life-destroying, and never fully adjusted back.
The other part is that gay hookup culture is extremely aggressive, and there's a tendency among the particularly promiscuous to treat sex almost the way straight men treat masturbation -- in other words, without foreplay.
urquan
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4d ago
Blizzard games seem to particularly attract players like this, I guess because as a developer they've always put gameplay above immersion. (And kind of lucked into immersion with vanilla WoW solely because they were passionate about that world.)
I suspect there are lots of starcraft 2 players like you, just as there are lots of WoW players who rarely do instanced content and just level another character once they reach max level. Unfortunately, if you're a competitive player interested in demonstrating your mettle under constraint, simplifying or streamlining things sounds like getting rid of the game entirely. Hardcore gamers base a lot of their self-concept on their ability to perform complexity under pressure, and see it as the central pillar of playing games at all, so they perceive people who don't share that motivation as either weak (and therefore mockable) or deluded (and therefore dismissable).
I think the reality is you have to take a lot of hardcore gaming culture with a grain of salt; I think it's cool that people can overcome pretty immense challenges in games, but it's an entirely invented status hierarchy that's often in an antagonistic relationship with the game developers, and being able to put fun before status in gaming is an important part of maturity, imo.
urquan
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4d ago
Technology Connections has always reminded me of another nice, friendly, but left-wing technology youtuber, CathodeRayDude. He's a little quirkier than Technology Connections and covers more old PC stuff, but he has the very similar vibe of "geeky leftist dork who believes he is enlightened by his intelligence."
CRD has a very droll sense of humor and he's fun to watch, but he definitely has a nasty habit of going on unnecessary political tangents where he insults the right, especially about trans issues because his partner is transgender. But mostly he complains about capitalism and how all jobs are awful with a kind of antiwork energy, which kind of makes my eyebrow raise, because I feel like if he weren't dating a transgender person or weren't from Oregon, he'd be a self-employment bro talking about how you've got to make your own money away from the corporate machine, small businesses baby! kind of guy.
What I don't understand is why people with this personality -- which is often skeptical, critical, capable of immense analysis of technological and engineering tradeoffs -- are often unable to see that there are elements in politics where different policies have different tradeoffs for different people. Energy policy is one of the clearest ones, where its obvious why Californians with living memory of smog and pollution, and Oklahomans and Texans and West Virginians, would have different assumptions about the value of burning fossil fuels for energy.
Well, some of these are a bit interesting. If you don't mind a few off-the-cuff takes--
Dating Roundup #9: Signals and Selection: "You're single because... [insert a bunch of reasons in a bulleted list format]".
These were interesting, obviously mostly well-known.
I do want to comment on the astrology thing though. I think I'd struggle to take a partner who used astrology as a means to talk about personality seriously. My view is that it's ludicrous, but moreso that it forces human personality into very silly boxes instead of using big-boy (girl?) words to actually talk about things in an organic manner. It suggests immaturity in emotional and social communication.
This tweet included in the essay was interesting to me:
Astrology is a vehicle women use to communicate indirectly. Why would it possibly make you annoyed?
That's actually a question that includes the answer -- the problem is that it's a way to communicate indirectly, and as the article says "super flexibly", without actually committing to making a statement. That's one of the worst traits in a partner, from my point of view.
This comment on the article was interesting:
A girl opens with "what's your sign", you tell her, and then you make up a story together about the relation between the two signs. There's no actual predictive power there, the signs are meaningless (she knows this, at least subconsciously), it's just a framework within which you can indirectly talk about how you'd fit together.
I love talking about values and hopes and dreams and goals. It's actually because I like talking about those things that I don't like astrology. I don't believe it's necessary or helpful to try to fit me, or you, into a star-sign box. If you're someone who likes to stay in a lot and is slow to trust someone, you can just say that. Have an adult conversation with me about who you are and who I am. I don't believe in "indirectly" communicating about "how we'd fit together," I believe in directly communicating it. I kind of want to make a joke on the "I don't consent" Jesus meme where the third player is "literally the observable universe." Don't bring galaxies into the bedroom, please!
I think tact is useful. But when I'm looking to share my life with someone, I want to know they can communicate about desires and preferences in a straightforward, clear, and reasonable manner. Astrology as an interest suggests a way of looking at life as a kind of following the wind, at the mercy of (literally) astronomical forces, and that leads me to believe someone is flighty and doesn't fully take responsibility for the outcomes of their own life.
