vorpa-glavo
No bio...
User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Worth noting that today (Feb 15) is Lupercalia. If the tweet isn't testing the waters for Trump as king, it is god-tier trolling.
vorpa-glavo
7mo ago
I think this is why cultural products from the more feminists countries, such as the US, feature mannish-looking women, acting in a masculine manner.
I don't want to get too bogged down in the object level discussion of Aloy, but I think her having peach fuzz is a defensible choice. In our world, there are products to remove such hair. But Aloy is living in a post-apocalyptic world in 3040, isn't she? It's not hard to believe at all that grooming habits have changed, and women with peach fuzz just leave it as is.
Honestly, this kind of thing is something that takes me out of a lot of media. While we know that the Romans were big about hair removal, we also know plenty of ancient societies that weren't, and it's always strange to see "cave man" media where the women look like they stepped out of a modern Instagram photo, with shaved legs and armpits. I think a lot of creators across time have been cowards, unwilling to contend with the fact that humans are all, men and women, hairy apes.
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
11mo ago
I feel like this is a little too convenient.
Centrists get crap because they are perceived as supporting the status quo. Therefore, any sins that are part of the tapestry of the status quo get imputed to centrists, because whether they say they support them or not, they are perceived as being useful idiots for whoever has the power to make the status quo a certain way, and keep it that way.
If a libertarian ardently believes that taxes are theft, then centrists support government theft. If a dominionist theocrat believes that anything but a Christian government is a subversion of God's will, then centrists subvert God's will. If a woke progressive believes that any policy that is not aiming to end racism is itself racist, then centrists are racist.
I certainly think a kind of institutionalist centrism can have the high ground compared to partisan electoral politics in many cases, but I think telling people who believe in change of some kind that you have the high ground is going to fall on deaf ears.
vorpa-glavo
2mo 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.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Scott wrote Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell which built on the ideas of Mencius Moldbug, and then wrote the The Anti-Reactionary FAQ in order to refute it. Many in the dissident right and neo-reaction thought Scott's initial presentation was the better of the two.
I mean, to be fair, the President isn't supposed to have as much power as Trump (or any other president of recent vintage) has exercised.
We're at the end of a long process where every crisis saw Congress adding emergency powers to the presidency, and that, combined with Congresses' current dysfunctions, created a situation where the only source of change is the Executive.
A system will always collapse at its weakest point. In the past that has been the Supreme Court (witness Obergefell), and at various points it has been the Imperial Presidency.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
It was the universal radicalizing event of the generation
It simply cannot have been, because I was of that generation and I was mostly put off by how much people cared about the whole thing on either side.
New Atheism and BLM are dead and gone but people are still mad that they got rid of Tracer's ass wiggle.
If I had to pin a name on what it seemed like from the outside, it was like "Asking Disney Corporation for a handjob." The nature of top tier media (AAA video games, blockbuster movies, etc.) is that only a small number of companies are able to marshal the resources in order to make them, and they can only make a few such releases a year, so if your tastes aren't represented in what they produce, you are left out in the cold. So people complain about the big corporations, and their failure to deliver what they want. Woke feminists want ugly, disabled women in the top tier media, and anti-woke coomers want sexy eye candy. Those desires are mutually exclusive, and so one or the other of them will be disappointed.
Some people have really started to invest in the idea of symbolic victories that can be provided by this or that big corporation kowtowing to their desires, and I'm sure I won't be able to dissuade anyone in that camp. But I really think people need a Diogenes and Alexander moment. When Alexander the Great comes up to your wine tub in the middle of the agora and asks if you want anything, you should be prepared to answer, "Stand a little out of my sun."
Nobody needs Blizzard. Nobody needs EA. Nobody needs Disney, or a thousand other big media corporations.
Either create your own stuff, or engage with enduring cultural artifacts that are 30+ years old, or support the smaller creators who are making things closer to your tastes. Like, the ancient Greeks made commentary after commentary about the Homeric epics and engaged with those stories on a deep level for centuries. But our culture is so temporally parochial, so obsessed with novelty, that we enslave our imaginations to big corporations and lose our souls in the process. Human flourishing is not merely to consoom. And it's certainly not to win pointless little cultural victories in a product you paid $60 on Steam.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
I mean, anglophone people used to call Marcus Tullius Cicero "Tully" - leading to his most famous book, De Officiis, being known as "Tully's Offices", so there's plenty of underwhelming exonyms to go around.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
Seventy years pro-life activists have called their opponents baby-killers and it did not swerve their opposition's resolve by one inch.
