site banner
PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38487 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

13
Top Bottom New Old Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

This is how I know the Trump assassination attempt was done by a rando. He tried going for a headshot. You never go for a headshot, you aim for center mass. People who think a headshot is what you do get their ideas from games and tv shows.

trump was wearing body armor . Given that Trump had medical staff within feet, the killer's only choice was a headshot which would have been instantly lethal. even aiming for the upper torso could have been survivable with armor and rapid medical attendance.

Trump wasn't wearing some fancy battlefield armor with ceramic plates. Meaning any rifle round apart from (maybe) hollow point small rifle ones would have gone right through.

Also, he was being shot from the side, which is a direction where soldier armor doesn't have ceramic plates so rifle rounds are lethal.

Really, had the shooter used a better gun, practiced more and went for center of mass, he could have killed him easily.

Odds are cca 50% that a torso hit with a .30 rifle kills a person. And he's a spring chicken only when compared to Biden.

Odds are 50% that the shot would have splattered Trump's brains. And it's not a non-zero probability the body shot would have missed as well.

Apparently the shooter missed because Trump turned his head at the last second pointing at the poster that was there..

The reason that you shoot for COM is not that it's a bigger target, it's that heads bob around a lot and centre-of-mass does not. (as anyone who's done defensive line in hockey, soccer, or football knows perfectly well)

Trump's (20"x20" or so) torso is surely not a killshot -- but the 10-12 inches around his heart definitely is, .223/.308/doesn't matter. This is kind of a textbook case against headshot efficacy -- Trump literally moved his head just after the guy decided to pull the trigger; if he'd shot for the heart with the same accuracy we would be living in a very different world today.

but the 10-12 inches around his heart definitely is,

Theodore Roosevelt not only survived being shot at torso, but even continued his speech for 1.5 hours after being shot.

.223/.308/doesn't matter.

of course it does, size of bullet and whether it rotates on impact makes different size hole, .22LR might fail to reach heart vs. vest + rib at that distance.

Here's what cheap-ass .223 ammo does to soft armour:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=T71ku4Fjn3w&t=479

Note all the action in the ballistic gel -- this is not something you want going on anywhere in your torso, and absolutely makes you D.R.T. if your heart is in that area.

Yes, .22LR or whatever bullshit pocket pistol cartridge was used on Roosevelt are quite a different thing -- these are literally an OOM less powerful than centrefire rifle rounds, even .223.

Sorry if ".223/.308/doesn't matter" was unclear -- the 'doesn't matter' refers to centrefire rifle rounds; any of them (with very limited exceptions; .22 Hornet maybe?) will go through soft armour like butter at this range, and retain enough energy to create a hydrostatic wave which will shred/explode one's heart given a true COM hit. Other parts of the torso (eg. lung shot) might be survivable with prompt medical heroics, but would still have been a pretty bad time for Trump.

I don't think you need to penetrate body armor at all. You just need to pump enough kinetic energy into the heart area. And at trumps age chances of it being fatal are not low.

Fat standing between unpenetrated vest and heart area would distribute kinetic energy pretty much

I'm seeing online (so let's take a grain of salt) that this shot was from 130 or more yards away. Maybe this is just how good this guy's aim is. Bullets flying wide. We don't know where he was aiming.

I think after seeing he missed his initial shot realized he only had a few seconds left, so unloaded as fast as he could

This article makes the same argument.

It's always funny to see these blogs where some random nobody (or at least, nobody with any credentials relevant to the case) gives a detailed argument in support of a definite claim that turns out to be entirely and utterly wrong.

Yeah true.

photos and eye witness describe it it being a riffle

it instantly killed one of the audience members after being hit to the head

snipers regularly aim for the head ,as the secret service had done for example. they didn't shoot his torso

Shooting from an elevation into a crowd, head hits are more likely.

Snipers aim for whatever's showing.

To be fair, his head was probably all they had to shoot at if he we peeking over the peak of the roof from prone.

Thank you for using the right word. I see everyone using "peaking" nowadays and it's driving me crazy.

"Sniper peaking on the roof" like damn, he really enjoys his work

Exactly, they watch too much TV instead of looking at the actual data. The reason assassinations like Kennedy and Lincoln were unsuccessful were because the assassin went for the head, whereas in successful attempts like Roosevelt and Reagan, they aimed for the body.

Ah yes, point blank and multiple shooters. Really, it's all the same thing.

Multiple shooters?

Referring to Kennedy. I don’t know if I like the grassy knoll theory, but several of the alternatives still have a second shooter (including my personal favorite, accidental discharge by adjacent Secret Service officer).

Mary Todd double-tapped Abe while Booth was distracting everyone by jumping on stage.

and shouting "sick simping trannies"?

Too early for irony, only one cup of coffee in this a.m.

I am inclined to believe that a modern combat rifle round would have gone straight through Roosevelt, assuming he were not equipped with tougher armor than his speech and glasses case.

why? late 19-20th early century rifles (e.g. Mosin) used more powerful cartridges than later assault rifles ("intermediate cartridge")

Roosevelt was shot with a .38 Special, which is like 250J when shot from a short barrel, almost half the energy of a 9mm Luger cartridge, another handgun round, or about the same energy as a high-powered .22 LR cartridge.

You are right that any rifle round would've gone straight through Roosevelt, though.

I thought it was a .32-20. basically the same really

He's just comparing the 32-20 black powder carbine/pistol round with a modern smokeless rifle cartridge, which is <300 joules to 1800 joules.
(I know Roosevelt wasn't shot with a blackpowder version, but the original loading still limited chamber pressures, and the non-expanding semi-wadcutter bullet is much less lethal than modern hollow points, let alone engineered-fragmentation rifle bullets)

before the advent of modern medical care and decent body armor , aiming for the torso would have been better . infection would have been lethal if initial bleeding/trauma wasn't

From what I’m seeing a direct torso hit only had a 62% death rate in the civil war era. If you have a better than 62% odds of hitting their head, you would have been better off aiming for the head. Doubly so if the person is particularly healthy and hardy, given it was usually days or weeks till they actually died, and those with robust immune systems had much better odds.

On the other hand Trump is in his late 70's and if the objective was 'Trump can't be President' that'd likely be accomplished by even moderately wounding him considering recovery timelines at his age and needing to campaign.

How do you know he wasn't aiming for center mass?

You don't know whether he went for a headshot.

It's a common joke really. "1: nice shot, you got him right in the head." "2: I wasn't aiming for the head"

You don't aim for center of mass if your target is wearing body armor. I don't know if Trump was (probably not, it was too damned hot), but the shooter had to consider that possibility.

Can't rule out that line of thinking, but no normal soft ballistic vest will protect against rifle rounds. They're certainly not strapping up presidents with ceramic plate armor these days, right?

Correct. A soft vest wouldn't stop rifle rounds.

Not at short range, but this was a pretty far shot. The bullet would be going much slower than muzzle velocity when it hits.

556 at around 100 yards easily goes through soft armor. Velocity should be at or a bit lower than 3000 ft/s. Let's call it high 2000s ft/s depending on barrel length and ammo.

this was a pretty far shot.

This isn't a far shot for the cartridge (5.56 is effective out to 800ish yards, but 450 is about the practical maximum if you're not fiddling with the sights) and it'll still defeat soft armor at those distances provided you're using the appropriate ammunition. It won't defeat the cutting edge of body armor, though (the newest-gen UHMWPE stuff).

It put a hole in a hydraulic lift, so I suspect it would easily penetrate a soft vest (unless that shot was really lucky and actually hit a hose). But I think a sniper wouldn't want to count on that with a .223.

I would assume hydraulic hoses are significantly easier to penetrate than any armor, soft or otherwise.

They're pretty hefty actually, I wouldn't be so sure -- hydraulic fluid is at like 5000+ psi, there's several layers of steel/rubber/fibre in there.

Anyways unless he was using some frangible coyote round .223 absolutely does penetrate soft armour at 150 yards, this is not even a question.

agree. this center of mass rule is for police shooting at ordinary civilians who do not have body armor

Basically. There's various youtubes and articles out there about the difference between military (1000 yards/meters+ center of mass) and police snipers (<200 yards/meters head shots) and what they aim for. Assassins are in the later category. Today's events is a case in point. Look how close the shooter got.

FWIW, I regard the whole idea of assassination by medium-long range gunshot at a well-known public event to indicate a crazy rando. Someone seriously experienced or some sort of elite intelligence operative would work on acquiring and leveraging specialized intelligence for a much simpler and more certain kill, and good chance of the assassin surviving and escaping.

Especially for someone with a little less protection like a former president and candidate, it's likely that at least a dozen times a week he's just walking around in some random public place with a bunch of random people nearby who haven't been checked for weapons or inclination, with a few USSS bodyguards around. This is mostly reasonably safe since it's highly secret and hard to predict exactly when those encounters will be. If you were super-elite, you'd try to learn about some of these ahead of time, choose one where you're reasonably likely to be able to get away clean after you shoot, and take the shot. Get away clean, and it's a super-mysterious event. It'd be hard to prove afterwards whether it was a crazy rando that just got lucky or really was some kind of elite operative acting on masterfully-obtained evidence.

Depending on the connections, certain randos can roll their own shaped charge.

Randoms being the same as the Stasi, now.

I'd note that that incident wasn't exactly randos - it was the work of Red Army Faction, which was backed by the KGB and likely receiving training and materials from them. I don't think any randos are going to be constructing a precisely timed shaped charge IED to take out a target in an armored car.

It's possible to get away with murdering a high-ranking official even with a sloppier and more opportunistic approach; just have a clean record to avoid being identified by your DNA, wait until a reasonable opportunity presents itself and then take the shot. Sweden's Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated more or less this way in the Eighties and the killer still hasn't been conclusively found, though one Christer Pettersson was put on trial (but acquitted in the Court of Appeals) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Olof_Palme

The real give-away of a nutjob amateur is indeed choosing a time, place and method of execution which only guarantees one casualty: that of the gunman.

It could "make sense" if your goal was not necessarily just to shoot him, but to explode his head on national television so the Internet could be flooded with 4k celebratory videos.

Sure, we wouldn't think of that as a rational calculation compared to aiming for center of mass, but I'd go out on a limb and suggest that people shooting at Presidents are not gruff sober Operators concerned with eliminating the target and nothing else.

There's nothing inherently stupid about going for a headshot. It's obviously a high risk, high reward strategy relative to center mass, but there is no guarantee of a death with a center mass shot and the medical care a President would receive. We don't know the caliber of rifle being fired, but if speculation that it was a small caliber is accurate then going for a body shot would risk failing to even defeat light body armor.

The reason I would tend to think the competence level wasn't particularly high is the apparent choice of weapon. As near as I can tell, he didn't have any sort of optics. While that distance is absolutely a makeable shot with an AR platform rifle with iron sights, it's a hell of a lot more assured with a simple hunting rifle and good glass.

It is the thoracic triangle from what I read. Shooting him from beneath the chest would not have been lethal given rapid care . He was wearing armor

Also wouldn't the principal have body armor of some sort on?

From 1/6 one thing we have never been given any information on is the alleged pipe bomber. Zero. Nada. The only planned terrorist activities on that date.

I have no idea what happened here. Was it the CIA. A lone wolf Democrat activist trying to paint maga as terrorists? Some smart maga extremists crazy enough to do the strategy but smart enough to do it right?

person of interest https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fbi-identified-person-interest-capitol-pipe-bomb-case-jan-10-2021

Conspiracies do hide in plain site. Eipstein being a pedophile and getting a sweet deal was well known. Hunter Biden laptop to a lesser extent.

The left also hasn’t tried to hammer the right on the issue of a pipe bomber being there. And the left often tried to play up things that weren’t done/known like Trumps covid disinfectant drink bleach thing, Ivermectin as dewormer, or the fine people hoax. Maybe it’s not enough of an edge case to get people to fight over it or the powers that be knew not to publicize it because if people looked into it more it would be bad.

Edit: I guess you could argue Russia/State Actor did it. Saw that America had gone crazy. And wanted to escalate. Could have their Michael Westen whose good enough to do it right without being caught.

I think it’s worth pointing out that pipe bombs were placed outside the nrc as well. Which makes this whole effort to assert that it was some sort of false flag operation seem ridiculous https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/seeking-info/suspected-pipe-bombs-in-washington-dc

I don't follow. Why is the presence of a second pipe bomb evidence against, rather than evidence for, or irrelevant evidence?

I think his take is wrong.

It can be argued it was a maga because the GOP didn’t properly fight for him etc. I don’t believe both getting pipe bombs tells you anything.

"can be argued" is a poor standard here.

The point is that if this was a false flag operation to make the right look bad, it would have been more effective had there only been a DNC bomb.

At the very least it's off narrative, although it's in somewhat of a subtle way. The media and "deep state" don't like to publish things that make people get ideas. The idea that someone could do this and get away? Big no no. Emphasizing all these stupid Trump supporters who were stupid and got stopped by the majesty of the security state? Big yes yes.

So they probably don't want others to remember this and get ideas. Which is also kinda fair?

99.99% an op IMO. DC is the most recorded place in America. You don’t enter or leave it without being recorded. The full weight of intel might would be on finding the planter. It would be a trivial project for deep state to determine the person’s vehicle, the direction of the vehicle, how they obtained the vehicle. I do not believe that a planter could have the sophistication to steal a car, sufficiently hide his appearance while driving, hide the car (dna / prints) somewhere our of sight of video recording and vehicle photographs (no highway) where a different vehicle is waiting. Doing this on a day in which security would be increased makes no sense.

This is as suspicious as the Seth Rich murder, which for some reason has been memoryholed from my own memory — didn’t they find his probable Reddit account pointing to his leak or something?

Do you realize what that would mean?

If the pipe bomb was an OP assuming CIA. Besides the huge abuse of power etc. What were they covering up? You start going down a path that gets very crazy.

The mildest version would be Biden legitimately won the election but the CIA wanted to permanently ruin Trumps political future.

Technically, the mildest version would be some variant of the Curtis Culwell Center attack. If the malefactors in that case hadn't gotten shot red-handed on-site in a way that shut down the center of a small city, they'd have been incredibly embarrassing for the feds to pursue in court: encouraged toward attacks and their specific target by a federal undercover agent, armed with a Fast and Furious gun, and literally tailed by FBI agents who were apparently dressed up like Team America extras but did not provide aid to those under attack.

We don't, tautologically, know of any situations where this sort of embarrassing attack happened and the feds just shrugged their shoulders about it (... probably), and I'd like to think that 'found the pipe bomber' would outweigh the 'took an embarrassing and hard-to-solve case' bit, but it's at least plausible that they exist.

That said, I think the null hypothesis is still more plausible than most people think. DC police and surveillance just aren't that good, and while opsec is harder than a lot of people think, sometimes even mediocre opsec won't necessarily drop a case into your lap. There are some details that leave me suspicious enough that the more dire options aren't implausible, but follow enough crime investigations and you do occasionally see people caught on HD video with no masks, who drove past a couple LPRs in a bright painted weird car, and who left ammo cases at the scene, and months later no one can find or ID the fuckers.

For the 16th Street Baptist Church scenario that would seem to strongly point towards an antifa or otherwise identifiable leftist group as the perpetrator. That would be a reason the FBI would bury evidence on who did it.

Since after 1/6 Trump was a very bad man and the primary target you would not want it to come out that on 1/6 day there was also a leftist trying to do a frame job on Maga as very bad people by planting some pipe bombs. That would lead to a mixed narrative that gets Trump off. If it was a Maga guy who did it then they would use it to hang Trump.

It could still be a Russian op, or something. It doesn't necessarily have to be CIA. Although I guess if it was a foreign intelligence operation I would expect the FBI to accuse someone of it.

Can we be sure he brought a vehicle into DC rather than walking the last 10 km or so (possible if you're determined enough, and pipe bombers are usually pretty determined)? Can we even be sure he doesn't just live in DC?

Even assuming that DC is so well recorded that it is almost impossible to not notice, it doesn't need to outright be an op. It can simply be someone inconvenient for whatever story the CIA wants to push. Which in this case would probably mean somebody who is openly and obviously anti-trump. But again, that would just be damning in a different way.

the cellphone data from one provider that law enforcement usually has access to was also corrupted. but don't worry it was not on purpose and we don't want any conspiracy theories.

