vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
I mean I think many of the Revolutions are less impressive as they always end up recreating the structures that actually work for human society.
I'm not sure I agree. My view of history is that technology often creates a latent possibility for change within society, and that if a Revolution happens "at the right time" it can radically alter the shape of society. If it happens "at the wrong time" it will either destroy a society completely, or just change who happens to be at the top, but reproduce the successful model that preceded it.
The best examples are the French and American revolutions. I think they happened at the perfect time to create a transition from feudalism to capitalism and from monarchy to constitutional republics. The printing press changed us from a network society to a broadcast society, the post-Renaissance engagement with Classical history was stronger than ever, the Age of Sail was exposing European societies to new resources and new ways of thinking, and the Scientific revolution was in full swing. Things were ready for a shake up.
But human nature doesn’t change and truth doesn’t change and the hard realities of life on earth doesn’t change.
I partly agree with you, and partly disagree.
I think there is something to a Steven Pinker-esque argument about how much better our society is from those in the past: Less infant mortality, less war deaths, less starvation, etc. All of those things are tangible differences from the past. (I don't discount that a lot of these could be reframed in a more pessimistic light, where the threat of violence is just as strong as it has ever been - it is just the case that we have created a global system where the stakes are so high that all of the big players with survival instincts choose to engage in smaller scale proxy wars to avoid a nuclear apocalypse.)
However, I think many people feel like something has gone deeply wrong with modern society, and I personally think a lot of it stems from what I like to call "unenriched zoo enclosure syndrome." Anatomically modern humans evolved ~2 million years ago for an ancestral environment very different from anything we see in the modern day. I believe that our basic body plan and capabilities have been enough to give us a massive ability to shape our own environment, but that increased control has allowed us to create societies that aren't good matches for our psychology.
I think things like Bowling Alone, the male loneliness epidemic and many other societal problems fundamentally stem from the fact that we've designed a "zoo enclosure" for ourselves that doesn't fulfill our basic psychological and social needs as animals. It's like the birds that die of stress when put in captivity, or the lions that pace unhappily back and forth in a bad enclosure. Our instincts leave us expecting a highly social world of in person social interactions, full of green and certain kinds of stresses and challenges, and we have produced a world where we get none of that. Materially, we're better off than we've ever been, but psychologically I think we need to find new and better ways to deliver on experiences that "enrich" our zoo enclosures and leave us as happy human animals.
I sometimes wonder if there isn't a political analogy to the idea that 'Science advances one funeral at a time.'
I think you could tell a story of the last 400 years as a time of massive upheavals in traditional ways of life, as the rate at which societies had contact with wildly different societies rapidly increased, better instruments and math led to better understand of and dominion over the natural world, and society began to change at a more rapid pace than ever before.
Different human societies have always been changed by contact with one another. Just look at Ancient Rome, which saw Cato the Elder rejecting Greek philosophy as an anti-Roman thing that Rome had no need of, only for his great grandson Cato the Younger to become one of the most famous adherents of the Greek philosophical school of Stoicism and a sort of secular patron saint of lost causes complete with a pseudo-martyrdom narrative. If we use that as a measure, it took at most 4 generations for the "anti-Roman" Greek philosophy to be Romanized and assimilated by the Roman elites. That's a glacial pace of societal change compared to modernity.
In the modern day, you can be exposed to different ways of life in a thousand different ways. If you want to go deep on modern China or India as Westerner, you can do so. If you want to dive into everything the Western world knows about modern "primitive tribes" you can do so. You can read about the history of every great Empire and every historical time period and people we have records for. In a way, a modern person is constantly reliving Rome's first serious contact with the Hellenistic other. I think for most people, it is too much too fast. It is impossible to maintain a stable "Romanitas" in the face of all this information.