I also disagree with this:
People underestimate how much relationships are built on that ability. To step into someone’s weird side hobby, their micro belief system, their little rituals, even when you do not share them. She might have astrology. Someone else has Dungeons & Dragons lore. Another person has fantasy football statistics. Your uncle has his grill.
"Dungeons and Dragons lore" or "fantasy football statistics" are generally not means by which people aim to understand themselves or their place in the social universe. The closest equivalent is actually if some guy tried asking his date about her DnD moral alignment -- I think most people would find that cringe. I'd be happy to listen to a date talk about her interest in makeup, or fashion, especially if she could forgive my ignorance -- but not astrology. It's just a different kind of a thing.
But what's most interesting to me is that the article ignores the biggest and actual reason you're single: the social people aren't available, and the available people aren't social, because they're on their phones scrolling TikTok because fewer and fewer people participate in voluntary social activity, especially after college. It's almost a meme how many times I've been told "I'm boring, sorry," by women whose hobbies included watching YouTube videos and eating dinner, alone, at home. I don't have any problem with that! But that's not exactly a social calendar that lends itself to meeting interesting people. If my girlfriend and I hadn't met each other at the right time, I'd probably be single too. And so would she.
That said, the main thing I have to say about astrology is I took an astronomy class in college for a natural sciences credit, and at the end of the course two girls had a short discussion in the class group chat, where they said:
This class was so hard [it wasn't], I thought when I signed up it was going to be astrology
BITCH ME TOO
I don't know why we're giving bachelor's degrees to people who can't distinguish between astrology and astronomy, but that's a different issue.
Alternative lifestyle choices work great - for alternative people: Pretty self-explanatory title. Alt lifestyles only really work for people on the fringes, and chances are you're not one of them. Examples include polyamory, drugs, sex-positive feminism, psychotherapy, gender transition, following your dreams, amateur pornography, and being a Linux user.
I'm a Linux user (btw), but I do have to admit I'm fringe.
Well, I guess I just had a couple thoughts as I actually selected what random neuron firings deserved being typed out. Anyway.
urquan
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6d ago
What I’m not seeing mentioned here is Lemon’s defense; he says he was watching the protest as a journalist, which to be fair was his career and he claims to be doing independent journalism after his retirement from CNN. We do have video of him doing things like interviewing protestors and the pastor (who asked him to leave), and commenting on the contrast between people yelling and protesting and people trying to pray as demonstrative of a divided America. I don’t know that it’s great journalism, but it’s a more complex situation than “Don Lemon was rioting in a church.”
I think Don Lemon should be charged with trespassing, maybe criminal mischief, etc, particularly since he remained in the church after the pastor asked him politely to leave and told him that he was contributing to the disruption of their worship service. But I don’t know if it’s appropriate for him, personally, to be charged with civil rights offenses. The organizers of the protest and the people chanting and screaming during the worship services should be slapped with those, though. I think it’s important to draw a firm line on protesting and disrupting religious services, lest we become a nation where Christians start screaming about devil-worship in mosques or Palestinians start screaming about Gaza in synagogues.
She now agrees with me that America is in decline and she, too, would love to live elsewhere.
I think everyone's realizing this. Left, right, and center. The debate is over who's causing it and what we should do about it. On that note I think there are things that most parts of the political spectrum have a good point about, because they notice elements of the decline that others don't, or don't want to notice.
I think the left is broadly correct about social mobility being down, and the benefits of productivity being increasingly centralized, and normal people losing economic power and agency, and the right is broadly correct about social cohesion being down, and people being unwilling to contribute to the common good, and people being more motivated by personal expression and self-actualization than participation in society. (And centrists for their part are right about social mood being elevated, and political anger being out of control, and political intensity causing mental distress.) The issue is these things are all connected.
But I do think the root cause is that productivity increases have declined in the past 10-15 years, so there's less pie to distribute, meaning that there's a drive to centralize and cut down on waste rather than spread treasure, which is why store closures and layoffs have accelerated. The economic incentive is to extract more value from each individual customer or employee while providing less real value in return. It was easy for America to feel great and happy and joyous in the midst of economic good times during the baby boom or the 80s/90s deregulation capitalism fun fest, but now that lean times are here, the knives are coming out.
But it echoes all the admiration Luigi Mangione was getting, and I think for the same reasons: he's the Hero taking on the Bad Evil Wicked Horrible Guys, of course mm-mm he's so dreamy and smart and the rest of it.