We did a complete geofence. We have complete data. Not complete, because there's some data that was corrupted by one of the providers, not purposely by them, right. It just – unusual circumstance that we have corrupt data from one of the providers. I'm not sure – I can't remember right now which one. But for that day, which is awful because we don't have that information to search. So could it have been that provider? Yeah, with our luck, you know, with this investigation it probably was, right. So maybe if we did have that – that data wasn't corrupted – and it wasn't purposely corrupted. I don't want any conspiracy theories, right. To my knowledge, it wasn't corrupted, you know, but that could have been good information that we don't have, right. So that is painful for us to not to have that. So we looked at everything.

https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/republicans-release-new-information-january-6-pipe-bomb-investigation

though, maybe these warrants that the government is using are unconstitutional. i guess in this case maybe if the location and time were precise then it is kind of similar to accessing CCTV information.

I expect anything they get out of a telecom is fine by the Third Party Doctrine.

Note that I at all support that doctrine, I would probably pare it back to say that anything an individual shares/discloses to a third party with the recognized and reasonable expectation that the party would not further disseminate it is protected by the Fourth Amendment. That language is stolen directly from Katz vs US.

Alas, that ain't the law today.

Peterson vs Fuentes twitter drama

The entire story is shown in this thread. Someone is asking why something is 'like this', Fuentes predictably answers 'Jews', Peterson swoops in to condemn, and then the rest follows.

The AmericaFirst/Groyper movement seems to have finally found another 'gatekeeper' to poke. After Charlie Kirk rather expertly adjusted his rhetoric to fall outside the AF/G firing line.

To avoid doing another dissection of Peterson: he certainly seems to have been bitten by the Zionist bug. For all his posturing as a rational and reason minded clinical psychologist when talking to feminists about feminism and the difference between the sexes, the merits of individualism and focusing on immediate short term goals and family, he seems completely unhinged when it comes to semitism.

Bullies thrive on weakness, and whilst it might not be nice to push peoples buttons like this, I'm left wondering just why Peterson is such a rabid philosemite. The trolls can only do what you allow them to get away with, as Charlie Kirk demonstrated by defusing the avenues of attack. Peterson seems to be doing the opposite of that.

As a further question, is this part of the right wing sphere dying? I'm not sure how Peterson is doing. Last I heard he did a rather big media deal with Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire. Whilst the AF 'conference' or whatever it's called, didn't do so well.

  • -10

Quick compilations:

It's amazing watching these figures collapse into a deluded schizo-philosemitism. These figures used to represent the "Right of mainstream" perspective but that is falling apart as this nauseating Israel worship gets exposed to increasingly skeptical audiences.

As a further question, is this part of the right wing sphere dying?

What do you mean by "this part of the right wing sphere" here? I wouldn't consider Peterson and Fuentes part of the same sphere. I also wouldn't consider the AF 'conference' being canceled an indicator of that sphere dying. Engagement on X is probably the biggest indicator for the growth of those spheres. And Fuentes was able to ratio the Petersons handedly. And yes, ratios matter- they are the memetic fitness signal among the genetic algo of X discourse.

There also appears to be an enormous proliferation of DR engagement on X. It's quaint to imagine not too long ago where the most "radical" decile of the right wing youth would be listening to Glenn Beck or something. But now they are on X signal-boosting DR talking points and engaging in WWII revisionism. The engagement is huge and appears to be growing.

Another area in which X discourse seems to be changing is Holocaust Revisionism. I am increasingly seeing posts alluding to or outright endorsing Holocaust Revisionism and WWII Revisionism with high engagement and high numbers of likes. The ranks of "Holocaust Deniers" are certainly bigger than they have ever been before and appear to be growing judging by the number of accounts I am seeing endorse it on X. The taboo is collapsing, and it is largely because of the actions of Israel and the collapse of the credibility of the Jordan Petersons and Glenn Becks unable to corral young right-wingers any longer.

"Western civilization would die without Israel"

It's takes like this that are utterly baffling to me. And I say this as someone who's very pro-Israel and who generally likes Jews (even though I generally hate their political leanings). Like Nikki Haley saying Israel doesn't need us, we need them, it just strikes me as a completely delusional way of looking at the relationship between Israel and the West. I'm more than happy to sell Israel all of the weapons they need to glass Gaza or replenish the Iron Dome or bomb Iran or whatever tickles their fancy, but I'm not happy to be the one paying for them via our foreign aid. Israel has clearly been very dependent on us for both arms and the funding to buy those arms, and it's completely insulting when people like Shapiro and Haley suggest that we need them and not the other way around.

After Charlie Kirk rather expertly adjusted his rhetoric to fall outside the AF/G firing line.

What did he do? I mean in general Trump is moderating so hard that he’s repudiating even the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, it’s clear he’s in another dimension to the whole AF wing.

Trump is moderating so hard that he’s repudiating even the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025

The impression I'd got from this article in Unherd was that Trump doesn't like Project 2025 because:

a) He's the big boss and nobody tells him what to do (in his self-conception). He's not interested in being some pencil-neck's sockpuppet.

b) He thinks that small-state conservatism is stupid and electorally unpopular.

How accurate is that? I don't really know much about the Heritage Foundation.

Trump didn't write it and hasn't read it. Reporters keep asking him questions about it and he doesn't like how those questions hijack his messaging strategy.

More or less, with a side of project 2025 being way overblown and not coordinated well enough with Trump.

It’s funny that JP’s own hero Solzhenitsyn, who he quotes and praises endlessly, wrote a ~1000 page tome on the influence of Jews in Soviet Russia, criticizing Jewish Russians as well as gentile Russians. Yet Peterson is unable to discuss the topic as it applies today. As if Judaism today is somehow different from the Judaism in 1900 or 900. I think this is just part of his boomer programming. Remember that every boomer westerner has been circumcised with the holocaust narrative: consciously traumatized at a young age in a way that reduces their sensitivity while inculcating a definitive story about Jewish suffering and redemption. Not far from the original circumcision-exodus narrative, just applied to gentiles.

is this part of the right wing sphere dying

Nick Fuentes continues to grow in popularity, he is literally ratioing the Petersons and getting shoutouts from the Tate brothers. Fuentes-adjacent Sam Hyde is sitting down with zoomer influencer Matan and KillTony regulars, and also has a bizarre inroad to underground rap through Joeyy. They sorely lack IRL infrastructure but their influence is expanding I’d say.

As if Judaism today is somehow different from the Judaism in 1900 or 900.

But it is. No way in heck would any Jewish community in either 1900 or 900 have outmarriage rates nearing 50%, for one.

Antisemitism is rising in popularity among younger people in the west. I don’t think that Fuentes is the story- he’s too much of a dweeb- but it’s definitely a thing.

Remember that every boomer westerner has been circumcised with the holocaust narrative: consciously traumatized at a young age in a way that reduces their sensitivity while inculcating a definitive story about Jewish suffering and redemption.

I like this metaphor even if I disagree with lots of the specifics. The overall thrust is definitely true in the sense of boomers thinking Jews are special perpetual victims.

The west can’t solve antisemitism because the west isn’t a fact based society. Maybe no societies are fact-based. The left can’t deal with antisemitism because oppressed-oppressor ideology makes the Jews look like the bad guy because they’re the most successful society on earth. The right is probably more aware of the reasons but they still can’t have the honest debate on the Jewish question.

Is the reason “evolution doesn’t stop at the neck”?

they’re the most successful society on earth.

The Jews are America now?

Most successful group in the most successful country

We probably lose WW2 if the germans just wanted to dominate Europe and were pro-Jewish. They get the bomb when we did and you just have to guess their intellect is enough to delay D-Day.

That quite clearly didn't work for them the first time they tried it, although I suppose the treaty of Versailles was a better deal than the end of WWII.

Truth there. Taking France so easily completely tilted it. I guess that was the difference. Even Oppenheimer was a NY born German Jew. It’s not hard to imagine the scenario if they got the nuke first if they somehow were friends.

We probably lose WW2 if the germans just wanted to dominate Europe and were pro-Jewish.

Who is "we"? Maybe we never get into a war with Herr Schicklgruber; he nukes Moscow and unites Europe under a 6-armed swastika, and the US just deals.

Point being that a WWII Germany that's pro-Jewish is so different that you can't really assume anything will be the same.

What did Charlie Kirk do?

Started using the term 'anti-white'.

He used to get 'invaded' a lot by AF/G, both online and in real life. He could hardly hold an event without the open question line being filled with AF/Gers asking about his stance on immigration, demographics and the relationship between Israel and the US. Most notably asking him over and over about the USS Liberty incident.

Charlie, to his or his handlers credit, changed his tune a bit. Becoming more aggressive against anti-white rhetoric. There's a layer of irony here, but there was definitely a change. But if there's lore here I'm missing I'd be happy for someone to correct the record on this. I'm not as tuned in to politics as I used to be.

You know, I forget the interview I was watching. Maybe it was Tucker Carlson and Dave Smith. They stumbled onto the topic of Worlds War II history, and how "infected" it is. Which is to say, you can question the facts, the narrative, the scholarship, the normie understanding of virtually any other historical event. "Well actshually..." to your hearts content. "Just asking questions..." all you want. But you do that with World War II and people lose their god damned minds, as though you were poking an infected wound.

Now in the interview, they mostly take this framing, and talk about how WW2 was the dawn of the American Empire, and all the stories we tell ourselves about how America is a force for good in the world. This despite losing virtually every engagement we've fought since, not achieving any publicly stated foreign policy goals through said conflicts, and spending massive amounts of blood and treasure doing so. And it all goes back to the story we aren't allowed to question at all about how we were the good guys in World War II.

Now they don't go down this rabbit hole, but I will. Wrapped up in our unquestioning moral superiority that gives us the right to intervene anywhere in the world we want, is that we stopped the holocaust. And so philosemitism is baked into that story that is holy to our civic religion. Jews are our chosen people, and protecting them gives us the moral standing we need to bomb brown people for any reason what so ever.

This is an example for how X discourse influences the Tucker Carlson's and creates a feedback loop. Carlson will wade further into WWII Revisionism as it continues to gain ground on X. These twitter Spats actually matter.

This despite losing virtually every engagement we've fought since...

When did this idea become so popular? Korea was a stalemate that has sharply bettered the lives of many people in the long run. The US won in Grenada, in Panama, in Kuwait, in Haiti, and so on. Maybe the results suck anyway or maybe these are just too lightweight of opponents to be treated as serious, but the United States does win military conflicts. Iraq was a stupid idea, but Saddam Hussein is emphatically dead. Muammar Gaddafi doesn't think he kicked the Americans out of Libya, notably because we came, we saw, he died.

When did this idea become so popular? [...] Maybe the results suck anyway

When figuring out what someone is trying to say in a compound sentence, it helps to read the part after the comma

not achieving any publicly stated foreign policy goals through said conflicts, and spending massive amounts of blood and treasure doing so.

Yes, you have correctly restated my point that even when we "win" on the field and have a great big "Mission Accomplished" celebration, we are worse off for it.

Perhaps you didn't intend to use "and" to join those clauses, but there it is, clear as day. Many of these conflicts were won militarily. In fact, many of them even achieved the publicly stated foreign policy goals.

I suspect that in two to twenty years we will have retroactively lost the Korean War.

Can you explain?

In other words, I think North Korea will probably successfully invade South Korea and the peninsula will be united under the hammer and sickle. If that happens, it will be difficult to look back at the 1950 Korean War and call it a victory, even if it really was a mostly successful military operation at the time. A similar thing happened with the first Gulf War, which is now much less rosy in the American memory after the 2004 Iraq war and the current state of Iraq now.

I think North Korea will probably successfully invade South Korea and the peninsula will be united under the hammer and sickle.

That is certainly a bold prediction. I don't see it going quite so well for the Norks. Say whatever you will about the US military's ability to deal with insurgent groups, if you give them a stand-up fight against an organized state military it'll be Christmas at the Pentagon. Generals who cut their teeth as butter bars in Desert Storm will weep tears of pure joy.

I suspect that any scenario in which Kim goes for it will involve the US military being tied down elsewhere.

The US Military is highly effective. The US State Department is completely unable to do any of the "establishing a peaceful liberal democracy" tasks that it thinks it's capable of.

But the State Department is also where people who study international policy dream of working, so they push it's failures back onto the military.

That sentence also stuck out to me as very strange. I generally think of it the opposite way. The US has generally won every specific engagement its been in. They seem very good at winning battles. The rare times they do lose become rallying cries for the improvement and betterment of the armed forces.

The US achieving its foreign policy goals seems heavily related to just how realistic and specific those goals are. If the goal is something specific like "kill that guy, or destroy that small country's military" then they do well. If the goal is more nebulous like "spread democracy, or prevent the spread of communism" then they seem to consistently fail.

Did Vietnam result in meaningful improvement? Judging by Iraq our counterinsurgency skills were still lacking.

South Vietnam didn't fall to insurgency. Both the Ngo family and the later variants of kleptocracy were able to handle the VC. South Vietnam fell to North Vietnamese tanks, and the US military is quite good at conventional warfare- both in 1975 and today. In actual fact, US involvement did prolong the life of the South Vietnamese kleptocratic minority-rule dictatorship(which is what it was) meaningfully- the ARVN couldn't have stopped the Tet offensive on its own, and required US air support and political advisement to stop the 1972 North Vietnamese offensive.

I thought the general goal with Vietnam was to prevent the spread of communism. They failed at that.

Vietnam seems like it's in a good place nowadays, my guess would that the Vietnam war made that happy ending take longer.

Fuentes is charismatic but not very intellectual. I'd guess that he's been embarrarassed in public a few times by being unable to compete with Ashkenazi verbal ability.

Also there are a bunch of Middle Eastern groups eager to fund anti-Isreali speakers on the right, so I imagine that plays a part.

Whenever left wing activists hear someone on the right complain about powerful rich New Yorkers, they immediately respond with "Oh, so you hate Jews?!?" I think that Fuentes has embraced that to a certain degree.

If you come from a working class background and have a non-HBD world model, it's easy to assume that it's Jews who are making decisions that negatively affect your community. If he was a bit more worldly he'd realize that upperclass gentile blue tribers also hate him.

He's been attacking Steve Sailer recently because a bunch of the more intellectual groypers read "Noticing" and were discussing it's contents. Previously Sailer's work was scattered over decades of posts on different sites, it was suddenly more accessable.

Fuentes couldn't really engage so he started attacking Sailer as a secret Jew. Sailer is adopted and despite his interest in genetics has never done a DNA test, I think he feels it would weaken his connection to his adoptive parents.

But fundamentally Fuentes is reactive not reflective. He caters to lazy anti-intellectuals.

The default low-IQ tradcath take(which Fuentes either is or pretends to be, even if he’s more of a racist than anything else) is some kind of antisemitic conspiracy theory. Fuentes being not that intellectual…

I think it's because JP spend a lot of time thinking about evil, and he seems to have learned about the human capacity for evil by studying WW2 and concentration camps. He knows how easy it is for somebody to fall into an ideology like nazism and rationalize ones hatred for an outgroup, and he's quite determined to keep this from happening (again, this is just my view). Sadly, because he feels so strongly about this, he seems unable to pick up on the patterns relating semitism and wokeness.

Ethos is downstream from Mythos, it really is as simple as the boomer-internalization of the gas chamber mythos.

What's the party line today from your type, that the gas chambers weren't real, or that they were somehow exaggerated?

The Revisionist position is the same it has always been: the story that millions of people were tricked into entering gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower was wartime atrocity propaganda. This propaganda originally centered around the Western camps until those claims were proven false after Allied investigation.

The mainstream position admits the gas chamber story in the Western camps was a hoax, created by false testimony and confessions, but then they claim that the "extermination camps" conquered by the Soviet Union were all totally real. Revisionist scholars have spent decades proving that the gas chamber story was likewise a wartime atrocity propaganda hoax in the currently alleged Eastern 'extermination camps' like Majdanek.

So the Revisionist position is simply that the gas chamber story is as real in the Eastern camps as it was in the Western camps. The mainstream position is that it was a hoax in the West but totally real in the camps "investigated" by the Soviet Union, where they fabricated evidence and denied access to Western observers.