While I view it with as much suspicion as any of David Graeber's works, I think the book "The Dawn of Everything" made me realize the double-edged sword of the European Age of Sail. Sure, Catholic missionaries were being sent to what is now Quebec, and trying to convert the native Americans, but at the same time they were learning the languages and ways of life of these natives and sending reports back to the Old World which were read with great interest. I mean, just imagine that you're an educated Frenchman and you're suddenly hearing a ton about a bunch of cultural practices, governments, and religions that are unlike anything you've ever heard about. Even if you start out with a firm conviction that your way of life is superior, it would be hard to not update your view of human nature and what makes for a successful society even a little.
I think that there are two basic orientations a society can have: a rigid, fixed view like the Amish which is slow and deliberate about change, and a more open, changing view which tries to update and assimilate all new perspective which are put to it. The problem with the first view is that in many circumstances it might leave you vulnerable to outside invasion by a superior foe. In one sense, the Amish are lucky that people mostly admire their way of life and don't consider them disloyal or "foreign", because if the United States military wanted to take down the Amish it wouldn't even be a fight, it would be a slaughter.
I also think that in some ways "Progressiveness" or a Whig impulse is kind of inevitable over the last 400 years. In the United States in 1790 around 90% of people were involved in agriculture, whereas today less than 2% of the population is involved in agriculture. I don't think there's any set of societal values that would survive a transition like that. A modern American city calls for a different approach to society than what works in a 1790's farm society. Anyone who thinks otherwise is simply delusional. In 1790 there were no engines, no automated factories, no labor saving devices in the home, no video games, no internet. We didn't have modern antibiotics, automobiles, planes, mass surveillance, or a thousand other modern inventions. Frankly, it makes sense that society would change in response to those things.
I don't think we can start having a super viable "conservatism" again until the pace of technological progress slows down, and we artificially limit the number of "first contact" scenarios with very different cultures from our own, but I doubt that is going to happen. Instead, while we still haven't even ironed out all of the kinks of Modern Society + Smartphones and Social Media, we're adding Generative AI to the mix. We don't have time for healthy norms to develop, instead we just panic about the last problem while a new one starts rearing its head on the horizon.
vorpa-glavo
7d ago
I do think a lot of that is part of the sub role, but I was also trying to describe the appeal from "both sides."
There are people who want to become the bimbo, and I agree that a large part of the appeal for them is literally "turning your brain off" and giving in to blissful ignorance while letting another person take control. But there are also people who want to make the bimbo, and I think for them it is all about the feeling of seeing someone who was smart being taken down a peg and becoming a parody of themselves.
I think the bimbo sub has a lot of overlap with the sub in ageplay, petplay, hypnoplay, etc. All of those involve embracing a more simple-minded mentality and letting someone else take control for a while.
A much more speculative part for me is why particular kinks end up appealing to particular people. I have a second hypothesis, which I might call the 'horror story hypothesis.' I think that the power dynamic that becomes part of a person's fetish is often a thing that they worry about a lot. Classic examples would be the girl obsessed with staying skinny who ends up with a weight gain fetish, or a smart guy whose greatest fear was brain damage getting a bimbofication fetish - which are both examples I've seen in the wild. I don't think that this explains every instance of someone fixating on a single power hierarchy, but I think it probably explains a good deal of them.
vorpa-glavo
9d ago
Did you reply to my comment by mistake? It feels like a bit of a non-sequitur.
Now I want to know whether "being forced to find the derivative of an integral" is someone's kink. Surely not?
I assume /u/FarmReadyElephants was referencing bimbofication fetishes, and I have also observed a huge overlap between transwomen and bimbofication fetishes online.
It seems far less common for people to fantasize about people becoming smarter, and so I doubt there's been a lot of kink around being forced to do derivatives of an integral.
Mostly, my "grand unifying theory" of kink is that most fetishes (in the non-clinical sense) involve sexual power dynamics filtered through an "unusual" power hierarchy. So gigantification/shrinking fetishes are dominance-submission dynamics filtered through the lens of size, bimbofication fetishes are dominance-submission dynamics filtered through the lens of intelligence and low class beauty norms, weight gain fetishes are dominance-submission dynamics filtered through the lens of weight, etc., etc.