It's weird that this has happened twice, and it's doubly weird that Oracle's brother was the one doing it this time. I'm really not sure why it's a thing for some people on the left to talk about the physical attractiveness of their heroes like this -- I thought the left would be the ones saying that your values are more important than your appearance.
But also the pattern-noticer in me is considering that this has happened only in instances where white adult men have been the grand hero of the left. I can't recall George Floyd being praised for being a dreamboat. And bizarrely the American left types who might have venerated Thomas Matthew Crooks were convinced he was a Republican (?) false flag operation (?), and anyway I guess he radiated "loser teenage boy" energy rather than "big stronk warrior man" energy.
Actually, it's startling to me how little we know about Crooks, his motivations, and the failures of the Secret Service, but unfortunately there's no force that actually wants us to know more. Despite the historically-significant photo he got out of it, Trump seems incredibly embarrassed about his near-death experience and hasn't milked it the way he should have. He seems grateful for the Secret Service despite their failure. Given everything that's happened since, Crooks' assassination attempt is one of the most historically significant events of the past 20 years.
(?) EDIT: I did some research -- I guess Crooks had been searching various political figures in the months leading up to the shooting, it does seem like he was just kind of a loser who wanted to be historically significant by killing someone. I had merged this case with the Kirk assassination case in my head, that's a more clear instance of a shooter who grew up among Republicans becoming a convert to the left due to the internet and LGBT partners, and being radicalized into political violence. That many on the left were willfully ignorant of the fact that this was a guy who grew to share their values and acted on them in an extreme and violent manner is still wild to me. "LGBT liberal from a Republican family" is a stock character. Few people would say they "weren't really a leftie."
urquan
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10d ago
For some reason, young people are just not that interested in doing stuff organized by people much older than them, or in hobbies that require them to follow a set schedule.
I call this the “magical internet box” phenomenon. Much easier to just hang out at home than to sign up for something. Much as I’m critical of the attitude, I know that I’m shaped by it, as an introverted zoomer.
Your account lines up uncannily well with my experience in the US, as do most of the other responses. It seems like the social effects of modernity and the internet are broadly similar everywhere.
urquan
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11d ago
Well, maybe we've had enough about European-American relations for the past week. Let's talk about European-European relations!
We know a lot about gender imbalances in China, hikikomori in Japan, 4B in Korea, and Americans screeching in existential terror at every element of the opposite sex on social media. It seems like many of the most developed parts of the world are struggling to maintain stable relationship norms, and men and women are opting out of relationships altogether at unprecedented rates. That obviously prompts the question: what about Europe?
Europeans: how do you feel about the dating and marriage situation in your part of the world? Do men and women generally couple up ok? Have dating apps caused damage? Are people isolated and on social media, or do romantic connections and friendships form more easily? More philosophically, do men and women in your country generally feel the opposite sex is trustworthy, or do they see them as more dangerous than helpful? Are there tensions over gender norms, or have people where you're from settled on a new accommodation for the relationship between men and women?
urquan
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12d ago
I guess I took your comment and springboarded into my own thing, sorry. I do agree with you. The topic of romance in general has been on my mind lately, I made a twitter and the algorithm keeps feeding me intense gender war threads. I’m terrified we’ve entered a stage where there’s no possibility of stable romantic love existing because the sexes have decided the opposite sex is incapable of human decency or can only be dealt with transactionally. Figuring out what I think instead is the only thing that makes me feel better.
urquan
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15d ago
I guess I see his point, that it's easy to generate romantic feeling early on that doesn't cash out in commitment, and that you often don't know what kind of a partner you'll be in a relationship until you're in one. I see he's trying to burst the bubble of "$lonely_redditor who's never had a date is treated unjustly because Henry the wifebeater has a string of inexplicably loyal girlfriends." That strikes me as wisdom borne of experience.
But I also don't think a compassionate stance towards lonely men requires that we assume every one of them is deeply a good guy, or will always be a great partner to women. My view is that it's a sad fact of the world if $lonely_redditor is lonely and inexperienced despite having the capacity to generate feelings of love and intimacy. It's certainly possible that $lonely_redditor gets some experience and turns out to be a jerk. It's also possible that he turns out to be a great guy. The issue is we don't know, and perhaps more vitally he doesn't get the chance to learn from minor failures how to be a great guy. I think anyone among us has to admit to ourselves that we made boneheaded moves in our early relationships, and improved as we got older and gained more experience.