The mainstream position is that it was a hoax in the West

[citation needed] that it is mainstream position

The mainstream narrative says that the six alleged death camps were in the east. See: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/concentration-camps-1942-45-maps

Notice how all the camps in the west were not death camps. So in the context of the mainstream narrative, how do you explain contemporary newspaper articles from the time confidently claiming otherwise? Obviously they are understood to be propaganda. In other words, a “hoax.”

Can you link mainstream position confirming that camps on West were described as extermination camps?

(It was claimed upthread that "western extermination camps were hoaxes" and want to see confirmation of that)

(again: it would not make big difference to me whether they gassed people to death or starved them to death in Auschwitz, but I obviously prefer to have an accurate info)

At Nuremberg, the series of Eastern camps allegedly responsible for the majority of gassing victims were barely mentioned at all in the trials. What was filmed and submitted as evidence were allegations that the camps liberated by the Western allies were the centers of extermination. Here is the Nuremberg Concentration camp footage which was submitted as evidence and shown in the trial courtroom supposedly showing a gas chamber at the Dachau concentration camp, here's a short transcript of that part:

Hanging in orderly rows were the clothes of prisoners who had been suffocated in a lethal gas chamber. They had been persuaded to remove their clothing under the pretext of taking a shower for which towels and soap were provided...

Even mainstream historians admit today that the clothing hanging outside the delousing chambers was not from prisoners executed in gas chambers, but that these were real delousing chambers use to disinfest clothing to prevent epidemic typhus. Dachau was one of the camps mentioned in the document I cited earlier, admitting that this claim was a hoax created by false testimonies and confessions:

The Allied Commissions of Inquiry have so far established that no people were killed by poison gas in the following concentration camps: Bergen Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, ...

In those cases, it has been possible to prove that the confessions had been extracted by tortures and the testimonies were false.

This must be taken into account when conducting investigations and interrogations with respect to war crimes.

The result of this investigation should be brought to the cognizance of former concentration camp inmates, who at the time of the hearings testified on the murder of people, especially Jews, with poison gas in those concentration camps. Should they insist on their statements, charges are to be brought against them for making false statements.

The Mainstream position admits that this film submitted as evidence at the Nuremberg trial was a lie. But it insists that the identical claims made in the camps conquered by the Soviet Union, the camps where the Allied Commissions of Inquiry were not allowed access to investigate, are the only camps where those claims were actually real.

Revisionists though have shown that likewise these Eastern camps which are currently claimed to have been extermination camps are the exact same story as the Western camps: real delousing facilities and shower rooms which were fabricated as gas chambers by Soviet propagandists, tortured confessions, and false testimonies.

Fun fact, if you review the Wikipedia page of the Nazi Concentration Camps film submitted as evidence and screened at the Nuremberg trial, the "Contents" section omits Dachau entirely and makes no description of the falsely alleged gas chamber described in this film. This is part and parcel for Wikipedia treatment of the Holocaust topic as a whole.

I'm left wondering just why Peterson is such a rabid philosemite.

I understand it to be similar to my own embrace of Zionism - I just despise Israel's enemies. If Israel's enemies weren't also the enemies of the West and free civilization more broadly, I would apply a great deal more skepticism to things like their colonization of the West Bank. As it is, I just need to pick sides and the choice is very easy. Notably, this extends to the spillover of the causes in the United States, where enthusiastic Zionists are no real problem for me, but the Hamas enthusiasts are spectacularly annoying leftists.

If Israel's enemies weren't also the enemies of the West and free civilization more broadly

They aren't. Palestinians are fighting to stay where their great grandparents lived. Assad fights to keep Syria together. Israel fights to cause a mega-refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep. AIPAC and ADL want to open the borders to the west and ban right wingers off twitter. Israel financed jihadists in Syria while bombing the country. Meanwhile, israAID was shipping migrants to Europe.

We heard similar arguments for invading Iraq. The result was a giant refugee crisis, a spike in islamism and a disaster for local christians. Israel is not the anti-islam option, it is the pro Islam option.

Palestinians are fighting to stay where their great grandparents lived.

Must be a really great place. I can't imagine anyone fighting that long to stay in Jersey City or Bayonne, NJ.

the enemies of the West and free civilization

The West and free civilization seem to have led inexorably to everything you now decry. Are you sure this makes sense?

Are you sure you're thinking of me? I am quite literally proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free. Disagreeing with my fellow Americans about whether Chevron deference or Skidmore deference is the appropriate degree of license for administrative agency discretion does not shift me to wishing I had more Islamic theocracy in my life.

To avoid doing another dissection of Peterson: he certainly seems to have been bitten by the Zionist bug. For all his posturing as a rational and reason minded clinical psychologist when talking to feminists about feminism and the difference between the sexes, the merits of individualism and focusing on immediate short term goals and family, he seems completely unhinged when it comes to semitism.

He hates Fuentes for the same reason he hates the feminists.

His reaction to complaints from UofT pro-trans progressives was to liken them to Maoists. He accuses Trudeau of having a "murderous equity doctrine" for defending gender equity. Anything that blames/focuses on groups earns his ire as the revival of some murderous 20th century movement.

If feminists are like murderous communists and pro-trans activists are Maoists, how should he feel about anti-Semites?

There are absolutely philosemites nakedly driven by shared enemies (Douglas Murray comes to mind) but Peterson has always leaned towards unhinged rhetoric about people if he feels they resemble certain baddies. We don't need an explanation. What would be strange is him having any patience for Fuentes at all.

I'm left wondering just why Peterson is such a rabid philosemite.

Because your standards for being a philosemite are absurdly low such that everyone seems to be defending the Jews too much.

What is going

On with Peterson’s

Spacing, capitalization, and punctuation

In that thread

Been reading e e cummings?

It makes a little sense if you try to do a Jordan Peterson impression when you read it.

  1. Peterson should know by now that he's really bad and unpersuasive at X-posting. Every time he gets in an argument there he comes across much worse than when he's talking.

  2. As is often then case with X threads, it's kind of hard for me to evaluate what's going on. It's like everyone is sitting around drinking absinthe and yelling at each other (in free verse? And drawing angry pictures?), I walk into the room for 5 minutes, and then walk right back out again thinking that maybe I prefer social contexts with babies and tea after all. Except that it's conducted in a public online venue, which is weird and probably not a good idea.

That sounds like it should be able to be sorted out, legally. It should be possible to get a green card issued. So maybe talk to a lawyer?

It looks like the process is a decent bit easier if she was here legally in the first place, which it sounds like is the case. Otherwise she'd need to leave the country, which adds complications, as having been in the US illegally could make prevent her from being allowed to return for ten years, so fortunately, you probably don't need to worry about that. She'll need to apply and an immediate relative who is a citizen (your father, if they're married, or you, if you're at least 21, could both work) will file a petition on her behalf. One form for each of the citizen (I-130) and the noncitizen (I-485), it looks like.

It looks like she then wouldn't need to worry about deportation in the meantime before the green card comes in.

I'm not sure how long that will take.

As an anchor baby you can sponsor a family visa for your parents.The fact that you haven't even bothered trying shows how blatanly open the border is.

As an anchor baby you can sponsor a family visa for your parents.

If he's 21, which, given that the entrance was in the 90s, and the marriage after, is probably but not at all necessarily the case.

Sponsoring a family member who is already in the US illegally is complicated. Firstly, the anchor baby can only apply if they are 21 and meet the financial requirements. (Although in this case, the US citizen spouse of the illegal alien should be able to sponsor them).

CFR245.1(b)(3) says that someone who entered the country by sneaking across the border ("without being admitted or paroled following inspection") can't adjust status in-country, and on leaving to apply for a visa from abroad they would become inadmissable for (probably) 10 years due to previous illegal residence.

This case is a visa overstay. Most visa overstayers are ineligible to adjust status in-country under other paragraphs of CFR245.1, but people applying as immediate relatives of citizens are exempt from those restrictions. There are various categories of ineligibility due to previous illegal residence, but they don't apply to the case of someone who entered the US legally, overstayed, has not left the US and returned since their visa expired, and had never been in the US illegally before their arrival. OP's mother appears to fit that category, so it is more likely than not that OP's father could have regularised the situation by sponsoring mum on as a spouse of a US citizen.

But the claim "As an anchor baby you can sponsor a family visa for your parents" is mostly false.

How much should a host country suffer on behalf of outsiders before they can legitimately demand that they be left alone?

I see the term 'diaspora nationalism' thrown around a lot, where the immigrants are proud of who they are, where they come from, try to live through some of their homelands culture through cooking and music and such... And whilst there is a lot of examples of that in real life I don't feel it captures the whole of what's going on.

In my experience 'immigrants' adopt and invoke a sort of universalist ethos. Immigrantism, for a lack of a better term. The core of it is simple: So long as the immigrant is working hard and following the law, they should be allowed to stay in whatever country they are in.

It's hard to argue against this in practice, since it's a very emotionally confrontational thing to tell someone that they are not wanted despite those things. But at the same time we are seeing first world countries shift towards third world norms. All the hard work, all the faith in the old country and whatever else sentiment carried by immigrantism doesn't change this constant slide towards things becoming worse.

I feel like there needs to be some reciprocation of charity here. Maybe try tugging on your own heart strings as little The good first world folk let you in, now they want you out. Why should they feel obligated to empathize with mix status families with young children when, as things are going, the first world can't effectively have children of their own.

While I'm quite sympathetic to your position, it's harder to be sympathetic to your mother and other people like her. She knowingly and willingly broke the law of a country that was kind enough to let her in. She is, in a quite literal sense, a criminal. Ultimately, laws only work if they are enforced. All Trump is planning to do is actually enforce rules that most of the political class (claim to) agree with.

It's about time that the US got rid of birth right citizenship too. It's a bizarre custom which seems to only exist in the Americas for some reason. Like the right of a asylum, it's a gigantic moral hazard. If you want people to obey the laws of your country, you shouldn't reward them for breaking those laws.

While I'm grumbling, the disingenuous conflation of 'immigrants' and 'illegal immigrants' is also very frustrating. Conflating the two is like conflating renters with squatters or shoplifters with customers. Ditto for euphemisms like 'undocumented immigrants' (did they leave their visas at the hotel?) or 'irregular migrants' (A North Korean migrant is irregular, a Mexican who snuck is just a regular criminal).

I don't think most of the political class agree with every variation on retroactive enforcement, especially when it comes to children that grew up here.

And I think this can be earnestly true even in such cases where an individual believes that we should be stricter in enforcement prospectively.

retroactive enforcement

Sometimes it takes time for the criminal to be apprehended, but if the laws which the criminal is said to have broken, were already in force when the crime is said to have been committed, there is no "retroactivity".

What I mean is that the ruling mentioned appears to postdate the actions under question.

It's a bizarre custom which seems to only exist in the Americas for some reason.

Do you mind justifying this statement more? Here's the standard defense for birthright citizenship: two kids who grew up in the same neighborhood and are equally connected to their surrounding community, equally adapted to the local culture, etc. should not be treated differently under the law just because of who their parents are. Not doing this is extremely inegalitarian---it's not about "rewarding" the parents, it's about not capriciously punishing the kids for something they have no responsibility for or control over.

Given all this, it might even be justified to claim that it's bizarre that it doesn't exist in other countries (particularly European ones) that pretend to buy into classical-liberal ideals. This is in fact my goto counterargument when the inevitable America-bashing discussions start with European or progressive colleagues.

and are equally connected to their surrounding community

Except they're not equally connected to the surrounding community, and cannot be, because one of those connections — perhaps the most important connection — is ties of blood, of kinship. This is something I'd say most people in history, from ancient Athens to modern Dubai, have understood well. "Nation" and "state" are not synonyms, and their conflation by many modern people reduces our grasp on the relevant concept spaces.

it's about not capriciously punishing the kids

I think you're smuggling in an assumption here: that the kids in question in some sense deserve or are entitled to citizenship, such that it constitutes a "punishment" for them to be deprived of it. Does a club "punish" everyone to whom it fails to grant membership?

Except that the US as a country has specifically rejected that blood and kinship ties are important since it's founding---I feel like I repeat this so much here but no one ever seems to remember "All men are created equal". This is what enlightenment, classical liberal, or whatever you call it values means! And yes, they are drastically different from any values anyone had before the 1700's---this is why the enlightenment was such a big deal and why we think of older civilizations as morally hopeless and barbaric. We definitely don't think of places like Dubai that are blatantly not onboard as reasonable.

It's also funny to get this reply when I've just had a bunch of discussions here about the prevalence of explicitly racialist values on the Motte. @Felagund, Let's see how much the peanut gallery supports this.

When the founders said that all men were created equal, what they were endorsing was an equality before the law, and a lack of hegemony. In particular, they were opposed to the deprivation of the traditional English rights from the American colonies, which they saw as antithetical to living freely, and were also opposed to titles and legal birthrights and so forth, supporting rather a republican form of government. If I remember rightly, they considered adding a prohibition on titles to the Constitution. (Yes, all this seems incompatible with slavery, but there's nothing forcing individuals to be consistent.)

So yes, I do think that Dubai and similar, where there is a large labor class with diminished rights would be contrary to American values, even if, given slavery, something more extreme than that already existed. (And even if I personally wouldn't be all that opposed to one existing, consensually of course, in the United States on economic grounds.) And so I do not think it would be American for there to be a class of permanent residents without other allegiance who are not citizens.

In practice, this would seem to mean that having a de facto class of people without birthright citizenship living out their lives in the country for generations would be contrary to American values. This seems to be what @atokenliberal6D_4 thinks removing birthright citizenship would be like.

At the same time, this vision does not seem to require that those with a more tenuous connection be granted the same affordances. So if lack of birthright citizenship were followed by immediate deportation, that doesn't seem to be obviously in conflict to me. An equality among men does not grant them a right to your sovereign territory, and as long as you are being consistent in not setting up a two-tier citizenship, this does not seem contrary to founding principles. I imagine this is what @Capital_Room would endorse.

But that's merely trying to spin out a philosophy from the declaration. The U.S. Constitution, following the abolition of slavery, acquired the 14th amendment, saying, among others,

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

This seems designed to, among other things, overturn the effects the infamous Dred Scott decision, which held that people of African descent could not be citizens (and which Lincoln, along with many others, thought was wrongly decided).

I imagine @Capital_Room would lean on the "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" clause, which, from looking online, was originally meant to be excluding foreign nationals and some Indians (cf. "Indians not taxed") from what is under discussion here.

My reading of this would seem to allow for broader exceptions to birthright citizenship than currently are in place. But I'll also note that, contra @Capital_Room this does not seem to be about blood or an ethnic Nation, as this was deliberately to bring in people (Blacks) who were, to that point, excluded from citizenship based on blood.

So, I suppose, I think both of you have points?

Now I want to read Dred Scott and Lincoln on these matters some time. That would be fun.

All men are created equal, not all men are created American.

Those other, non-Americans can go on being equal somewhere else.

two kids who grew up in the same neighborhood and are equally connected to their surrounding community

What does this have to do with foreigners getting on airplanes while pregnant in order to secure a US passport by technicality?

Not doing this is extremely inegalitarian

Life is inegalitarian, and that isn't going to be fixed any time soon. Make the case that it is bad on its own merits, or don't.

it's about not capriciously punishing the kids for something they have no responsibility for or control over.

Bad things happening to you need not be punishment.

And you don't care about the actual citizens being punished, who also have done nothing wrong and do not deserve to have their citizenship devalued as it has been.

Well as I said, it's a giant moral hazard. If you grant any child born on US soil citizenship, then you allow the parents to stay to look after the child, then you incentivise parents to come to your country illegally. You reward criminals instead of punishing them, which incentivises the crime. The appropriate thing for parents who give birth abroad to do is to go back to their home country, where all three members of the family have citizenship. That's what the rest of the world does and it works absolutely fine. Nobody thinks there's any wrong being done when foreign tourists take their newborn home rather than using them as a tool to stay in a country they are not allowed to be in.

Indeed, the justification you gave conveniently skips the decade or so when the parents could have returned to their home country. There is zero reason for a newborn to stay in a foreign country, even if he was born there. He's not losing any emotional ties or severing any relationships. Indeed, that justification only works if a country has de facto open borders and gives illegal immigrants all of the benefits of legal residence in spite of their crimes. And well, we don't need to speculate about what happens when a country does that.