I suspect that normal human psychology in both men and women goes out "looking" for power hierarchies to internalize, and that most people in our society converge on a broadly overlapping set of hierarchies (wealth, beauty, class, height, etc.) Those hierarchies then play a role in what a person goes looking for in a sexual partner. But in a subset of the population, they become fixated on a single power hierarchy, like height, weight, or intelligence and so when the internalized hierarchy interacts with their psycho-sexual development, it manifests as a fetish.
I suspect that "being forced to find the derivative of an integral" is off the beaten path of power hierarchies, though I suppose it could have overlap with teacher-student roleplay.
vorpa-glavo
11d ago
I'll concede that "I have to shop around for banks that will give me credit in my own name, and I might not get it in the end" is less oppression than, say, "Society is structured so that the entirety of my future is decided by another person", but I think it still qualifies as oppression.
The nature of this discussion is that there is going to be some point where the oppression falls below a threshold where it makes sense to draw attention to it, or where the benefits of paternalism and freedom outweigh the downsides of oppression.
I don't think it would be unreasonable to say that women were oppressed as late as 1974, and that things may have tipped over towards very slightly favoring women on net starting in 1979 (when women became a slight majority of people enrolled in college), but I wouldn't think a person was wrong for choosing slightly different dates for those things either, or for saying that there is rough equality of the sexes in the United States, because both sexes have problems and they mostly fall under the threshold of attention worthiness.
Your understanding of the bill and mine are the same, though I certainly see that I didn't word it correctly in the post you responded to.
But even reduced, uneven access to credit is a form of oppression.
Like, are we going to pretend that the moment Esso started serving gas to black motorists nationwide in the 1930's, that suddenly black motorists were completely unoppressed as a group? Having to navigate an environment in which you can get an essential good from some firms, and can't get an essential good from others limits your options and often mean you're left with a worse set of choices.
Edit: Typo
vorpa-glavo
12d ago
At no point past 1920ish was this true for women (so no woman born/raised in the West knows what it's like to be uniquely oppressed- that it happened once upon a time is their origin myth, just like it is for the Indians)
While I'm broadly sympathetic to the idea that women are less oppressed than is commonly claimed, I do take issue with your claim here. In the United States, The Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) was passed in 1974, and was the bill that allowed women to get credit in their own name without the signature of a husband or male relative. I would argue that lack of access to credit in one's own name is a form of oppression, even if it could be counterbalanced by paternalistic or progressive benefits.
It is also worth pointing out that families and social expectations can function as "tiny tyrannies", even if people are theoretically free according to the law. My mom grew up in a fairly patriarchal household, and when my aunt got into the Air Force Academy her dad (my grandpa) said "no, you're staying right here with the family" and my aunt meekly accepted his word as final. On the other hand, my mom got into MIT and when my grandpa told her she couldn't go, she basically said, "I wasn't asking for permission, I'm going to MIT." My mom was also the most stubborn of her sibllings, and I don't think it's a coincidence that she was the one that left the state they all grew up in and became an upper middle class engineer, while the rest stayed nearby like grandpa wanted and mostly didn't do as well (except for the one aunt who got into real estate and banking.)
Women are higher in the Big 5 trait of Agreeableness, and I think that means that even in legal regimes that are relatively favorable to women, they can still get "stuck" in a tiny tyranny through mere social pressure alone. The women who escape are either unusually low in Agreeableness for a woman (like my mom), or autistic/weird enough that they naturally drift away when given the chance (like Aella.)
vorpa-glavo
22d ago
One of her boyfriends mentioned on her substack that she had a few bad experiences at in person events. Maybe she's skipping Vibecamp since she doesn't want to have to deal with being a microcelebrity at the moment, even if that's the sort of event where people would tend to be neutral to positive on her.
I see shame as the most powerful tool in the social toolbox. It needs to be used sensibly, and using it too much and too trivially is going to make it harder to use it for the things it needs to be used for.
This basic idea is one of the major breaking points between the ancient Cynics and the ancient Stoics.
The Cynics were famous for their shamelessness, which they achieved through rigorous exercises designed to desensitize themselves to shame.