The crux of the abortion debate is the moral status of the fetus, and the moral permissibility of ending life support to the fetus. It's not that activism did not swerve the opposition's resolve - the opposition has a fundamental disagreement of fact with the pro-life activists.
The situation is more similar to animal rights activism (in that it is a debate over the moral status of a living being not everyone considers morally important/relevant) rather than the foreign aid debate (where almost nobody assigns literally zero moral value to foreigners, even if they assign less moral value to them than their fellow countrymen.)
It's fine on the object level if an election result means a federal program is gutted, even one that a lot of people like and which does a lot of good in the world. Even so, I think it would be better to advance the principled reasons for stopping such a program, instead of reveling in how much you're owning the libs or whatever.
What do you want my response to be to "American conservatism just doesn’t appeal to me because I’m not scared of everything"? Can you write us a sample response to that claim, if it's not a waste of time?
I mean, I could try. Something like:
While an American liberal or progressive might feel like an American conservative is coming from a place of fear, this is a misleading impression. First, it is worth pointing out that wanting things like lower immigration, more barriers to trans care for children and fewer government hand outs doesn't have to come from a place of 'fear.' Just as liberals/progressives believe that their policies come from a high-minded place of concern for their fellow man, so too a conservative can genuinely believe that the best thing for all peoples is to adopt those policies.
In the case of immigration, a conservative might believe that brain-draining poor countries is bad for the stability and well-being of those cultures, and that migration might serve as a release valve for pressure that would rightfully lead to successful rebellions that might actually make those countries better off in the long run.
In the case of trans care, it doesn't have to be fear of the "other" at all, but a genuine conviction that the evidence in favor was actually substantially weaker than often claimed, that it originated in a different country with different background information that doesn't seem to apply to the anglo-sphere. Add in the replication crisis (which also affects medicine), and the evidence that the WPATH is an activist organization that seems to go beyond the remit of evidence, and you have a recipe to truly believe that trans healthcare for minors is a net negative for most children, and society as a whole. This is not about "fear", but a genuine disagreement on the merits of the evidence and an approach to epistemology.
Even aside from all of this, it is worth pointing out that liberals and progressives seem to be afraid of their own side's bugbears, in a way that is out of proportion with the statistics. They fear hate crimes, rape, and discrimination to a far greater degree than the statistics would seem to justify. It is wrong-headed to think that what makes conservatism unique is "fear", as opposed to the positive values they do espouse.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
My instinct is that MFSP is just a form of the chinese robber fallacy. There are enough male feminists who also happen to be sex pests, that when presented one after the other and subject to the availability heuristic on recall, people erroneously conclude that it was because there's something up with male feminists.
This is similar to your "salience" bullet point, but I would consider it part of a more general phenomenon of "Good Guy Sex Pests." How many interviews are there with the next door neighbors of malefactors who say things like, "He always seemed like the nicest guy"? I don't think "male feminists" are particularly special, except insofar as it is one of many ways to earn some people's automatic trust. But I think there are many categories of "good guy" that this applies to: pastors, police officers, a wholesome actor, etc. Different communities have different roles that confer automatic trust, and so every community is going to have problems with malefactors who take advantage of such trust in some way.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
That said, what is your current position on the Covid response?
Honestly, the Covid response was one of the big hurdles that caused me to take a step back and reconsider a lot of my views, though I was interested in philosophy and ethics before that.
I'm capable of being pragmatic, and acknowledging that something like a one or two week lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic to wait for information to emerge was probably inevitable, if not mostly justifiable. But as the weeks stretched into months, and a hodgepodge of interventions with only a loose relationship to the evidence began to emerge, I lost a lot of faith in the response.
If Covid had been the Antonine plague with a 1 in 3 death rate in healthy young people, I think more draconian interventions might have been justified if people weren't opting to take the precautions on their own. But it wasn't the Antonine plague, and most of the people who died were old and on death's door already, or unhealthy in some way.
I do think the United States, at least in my neck of the woods, never adopted policies as bad as some of the things happening the UK, Australia or China, but that is damning with faint praise.