A lot of things violate equality or hurt the kids other than just saying the kids can't be citizens. What if one kid has a car given to him by his parents, but another kids had parents who stole a car and gave it to him? Should we refuse to confiscate the car and return it to its owner on the grounds that the kid didn't commit the theft and taking it away makes the kids in the two families unequal? What if one set of parents is just ordinary criminals, should we refuse to send them to jail for bank robbery because doing so impacts the lfe of the innocent kid?

If you don't "capriciously punish" the kids, you create a moral hazard that encourages parents to illegally immigrate (or steal cars, or rob banks).

(@4bpp too) Values come in conflict a lot and you need to make trade offs. The cost of allowing theft for sake of children to be ok is much more than that of allowing birthright citizenship. The same holds for the massive wealth distribution equalizing inheritances would require (I think this is another related example people bring up a lot). In particular, the anchor baby problem has been and can still be mitigated in a much more morally acceptable way by tightening border security than by outright getting rid of birthright citizenship---if you make the moral hazard hard enough to actually take advantage of, it'll happen infrequently enough that the cost is an acceptable trade-off, I think for almost everyone's relative weightings of the values. (For full disclosure, I weight the values in way that, for example, much more dramatic redistribution of inheritances than we have today would be a good idea, but I'm trying to make sure this argument works even if you weight differently).

By the way, it's also important to emphasize that most people's morality is actually ok with some level of theft for the sake of children in extreme circumstances---Jean Valjean is the hero of the story after all.

Jean Valjean is the hero of the story after all.

I don't think this is quite what Les Miserables is doing. The book doesn't spend all that much time downplaying his crimes and so forth; rather, it presents him as, at least after some time in prison, a hardened criminal redeemed only by the mercy of the bishop, and who becomes afterward a great man. To be fair though, stealing bread there was to give maximal sympathy, so I don't know that I disagree with your overall point as to what you can draw from that, just, I don't think that his crime was minor is really very related to him being the hero. It's probably closer to a reflection on the legal system as a whole, and so, if anything, would reflect more on Javert than Valjean, even though Javert was, to the best of my recollection, entirely uninvolved.

It's a great book.

Something that may appeal to a few people on this forum is that Thomas Aquinas allowed for theft, or well, considered it not theft, in such extreme cases. This is not unique to him either; there are Protestant authors that say the same, as well as political philosophers like Locke.

There is a model of anchor babies that would see them as comparable to a hostage situation: the parent essentially says "let me stay here (too), or else this innocent child suffers". Do you also believe in a general moral obligation to yield to hostage takers if the hostage can't be saved otherwise, the argument that this encourages more hostage-taking notwithstanding?

If she married an American citizen she should be fine. Deportation is not a revokation of citizenship.

You should probably have known this already and you should become educated on the subject to correct that immorality.

Is there a statute of limitations on the offense that the mother originally committed (visa overstay)?

Criminally, perhaps. But even if there's a statute of limitations, a person that's present here without authorization is (generally, YMMV, consult a good immigration lawyer) eligible for removal.

If she married a US citizen in the ‘90s, presumably she is now a naturalized citizen. That citizenship won’t be revoked, even in the case of a criminal conviction (AFAIK). But if she is and will remain a US citizen, on what basis could she be removed from the country?

Edit: TIL that denaturalization is a thing. But it seems like that can happen only when a naturalized citizen is found to have become naturalized illegally, e.g. by making false statements on a green card application or whatever, or for various other reasons that don’t apply here (like taking up arms against the US, or holding certain government offices in a foreign country). In this case, the naturalization process itself was (presumably) carried out legally, via the marriage pathway.

You don't automatically become a citizen. There's a process that has to be gone through.

Right, but presumably that’s already happened

It sounds like not in this case?

I think it's like possession where the crime continues for as long as you remain in the country.

Changing birthright citizenship would require a constitutional amendment, since it was created by a choice of wording in the 14th amendment. So you yourself are probably fine. Your mom should probably talk to an immigration attorney regardless of who ends up president.

I know Ramaswamy's argued otherwise, as e.g. children of ambassadors don't count.

Depends on what the clause “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” was publicly understood to mean.

It would be odd for it to literally just mean something like personal jurisdiction — that would be the case whenever someone was in the US (ie the clause is surplusage).

There is an argument it meant something differently (ie that the person was somehow legally connected to the US, which is different than an illegal alien or somehow who was just visiting the US).

It would be odd for it to literally just mean something like personal jurisdiction — that would be the case whenever someone was in the US (ie the clause is surplusage).

No, it could mean that there was no bar on the US refusing to treat expatriates as citizens. I agree that it's an unlikely meaning but it doesn't render the clause surplusage.

Usually the meaning is taken to be that they were subject to US jurisdiction at the time of birth (or naturalization I suppose, but I don't see how they could not be) -- so not children of diplomats or invading armies. But I don't know if that was the original meaning.

The case that "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" is about children of diplomats and invading armies - and in the US context also members of quasi-sovereign Indian tribes, who didn't get birthright citizenship until 1924 - is that those were the exceptions to birthright citizenship under English common law at the time of the founding. (Incidentally, the UK didn't abolish birthright citizenship until 1983)

This is bait, new account and as others have noted, highly ignorant for being in a life changing problem.

That said, I'll take the moment to pitch my opinion: citizenship should be purchased with a large fine in cases of illegal aliens who have clean records, employment, and obvious means of support. Laws were broken, let them pay their literal debt to society.

Strong agreement. We in the U.S. should be willing to practically sell citizenships for a substantial sum... perhaps $50,000? Given a clean record and lack other risk factors, of course. We let a lot of money to into lawyers pockets when we could get roughly the same outcome but pocket the cash ourselves.

Taxing immigration in general (or an auction) would be a nice policy—it would incentivize preventing illegal immigration, make it easier to pitch for more legal immigration, and would raise revenue.

Edit: I don't know that a new account is actually a good signal of bait in this case, although it would be evidence in that direction.

Until I started working with geniuses, I never really understood the laments you sometimes hear that go, what a pity it is that our brightest minds have all gone off to Wall Street. I thought, that can't really be the case right? But then I joined a quant trading firm, in a sort of supporting role, and suddenly I also find myself wondering, as I interact with certain people at the office: shouldn't you be uncovering the secrets of the universe or something?

It took a while to hit me. I think I spent my first few months constantly debating people on this or that, convinced I had something to teach them, at least in my little domain. After all, it isn't always immediately apparent when someone is far more intelligent than you. But time and again I would have these epiphanies: oh, he is right, he was right two weeks ago, and I should've just listened then, as it would have saved me two weeks of trouble, and now I have to rewrite this code, and he had foreseen all this, and all this time he's been gently, politely nudging me to understand, as with a child, never brashly asserting his superiority, which must have been obvious to him. And I would feel ashamed remembering all my impassioned but mistaken arguments. After a while I picked up a sort of epistemic helplessness: even if my intuitions disagreed completely with one of these people I knew to be brilliant, I would go along with them. Eventually I would understand.

I'll call one of these brilliant and competent people Mark. I hesitate to say "genius" but I wouldn't object if you used the word. If I had to guess, I'd say he's 4 standard deviations above the mean, but really it's kind of impossible to judge people much smarter than you I think. Anyway, at some point I noticed Mark never came in anymore; he always worked remotely. That isn't normal at my company, but I assumed he must have negotiated an arrangement with the director. Perks of being a star. Was he on some beach? I don't know. He was still on Slack, ready to explain some point about statistics whenever I messaged him occasionally.

One day the midwits of HR took it upon themselves to organize mandatory in-person harassment training for everyone. Up till now, the annual training had been online and easy enough to click through without too much thought. But now we were forced to sit and discuss various hypothetical scenarios aloud, under the guidance of a training facilitator. In one scenario, a black employee is offended when someone describes her as "articulate". I wanted to pull my hair out, listening to the facilitator explain to my genuinely confused Indian coworker why this description was problematic. It struck me that our baroque American woke social norms perhaps do more to exclude minorities than to include them, on net. In another scenario, an intern with they/them pronouns is misgendered by those around them. Our guided discussion of this scenario was absolutely farcical. No one managed to utter two sentences about this hypothetical scenario without also accidentally using the wrong pronouns (and amusingly it was always "she", never "he", that people accidentally said), prompting stifled giggles all around. Even the training facilitator slipped up and had to conclude by mumbling something about how “intent matters”. It was as if we all knew subconsciously that individuals such as the hypothetical intern had on some level deluded themselves. Overall, I was (and am) annoyed that HR had been permitted to waste the valuable time of these smart people in this silly way, since the company had otherwise been very no-nonsense. I supposed Mark was somehow exempt from this training.

Weeks later, Mark returns to the office, ending his long absence. Only now he's a she, and goes by Mary.

And now maybe some of you are rolling your eyes at this post: you’ve been duped into reading propaganda. But no, I don’t really know what I’m trying to say here. I’m just trying to reflect on my own perspective on trans people suddenly shifting based on this one person. It’s not that I’d never encountered trans people before, but in the past they were always of the annoying sort, the sort that you could dismiss as a self-deluded victim of a weird sort of social contagion. But I can’t see Mary as self-deluded. Self-delusion is the one thing those of her profession are good at avoiding. Can you tell she’s trans? I dunno, kind of? Is it autogynephilia? No clue. It feels a little impertinent to ponder, though that’s the sort of question that I might have said mattered a lot before. Somehow just witnessing one extremely competent and effective person I respect turn out to be trans made it “real” for me, especially after all the other times I deferred to her judgment.

(I recognize that not everyone worships mathematical talent like I do, and you may find my automatic deferral of judgment weird or even disqualifying of my opinion. I know there are brilliant mathematicians with stupid and wacky beliefs in other domains. I do think, though, that the intelligence of Mary and some of the other quants goes beyond the academic; trading real money tethers your beliefs to the real world. She is not some aloof ideas person. She was and is reasonable levels of well-adjusted, funny, and courteous, and unreasonable levels of good at cranking out code that makes millions of dollars. Make of this story what you will.)

Has my opinion changed on any concrete trans issue? I don’t know. If a random person insists on referring to Mary as a man, and I’m required to say that between the two of them one is a fool, I’d have to say that Mary is not the fool. I don’t know if she’d be very angry about it anyway; she’s a level-headed person. What about sex change therapy for children? Still seems bad. Maybe the main change is just that I feel like I should be less quick to judge people in general.

I wasn’t there when Mary walked into the office for the first time as a woman. I don’t think anyone made a fuss over it or anything, and now everyone respects her new name and pronouns, but it still makes me anxious just imagining what it must have been like. Surely a measure of bravery was required, probably more than I’ve ever mustered on any occasion. What compelled her to do this? On a visceral level, it still doesn’t make sense to me, and I can still make it gross if I want to, just by thinking about it. But why do that? I’m inclined to defer to her, whether or not I understand.

I do wish she'd go and pursue science though.

I mean, this is how minorities of all kinds have eventually grown their public support, even as people opposed to it are upset - by being parts of various communities, big and small. In a world without an hierarchical society imposed on-high from either an authoritarian government or religion, it turns out continued interactions with people different from you tend to make you friendlier to that group of people.

The big jump that eventually causes the loss of widespread opposition to a minority groups isn't "I love these group of people and embrace them" grows to a majority, it's "I met x, they're a y, and they're fine, so you're weird for being so freaked out" grows to a majority.

That's why even among Trump voters, their actually less harsh on immigration than even some centrist Europeans, because they've grown in a far more multicultural society than most Europeans have.

In a world without an hierarchical society imposed on-high from either an authoritarian government or religion, it turns out continued interactions with people different from you tend to make you friendlier to that group of people.

This is a typical unsupported progressive truism. As I have spoken about many times, I have lived my entire life in one of the most racially-diverse cities in the entire world, and it has absolutely not made me friendlier to certain groups among whom I have spent quite a bit of time.

I agree that continued exposure to various groups helps you separate justified stereotypes from unjustified stereotypes; if a common wignat talking point was “Mexicans are lazy”, I would know enough to dismiss this as the ignorant prejudice of someone who hasn’t met very many Mexicans. However, the wignat talking point “blacks are, on average, lazy and hostile” has actually been borne out many times in my experience, so simply living around this particular group of “people different from me” has done the opposite of making me more friendly toward them.

I mean, sure, nothing works 100% of the time. There are still people upset over Brown vs. Board of Education out there after all.

But, I'm not talking about woke self-hating white liberals like myself celebrating the end of the white majority or whatever.

I'm talking about the fact that your median Texan exurban Trump voter in a middle class neighborhood is far less likely to freak out over non-white people moving to their neighborhood than frankly, even pretty centrist to center-left European's when it comes to Muslim's or hell, Romani people. If you look at polling, even now in a fairly anti-immigrant swing of thermostatic opinion, there's still fairly decent numbers of Trump voters about immigrants in society and such, and even now, the less/more/same numbers on immigration are still far better in the US than basically anywhere in Europe.

The same thing happened with gay people - it went from only freaks in San Francisco or whatever to oh hey, that's sad that gay people are dying to oh yeah, my cousin's daughter is a lesbian to oh, Dave in the office is gay - weird, he didn't seem it to Mary & Alice bought the Newman's house and so on.

Integration is key, and ironically, America is much better at it than Europe in a variety of ways. In part because we just got a whole lot more non-white people, but also because we're not wedded to 'my family has lived within 10 miles of this village since before basically recorded history and that's the only true way to be x' or whatever the Euros have their hang ups about. Meanwhile, in America - show up, pay taxes, get a job, and learn to cheer or boo the Cowboys depending on where you live, and welcome to America. Pass the burger. We even threw on some veggie ones for Vivek and Priya even though I'd never eat any.

Same thing will and is already happening with trans people. At an accelerated pace, but partly because the numbers are so small, only conservatives stuck in very blue areas and grifting online right-wing entertainers care all that much in reality. Polling showed in a post-mid-2022 midterms that it was the least important issue among Republican voters.

It is very convenient to compare middle class non-white people of unspecified race and culture to specifically muslims and Roma of unspecified class. Now try comparing middle class european acceptance of middle class indians and east asians to american acceptance of low class blacks from their own country.

I haven't encountered anything worrying about middle class european acceptance of middle class indians and east asians.

I feel obliged to note that the usual RW retort is that it wasn't presence that accomplished the shift with LGB, but rather the long march through the institutions and in particular the media and education system.

Meanwhile, in America - show up, pay taxes, get a job, and learn to cheer or boo the Cowboys depending on where you live, and welcome to America. Pass the burger. We even threw on some veggie ones for Vivek and Priya even though I'd never eat any.

This is like a 2024 neoliberal Leave It To Beaver headcanon of race relations in America.

Integration is key, and ironically, America is much better at it than Europe in a variety of ways. In part because we just got a whole lot more non-white people, but also because we're not wedded to 'my family has lived within 10 miles of this village since before basically recorded history and that's the only true way to be x' or whatever the Euros have their hang ups about.

Has it occurred to you that the difference might not be purely a matter of Europeans’ irrational “hangups” or “freakouts”, but might have a great deal to do with the actual nature of the specific immigrants each respective society is receiving? Over the last two decades, Europe has received a massive amount of unvetted, mostly unemployable “refugees” from the Middle East and Africa - many of whom are, plainly, the absolute criminal dregs of their countries of origin. Crime rates, unemployment, welfare usage, and other hallmarks of extreme dysfunction and parasitism are massively high among these people. So perhaps when Europeans are angry about their ever-increasing numbers, it’s not because Europeans are committed to the sort of extreme petty localism you attribute to them, but rather because they are accurately observing the extent to which these people are different in dangerous and overwhelmingly negative ways. (Hell, you brought up Gypsies and implied that Europeans irrationally “freak out” when a community of Gypsies shows up in town. Actually, the Gypsies have been consistently and widely reviled in Europe for many centuries now, because of their well-known extreme proclivity for stealing. In what sense is Gypsies’ lack of integration due to Europe “just not being as good at it as America is,” versus being a result of the actual qualities of Gypsies themselves and their compatibility/ability to be integrated?

As for why American appears to be “better at integrating immigrants”, again, so much of this is a result of the fact that for at least the last few decades, immigrating to America from anywhere other than Mexico was really difficult. America could be more restrictive about the types of people it let in, because it actually had the ability and political will to get rid of the people whom it didn’t want. This was not always the case! In fact, America’s “ability to successfully integrate immigrants” - again, I love the way this concept places the entire onus on the host society to integrate the immigrants, rather than on the immigrants to integrate themselves - has fluctuated pretty wildly throughout its history.