Zeno of Citium was a student of Crates, the third scholarch of the Cynics, and he was assigned the task of carrying a pot full of lentil soup through the pottery district of Athens. Lentils were an incredibly low class food, and carrying them out in the open was basically admitting you were gutter trash. Zeno, who had been a wealthy merchant before a shipwreck stranded him in Athens, kept trying to hide the lentils under his cloak and be as inconspicuous as possible with them. Crates realized what his student was doing, and broke the vessel Zeno was carrying the lentils in, causing lentils to dribble all over Zeno's legs, and embarrassing him enough that he fled the pottery district, with his teacher calling after him, "Why run away, my little Phoenician? Nothing terrible has befallen you."
Zeno was constitutionally incapable of cultivating the extreme shamelessness that Cynicism demanded, so he founded a less severe philosophical school that found a balance between the extremes of Cynicism, and the irrational and unvirtuous masses: Stoicism. In many ways it was still quite demanding, and had its own exercises designed to instill excellent character and healthy emotional responses in its adherents, but in a way that was a lot more attractive and achievable by a wide variety of people.
I agree with you Maiq, that shame is an important social tool, but I also wholeheartedly believe that cultivating a resistance to shame is important as well. Having a strong enough moral character to go against the crowd or the people in charge is important. It's the kind of strength that let Socrates refuse to obey an unlawful and immoral order while serving in the army during the reign of the Thirty Tyrants. It's the strength that let Helvidius Priscus speak truth to power to the Emperor Vespasian, for which he was sentenced to death - a sentence he submitted to with equanimity.
I think this is a weird aspect of how the idea of freedom of speech has developed in the West. Nowadays we view it as a right that governments are obligated to protect, a limit on state power. But for the Greeks and Romans, the virtue of parrhesia (=frankness of speech) was something that a person of excellent character did because it was the right thing to do in spite of the risk of consequences to themselves. In a way, I think the thing missing from all sides of the cancel culture debate are the Helvidius Priscus-es. Where are the sages of strong moral character on the Left or Right, who rather than whining about the injustice of their cancellation, simply nod and say, "You will do your part, and I will do mine: it is your part to kill; it is mine to die, but not in fear: yours to banish me; mine to depart without sorrow."
vorpa-glavo
24d ago
I think it was around the time Lukas did his ‘why you should steal a woman’s photo to impersonate one online’ thread.
Could you please link to this thread? Sounds interesting.
A: What evidence is there that any/some/all of the dead died because there was no overnight forecaster? I checked the stats for 2023, a good Biden year, and there were 87 dead from tornadoes that year, including 23 from a single storm. 27 doesn’t seem wildly out of line with those numbers.
This is a fair question, and the same basic point was raised by /u/meduka. I agree that one storm is not conclusive. We will need to see the long run trends before my pronouncement is rigorously defensible.
Your other questions are ones I do not currently have an answer for. I am trying to see what data is available on this topic.
E: At a minimum, the following [...] Does not strike me as the sort of phrasing used by someone who is simply expressing scientific concerns without fear or favor.
I don't fully endorse what Rebekah Jones of Mesoscale News said in the full piece I linked. I just thought that the part I quoted did a better job than I could have laying things out, and I didn't see the point in reinventing the wheel.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I'm strongly anti-safetyist. The optimal number of yearly tornado deaths is not zero. The government could obviously reduce tornado deaths to zero if this outcome was prioritized at all costs. We acknowledge that there are diminishing returns and don't invest the resources to drive tornado deaths to zero. It seems extremely unlikely to me that the current resource distribution is optimal, though plausibly it's in a local minimum and moving out of it will cause some amount of pain.
I'm in agreement with you here. That's why I brought up the Value of a Statistical Life (VSL) calculations that the government uses. They're not beyond debate - I could certainly see arguments for raising or lowering the value from the $7.5 million it is set at, or using different statistics like Quality Adjusted Life-Years (QALYs) that might come to different results. But they are a reasonable starting point for cost-benefit trade-off discussions, and they set a limit to how much money we're willing to throw at saving a life through government policies around things like disaster preparedness and response, healthcare, road safety, etc.