But the principal issue with lonely men is their subjective experience of unfulfilled capacity for intimacy, and the main complaint (going back to Scott's famous posts) is that this experience is often treated with scorn, dismissal, or disbelief. I don't think many people, even struggling men themselves, want to actually face what it means for people to suffer loneliness. So we get just world theories, "well maybe they'd just be bad boyfriends anyway," accusations of various forms of creepery, and on the other side of the fence, "women are just vain hoes, the system is fundamentally evil, it's all women's fault," etc. Romantically ineffective men are almost by the iron law of nature low-status, and problems that are low-status are shoved under the rug because they're inconvenient, or denied and converted into injustices because they're ego-destroying.
That said, I think the reality that the only law of male dating is "be attractive; don't be unattractive" drives a lot of the "I'm just going to be a bastard to women, fuck you," attitudes you see among young men these days. At the extremes this is the kind of Andrew Tate stuff, somewhat less extreme the kind of Sloot stuff, a little closer to the mainstream the redpill stuff. If morality plays only a limited role in one's romantic success, and isn't a "defense against unattractiveness" (to put it one way), that's going to naturally drive them towards a feeling that acting morally is just leaving value on the table in a highly competitive environment.
urquan
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17d ago
Yeah, the immediate cause of the civil war has to be the fact that the South could present a united governmental front and thus actually secede in opposition to Lincoln. To add to your point, I think a civil war is unlikely for the same reason the Kim family wanted nuclear weapons; nukes and various other advanced weaponry provide a deterrent effect to full-on governmental rebellion. Anything that rises to the level of full-scale civil war cannot be allowed — for the sake of the launch codes if for no other reason — but it’s likely that the kind of low-level strife of people and police we’re seeing in Minneapolis will continue.
I’ve told friends and family I’m seriously worried about a Troubles-style set of social violence breaking out. Unfortunately, we’re at a point where both sides of the culture war are out for blood, and believe the other is out for blood, in an escalating cycle of fear leading to anger leading to hate. I don’t know how we stop that.
Perhaps this kind of social unrest was the inevitable result of algorithmic social media, the same way the printing press led to peasant revolts, schisms, and religious wars. Every time I get curious and open up Twitter I feel like I’m fed a firehose of misunderstandings, misattributions, misanthropy, and raw, burning, yet affectedly droll hate.
I’m reminded of the verses from the gospel of Matthew:
Brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death.
These are not the end-times, and Deus will not ex machina us from this crisis. But I don’t know how this ends, especially as marriage, parenthood, the family, and the community, normally the buffers against social contagion or corruption, are “in play” as part of the warfare. The theology of my religion claims that men and women together brought about the beginning of evil through their cooperation of evil; perhaps the book about the evil coming into this world through the antagonism of the sexes against each other has yet to be written.
urquan
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26d ago
It’s mattering a lot nationally, people I don’t often see as intensely political have become emotionally affected by it, on both sides. It’s also being pushed by the media pretty hard, I can’t scroll through YouTube or try to read the news without a “special breaking news event!!!” banner about some new detail of the event being presented.
I don’t think it needs to be that important and I’m bewildered it’s become such a big deal, but it’s activated strong feelings on both sides and people have very different intuitions about it.
urquan
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26d ago
I think this is basically correct, though there are other personality traits that are related as well. With Lovecraft, in particular, my impression is that he was a highly Open to Experience person who nonetheless was extremely conscientious and concerned about contamination. The highest predictor of political liberalism is Openness to Experience, but the second-most is sometimes called "orderliness," or concern about order, contamination, structure.
There are also people who are highly Open to Experience in an intellectual sense, but closed to experience in a social sense, and I'd probably put myself in that category. I'm happy to try all sorts of wild cuisines or explore all sorts of interesting cultures, so long as it doesn't impose on me all sorts of social tests that I might fail, to humiliation or sorting into a category of "ignorant American tourist."
So I guess you might argue I'm defensively xenophobic; I know what Europeans and LatAms and the Chinese and the Japanese say about Americans behind closed doors. Why would I want people who don't view themselves as natively part of my group subject to that derision to come here, potentially with their derisive attitudes towards me and the people I care about and the customs that are meaningful to me? I know, say, what my friend's French-American coworker says about America. There simply aren't a lot of people who are truly xenophilic towards America, despite the media representations from Los Angeles that falsify what's it's really like here and which we pump out to the rest of the world -- I'm not sure whether we should be sending our political news or our cultural products to Timbuktu, but no one in Hollywood consulted me.