Famously, during the Gilded Age, America was receiving huge numbers of dirt-poor and very culturally-backward peasants from places like Italy, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. Crime rates in these communities were very high; violent crime skyrocketed in many American cities due to the rise of organized crime networks staffed nearly entirely by immigrants. Political extremism, including acts of outright terrorism committed by immigrants, also increased massively. Additionally, with the lack of any meaningful welfare state at the time, huge numbers of these immigrant men eventually just went home. They didn’t have any way to sustain themselves financially in America, so they packed it up and returned to Sicily or whatever. In 1924 America passed a very draconian immigration bill, and it is only after this point did unassimilated ethnic enclaves begin to dissolve in America due to their inability to sustain themselves with new immigration.

We are now seeing the beginning stages of a similar wave of extremely low-quality immigration start to take hold in America, due to the absolutely minimal border enforcement of the Biden administration. Hordes of immigrant men from all around the world - Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Central and South America - are streaming across the open border, and unlike a century ago, they will have a welfare state to utilize and the protection of powerful lobbies preventing their removal, allowing them to remain unemployed and thoroughly unassimilated. I predict that we will see a rapid shift to European levels of anti-immigrant sentiment as the new reality of this style of bio-trash immigration - the third world emptying its prisons into the United States - starts to dawn on people. (In fact, recent polling showing that a majority of Americans, including like 40% of Democrats, supporting mass deportations is strong evidence in favor of my prediction.)

A "truism" is something that's obviously and boringly true, not something that's false.

truism

Except when it means the opposite. English is great that way: https://imgur.com/2t7jXIz

This is a typical unsupported progressive truism. As I have spoken about many times, I have lived my entire life in one of the most racially-diverse cities in the entire world, and it has absolutely not made me friendlier to certain groups among whom I have spent quite a bit of time.

In general though, whites who live or have lived in multicultural cities are more likely to be on the left regarding immigration than those who live in places with much lower immigration levels. It’s possible to argue that this is because those who don’t like it leave, of course, but that isn’t enough to explain the whole effect.

Indeed. Plus, when you do meet an exceptional member of a minority group you are just as often (more in my experience) to have the reaction of, "what the hell is wrong with the rest of you?"

As a cis-by-default, I have accepted that some people care as much about their gender as I care about e.g. my sexual orientation, and some of them (sometimes very smart people) are trans. Having this mixing matrix between gender and sex chromosomes seems to be worth it to accommodate them. The amount of effort they put into it (from hormones to changing their legal name/gender) clearly indicates that it is something they care very much about.

Of course, this does not preclude that some teenagers decide that they are non-binary because it is a high-status thing to do and moves them considerably upwards on the woke victimhood pyramid.

cis-by-default

Is this Ozy's term? I must confess I still don't understand what it's supposed to mean.

As I understand it, a sexual orientation that amounts to "I'm sex A, and sex not-A is the one that I'm physically built to mate with, so I guess I'm looking for a not-A partner".a "gender identity" that amounts to "I have sex-A parts, and in our society sex-A people are expected to dress/communicate like this and have interests like that, so I guess that's what I'll be doing". The test case are hypotheticals like anime transmigration/body swaps: assuming you are male, if you woke up stuck in a female body tomorrow (and your preexisting social web were conveniently erased), would you be looking for male or female partners going forward? would you (1) have a strong preference to refer to yourself or be referred to as male, (2) -"- as female, or (3) a weak preference to be referred to as female because anything else would now seem factually wrong? Answer (3) is the "cis-by-default" one.

I think I'm in the set of people the label is supposed to describe, and I really understand it as the natural outcome of not having whatever sense generates the "I'm gender not-A" qualium in dysphorics but still being socialised in a society with distinct gender roles.

The way I understood it, it has nothing to do with sexuality. It's more like "if you woke up stuck in a female body tomorrow, would you feel a sense of existential dread, and would attempt to come back to being male".

Yeah, I corrected myself after making the initial post. Conflating sex and orientation is also something that's easy to do as a -by-default, though.

It's like... some people experience dysphoria, right? They are in a body that matches their gender, and if they were in a body that didn't match their gender, they'd feel something was wrong. That's what'd make them trans in that situation. We may model that as two facts: they have a body, and they have a body model, and when the body model tries to match to the body and fails, it generates error signals that are experienced as dysphoria. That is, they are cis - body-aligned - if they have a body that matches their model, and trans - body-unaligned - when their body does not.

Cis-by-default people have a body, and they have a body model, but the body model is a model of whatever their body happens to be. If they put themselves into situations where they experience a body with a different sex, ie. mirror experiments, VR, really good imagination, then their body map just updates to the new schema. They're cis - body aligned - not because their body map matches their body, but because their body map tracks their body. If you gave a cbd man a female body, or a cbd woman a male body, they'd go "huh, neat" and move on with their lives - sex-changed but still cis. They might even swap pronouns, purely on the basis of "well, it's female now, innit. Just look at it." Or if not, it'll be on the basis of something like thinking that gender shouldn't be about sex at all.

As an AGP transhumanist, I identify (in the literal sense of "looking at myself, I think I am described") as CBD and I think this hangs together really well with AGP. Because you know you'll be fine regardless of sex, you can start having preferences, even kinks, about sex - but they're just that, not needs.

What I mean is that if some magic fairy turned me into a women tomorrow, I would go along with it and not embark on a long quest to get my real body back, just as I would not embark on a long quest to find such a fairy in the first place. My gender is not tied strongly to my identity. By contrast, if a fairy cursed me to say become computer illiterate, I would grudgingly do whatever I had to do to undo that curse.

On a similar note, I have always wondered how much of the stereotype of computer programming being a common career path for trans people is because it is a lucrative profession (=able to afford treatments) where competence matters enough to make a certain amount of "weirdness" tolerable, and how much of it is because of the apparent link between autism and trans people?

It's also interesting to me how often seemingly unrelated hobbies end up converging for certain neurotypes. The first trans person I ever met was one of the organizers at my Pokemon TCG league as a kid, and now as an adult my local Magic: The Gathering shop has several trans people who show up for Commander nights, and a few of them are the ones you go to if you need a ruling on a complex rules interaction and the actual judge is busy.

Heck, some of the smartest computer scientists I know from college came out as trans at some point.

I don't think your story comes off as propaganda, /u/ffrreerree. I think your experience is the tip of the iceberg, and doesn't necessarily say anything about the validity or invalidity of trans people one way or the other.

Maybe I'm going on a tangent to your interesting culture war anecdote, but since you touched on it, there is a problem that has been bugging me lately: is there any way we as a society can discourage our best and brightest from going into rent-seeking professions?

I used to be a quant trader. I left because I was bothered by the pervading sense that what we were doing created nothing of value for society or the world, and by the moral decay it seemed to create in the environments I was working in.

Almost by definition, quant trading will never generate any significant positive externalities for anyone, since most of what you are doing is seeking to exploit temporary inefficiencies. And it generates a significant negative externality by draining talent and capital that could otherwise be employed productively.

So why don't we ban quant/algorithmic trading? Or regulate and tax it heavily? This is what governments usually try to do when an industry is generating negative externalities.

I can make a few good arguments not to ban it outright:

  • There are well-known benefits to having stable, liquid capital markets in terms of attracting investment to an economy.
  • The markets for capital and labour should be efficient, as long as we ensure competition in the industry. Sooner or later, these salaries should come down to Earth and the talent will go someone it's needed more.
  • All of the negative consequences of quant trading seem to be higher-order impacts. There's no immediate, visible negative consequences produced from this activity, like say, tailing ponds or child amputations.
  • It's difficult to even define what it is exactly. When is it "quantitative" or "algorithmic" vs. "fundamental" or "gut-based" (and are the right-hand terms even more virtuous somehow?)? Maybe you just want to ban noise trading or scalping, but even those could be difficult to differentiate those from other activities such as market-making or longer-term investing.

A lot of the same considerations apply to other lucrative bullshit industries that are currently sucking up talent such as cryptocurrencies, internet advertising, social media, or video games. I think these are all terrible things and if it were between having them or not, the world would be better off without them, unquestionably. But I don't think it's a good idea to ban them, and politically, this is never going to happen.

Taxing these industries could be more practical. A well-considered tax could offset some of the negative externalities and shrink the number of seats available, forcing many would-be quant traders or social media engineers to venture out into the productive part of the economy instead. But there are still practical and political considerations that will prevent this from happening in our world.

So what else can be done? Since the government isn't going to do much to fix things, maybe the solution lies with individuals instead. As in, what would make me our best and brightest go against financial incentives and actively choose not to be quant traders?

To imagine what this solution might be, we can look at the petroleum industry. Years ago, many of our best and brightest engineers used to flock to oil & gas. Dating myself a bit, but when I went to school, chemical engineering was known to be a lucrative option. But then in the last decade or so, besides a correction to the price of oil, working in oil & gas became possibly literally the least cool thing you could do. The younger generations have experienced a major moral awakening, and decided that they wanted to be on the right side of history when it comes to the climate crisis.

Could finance have its moment like this as well? Certainly, back in 2010/2011 it looked possible with the Occupy movement. And of course, anti-capitalist sentiment amongst youth has been rising lately, especially ever since they got their hands on TikTok (what a strange coincidence). I would never rule out change due to negative backlash from an economically alienated, ill-informed mob.

But what I would really like to see is a positive change in the mindset of the elite itself. As someone who is arguably part of this elite, I would put forth the following ethical argument:

  1. The world has very pressing issues that we need social, cultural, political, and technological solutions for.
  2. These issues require members of the elite to devote themselves to solving them. Most non-members of the elite will not be able to do so, since they are just scraping out an economic existence as it is.
  3. Therefore, as the intellectual elite, we have a moral responsibility to solve these issues for the benefit of all (elite and non-elite).

To me, this is the core of a belief system, or possibly even a religion. Speaking as an atheist, I think maybe at least part of the reason that these industries exist in their current form and the world is so screwed up today in our post-modern areligious world is that we've lost a bit of the moral anchor that religion used to provide us. So maybe what it takes to save us is actually a new kind of religion.

I just wanted to say thanks for these interesting thoughts - I'd hoped to see more discussion about the misallocation of talent especially since I don't know what to think myself. It seems unlikely people are going to engage on this topic anymore - too bad about the timing.

Is it autogynephilia? No clue. It feels a little impertinent to ponder, though that’s the sort of question that I might have said mattered a lot before.

If you gave me even odds, I would bet the house that Mark has masturbated in women's underwear before he showed up at your work in women's clothes. Whether that makes him an autogynephile is a matter of definition, but I don't think it's impertinent, and I think it's equally obvious the answer is yes. That's just what happens when middle-aged autistic men transition.

If a random person insists on referring to Mary as a man, and I’m required to say that between the two of them one is a fool, I’d have to say that Mary is not the fool.

And if you had to follow one into combat, to lay down your life in the company of other men, fighting for your home and hearth, would you rather follow Mark who calls himself Mary, or would you rather follow the one who calls him a man? Everything in this world is downstream from violence, although we've done wonders to conceal that. I might trust Mark at th

On a visceral level, it still doesn’t make sense to me, and I can still make it gross if I want to, just by thinking about it. But why do that?

Probably because gross things are bad, and viscerally gross things are especially bad, and it's a normal and healthy reaction to the abnormal and diseased world about you. Sure, you can stick your head in the sand, pretend nothing is wrong, and ignore all your warning instincts and soothe your raised hackles, by why do that? Why not instead see the world for as it is, and spare yourself the dissonance? I've never understood the desire to repress your instincts like this.

If you gave me even odds, I would bet the house that Mark has masturbated in women's underwear before he showed up at your work in women's clothes.

How'd you arrive at those numbers?

And if you had to follow one into combat, to lay down your life in the company of other men, fighting for your home and hearth, would you rather follow Mark who calls himself Mary, or would you rather follow the one who calls him a man? Everything in this world is downstream from violence, although we've done wonders to conceal that.

Combat is involved in very, very few aspects of life. It's vastly more likely OP has to follow Mary into the world of finance, where Mary will crush the vast majority of people who insist Mary is Mark. For most people, trying to surround themselves with the best warriors is not a path to a succesful life.

And if you had to follow one into combat, to lay down your life in the company of other men, fighting for your home and hearth, would you rather follow Mark who calls himself Mary Mary née Mark, or would you rather follow the one who calls him her a man?

Which one can hit a target at 300 metres?

I was asking after leadership, not marksmanship.

There's TWO criteria which matter, and the second is IMO more important than the first

  1. Can he/she/it shoot?

  2. Will he/she/it aim at your enemy?

It's the second which would be the one at issue here.

(this particular formulation is taken from the Liaden books, but I'm sure the idea is older than that)

Several responses:

One of my favorite interview quotes of all time, and one I live by, from boxer Tex Cobb:

After I dropped out of college, I started traveling around the country. I was 19 years old and I decided to find me something that worked, like being cool. Being cool worked, it got you out of trouble and you got a lot of good things happening for you but I never had more than maybe a C- in cool. Being smart worked for you. It got you out of a lot of trouble and got you a lot of good things and although I was actually pretty quick, I didn’t count it for much ‘cause it came real easy to me. I could memorize large sections of data and regurgitate it back to you but it didn’t bring me any happiness. But believe me, being smart isn’t nearly as good as being wise. Then there was having money, it got you out of a lot of trouble and got you a lot of good things and I never had two nickels.. . but there was being bad . . . and being bad applied across the board. Because you could take a rich, cool, smart guy and you could have him doing anything you could possibly conceive of because you were bad. So I thought, hey I found me the secret of the temple, I’ll go out and get me a Pass Master in bad, and I did. And there ain’t nobody bad believe me, I looked. I fought for world titles in boxing, karate, I fought bar wars, street corners, most everything living and half the stuff dead and darling it don’t matter there ain’t nobody bad, I know, I looked . . . just God.”

I could rephrase that last line personally. I thought intelligence was everything. And I've argued with college professors and with wall street CEOs, I've debated with Senators, Congressman, drunk philosophers and internet impersonators, gamblers on commodities and on blackjack, rationalists and bishops, ivy league lawyers and both elected and appointed judges, most everything living and half the stuff dead, and ain't nobody smart, I know, I looked...just God.

Don't get overly into the idea that there is such a thing as generalizable intelligence. I know many brilliant people who are into religious or philosophical concepts so stupid I can't imagine sitting through them, let alone making them part of my week. I consider transition a primarily religious belief, having to do with a metaphysical gender-soul which exists separate from any physical evidence thereof, and a philosophical requirement that one live in conformance with it. If I tried to believe in every religious belief that someone brilliant I know believed in, I'd have a set of contradictory and useless beliefs, some of them so stupid I can't even reckon with them.

That said, I broadly agree with your vibe. When I interact with trans people, I don't generally find them either dangerous or disturbing, and I do my best to respect their choices personally, but that doesn't mean I philosophically agree with them, nor does it require that I buy into the metaphysical framework they live under, and least of all does it require of me any political position. I simply find them to be fine enough people and don't make a big show of hurting them. I suspect most people who hold "transphobic" positions online are probably similar. I recall a tweet that went something like: if instead of asking yes/no polling questions, one interviewed Americans about their opinions on trans people, the actual answers would converge towards something both intensely bigoted and basically accepting in ways that neither political party would find acceptable. Most people go along to get along, and I believe that if you respect Mark broadly then you reasonably ought to give his religious beliefs respect in conversation.

There was a bait post on here some weeks ago asking what evidence it would take to change your opinion on HBD, iirc in some annoying fake math that I didn't feel like messing with. But my first thought about it was, well you'd have to somehow prove to me that my black friends, professors, coworkers, etc were hallucinations, that they weren't really there or weren't really what they seemed. Until then, I'm not going to buy into a strong framework that predicts that those people would be so much rarer than they seemed to me to be. Whatever is going on in the graphs, it can't change my actual experience, and that's going to predominate in how I see the world.

Reality is under no constraint to be philosophically consistent for us.

As the author of the alleged bait post: might it be that we observed nearly disjoint chunks of society? IIRC you went through a professional/verbal education at elite institutions on or near the East Coast. I did pure math at thoroughly non-elite ones in the West. The elite vs non-elite selection effects would account for a lot of the difference.