Even if the optimal number of yearly tornado deaths is not zero - if we were successfully reducing tornado deaths with advanced warnings at a reasonable cost tradeoff, and we just stopped doing that earlier this year, then I think there is a fair case to make for us going back to the way things were on this particular front. I recognize that I have not yet conclusively made the case for this, and I'm trying to take a step back and do a more thorough investigation of the trends and causes in tornado deaths to get a better handle on what is going on here.
Your point about my pronouncements being somewhat premature is well taken. I certainly agree that an enduring spike in tornado deaths through to 2027 would be better evidence of the position I have staked out. Though I think setting up the "natural experiment" in a way that we can be sure it is due to staffing cuts and not something else is kind of tricky. Probably, you would look at all tornado prone areas of the United States, see which ones had staffing cuts and which ones did not over a relevant time period and then look at the long run trends going back well before and well after the DOGE cuts. Once the data was in, you could make suggestive correlational arguments that wouldn't be the end of the discussion, but might be enough to convince someone that it was indeed a mistake.
I couldn't find any information on whether an emergency alert was sent out in Kentucky (though I didn't look very hard) but if one wanted to make a case for these cut positions being important (rather than just accepting a statement from the Weather Service union) you'd want to dig up some data regarding how many tornados are "typically" caught -- and how quickly -- pre and post cuts to quantify the effectiveness of these local overnight forecaster positions.
All good points, and I have started to do some digging into the data.
I'm sure more information will emerge on this particular disaster, and I'm certainly willing to eat crow if more information emerges and I jumped the gun too early here.
EDIT: I no longer endorse this post. USA Today and NPR for Northern, Central and Eastern Kentucky have both run stories that confirm that the Jackson, Kentucky NWS office was staffed the night of the tornado:
Fahy said Jackson workers were called in May 16 work the overnight shift to coordinate with emergency management personnel and issue warnings throughout the night. The Jackson office had a full staff that he described as an “all-hands-on-deck” situation due to the extreme storm.
“The deaths were not attributable to the staffing cuts,” he said. “Everybody was there last night. We had a full team.”
In a statement, the weather service said the Jackson office had additional staffing and support from neighboring offices through the weekend.
As USA TODAY reported before the Kentucky storms, the weather service has had to scramble to cover vital shifts. For the first time in decades, not all forecast offices have “24/7” staffing, according to the weather service union.
I still believe it is irresponsible to leave offices unstaffed, even if there is some ability to move neighboring employees around when they're expecting storms, but this is much less bad than I initially believed. I think I'm going to take a break from the Motte for a bit. I do love this community, but I have not been doing a very good job contributing to it.
On May 15th, the New York Times ran a story about how DOGE cuts had left parts of Eastern Kentucky vulnerable while it was under moderate threats for extreme weather:
Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the union that represents Weather Service employees, said the office in Jackson, Ky., was one of four that no longer had a permanent overnight forecaster after hundreds of people left the agency as a result of cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency, the initiative led by Elon Musk that is reshaping the federal bureaucracy. (emphasis mine)
This morning, May 17th, it became apparent that eastern Kentucky had been hit by an overnight tornado that killed dozens.
I was honestly speechless when I read that.
This is what London, Kentucky looks like after the tornado. To quote someone who put it much more eloquently than I can:
Of all the disasters I’ve studied, tornadoes scare me the most.
They come with little warning and can erase entire communities in minutes — even seconds.
There’s no four-day lead-up to prepare like we often have with major hurricanes, and the winds of these storms can far exceed the most violent tropical cyclones.
In those few moments before one hits, especially if you’re sleeping, you’re at the mercy of your local weather station.
If someone is watching, they can issue a warning in those critical minutes before it’s too late.
Those few minutes after an emergency alert is issued are the difference between life and death.
[...]
Tornado warnings were delayed because of reduced staff. Those critical moments — a midnight warning to your phone waking you up, giving you precious seconds to find shelter — came too late for some.