My opinion is that most immigrants, legal and illegal, to the US are people who view it as an economic resource, not a country and a people with its own customs and values that should be respected. I want people to come to my country because they share my love for it and want to make it their home, not because they see dollar signs. I want assurance that the place I live, the customs I grew up with, and the people I care about are not being judged as stupid, corrupt, or contemptible by those joining them.
The feeling that Americans have about our relations to the rest of the world is that we're hated for geopolitical reasons that the average American has no control over -- I don't know who I have to vote for to stop my country from antagonizing foreign peoples like we do every five milliseconds -- and because of wealth that to us feels like poverty, because cost of living adjusts. Both the left and the right feel this, but the left tries to apologize for it or adopt what people say we should (we should be more like Europe, European governments do this, all other western nations do this, we're really just like a third world country, Obama's apology tour), and the right either lives in denial of it ("leader of the free world!," "USA, USA!"), or, more recently, leans into it.
Trump, enter stage left. I don't know if you can understand the Greenland stuff or the America First stuff or the Venezuela stuff without the sense that a lot of red Americans have that the world believes (in their estimation) that the US has no soft power and is a fat, ugly, overprivileged waste of resources that believes in ridiculous, outmoded forms of belief like Christianity, or freedom of speech, or patriotism. I suppose Trump's gut feeling is, "well, if that's how you see us, then I guess that's our only avenue to global influence without abjection and humiliation." To some degree, American xenophobia is directly related to the impression that our attempts at xenophilia aren't met with mutual respect, if not from politicians, then at least from ordinary people or cultural elites.
It's true that cosmopolitanism often correlates with wealth generation, but at the same time, almost no countries on earth are truly xenophilic -- they use cosmopolitanism as a tool, like China and Japan or hell, MBS style Saudi Arabia, while retaining an intense sense of nationalism and a commitment to national identity. So I'm not convinced that cosmopolitanism is useful without limits, and may even be destructive and non-competitive should forming a strong, coherent national identity serve as an adaptive strategy in the modern era after all, as I'd argue it's doing for countries like China.
The issue isn't whether cities are economic engines or whether cosmopolitanism is useful for global economic trade. It's what the limits are to cosmopolitanism's utility. At times, cosmopolitanism begins to feel less like benevolence and more like unreciprocated vulnerability. The US oscillates between generosity and defensiveness because we're desperate to be seen as good. The debate is the same one the country had in 2016: should America be great (again), even if it means being terrible, or should America try to convince the world that, in Hillary Clinton's words, "America is great because America is good." The fear is that it's not possible to be both.
urquan
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26d ago
Cyberpunk 2077. I bought it in 2022 but never completed it, so I've been working on getting to the endgame. I'm terrible at games but the gameplay is really fun, and I'm enjoying the story although I wish Keanu Reeves would shut up. I don't like that everything ends terribly, but apparently the developers were insistent that was supposed to be a cyberpunk element. I'm kind of reminded of Mass Effect; it's like game developers are better at starting stories than ending them satisfactorily.
Also a bit of WoW. They finally added player housing, and it's actually pretty good. Most MMO housing systems make me feel more constrained than creative but the housing system actually lets you do what you want.
urquan
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1mo ago
I guess in some ways that’s true, and I guess I do hear about the “galentine’s day” type stuff where that’s leaned into. But it also doesn’t describe the women I’ve known personally, who have definitely been in close relationships with women but nothing I would say gets anywhere close to competing with men especially for physical affection. But I can also say I’ve never been close with women who are kind of the stereotypical “girl with the girlfriends” energy. Most of the women I’ve known have been introverts who hate sororities, that sort of thing.
urquan
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1mo ago
Add to this that it seems women are more comfortable being single than men are and a drop off in relationship formation is not that hard to explain.
Yeah, I think the old belief that women are more romantic than men, on average, isn’t true. That’s not to say that women don’t read romance novels more than men, or that many women don’t have a great interest in romance, but there’s a revealed preferences sense in which men feel the lack of a partner more acutely than men do.
Is it just sex? I don’t know. When I was single and lonely obviously that played a factor, but more of a factor was falling asleep alone, missing subtle physical affection, enjoying telling someone I love them, giving little gifts and seeing someone’s eyes light up, cuddling on the couch, etc. Having a partner feels physically grounding. Do women just not experience that kind of lack as acutely? Am I just weird?
urquan
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1mo ago
There's a lot of messiness with lesbian/bisexual woman politics, because there's such extreme potential for jealousy, and because a non-trivial number of bi women do either get out of college or just randomly sort into het relationships.