I do think that's an interesting angle on why Affirmative Action is such a crime against society, it takes the talented tenth and pulls them out of general life for most people. Harvard is, as it were, hoarding all the smart Black Friends.

I didn't get into this in the prior post for that reason, no one will get anything out of the discussion.

I consider transition a primarily religious belief, having to do with a metaphysical gender-soul which exists separate from any physical evidence thereof, and a philosophical requirement that one live in conformance with it.

I remember a particularly memorable anecdote, I'm pretty sure from The Rest is History podcast, comparing the craziness of the last decade or so to the Reformation: we've got our statue-toppling iconoclasts, and our loud philosophical debates including over, effectively, transubstantiation after terrestrial rituals. It's not "this bread and wine have literally and physically become body and blood" (here, try that and let me run it through a mass spectrometer!) but "this organism, previously male, is now female and always has been." I'm not sure it's an answer to your thoughts, but I found it comforting that this sort of disagreement has long-standing precedent in history.

A couple unorganized thoughts:

  1. Of the people I've worked closely with in my software engineering career, the women are smarter and more competent than the men, by a significant margin. This is entirely driven by most of the women I've worked with being trans women.

  2. There is absolutely a very significant correlation between all of mathematical capabilities, having at least mild autistic tendencies, and identifying as trans. My running theory is that the causal arrow runs from not being neurotypical to not fitting into the very narrow social role for men (which is hard to navigate as an autistic person) to very rationally deciding to just start identifying as trans so you have more flexibility in how you present yourself. I'd be interested to hear Mary or another highly capable trans person talk about if this resonates with them at all (I'm always too sheepish to state this belief in polite company).

  3. I don't think trans people are the primary drivers of corporate woke struggle sessions. I've heard from two that they actually dislike them. Constantly having people tiptoe around them and someone making a performative point to always ask for pronouns in front of them is, if anything, triggering and othering. Instead, it's mostly white HR women who are pushing it: it establishes a social hierarchy with arbitrary rules that they can assert themselves as enforcers into.

  4. Trans people on Twitter are not at all representative of typical trans people, who are much more normal than you'd think if social media was your primary exposure to them.

My running theory is that the causal arrow runs from not being neurotypical to not fitting into the very narrow social role for men (which is hard to navigate as an autistic person) to very rationally deciding to just start identifying as trans so you have more flexibility in how you present yourself. I'd be interested to hear Mary or another highly capable trans person talk about if this resonates with them at all (I'm always too sheepish to state this belief in polite company).

I wonder about this myself. I know a transman who is likely autistic, and from what I have gathered talking with him, it really seems like part of the motivation for transitioning was his difficulty fitting into the female social role as an autistic person. He was raised a conservative Christian, went to a Baptist college, and was married to an emotionally abusive man for 10 years, so I wonder if he didn't experience the female role as rather more restrictive than most women experience it?

I would be curious to find out whether trans people are more likely to come from communities which emphasize hard-to-navigate social rules (for either sex) in the modern day. I could easily imagine a pipeline that looks something like: born autistic in a community with strong gender norms > doesn't fit in to natal sex role due to autism > labels that difficulty "gender dysphoria" and questions if they might be the opposite sex > transitions and enough people give them a bit more leeway for them to learn the rules of their new sex role > they're much happier in their new role as a result.

That's possible, but then one would like mainstream society to be sending a message like: it's perfectly alright to be a nerdy masculine woman or an effeminate man!!! You definitely do not need to go on hormones and cut off your breasts or other parts to deal with this! Go find yourself a supportive community in a big city, they totally exist!

Mainstream society should definitely not be sending a message that medical procedures and messing with puberty are a good way to deal with the situation, or at least not until they've tried other things like finding a supportive subculture, finding their own preferred aesthetic, etc.

one would like mainstream society to be sending a message like: it's perfectly alright to be a nerdy masculine woman or an effeminate man

That's the tack that society has been taking since at least the 80s or so. Obviously there's no blinded experiment or anything and lots of different overlapping trends, but it seems pretty clear to me that downplaying gender roles led to an increase in people desiring to transition rather than forestalling transitions.

That's the tack that society has been taking since at least the 80s or so.

It used to be. Then a certain kind of angry, selfish person started problematizing masculinity and proclaimed that "nerdy/masculine woman" (masculinity as action) and "effeminate man" (masculinity as identity) were all bad.

That started around 2010 or so and has done nothing but get worse. It seems that the trans stuff is just responding to that worldview.

That's the tack that society has been taking since at least the 80s or so. Obviously there's no blinded experiment or anything and lots of different overlapping trends, but it seems pretty clear to me that downplaying gender roles led to an increase in people desiring to transition rather than forestalling transitions.

Hypothesis: Downplaying the traditional norms effectively removed the training wheels from the kids who would have really needed them. It may be difficult to adapt to unsaid social norms if the well-meaning adults are too drunk on their utopian koolaid and insist there being no norms. If a task is difficult, some people do not succeed.

If you complain, the well-meaning adults may say that you've got it all wrong, it is how it is meant to be: the kids (later grown-ups) who take non-standard paths have been liberated from oppressive structures and are finally able to find/express their non-standard identity.

I would be curious to find out whether trans people are more likely to come from communities which emphasize hard-to-navigate social rules (for either sex) in the modern day.

There isn't any other kind.

I feel like that's a bit presumptuous though, unless you mean it in some trivial sense like, "All communities emphasize hard-to-navigate social rules (for either sex), therefore all trans people come from such communities."

I would tend to think that so-called "autogynephillic transexuality" would be a kind of transness that only requires that men and women wear different kinds of clothes and look physically different, which isn't a "hard-to-navigate social rule" in my book. Heck, even so-called "homosexual transsexuals" don't require the existence of hard-to-navigate social role for either sex, just for a "gay" person to realize on some level that they'll have more of the sexual options they prefer if they transition.

I'm inclined to give my hypothesis a label more like "pseudo-dysphoric autistic transsexuality", and would tend to consider it distinct from either of Blanchard's two categories (though I'm sure there's comorbidities.) I actually wonder if most transmen in the modern rise of transness don't belong to this category. Though I could also see an argument for something like "pseudo-dysphoric cluster B transsexuality" or a more general supercategory of "pseudo-dysphoric 'weird outcast' transsexuality" (which I suspect would often line up with neurodivergence of some kind, though it might never be diagnosed.)

It seems like people in the field are more likely to be a bit all over the place. There are more people doing things far out of the mainstream in every direction.

As for the trans thing I find it perplexing as the typical developer especially in the nerdier fields is far from being feminine. Even the ones who are trans aren't very feminine. Stick a transgender haskell developer in with at a Taylor Swift concert and he will really stand out. Much of the femininity is missing from them. They aren't talking with their friends for four hours about nothing, they don't really love kids, they don't really have feminine habits. Developers tend to speak in bullet points rather than the free flowing emotional output that women speak in.

Mathematics/CS is hyper masculine. It is purely logical, incredibly concise, black and white and doesn't care about your feelings. It is for somewhat unempathic types who answer the question "do you like my shirt" honestly. They aren't very girly. I find the autist to trans pipeline to be truly perplexing as autism is linked to high prenatal testosterone and is in many ways a hyper masculinized brain.

My guess is that they don't fit in with the bros and are desperately searching for an identity while needing attention.

I imagine some of it is also that stereotypical masculinity is not the self-image of many nerds.

Is it though, nerds throughout history are nearly all men. Pretty much all major scientific discoveries were made by men. Technology has been dominated by men. Nerdy occupations have some of the highest over-representations of men.

It is a different male archetype than the chad but it is hardly one that isn't male.

Over thinking patterns without any actual way to determine truth is at the center of my trouble with the whole trans thing. I think it's well known that at least one strand of the trans person is stereotypically a very good programmer, perhaps you hadn't encountered that meme. But it's so well known that I pretty much guessed where this story was going at this point

Anyway, at some point I noticed Mark never came in anymore

It's precisely the keen analytical mind that notices they feel a disconnection(A better word eludes me) and searches for a reason. Maybe they find god, maybe they find community in some niche, maybe they discover the concept of gender identity and ascribe their not fitting in to being the wrong gender. All these answers have a kind of new equilibrium to them and I can't confidently say they're wrong. But I do know the appeal. Landing on belief in one's trans identity to explain your dislocation has this feature that even after transition you have any number of handy explanations for why you don't quite feel right. The important thing isn't alleviating the disconnection, it's finding an explanation for it, not having an explanation it what was really eating them up. They can handle anything so long as they can put a label on it and gain that little bit of control.

See also Eliezer's post "Outside the Laboratory". Few people have fully generalised rationality: many people who are extremely intelligent and rational in one domain can be exactly as susceptible to peer pressure, social contagion, motivated reasoning, bias etc. in other domains. I suspect that this is the rule rather than the exception among anyone of above-average intelligence. I'm not sure if I've ever met someone whose intelligence is (per your account) four standard deviations above the norm, but I see no good reason why this wouldn't also be true within that cohort.

MtF-transgenders on average scale as superior on IQ tests compared to the norm, IIRC well over 1 standard deviation, which is not that surprising given the propensity of high-functioning autistic men to transition. I don’t think the fact that people are not fully ‘general’ is fully explanatory beyond the fact of it as a basic truism, obviously autistic people aren’t fully rounded in every cognitive task, since social skills are included in cognitive tasks pretty readily.

For an obvious example of a transgender-inclined 4-sigma person acting neurotically, look at Ted Kaczynski: 160+ IQ gender dysphoric social outcast whose neuroses eventually led him to just kill people, since he was sexually isolated when he was younger. The same archetype follows, I think, in the average socially-isolated high-functioning autist whose mind is obviously elevated beyond the masses generalistically in terms of ability but not morally, which is the main culture war issue we’re currently discussing (the high-IQ nature of the transgenders is also similar to the nature of the Askhenazim, which is why ‘ideological capture’ is such a charged notion likened to trans-genocide).

Of course it is almost certainly autogynephilia. Too high profile and too functional to be some sort of dysfunctional autistic or impressionable personality disordered type.

Plausible transsexuals, the very feminine male-attracted types have feminine interests. They're not into software engineering or mathematics, not moreso than ordinary women who avoid these mind-numbingly boring if lucrative occupations if it's at all possible.. That's why you find more Turkish or Iranian female software devs than Norwegian. They want to not be poor.

But I can’t see Mary as self-deluded. Self-delusion is the one thing those of her profession are good at avoiding. Can you tell she’s trans? I dunno, kind of? Is it autogynephilia? No clue.

Why?
If someone's entire sex fantasies are based around fantasies of being female, why couldn't a relatively sane person, in an environment designed to do so, manage to delude himself into thinking "I'm actually female?" Sex is the most powerful motivational drive there is. Lot of functional, socially adept people are deluded about something for one reason or another.

So, entirely plausible you're dealing with a mostly normal person who, due to the environment it is in, is behaving like this.

There are, at this point, at least 1813 erotic games based around the concept of sex change(page looks innocuous, deeply nsfw classification though).. Despite all the activist claims that autogynephilia is bunk, a whole lot of people seem to find the idea erotic to the point they spends a lot of time making computer games about it.

I mean, there's no reason to condemn the person, you don't choose your main sexual preferences. It is what it is though. Of course, a small part of these people are vocal advocates who believe it is their moral duty to try to convince others that they too, are transsexual..

In the end, it doesn't really matter one way or another, as the amount of these kinds of people and potential cases is way, way too low to matter in the great modernity die-off.

I think there's some element of that, but I don't think that's entirely it. There are definitely people who have sexual thoughts about turning into the opposite sex, but as progressives say, sex is not gender. Reality does not offer anything close to what that experience would be like if it could actually happen, and I think that's pretty obvious to even a casual observer.

I think there's some element of that, but I don't think that's entirely it.

I'm pretty certain that in cases of people into coding, wargaming and other almost exclusively male interests and the like, the 'entirety of it' grows on the scaffolding of 'sexual target identification error' which is thought to be behind autogynephilia. People 'fall in love' with the idea of themselves as women.

sex is not gender.

Yeah which is why ostensible 'women' with stereotypically male interests and male attitudes raise so much eyebrows.

Right, I get that, but that's not my point. I understand the fantasy. But trying to live the fantasy I don't think would bring them the things they want out of the fantasy. If it's something like "Women are hot and feminine. I want to be hot and feminine," well you're not going to be hot or feminine, you're going to be a dude in a dress. If you want to know what sex is like for a woman, surgery is not going to get you that.

I am saying that I would generally imagine that most with autogynephilia would desist with acting out their autogynephilia in public in disappointment. Not all, but a significant percentage.

I would generally imagine that most with autogynephilia would desist with acting out their autogynephilia in public in disappointment.

Yes, but there's a subset of them who aren't dissuaded by "it'd look terrible and it pisses people off when you aren't being subtle about it".

Which is probably why there's a missing middle of AGPs that want to do it but are more conscious of how they look while doing it (you know, like an actual woman would). But then again, if they were all wearing dress appropriate for the environment and not insisting on going into women's bathrooms while obviously male it would be a non-issue.

From an AGP standpoint, there's nothing qualitatively different between "just the underwear and one of those utility-type skirts that are basically just shorts without the pant legs" and "the showiest red dress you can find"- they're both female clothes, so they should both scratch that itch. It's the fact that they take it beyond parody/have terrible fashion sense/aren't satisfied with the clothes alone that's 99% of the issue.

If it's something like "Women are hot and feminine. I want to be hot and feminine," well you're not going to be hot or feminine, you're going to be a dude in a dress

Delusions are very powerful. I used to go to lunch with a psychologist, he said that every single trans person he knows is deluded about the outcome of these procedures.

I am saying that I would generally imagine that most with autogynephilia would desist with acting out their autogynephilia

It's unclear what % want to transition as long as it is what it is, but it's believed to be at least half. Hard to find out, but /u/tailcalled (on reddit) did some research thru surveys on it..

There's a lot of people who get off on that and are not really bothered by being guys.

How often do you see your co-worker tackling problems beyond their profession? In my experience raw intelligence and domain expertise can very easily give the impression of a deep and profound wisdom that simply isn't there. Do not be too surprised if one day you see them out of their element and the illusion shatters.

My first interactions with a trans person (or at least someone who I knew had transitioned) was as an audience member to a speech they were giving. I wasn't there to listen to a trans person speak, I was there to hear from Deirdre McCloskey a famous economist that transitioned in 1995. The fact that she had once been a man was an interesting side fact about her. It wasn't what defined her. The same could probably be said of Caitlyn Jenner. I also had a few colleagues that transitioned. It was generally not something we ever talked about. I tried not to make a big deal of it, and they didn't either. I have parts of me that are culturally conservative. But those parts of me mostly say to shut up about sexual topics and health issues, especially in professional settings. Something can be a huge cultural issue, political disagreement, and interpersonal dream/nightmare. But it need not impact the professional workplace at all.

I do agree with you about having a real worry about the opportunity costs of smart people. I see it with myself all the time. I wrote a semi-popular online web serial. I mostly stopped because I have kids and because I liked spending my time writing to argue politics on themotte more. I very selfishly chose a path that benefits far fewer people. I work a salaried non-profit job that has me working very low hours, but also pays about 40% under market price for my labor (or maybe I'm accurately priced given how much I work). Not everyone is in their optimal job, for whatever way you want to define "optimal". Personal happiness / pay / comparative advantage / benefit to the world / etc.

It does leave exploitable holes in the market. One of those holes is that a bunch of space and engineering nerds thought we should be doing more to establish a human space presence. Elon Musk gathered these people into space X and got cheap high quality engineering talent.

I read a bit about this Deirdre on the wikipedia page, and saw the failed cancellation campaign in 2003. I mean, probably it is true that this is not what defined her, but still I can see the germs of cancel culture in it.

In general, I think it's a big mistake to confuse "X" group with "X activists".

I cannot stand trans activists. But the actual trans people I know are cool. And this applies broadly. I mostly dislike unionists but actual construction workers are great.

Internalise this, and the world suddenly feels a lot more chill.

I understand that your intention with this post isn't anything as simple-minded as "this genius came out as trans, therefore trans is legit and TERFs should shut their mouths". But even if you're not doing that, some people may take it that way, and I see similar arguments for all kinds of political stances all the time, so I'm going to lay out here why the argument is fallacious.