My political stance has been evolving, but I'd describe myself as a state capacity libertarian.
To me disaster preparedness and relief are obvious, bread and butter, parts of the federal government. Sure we do stupid, wasteful things like give people flood insurance that lets them build and rebuild houses in the same vulnerable spot over and over again, when we should probably just heavily incentivize them to rebuild in a less risky area. Sure, with any given disaster there's going to be criticisms about how Biden did this or Bush did that. But I've always felt mostly positive about my tax dollars that go to disaster relief and preparedness.
I've had a growing sense of unease over the last few months as I saw reports of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announcing Trump administration plans to end FEMA, and reports about National Weather Service cuts back in April. I'm gutted that the easy predictions of these moves leading to unnecessary deaths has come true.
A part of me had hoped that Trump and Musk's Department of Government Efficiency would cut a lot of genuinely unnecessary spending from the government. When it was drag shows in Ecuador, even I as a rather Trump-skeptical person could admit that even a broken clock is right twice a day. But it was also clear to me that they were cutting with a chainsaw, not a scalpel. The images of Elon waving a chainsaw at CPAC feel a lot more hollow now. The man has blood on his hands. 27 people are dead in Kentucky because DOGE and Trump thought that it was "more efficient" to just let people die, instead of keeping overnight forecasters on staff.
Back in 2020, FEMA estimated the value of a statistical life at $7,500,000. By that standard, when doing the cost-benefit analysis the government bean counters are supposed to value 27 deaths as a loss of $202.5 million. I wonder how much it costs the government to staff permanent overnight forecasters in eastern Kentucky?
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Two thirds of the top level posts are about some combination of AI, HBD, Trans weirdness, Indian caste dynamics, Elon Musk, Polyamory or Aella gangbang dialectic. Nobody outside of Silicon Valley talks or cares about any of that stuff.
I'm in tech, but I've never even been to the Bay Area. I'm just part of the rat adjacent diaspora, living in a landlocked state.
To use a common reference point, let's take Game of Thrones. People have their favorite characters, subplots, settings, etc. With an AI-writer-model, you could say "Hey, write a new subplot where that blonde with the dragons and whatnot flies on up to the blizzard place and fucks around for a while." (side note: I never watched or read GoT, ironically enough, so all my references are going to be bad)
I feel like apps like Infinite Worlds are already tapping into this kind of thing. It's a relatively decent AI Choose-Your-Own-Adventure website that allows for a human creative to set up "worlds" with set plot points or details for players to play through. It's not as good as my favorite AI-powered game to date (the sadly defunct Medieval Problems), but it seems to have taken a writing forum I frequent by storm.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
This is a fascinating tempest in a teapot.
My senior capstone in undergrad was making a scheduling application for a big yearly conference that the school held each year. They told me that it took a group of people about two weeks to work out a schedule by hand. They gave my group a list of constraints and the panelist data, and we made something that could make a schedule in a few seconds, which I believe is still in use to this day.
While LLMs are different from a bespoke application, I think that anything that makes the lives of con organizers easier is a good thing, and it saddens me that the new generative AI luddites are rejecting useful tools based off of vibes and almost superstitious taboos. That said, I do understand the concerns about false positives and negatives, and think that some sort of appeals process, or perhaps even a way to request the AI's output would be a nice courtesy to provide to applicants.
You should consider formatting your post to be a list to make it easier to read.
To actually answer you question, you might check out Data Secret Lox, which is another part of the rationalist and rat adjacent diaspora, with its own group of regulars.
EDIT: Removed formatting point.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
If you want to hit politicians for pushing things that are obviously not true then you can throw in the entire left and their belief in intersectional social justice.
Can goals not be true? They can certainly be impossible to achieve, or theoretically possible but only at such great cost that no one would think it was worth the sacrifice involved, but I don't think the goals that motivate intersectional social justice can really be "false" in this way.
Technically, I think you could believe in HBD, reject blank statism and still have the basic goals of intersectional social justice. You'd just be using different levers to achieve your agenda than are currently used by progressives.