The only group of people that lesbians seem to hate more than straight men are bisexual women. I recall being algorithmically given some tweet where a lesbian separatist was insisting that the lesbian domestic violence rate normalizes once you exclude lesbian/bisexual pairings; no idea if that's true (it's rather self serving).
(I don't think gay men generally hate straight women, but I'm pretty sure there's tension between gay men and bisexual men because bisexual men are seen as having an easy path to normalcy, though my impression is that this is mollified somewhat by the likely long-standing fact that bisexual men are a big chunk of penetrative partners. My entirely politically incorrect, and probably also factually incorrect, theory is that crossdressing and affected femininity emerged as a kind of cultural adaptation to this fact that pulls in some straight-leaning bisexual men. The loneliest person I know is a gay friend, who is both the archetypal femme who went to cosmetology school and has mostly women friends, yet is, apparently, a top. He's the sort of man who would be a ladykiller if he played for the other team and were 10% less obsequiously feminine, so his professed loneliness startles me a great deal.)
I can also say that I had the strange honor? of having been propositioned by multiple women or trans men in marriages with women to cheat on their wives with them. Turned it down, very much not my thing. But it was more than slightly creepy how eager and graphic they were in their apparent desire for the male anatomy. Neither homewrecking nor "I'm the guy who turned her" are my kink, though it really must be said that these ladies were not for turning. They were already, well, turnt.
I can't say my LGBT friends have always been the closest, but dang did they give me some great stories.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1mo ago
I have no clue how people write the posts that are full of lurid personal stories and read like actual short stories or memoirs. They often seem insanely polished, but also I'm a very boring person, and it's an exciting day when I get to pull ethernet drops.
But for myself, when I write a long post, it's usually because I was compelled to write something for its own sake. I'm often writing for myself as much as for anyone else. Someone says something I disagree with, or that I think is cruel, or that I think is deeply right, or that affects me emotionally, and I have to write to get it out of my head and actually describe how I think I should respond to it. I write because that's how I figure out what I believe, and I can't stop until I've actually gotten the idea out and neatly summarized it. I'm usually thinking eight paragraphs ahead to all the other things that have popped into my head and trying to get everything out. If I don't do that, I have to sit with the emotion unresolved. So when I do write a long post, it's more of a compulsion than a craft.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1mo ago
Interesting. I liked the first 2/3 of the first book, but the big plot twist… just felt obvious, and played out — of course the religious authorities are hiding important truths!!! Maybe it didn’t help that the audiobook version I was listening to gave the (linguist? archaeologist? I can’t remember) crush this blistering Scottish accent that wasn’t the least bit feminine, which combined with her standoffishness made it hard to see what Hadrian saw in her. I felt bad for the other girl.
I guess the elements I liked were the parts where the protagonist had to navigate court politics. Once he ends up stranded, the intrigue felt less interesting.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3mo ago
Heck, even the Roman Emperors kept the Senate around as a ceremonial body that gave authority to their decisions. It was pretty wild when I learned that the theoretical institution of the Roman Senate lasted long enough to be meaningfully involved in the disputed election of a Pope even after the empire fell in the west.
Would it even be legally possible for Charles to abdicate without legal changes in each of the countries that claims him as head of state? I remember reading that the abdication of Edward required Parliament to write it into law and that law to become law in Australia, Canada, etc. Even given Charles's shaky popularity and Williams's solid popularity, I can't see that being an easy process especially with how independent all the various countries have become legally.
Reading Iris's about us page, my impression is this is likely a transgender person, both from the pic and the picture-perfect set of male hobbies, any one of which I know women who are into them, but put together is pretty strong evidence of not being a natal woman... and of course, "most of my recent focus has been on transgender rights, especially in the workplace." (Read: I came out as transgender recently and now that's my pet cause.)
Either that or the most masculine woman I have ever heard of in my entire life. So, in that connection, "trans woman in tech is extremely progressive and doesn't like transphobes," isn't exactly a wild outlier. They believe this is an existential fight for them; I'd probably call my enemies fascists too if I believed as they do. As it is, I just find their intensity of feeling a little silly, and so it's easy for me to shrug it off.