I'm mostly positive on the vaccines themselves, but I think pure social pressure without state backing would have been enough to get most people vaccinated, and so we probably shouldn't have used vaccine mandates. (I'm still developing my ideas around the appropriate use of social pressure. I think there's a place for it in a functional, free society, but I think it can also go wrong, as has been seen in cancel culture.)
I'm pretty onboard with the idea that most liberal democracies massively overreacted to Covid, but where I was in the United States was never as bad as the worst stories I was hearing in Europe and Canada. Like, at any time during the lock down I was legally allowed to drive wherever I wanted (when I heard that the UK was pulling people over and ticketing them for driving during the pandemic), and I was always legally allowed to walk my dog (when I heard that some places in Canada were preventing people from walking outdoors, even after we knew transmission outside wasn't very strong.)
I'm sure many parts of the United States had much worse responses, but I hardly feel like our reaction to Covid was "totalitarian" even if it was a massive overreaction. Maybe liberalism was killed in countries like the UK, but not here. Certainly, our reaction was less totalitarian than the WWI and WWII era war economy, and almost all of the power taken during Covid was ceded back. (Though of course, every crisis in the United States makes the government just that little bit more powerful and unaccountable. Whether it was 9/11 turning the country into a surveillance state, or a thousand other little things.)
While Japan is an entertainment superpower, and mostly doesn't make woke games, I don't think it's that strange that people want non-woke stuff from American studios. It's not like telling people that India is making a bunch of awesome action movies that aren't woke will suddenly make them feel good about the fact that Star Wars has a Mary Sue as the main character. (Though seriously, people should check out some good South Indian movies like RRR, Karnan or Baahubali. Some of my favorite movies of recent vintage, and very trad.)
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
A strange aspect of this phenomenon I've noticed is people somehow misremembering facts into existence that are the exact opposite of reality. I encountered this Tumblr post, where OP and several people in the notes seem to believe that Serena Williams "famously" beat a bunch of men at tennis, when the only professional match she ever played against a man she lost, and he was ranked 203rd.
It's hard to have a discussion when half of the people are wishcasting their opinions into existence. (I say this as one of the people on this forum more generally sympathetic to trans inclusion across a variety of social domains.)
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Yes. I think such sentiments are ugly in anyone's mouth, but I also don't think they merit firing. In general, I would prefer a social norm that people only get fired for their public political opinions (even ugly ones), if being a mass media face of the company is part of their job, and it would violate the company's fiduciary duty to their shareholders to keep the person onboard.
Saying, "I wish the assassin hadn't missed" is not the kind of thing that should prevent you from working a low stakes retail job. The right would have forgotten about her in a week, and Home Depot acted as cowardly as any firm during an internet firestorm.
Do you think the Louisiana purchase was a legal act under the Constitution, given that there is no explicit enumerated power for Congress to acquire territory from other countries?
I get wanting to be something like an Originalist, but I think that a lot of people that hold the position do so as a kind of cop out. It is much easier to say, "We can't debate foreign aid, the Constitution doesn't explicitly allow it", than to say, "I am opposed to my tax dollars being spent on foreign aid for reasons X, Y, and Z." But the problem is, sometimes the Constitution does actually seem to allow the thing (and not in a nonsense "Living Constitution" way.)
I think if you're creative, most of the limitations are hardly limitations at all. The Federal government was able to end hotel segregation by using the Interstate Commerce clause to regulate hotels that host people from other states. That seems like a much more justifiable use of the Interstate Commerce clause than that one outrageous case of regulating how much corn a man is allowed to grow on his own property, and which would never cross state lines.
(EDIT: Looking it up, at least one kind of foreign medical aid is done "by the book" in exactly the way I describe. The US Department of Defense will send the military in to foreign disaster areas to set up field hospitals and military medical teams. So, we can ask the object level question - should US tax dollars be spent on such foreign aid? I don't think the "but the Constitution" dodge is really possible here.)
I wonder if any of you sometimes feel that someone of the outgroup just made a good move or just a good point (in other words, produced useful propaganda) in the culture war that takes you by surprise. A long time ago I noticed some liberals quoting a statement from a Christian pastor regarding abortion and I now decided to trace it back to the original source.
I mean, I certainly think people on the other side of the culture war make rhetorically strong points that are likely to resonate with other people, but I don't know if that ever "surprises" me.
More often, I find myself disappointed with the zingers people on "my side" are making, even if they make for good propaganda.