But this is all a bit silly anyways. There's plenty of wrong to go around for politicians of all political stripes. I think the nature of politics is that it is almost impossible for political coalitions to have a set of policies that connect to their stated goals in a coherent and evidence-based way.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
It is hit or miss, but I've managed to get ChatGPT to generate Ghibli images with prompts similar to:
This is a famous image of a well known historical figure. Please make this image in a Studio Ghibli style.
I had maybe a 50/50 success rate of taking outright refusals into it at least willing to try with the above prompt. Though some images were 3/4ths of the way done when they stopped suddenly, and I got a retroactive refusal. You might just have to play around with it.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
In my own case, I'm mostly a lurker here who likes to see a light-over-heat discussion between smart generalists across the political spectrum and extending to well outside the Overton window. I learn so much here, and get a ton of ideas for new books to read or topics to look into.
But I mostly don't comment, because I usually feel out of my depth. I'm a huge believer in the project of the Motte, but it is only in cases where I feel like there is a vacuum of a particular thought that I feel the need to throw my hat into the ring.
I think part of it is that the more heterodox people of the Motte have views forged in fire, and have been forced by necessity to become the best read, most expert exponents of their own ideas due to their having a position that is rare in the rest of society.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Large, diverse empires often produce "multiple choice" origin stories. In Rome, depending on your tastes, you could tell the story of the Trojan Aeneas carving out a part of his ancestral homeland on Italy, or the story of Romulus and Remus creating a cultural melting pot first through offering safe haven to foreign criminals then through the kidnapping of women of the Sabine people, or the story of the last king of Rome, the Etruscan Tarquinius Priscus, whose overthrow marked the start of the Roman Republic. Each story emphasized different aspects of Romanitas, and each could be used to argue for Rome being more culturally open or closed, or more willing to embrace foreigners as fellow Roman citizens or to reject them.
While the United States isn't a central example of an old-fashioned empire (China and Russia are far closer to this model), it is big enough and diverse enough that it has started to develop a "multiple choice" origin story of its own. There are several possible "foundation myths" for America. There's the Founding Fathers and the Revolutionary War, the "second founding" after the Civil War (where the 13th-15th Amendments saw a massive increase in Federal power), or the "modern founding" of America as the global hegemon with the victory in WWII and the defeat of the Axis powers. There's the Mayflower and the Pilgrims vs. the idea of America as a nation of immigrants.
I'm not sure I'd buy the idea of "social justice politics" as a form of ethnogenesis. By and large, I do think the assimilated "white Americans" have largely displaced "anglo Americans" as a distinct cultural group, and that after two or three generations most white American immigrants are indistinguishable from any other white American. I suspect that most light-skinned Hispanics will probably be similarly absorbed into the white blob within a generation or two, thus strengthening the "white" coalition. At the same time, groups that are more visually distinct occupy a weird space. Asians kind of get treated as "honorary whites" or "model minorities", but I recently spoke to an Asian American man who felt threatened enough in the community he was living in (trucks of Trump supporters were driving through Asian ghettos and harassing the residents) that he went out and bought a gun. And of course, the hardest square to circle is the African American community, especially the ADOS subgroup which has never held power (note that Barrack Obama was not of ADOS descent.)
I think that social justice politics is just an attempt to form a non-"white men" coalition. College educated white women were xenophilic enough that they were happy to throw in with a variety of visible minorities in order to argue for shared interests in the spoils system of jobs, prestige and power. But with the election of Donald Trump there's been a vibe shift, and I'm not sure if the non-"white men" coalition can hold into the future. Heck, Kamala lost, but the coalition she tried to throw together was certainly some odd bedfellows, like Liz and Dick Cheney. I think we're about due for a political realignment, and I'm not sure where every group will end up in the new arrangement.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
And scientists aren't ubermensch immune to political bias; they vote blue as a rule.