But really I have a more specific pronoun problem with the website. I find it hard to take the website of a professional seriously when all of the pronouns are "we", and it's obviously just one person's consultancy. Just say "I," please. Don't pretend to be plural. (Wait.......)
(EDIT: Also, there's a publication "Published under my deadname.")
I think the issue is just what you've said: this isn't actually how TRAs, or almost any transgender people actually view the situation, and anti-trans positions certainly don't like it. So what you've crafted is a steelman that means little, because no one's going to accept it. I agree it makes a sort of logical sense, in that you're not advocating for empirical facts of the world. But you are advocating for avoiding discussion of empirical categories that do exist, which in truth-seeking is simply a lie by omission: "Sex is real, but it just shouldn't talked about for moral reasons."
Actually, that part of your steelman is significantly more radical than at least some of the actual transgender people I've met! A lot of the less activist-minded trans people are often entirely comfortable with the reality of their sex, and agree that it's relevant for medical and documentary purposes. What they often want is simply people to use their pronouns out of politeness and treat them with general respect. They're often quite honest about the limitations of their transition and self-effacing, even. The fact that you're describing common self-identifications like MtF and FtM as "egregious" isn't a weakness in the trans movement -- it's a weakness in your steelman of it.
Frankly, I think the "use pronouns out of politeness, sex remains necessary for medical purposes" is where the moderate left position is going and has been for a while. That seems to be a much better bridge to the right, and therefore a useful steelman, than what you're outlining. Your logician's take on the phenomenon is logically consistent, but cold, stripping out any source of moral urgency from the gender self-id case and therefore losing out to more impassioned versions (on both sides) of the trans phenomenon. "There's no objectively correct answer, it may make a small portion of the population less sad, and some people like it because it's aesthetic," is not a good argument for a political position!
Where I think the trans movement went wrong is when gender dysphoria (as an experience, not a diagnosis) was stripped out of the essential core of interpreting gender transition. Gender dysphoria is a serious form of suffering. I've known people who dealt with it. I've heard some stories. And the idea that someone might have such a tremendous mental incongruity with their sex that they can't recognize themselves in the mirror and feel about their genitals the way people who get limbs blown off sometimes feel about their missing limbs -- that's horrifying. And it activates a lot of compassion, especially in people who aren't primed by activists to find the overall concept disturbing. It's the sort of thing where knowing a transgender person is much more real and compelling than any amount of activism, or any logical argument.
The strongest, by far of the arguments that trans activists marshal for their view is that the only known way to treat this experience of suffering is gender transition. I'm not 100% convinced this is true, or that there are no other options available, but it's at least a plausible claim -- and an empirical one. I have no problem with the option being offered to adults, maybe even teenagers with parental consent -- go on, give it a shot, I don't support that we build a huge legal regime to stop you. But that view has some caveats. At the very least, I think therapy to help gender dysphoriacs be more comfortable with their sex must be legally available. I also know people who struggled with gender dysphoria, and general gender identity crises, but overcame them with social support. If the goal is to actually make people "less sad," as you put it, then we have to ask the empirical question: What will do that?
That also prompts the question of what the second-order effects are of the absolute self-id gender identity theory framing are, including on people who experience struggles with their gender identity: if we make this a prominent part of our culture or offer people the option loudly, do we actually generate more gender confusion and dysphoria among the vulnerable than might actually exist in a vacuum?
In the real world, I see conservatives grappling with that question far more than trans activists, who admit no downsides to gender transition (though there are many), and don't even admit the existence of a tradeoff between making peace with your sex or transitioning. That's another one of the big areas where both your theory and the activists' framing is wildly off-base from the on-the-ground experience of transgender people, who from personal experience I know grapple with and make judgments on that tradeoff all the time. I remember one of our posters here talked about struggling with gender identity, and feeling like people they interacted with online were, to paraphrase from memory, "part of a cult that just wanted to increase the number of trans people at all costs." I also know we have transgender posters here who take a more generally transmedicalist viewpoint; I've found them pleasant and easy to relate to, despite the disagreements we might have.
So I guess what I'm saying is this: you're bringing a QED to a knife fight. There's blood involved. Surgeries. Severe mental distress. Suicide. You can craft the most logical argument for whatever steelman you want, but it's not going to build a bridge here -- certainly not by telling people they can't acknowledge a fact of the world, even philosophically, for moral reasons. The only thing that builds a bridge is raw and real human experience. Or in other words, empirical things.
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