Years ago, Scott had a post arguing that brilliant people also holding some very strange (and presumably incorrect) beliefs is precisely what you'd naively expect. A genius (broadly defined) is a person who identifies actionable patterns that no one else has noticed before, which means that they must have an unusually sensitive pattern-matching ability, which can very easily devolve into fully-fledged apophenia if left unchecked:

Linus Pauling thought Vitamin C cured everything. Isaac Newton spent half his time working on weird Bible codes. Nikola Tesla pursued mad energy beams that couldn’t work. Lynn Margulis revolutionized cell biology by discovering mitochondrial endosymbiosis, but was also a 9-11 truther and doubted HIV caused AIDS.

To Scott's examples I'll add the laundry list of mathematicians who went mad, including Alexander Grothendieck, Kurt Gödel and John Forbes Nash among others.

"This extremely smart person is also trans" is not a persuasive argument that we should take the empirical, experiential or normative claims of trans people/trans activists seriously, any more than the argument that no one should eat sugar because Hitler did too, or that we should all be Christian because that student's name? Albert Einstein. If you think the arguments in favour of this or that component of trans rights make sense, it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference if the only people advancing them were the dumbest people you've ever met; if you think they don't make sense, it likewise doesn't make a difference if everyone advancing them got into Harvard on an academic scholarship, is a card-carrying MENSA member and/or has a PhD in theoretical physics. It's Bulverism in reverse.

Perhaps I'm far more intelligent than you or perhaps I've just not met as brilliant people but I've never ever experienced the sort of general intelligence gulf you describe. If anything my experience has been the opposite, I've assumed general competence and found just general overconfidence.

Sure, there are people vastly superior to me in specific domains but not in general. They're often competent in other areas as well but not experts to the degree they are in their chosen field. Conversely, there are people less intelligent than me that occasionally are right about things that I'm wrong about even if they can't articulate why they believe what they believe very well, especially when they have a lot of experience in the subject matter.

To me it seems very common for great domain specific expertise to lead to generalised overconfidence rather than being an indicator of general competence.

This sort of thing seems especially true about mental illnesses. I'm sure John Nash was incomparably superior to me at math but that doesn't mean that the FBI really was sending him messages through light beams or that literally everyone wearing red ties are commies.

Ideology is almost as bad as mental illness at polluting thinking.

Man, there's a lot of things to touch on here! Interesting post.

First: yes, I share your concern about our economy. I look at it as a sort of "Dutch Disease," where smart people are increasingly getting pushed out of academic science (too bureaucratic and unrewarding) into finance or IT (more intellectual freedom, waaaaay more money and easier to find a permanent position). I hope the recent tech layoffs lead to some long-term restructing there, but I don't have high hopes.

In your description of this specific person, I think: "I'm shocked! Shocked!... Well not that shocked." It seems to be a common pattern among highly intelligent tech workers that they transition MtF. Eg, there's a blog I read: The Digital Antiquarian And it's jarring just how frequently the early tech pioneers later transitioned. Not a majority of them of course but like... maybe 10%? Much more likely than you'd expect from random chance.

My feeling is that when highly intelligent tech nerds like the person in your story transition, it usually ends up OK. Maybe odd, but they were odd to begin with. They've got the money for proper medical care, a community of people who can accept them, and they've probably thought it through for themselves quite thoroughly.

I'm more worred about the um... less intelligent sort of nerd/geek who transitions. Like this guy: https://default.blog/p/the-year-when-my-husband-started. Seems to be much more "fetishized," less thought out, and without a community who can empathize. That guy ended up being reported to the policy by his wife.

Then there's the ultra-aggressive athlete trans people like Bruce Jenner, and the ones who go on hormones super young. Then there's FtMs which is a whole other kettle of fish. Trans is an interesting bucket of different types, and I feel like we're just starting to get enough data to identify these subtypes.

and they've probably thought it through for themselves quite thoroughly.

That doesn't follow. Highly intelligent people are also able to see gatekeepers as obstacles and can, using their intelligence, lie and manipulate to get around whatever criterion the gatekeeper is using to avoid later regret.

'Genius autistic MtF transitions' appears to be an exclusive phenomenon observed among residents of the digital landscape (Esports players, Programmers, Wikipedia editors).

My pet theory is that autistic geniuses blitz down to the bottom of rabbit holes faster than anyone else, and digital rabbit holes always end in Paraphilias. Furries, Wiafus and Trans MtFs are the exact same thing. It could have been something innocuous like trains, tanks or bonsai tree cutting. But on the internet, it always ends up being 'chicks with dicks'.

I'm a degenerate internet dweller, and I have navigated deep into some pretty glarly rabbit holes. Thankfully, my curiosities have been limited to geo-politics & cars. But even there, I've had to develop a strong filter to scroll-past futas, impossibly proportioned waifus, 500 year old loli vampires and furries. They are everywhere ! I can't imagine how bad it would be if I was into a hobby that WAS tangentially to any of those topics.

Now even 'normal' people have a fondness for paraphillias. S&M, Voyeurism, exhibitionism, (name you favorite porn category) are all paraphillias too. If the appeal of sexual-deviation has something to do with the taboo-ness of it, then a no-social-filter having autistic person is more likely to end up 'an expert' by getting to the bottom of it. A trans person might be into niche-and-odd sexual fetishes for the same reason that they install arch-linux and build compilers. Next, austic people are often obsessive (trans OCD seems to be pretty big area of discussion by itself), and you can see how they'd start obsessing over trans / furry / futa-dom.

To me, the final piece is community. Autistic people struggle to fit in or find their own. They find their people deep in sewers of the internet, and some of them are feeling pretty Trans. Now you have a group of people, who think like you do, feel like you do, and can explain the obsessive source of their condition in the exact words that make sense of tanother autstic person. That is a recipe for indoctrination. Now, I don't believe this is malicious or intentional. But, I do believe this phenomenon is an emergent property of 'internet sewers'.

I believe that some base population is trans.

I belive that autistic men are most pre-disposed to gender dysphoria.

I also believe that the social patterns of internet sewers lead to dysphoria, mlp-fandom & furries as a social phenomenon.

These people are the sole reason for the survival of the internet or the tech industry. I wish them a happy life. I hope they continue contributing 100x every FANG engineer.

But, I don't think we should normalize their condition among 'normies'. These people are kinda different, doing their different thing. I don't judge, but it is fine to keep it out of mainstream media.

Gender dysphoria is significantly higher among people on the autism spectrum. Tech work and engineering of all sorts are a natural fit for the computer-minded person with autism. Tech fields also tend to gather blue-tinged grey tribers.

Anecdotally, you’ll also find tons of people with autism who have species dysphoria (identifying as a nonhuman, aka furries and otherkin) or another dysphoria. A porcupine I know once told me she’s never surprised when someone in tech comes out as trans and a “furry lifestyler” (early 00’s term for species dysphoria).

I do wonder how many red tribers suffer silently from dysphorias because they don’t have culturally acceptable words for them. I’m a red-tinged grey triber due to my autism and family, and while they know I’m a furry, they’ll probably never understand about my species dysphoria or how it was cured in an instant in 2009.

Sorry if this is insensitive, but is species dysphoria a thing?

I don't doubt that furries are a thing, but I would have classified them as some kind of kink or cosplay or roleplay thing rather than genuine dysphoria.

I can totally get gender dysphoria, say someone with the Y chromosome feeling that they should really be in a lesbian relationship or being a caring mother or whatever. "I am a woman trapped in a man's body" (or vice versa) kinda makes sense to me.

Using s/gender/species/, species dysphoria would be "I am a felis silvestris trapped in the body of a homo sapiens", which seems incongruent to me. A nimble nocturnal hunter of rodents? That does not sound like a fulfillable aspiration this side of the singularity.

Dysphoria doesn’t care what’s fulfillable, feasible, affordable, or possible. It rejects one’s current body plan (that’s the dys) and usually says a different one would be proper.

If you were wearing an uncomfortable shirt, it would be uncomfortable whether it was a comfortable shirt worn inside out, in need of tailoring, or just badly made. The rate of suicide among dysphoria sufferers is high primarily because of the discomfort; whether or not the shirt can be reversed, there comes a point you just want to take it off.

I do have a theory as to why the anthro animal body plan is so often approximately a dog-snouted humanoid, though.

While humans domesticated dogs, dogs were domesticating humans, both species’ brain sizes shrinking as we grew to rely on each other for survival. Dogs have neural circuitry, mirror neurons, for responding to human verbal and facial cues. Dogs can’t point their fingers (instead pointing using their whole bodies), but they’ll follow a human’s pointed finger, something even the best trained cat never does.

We aren’t just Homo sapiens and Canis lupus, we’re Canis lupus familiaris and Homo sapiens canofilia. Both of our species are conditioned by evolution to enjoy looking at each others’ faces and reacting to emotions.

Here’s where the theory all comes together. As a young boy with autism, the family dogs’ faces were more comprehensible and familiar than my human family’s. I, like many people with autism, had mild prosopagnosia: I recognized human faces but couldn’t imagine them. Not so with dogs, and to an extent, any besnouted mammalian cartoon face. I could easily imagine them expressing any human emotion.

I believe autism dampens instinctual ability to understand human facial expressions of emotion, but often leaves instinctive comprehension of animal faces untouched, thus the high incidence of anthropomorphic animal appreciation among the autistic.

At that point, picking the European wildcat or a My Little Pony as one’s fursona (furry persona) instead of the golden hamster is like finding one’s favorite sushi restaurant out of all the seafood restaurants in town.

/images/17209932386595678.webp

I'd quibble with DuplexFields about how common dysphoria is among otherkin or therianthropes, barring definitions that require it, but it's definitely something that happens. Duplex compared his version to feeling like wearing a shirt inside out all the time (uh, in now-banned subreddit, sorry for not linking), and while that's an unusual explanation, it's not a particularly extreme one.

Optimistically, if you offered a whole bunch of therianthropes a magical potion, I'd hope some of them would ask for caveats about things like lifespan or opposable thumbs or social integration in their new shapes or pants (cw: no nudity, but might not be the best thing for DuplexFields to binge read), but at best at least some would quite happily jump in after that.

The lack of such a magical solution short of a singularity doesn't really change whether people can feel it: it's a sensation, not a realpolitick'ed set of political philosophy. It changes the degree you can seriously respond to it. There's some socialization stuff that could be relevant on the edges as policy questions -- some therians do feel a lot more normal with prosthesis like tails or ankle braces, which are also socially stigmatized in ways that make them highly impractical outside of Ren Faires -- but there's also reason that it isn't a philosophy with a lot of policy proposals.

I think "species dysphoria" is associated with otherkin (1 2), who are separate from furries.

From your first link, the species an otherkin believes themselves to be “may range from mythical species like demons, dragons, elves and faeries to wild animals and domesticated pets.” In my experience, these are the ferals, would-be quadrupeds instead of bipedal anthropomorphs.

Usually it’s true, the furry fandom and fandoms of mythical humanoids don’t overlap much (though the Elder Scrolls fantasy RPGs have two furry species alongside green orcs, three races of elves, and four races of humans). The biggest thing they tend to have in common is a dislike of humans, disavowing their affiliation with this species in a frankly stunning display of the human capacity for outgrouping.

I'll caveat that there's moderate overlap between furries and otherkin (or therianthropes, which was kinda a furry-specific variant of otherkin): furscience gives somewhere around 5-10%+ of furries identifying as therians or some related category, and while the higher estimates are usually coming from convention-specific surveys that have a pretty hefty selection bias, the lower ranges are not implausibly high.

But agreed that it's a different identifier, and I don't think there's any good numbers the other direction: there definitely are otherkin that aren't furries, and nobody knows what percentage of otherkin/therian/whatever they are.

That said, a significant number of therians didn't experience species dysphoria, or experience something that they don't categorize as dysphoria (eg, intentionally triggering phantom limbs for limbs they never had, but liking it), at least when I was able to follow the group in the 00s. Dunno what the internal frameworks are now; a lot of the matter has been driven off the open internet.

((There was historically more going on with the 00's-era 'lifestyler', both in philosophy and behavior, but the group that was distinguished by those differences is pretty much extinct today.))

Expand on what you mean by it being "cured in an instant".

It seems to be a common pattern among highly intelligent tech workers that they transition MtF.

The joke circulated among the politically incorrect is that it it's like frogs. Tech workers sense that the gender-ratio is too unbalanced and try to change sex to balance it.

Is it even a joke though? Like... it actually seems plausible to me. Not necessarily on a biological level but like, culturally, our species just doesn't work well in groups when it's too gender imbalanced.

I suspect that something like this is true at least via indirect pressures. Gender dysphoria is based on feeling uncomfortable in one's body, gender and identity, so anything that increases this discomfort is likely to at least increase symptoms if not the actual neurological source (though might do that too), and anything that decreases this discomfort will decrease symptoms (and possibly the source).

So I can easily see it being the case that if you regularly have positive encounters with people of the opposite sex which are founded in part on them liking you for being your sex, this might make you more confident and comfortable with yourself as you are. If such things are completely lacking, if you're just kind of the same as all the people around you but a small number of women get tons of attention and praise and special opportunities because they are women, you might start to wish you were one of them because it seems nice. If everyone around you hates straight white men, and loves women and especially trans women, then that might make you feel uncomfortable with your identity as a straight white man and wish you weren't one.

Maybe, I've never had gender dysphoria, but I used to be single and alone. And then I fell in love and my relationship with my wife is founded on me being a man and her being a woman. As a result, I'm way more confident in myself and my masculinity than I used to be. I'm not an expert, but I strongly suspect that falling in love heterosexually could cause someone wavering on the border to happily settle into their birth sex rather than becoming trans, so a lack of opportunities to do so would change the frequency of that occurring.

Sometimes it's meant ha-ha-only-serious, but I don't think it holds up. Our species does fine in groups when gender-imbalanced; militaries have done it for millennia. Blue collar workers aren't turning trans at a high rate.

militaries have done it for millennia

Debatable. Traditionally they brought along their wives/SOs as camp followers, or spent a lot of money on prostitutes. Sailors were famous for either going nuts on shore leave or turning gay, functioning through long deployments only under the harshest of discipline. And Rome was (mythically) founded by starting with a mostly male population that raided their neighbors to abduct women.

I don't know much about the lives of, say, oil roughnecks or crab fishermen, but my sense is that it's not a very healthy long-term community.

functioning through long deployments only under the harshest of discipline

Yes. "Rum, sodomy and the lash" are the true traditions of the navy, according to a great modern figure.

If they aren't getting drunk and fucking each other, it's because they are being whipped until they stop.

Jobs mostly aren't meant to be perpetual. Men should come home to their wives nights and weekends, and things like being a sailer are unusually stressful largely because that isn't possible.

Perhaps guys in tech/finance are working too much.

I read the first, autobiographical/Hemingway worship novel by James Clavell (Of Shogun fame), a fictionalized version of his experience in a Japanese PoW camp in Singapore during WWII, King Rat earlier this year. I highly recommend the book, but one character is pretty much this: Sean.

Sean is an RAF pilot who turns into a woman during the time in Changi. He's presented as the "Queen" of the camp, a parallel to the titular King of Camp. He is the only soldier given a private room, and private time to bathe. He's showered in attention and gifts, and in the regular theatrical performances he is the star attraction. It's implied he acts a bottom sexually, but it is never really the point: he traipses about in fine women's clothing, shaves his legs every day, showered in gifts and love and affection and service and praise for his beauty from other soldiers. He has immense privileges over every other inmate, far above his natural position in the hierarchy of the camp, second only to the King who runs the economy as a capitalist and above the commanding officers who have official power, simply as the star attraction in the theatrical productions. Far above the privileges given to the directors and producers of the shows! Clavell's self insert Marlowe knew Sean before the camp, and nearly killed him upon learning of his change in identity, but regrets it and considers it his own sin to fail to accept Sean, though he denies his own attraction to fSean. It is implied that Sean first takes on the female role because he was drafted to play a female role in a play, and that the attention lavished on him caused the change. That he couldn't turn down all the praise, and leaned more and more into the character until the mask became the face.