But won't this move only encourage them to vote blue in greater numbers? If one team says, "We're okay with burning down legitimate scientific research along with illegitimate politicized pseudo-science, as long as we're owning the outgroup while we're doing it," and the other says, "Yeah, science is important we'll throw a bunch of money at it," then the deal is always going to be that scientists will vote for the money-for-science team.
As a long term strategy, I think there's things the Trump administration could have done to either depoliticize publicly funded science or to increase the amount of legitimate scientific research that might come to anti-woke conclusions, and this probably would have been better for getting scientists on side. If scientists were able to look back in 4 years, and say, "Trump's presidency revolutionized America's approach to funding science, and improved it in a way that no one is likely to want to change" then wouldn't that be a lot better for the MAGA movement?
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Well it's not just the popular one, it's the scientific one. When biologists or geneticists refer to sex this is technically speaking what they mean. And it's not a human specific thing.
Are you sure? I've always had the sense that cluster of traits definitions were most common in biology and genetics. While I don't like such definitions as the "lie to children" version we teach most people, I do admit that something like the following process:
- Measure all primary and secondary sex characteristics, and sex-correlated traits in a large sample of a population.
- Perform k-means clustering on all that data. Use the elbow test to determine the ideal number of clusters (which is going to be either 2 or 3 depending on how the math works out.)
- Label your clusters "male", "female" and (if present based on elbow test recommendations) "neuter."
Is going to be a fairly reliable method, and a scientist will be able to plug a new data point in and identify what cluster it belongs to the vast majority of the time. It just doesn't really produce an easy, human-learnable rule for dealing with edge cases.
Technically speaking it's improper to say organisms that produce no gametes have a "sex" since it's a category error, they don't engage in sexual reproduction and have therefore no such trait. It's like asking what color is the number 42
I have considered that, but it doesn't work since Trump's EO eliminates the X category and mandates everyone either be classed as male or female.
While I fall somewhere in the "state capacity libertarianism" and "liberaltarian" spectrum, I would say my main objection to naive libertarianism is the problem of petty tyrants.
I think there's a sense in which libertarians mostly ignore the ways that a local bully with a lot of property and social influence can make a person's life a living hell. If we live in a Dickensian libertarian utopia, what exactly stops bosses from treating their employees like crap? If the bankers refuse to give you credit because of some immutable trait of yours, how are you supposed to build wealth? If everyone in town refuses to hire someone who looks or talks like you, how are you supposed to make a living?
At best, I think the libertarian just hopes that society ends up supporting a diverse enough set of viewpoints that somewhere there will be a boss that isn't crappy, somewhere there will be a bank willing to take on more perceived risk, and somewhere there will be a person willing to follow the financial incentives and hire you.
But I think similar to the old financial dictum that "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", there's a societal corollary that "Petty tyrants can make your life hell longer than you can remain solvent." Sure, the bigotry or social censure of a petty tyrant and their supporters ends up "irrational" from an economic perspective, but that can still create situations like those that necessitated black motorists creating the Green Book to help them find gas stations, restaurants and stores that were willing to serve their kind.
If the libertarian response to a black motorist who wants to use the government to make more spaces open for them is just, "Don't worry, it is in their financial interest to serve you, in the long run they'll be out-competed by the gas stations, restaurants and hotels that do serve black people", then a part of me feels like the response is incomplete.
A similar situation emerges with the treatment of untouchables in India. Even without law, people of higher casts often don't want to be in the same room or even have the shadow of an untouchable touch them. How were the untouchables supposed to end that situation in a libertarian utopia? In the real world, a lot of the way it happened is the Indian government using men with guns to integrate untouchables in schools, the same way it happened in the United States.
I'm curious if a more traditional libertarian can point to success stories of an oppressed underclass becoming a normal, accepted part of society without government intervention to force the petty tyrants to comply. I'm a little unclear on how a libertarian watchman state where all of the government enforcers are racist/sectarian/whatever, ever stops being bigoted. If you belong to a class of people whose de facto status is that you can be lynched or murdered and the local government will look the other way, is it not sometimes worth it to have a larger government that sends in men with guns to stop the local government from letting people get away with murder?
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