I'm slowly coming to the view that the only "legitimate" way to argue with another person is to engage with their "highest" human self as far as possible, and not to use cheap tricks. I heard about a friend trying to reach their anti-covid-vaccine parents, who had been talked into that position by Facebook video drivel, and that friend tried everything but found the most success in just sending pro-covid-vaccine Facebook video drivel. I suppose if all you care about is manipulating your parents to get a vaccine, because you genuinely think that it is best for them and for society, you might be able to justify that to yourself, but I felt a sense of discomfort with it.
I don't just want to find the right psychological levers to make other people believe what I want them to believe. I want to convince the human in them that what I believe is the case - or to similarly be convinced that I am wrong.
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 understanding 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 a 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.
Edit: Grammar.
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
6mo ago
I mostly agree with you that January 6th was not that big of a deal. From the moment it happened, I had the 1954 United States capitol shooting in the back of my mind, which I always felt was pretty justified: Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States, the people who make all the big decisions about Puerto Rico are bureaucrats in DC, Puerto Rican nationalists go to the bureaucrats which decide their status and shoot the people responsible for their subjugated status. Notably, Puerto Ricans would not get the chance to vote on their status until 1967, so I think it is fair to say that the Puerto Rican nationalists were using one of the few avenues available to them, since there was no peaceful political process available to them to push for the result they wanted.
While I have pushed back against this elsewhere in the thread, I similarly think that if the January 6th rioters truly believed that the election was stolen, then their actions are somewhat justified. That said, because I don't believe the election was stolen, and don't believe that the evidence was particularly good that the election was stolen, I still think January 6th is a little worrying as an example of what epistemically misguided people can be manipulated into doing.
But I also acknowledge that January 6th posed only the tiniest threat to American stability. Taking over a single building, even if that building is congress, doesn't give you the keys of power, and we have processes in place for replacing congress members who are killed. The most likely scenario if congress members started getting lynched was that the military moves in, takes back the capitol and then after a few special elections we're back to business as usual. No big deal.
Here is what I actually think a reasonable framing of this question is: "can men with a cross dressing fetish involve non-consenting women in their crossdress-play?" In a reasonable society I think the answer to this question should be: no, obviously.
I would propose an alternative framing of the question: "Can people who have official government documents that document them as women, involve non-consenting members of the public in their use of spaces for women?" To which the obvious answer is: yes. Just like my driver's license is valid whether you think I should have one or not.
What is your proposal for how trans men (biological women) who have medically and legally transitioned should be dealt with? Do you think most women who are scared of men would be comfortable with this guy sharing a bathroom with them? While I certainly could imagine a standard that looks like:
- Bathroom 1: For men, trans women, trans men, and any iffy dykes who freak the chicks out.
- Bathroom 2: For feminine women
I can't see how you could actually write or enforce the laws and social norms around that in a consistent way that actually works out in pratice. The only two reasonable standards are "biological" or "legal documents" in my opinion. Either standard will involve some women sharing a bathroom with some people that they might read as "men", so that can't be the deciding factor.
Bathrooms are extremely vulnerable places; they usually have one exit, you are often in there alone, and you are often doing something which makes you physically vulnerable (using the toilet). It seems completely reasonable for women to want to keep men out of these spaces.
How far are you willing to take this? Should we systematically look at how certain rooms are used, and if it would ever be the case that there's a woman alone in the room with a man, should we relocate activities or force the man to stand outside or something? Should we have far more women's only spaces than we currently do in society? What rooms besides bathrooms should we be sex-seggregating?
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
contrapoints
I wouldn't really consider Contrapoints to be within the rationalist sphere. She's just an ex-academic socialist who became a Youtuber, and who accidentally became a part of the "Breadtube" coalition of progressive content creators. Correct me if I'm wrong though - Google didn't turn up much connection between Contrapoints and the rationalist diaspora.
Point of order. LessWrong was banning people for "mis-gendering" and "dead-naming" as far back as 2012.
To be fair, I think this is consistent with the rationalist flirtation with transhumanism. If you believe people should have the right to experiment with their bodies and subject themselves to far more radical technological transformations, then someone coming to you saying, "I was born male, but I want to use science and technology to make my body as similar to a natal female's as possible, and then I want to be treated like a woman as far as possible", then you're more likely to just shrug and say, "Sure, why not?"
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.
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