Ultimately Sean is the other main character, alongside the King and his Javert-like nemesis Grey who pursues him, who receives the news of the end of the war and their liberation with depression rather than joy. Sean, totally unable to imagine explaining his time in Changi or maintaining his new identity or returning to his old identity, drowns himself in all his finery. His privileged position in the camp, arguably a form of service from a utilitarian perspective bringing joy to the depressed prisoners, evaporates upon the prospect of returning to normality, and unable to reconcile what happened with his future, he chooses death. This is partly a strong literary parallel with the King, who is equally depressed and confused, going from capitalist king of the camp to just another enlisted ex-PoW with only a stack of the useless Japanese-Singaporean banana-money to show for it. There's a strong implication that capitalism and male dominance, as the King exercises to achieve power, is its own form of drag, no different from that used by Sean to achieve his power. It is implied that Sean first takes on the female role because he was drafted to play a female role in a play, and that the attention lavished on him caused the change, that it all started as a raft of attention paid to him and transformed over time into something more. In the same way, the King chooses to exercise dominance over other men, takes pleasure in dressing in clean clothing when no one else can, in forcing others to serve him and defer to him beyond his rank. A big part of the character of Sean, as the novel as a whole, is about examining American capitalism as a form of mental-disorder. ((Those who think Clavell's depiction of Japanese society is racist haven't read King Rat, Clavell was the kind of now-mostly-extinct British racist who thought proper humans really only came from the environs of London, and that anywhere more than 50 miles away from Piccadilly only produced gross stereotypes))

To a modern reader, its tough not to ask more identity questions about Sean: there are other sodomites mentioned in the camp, but only Sean takes it the further step of becoming female in presentation and identity, he states baldly that he is a woman causing Marlowe to attack him, leading to a narrowly averted suicide attempt due to his former friend's lack of acceptance. This is what trans looked like before trans ideology: it was ok to argue it was the result of trauma and circumstance, but attacking Sean was an act of small minded bigotry in the context of the camp, nonetheless his death is tragic, an act of desperation and sadness at what should have been a moment of triumph and joy. I would love to ask Clavell about the character, were he alive today, and how he viewed Sean in the context of modern identitarian queer politics. Did he think of Sean as having a female soul, or as having an innate attraction to men, which was triggered by the environment of the camp? Or did he think of Sean as being a normal airman, that what "happened to" Sean could have happened to anyone, even self-insert Marlowe, had they been drafted to play a female romantic lead? It's such a fascinating view into pre-movement views of homosexuality and gender.

sounds like an interesting book! It reminds me of something I learned recently- apparently drag shows were huge during WW2, especially with the US army in the Pacific theater. See: https://youtube.com/watch?v=yN1C_bPC4tc . They weren't small or hidden, they were these huge elaborate productions with costumes, choreography, and talented singing and dancing! Eventually performed on broadway! All with dudes in drag. Who, I don't think identified as trans, but maybe a precursor to that.

Could this be something similar to how you see more male-male physical affection in Muslim countries? In that case it's just assumed that the affection is not gay (because being gay could literally result in death) so it's therefore more common and accepted.

Likewise the drag shows might be for "harmless entertainment" since nobody would think anything else could happen.

Great comment, thank you for sharing. I’ve written before about how interesting it is that so much of what gay society (in the Anglo world, at least) was before about 1960 is seemingly completely forgotten knowledge. As much a lost society as any other, I suppose.

I bask in your praise.

I really do recommend the book. I read it with a friend from Singapore, and we both expected it to be in large part about the cruelty of the Japanese and the struggle for survival against them. Instead the cruel Japanese are largely a far-group fact about the universe, the primary struggle is within and among the PoWs. The book started and presents as an adventure yarn, but becomes a withering critique of capitalism.

-The book started and presents as an adventure yarn, but becomes a withering critique of capitalism.

I don’t think Clavell saw it that way himself. He was a fan of Ayn Rand.

OT, not having read Les Mis: is Javert nearly as well written as Grey?

More comments

I mean, the shortage of trans plumbers and auto mechanics points to there being something else going on there.

They probably have more positive interactions with the fairer sex. Going back to the original story, it seems somewhat likely that Mark, while working from home, had almost no regular contact with women IRL prior to his transition.

I don't think men working on oil rigs or container ships have a ton of positive interactions with women for the weeks or months they are away from civilization, and I'm not aware of a high rate of transness in those groups.

Could be cultural though.

In that story it sounds like working from home was used to cover up a transition that was already happening.

@zackmdavis theorises that this is a (possibly unconscious) motivation for Scott and Eliezer's rabid defense of trans rights. The massive overrepresentation of trans women in the Rat-sphere is the only defense they can offer against accusations that the movement is a white boys' club.

But I can’t see Mary as self-deluded. Self-delusion is the one thing those of her profession are good at avoiding.

I don't think this is a thing. I'd say it's akin to how Major League Baseball players are good at hitting baseballs pitched by other Major League Baseball players; they're better at it than anyone else, but even the best of the best fail over 60% of the time. Though with self-delusion, I'd wager that the numbers are more that the modal person fails 99.99% of the time, and if you just fail 99.9% of the time, you're among the elite class of people who are really good at avoiding self-delusion.

I wouldn't put numbers on it, but yes. I don't think high intelligence makes anyone immune to self-delusion, or more broadly, to adopting strange beliefs and acting on those beliefs.

If the last decade of Rationalism taught us nothing else, it was yet another reminder that very intelligent people are just better at adapting to social incentives by rationalizing themselves into insanity...

Based on the first four paragraphs, I was expecting this post to lead to Mark refusing to attend the "mandatory" harassment training, and management being unable to do anything about it because Mark is such an invaluable asset. Kudos on the curveball, didn't see that coming.

Newton's interest in numerology doesn't make it seem any more plausible to me. It seems far likelier that he has some strong feeling about being the wrong sex and that that is enough on its own to cause him to behave this way than that his knowledge of math and computers has given him special insight (which it sounds like he hasn't shared with you) into the proper definitions of man and woman.

listening to the facilitator explain to my genuinely confused Indian coworker why this description was problematic

I witnessed a similar exchange with another Indian guy at a presentation on pronouns. God bless the unassimilated and keep them safe from cancellation.

Poly for anyone not in the top 10% of attractiveness is a cope. It's the dating equivalent of renting in a flatshare instead of buying a house. It's what you do when you can't do the latter.

Poly for those top 10% is basically just farming simps. If you're the most desirable one in a poly arrangement you have it fucking made. It's just a harem by another name.

I think Poly is hypothetically possible to do in a healthy manner but requires a lot of coordination, patience and understanding between a bunch of quasi-romantically entangled people and has such a tightrope effect that it's probably not worth exploring just to occasionally hump a different partner.

but requires a lot of coordination, patience and understanding between a bunch of quasi-romantically entangled people

It also requires that you know yourself. Which requires being capable of knowing yourself.

Which is why "poly as identity" really rubs me the wrong way- because if you're not skeptical every time "it's just the way I am, and all of my relations need to just deal with it" as a go-to/the only rationalization for what you're doing, odds are you probably don't understand how love works and are thus doing it wrong.

And at that point, even if you're among the very privileged few that can actually do this successfully, are you going to be Proud of it (and thus cause other people who actually can't do it to get themselves into trouble), or are you going to shut the fuck up about it for the sake of everyone else and maybe not even devote that much time to pursuing it specifically because it's not practical (read: "being oppressed by reality")?

If you're not capable of asking yourself that question, or you're capable of asking that question but can't answer it honestly, indulging $sexual_deviance is probably not right for you. And saying that out loud to people doesn't help as a consequence, so it's not fixable.

And even if you're a very good tightrope walker a bad day or two on the tightrope and you've got to spend a lot of time rehabilitating an exponentially complicated web of relationships. In which the benefit is potentially maybe being able to occasionally indulge in a new sexual partner (and if you're longterm stable Poly you're probably not even doing that any more).

I think the fatal flaw in your line of argument here is that you assume someone whose job requires rational analysis is not going to delude themselves in other matters. That's simply not how humans work. Everyone - everyone - has blind spots where they don't have a clear view of their own weaknesses. If anything, very smart people tend to be a bit more prone to this because they tend to believe their very clear understanding of one thing applies to all things.

I'm not saying your specific coworker is self-deluding - I don't know him. But you definitely shouldn't assume that because he's really sharp at the job, he therefore thinks through everything with the same clarity.

As far as I can tell, there is no evidence that there is any level of intelligence (that has been attained by humans) at which the ability to delude oneself disappears. It is facile to bring up the famous historical examples like Newton or Pascal, as to begin with it's hard to answer the question to what extent they would even resemble our modern understanding of a "genius" , but even in modern times there is no shortage of examples such as the cavalcade of Physics nobel prize winners (Pauling, Josephson...) who went off the deep end, or even cases like Mochizuki where the cancerous growth of delusion happened near the center of their actual domain of expertise. By any account, these people are the sort of geniuses you describe: their competitive advantage was taking leaps of correct intuition over gaps others could only bridge with lots of meticulous work.

Moving in a slice of academia where it seems that we're good enough to be the "thousand-year-old vampires" (TW: Yudkowsky being himself) to a distinct stratum of people below but also have a distinct layer of people above us who appear the same to us, I've had a friend and colleague in academia who is probably quite similar to the case of Mar(k/y) that you describe. His->her transition did come as a bit of a shock to me, but as I thought about it more the signs had been all there. Since I first met him there was always a class of topics that made him act squirmy and avoidant, mostly to do with his own romantic relationships as well as even seemingly non-romantic ones with some people around him that one would casually describe as "queer", but also whenever other people's romantic relationships came up, as well as anything to do with his own seemingly quite religious upbringing. This was not the avoidance of someone calmly deciding to not talk about a topic, but the avoidance of someone with a fear of heights suddenly pushed onto a suspension bridge, and it seemed quite likely that he would be struck by the same sense of vertigo if his train of thought hit upon these topics on its own. I can only imagine that she came to be either somewhere in the depths of the avoided area, or as a mechanism to cope with the inevitability of having to engage it - but how would I know? I don't have the social wisdom to know how to keep engaging with someone who broadcast a choice to discard the social identity I was acquainted with, and academic contingencies made us go different ways at the time either way. The thing is though that if I accept this cluster of anxious avoidance as being a "pre-delusion", there is no shortage of people on "the level above mine" that I have seen it from.

Mar(k/y)

Mark and the Funky Bunch.

I'll echo what AshLael posted and state that the handful of trans people I've met IRL have all been perfectly fine. Some passed ok, some didn't. None struck me as fetishists or AGP. And none seemed to particularly care about "trans issues" that you would see online.

It has led me to conclude that online trans activists are a huge net negative for trans people in general. I wonder if a big advantage for gays and lesbians is that the internet didn't exist for the majority of their activist eras, thus most people would never encounter the weird and disturbing subcultures that mostly stuck to small enclaves in major cities.

None struck me as fetishists or AGP.

If they were, you wouldn't know. That's another problem with the "highly intelligent people are doing this" idea. Highly intelligent people are better able to hide anything questionable.

I'm not anti-trans. Not by my own definition of "anti-trans", anyway. Take what I am about to say to be not specifically about transgenderism:

My personal experience has taught me to be very pessimistic about predicting wisdom from intelligence, or even predicting future wisdom from past wisdom. Social norms and other more general sources of folly are a better poison than intelligence is an antidote. You're not overestimating quant traders, but you are underestimating folly. When I see a folly-resistant person, I expect the pattern to continue until it doesn't.

Is it brave to have HR waste hours of everyone's time with a degrading struggle session as a preparatory bombardment for your triumphant return? To me that seems like only seeing and valuing other people as your obedient audience...

I don't really know what to say. You're clearly smitten with this guy, but to me the story sounds like a typical case of mid-life crisis autogynophilia from a successful guy who wants to feel inherently valued for something, rather than just for his job skills.

successful guy who wants to feel inherently valued for something, rather than just for his job skills.

OP didn't mention any particular romantic success on his coworker's part, just that he was good at job skills. I'd be willing to wager that they're sufficiently far onto the spectrum that the dating market had essentially completely rejected them, leading to trans affiliation as a hugbox.

It's often not that. Many of these guys are already married. They're not failures, they're just tired of only being valued for the things they do rather than what they are

It’s funny, people talk a lot about men not being valued for who they are but that doesn’t describe my own experience. I get the logic of it, but I don’t know how to explain the discordance between the view and my experience.

But I guess I’m just lucky. My family, friends, and partners have always seemed clearly to value me for who I am. I haven’t had many partners but the ones I’ve had have been lightyears beyond the descriptions of wives and girlfriends I hear online.

Right. Chris from Mr Beast was by all accounts the very picture of success -- money, wife, kid. Dude had it made. Then he blew it all up to cosplay as a girl. That's not a rational move by any stretch of the imagination. It's something that must be driven by emotion. Either in the way you say, or simple raw fetishism.

Then he blew it all up to cosplay as a girl.

Pretty sure Kris still has money and a kid. From what I can glean from light Google searching the amicability of the their divorce isn't known, but it's entirely possible it's what Kris wanted.

But I can’t see Mary as self-deluded.

Transsexuality isn't about delusion - it's about desire.

And no one escapes desire, no matter how smart you are.

If a random person insists on referring to Mary as a man, and I’m required to say that between the two of them one is a fool, I’d have to say that Mary is not the fool.

It's reasonable to take Mark's assertion that "X is true" to be strong prima facie evidence of X, if you generally trust his judgement. But surely you recognize that Mark's beliefs are still defeasible, correct? Mark can still be wrong.

If he were to say, for example, that God is real - and that, more specifically, Islam is the one true religion - I doubt you'd be running out to convert to Islam tomorrow. Islam doesn't become true just because Mark says so. That claim still has to be evaluated against the totality of available evidence and argumentation, even though the source is trustworthy.

Or suppose that he told you that a person can be both 18 years old and 36 years old at the exact same time. That's something that you know to be false, just based on an analysis of the structure of the sentence. Mark's statement to the contrary wouldn't be (or shouldn't be) enough to change your mind.

So why not treat Mark's claim that he is actually a woman named Mary the same as those other two examples? At worst, obviously false nonsense, and at best, a highly contentious claim that should only be accepted after a careful examination of the supporting arguments?

Transsexuality isn't about delusion - it's about desire.

And no one escapes desire, no matter how smart you are.

This. I think most Mottizens' model of the situation would be much improved my thinking of trans as primarily an unusual set of desires/preferences rather than as delusion or attention-seeking (or even, directly, an attempt to get one's rocks off). The thing that most transitioners (and a whole lot of others who don't go down that path) have in common is that they want, very badly, to be the opposite sex. The delusion, if it's there, is probably a consequence of that desire. Is that desire is born of a fetish or fetish-like sexual thing (AGP), or some emotional thing, or some complicated combination of these, or even of some external source like trauma? Probably each of these for different people (my money's on the complicated combination for most, though). But I strongly suspect that things almost never start with delusion.

Somewhat of a side note, but I find it relevant that quite a few philosophies and religions teach that mastering or overcoming your desires is a key to living well. Stoicism, Buddhism, and Christianity don't have too much in common philosophically, but they are all in agreement on that point. (Even then there are major differences -- Christianity teaches that some desires must be expunged and the others rightly ordered, while my understanding is that Buddhism thinks that they all have to go. But the common point is that if you can't rule your desires, they will rule you, to your detriment.)

The thing that most transitioners (and a whole lot of others who don't go down that path) have in common is that they want, very badly, to be the opposite sex.

I think this accurately describes pretty much all trans women who are making even a token effort to medically transition. For a lot of trans men (the canonical example being Ellen/Elliot Page), to me it looks less like wanting to be a man and more like wanting not to be a woman (including not being able to have children, not being someone who is the object of sexual desire etc.). For trans women, medical transition tends to scan as an attempt to fulfil a fantasy; for trans men, an elaborate form of self-harm and self-obliteration. The difference in the tone of trans memoirs is striking: trans women's tend to read like "coming out was the most joyous and uplifting moment of my life, I finally truly understand who I am and now I'm free to be my best self", while trans men's tend to read like "it was after my third suicide attempt during my second hospitalisation for anorexia (prompted by getting raped) that I finally realised I'm actually a trans man, and I am exactly as miserable and dysphoric since my mastectomy as I was beforehand".

You are probably right about that. The dynamics in the modal cases do seem different.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats