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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   38251 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

  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.

FRENCH PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS

Another win imho for the faction "Nothing ever happens"

Win for the NFP and the left, Macron's party recedes but still resists, RN did not win ad expected. Tactical voting and a surge in participation did it, the "1945 Front" keep winning.

The huge banner that says "France is a nation of immigrants" says everything.

One thing I've always liked about Macron how willing he is to put the common man in his place and his actions over the last month have only solidified this view. A substantial minority of the French threw a far right tantrum in the EU elections and they are going to be punished for it with total government deadlock over the next year at least. Here's hoping next time around they see sense (the pessimist in me knows though that it'll take at least a few more rounds of "treatment" before they behave).

  • -32

A substantial minority of the French threw a far right tantrum in the EU elections and they are going to be punished for it with total government deadlock over the next year at least.

punished with deadlock

Don't threaten me with a good time. Are you sure it's the "far" right throwing a tantrum?

These are the French we're talking about. Famously the country with one of the largest tax to GDP ratios in the world. Cutting off the ability for their government to function (and thus extract even more tax to fund even more spending) is like taking a fish out of water. It's gonna hurt.

Electing a divided government does not guarantee an end of taxation and policies and stuff. Your idea sounds like a kind of vengeful wishful thinking: you want the French right to suffer, so you need an explanation. "The government you hate is more divided and powerless than ever, haha!" ?

Famously, the protests over the election are by the far left.

No don’t ask me why.

Weird how they have one of the best results in a while and still insist on le riot.

The French riot every time something happens. In Summer 2020 when the Floyd meme came to France, French policemen held their own counterprotest against accusations of brutality.

The rioters didn't necessarily vote for NFP (at least in the first round), or vote at all.

You know there are lots of interviews with them, right? Like why are you trying to deflect the blame here rather than celebrate like they are?

Cutting off the ability of their government to mutilate their country even further can only be a good thing, if you're of a far right mindset.

This comment (like many others of yours) seems motivated by a desire to guard your ego against the idea that indigenous Europeans don’t like your presence, and that you may not actually belong here.

There is no tantrum, there is just the usual democratic process, there is no punishment, merely Macron trying to retain power, again the usual democratic process.

Please refrain from psychoanalyzing other commenters. Or genetically analyzing them.

  • -11

Or genetically analyzing them.

What does this even mean? Are you saying it’s against the rules to acknowledge another commenter’s racial/ethnic background? Even a commenter like @BurdensomeCount who brings up those same topics all the time and who speaks openly about his own fraught racial/ethnic relationship to his host society?

There is a type of accusation along the lines of "you think this thing X, because you are a Y". These accusations are generally very annoying:

  1. Puts words and opinions in people's mouths that they might not hold.
  2. Turns discussions personal rather than idea oriented. It can become about whether someone is a Y rather than whether X is a good idea.
  3. Implies that the person can't change their mind and thus insures that no discussion can take place, only arguments and debate.

There are good ways to acknowledge someones biases without turning it immediately into shit flinging. "If I was a middle eastern man living in France I think I'd feel this way about things".

There are definitely situations where I wouldn't mind other people shedding some light on my own psychology. Sometimes I can see what my thoughts are motivated by and sometimes I'm stuck in my own blind-spot.

Perhaps the best way to do it is to collaboratively compare and contrast life experiences with one another. I've seen a few people having that sort of discussion on this very page. It seems to shed the desired sort of light with minimal epistemic friction.

Its the difference between solicited and unsolicited advice. Sure, go ahead and ask for solicited advice, we have whole weekly threads for that. Giving that advice unsolicited ... seems pretty rude and like you just want to pick a fight.

Fine, but why not? (Psychoanalysing, I didn’t do any genetic analysis, he revealed his ethnicity giddily more than once)

It's a form of bad faith argument known as Bulverism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism

The Bulverist assumes a speaker's argument is invalid or false and then explains why the speaker came to make that mistake or to be so silly (even if the opponent's claim is actually right) by attacking the speaker or the speaker's motive.

Is it really psycho analysis though?

He's been pretty vocal in expressing his disdain for white people in general and western culture in particular. Are we supposed to just ignore that context when he starts going of about how people different from him desrve to be punished?

Yes and no.

seems motivated by a desire to guard your ego

Where does the conversation go from there? It’s immediately dragged down, because in addition to making it personal, this remark is unfalsifiable. BC can say “nuh uh,” and A can double down, but nothing good is likely to come of it.

Responding on the merits is best. Questioning motives is not recommended, but can be done with tact. I have yet to see someone tactfully and respectfully accuse another user of having a fragile ego.

A substantial minority of the French threw a far right tantrum in the EU elections and they are going to be punished for it with total government deadlock

Good, don't catch a falling knife. The situation in France can't be fixed with democratic reforms and a society that focuses on feelings. The correct way to vote for right wingers in the west is to vote against the system. The most anti-system vote is voting for gridlocking the system. Vote to get lame duck presidents, impossible coalitions and endless palace intrigue.

The system has several systemic issues to deal with and the best way to fight the behemoth is to ensure that the system is too busy squalling among themselves to solve anything.

You should probably include what you think is wrong with France that can't be fixed by democracy as normal.

Probably something to do with the Jews.

Please don’t speak for other posters.

If you think functor is being dishonest, either press him on it directly and politely, or move on. This sort of speculation isn’t helpful.

RN won 37% of the popular vote and the Macronistas have delivered an awkward minority government where they'll be deadlocked by the left until atleast the Presidential election.

Where is this banner?

I was running markets on the election. Gotta say RN did slightly worse than expected but people assuming/acting like they were poised to win an outright majority were insane. I think this is a good step forward for them, especially as the Presidential election will likely be after 2-3 years of not much happening.

US Election Updates – Democratic Infighting + Project 2025

Some “top” House Democrats met yesterday to discuss the ongoing situation within the party. Besides an Asian Congressman being confused for another Asian Congressman, nothing really happened – House Democrats remain divided on how to proceed. Biden reaffirmed that he was running in a spicy letter to House Dems and told Dems to challenge him at the convention if they had a problem. Biden refused to acknowledge himself as “the elite,” using populist rhetoric to separate himself from the establishment that has defined his career. One Congressperson is pissed about leaks from the call, having wanted the opportunity to speak candidly amongst peers.

Some Senate Dems were supposed to meet today, but concerns over leaks led to Warner cancelling the tentative plans. Speculation grows they will instead discuss at the caucus meeting tomorrow. Schumer told Manchin to back off of publicly calling for Biden to drop out. Manchin, generally a maverick, obeyed, for reasons that are unclear.

Horseshoe theory is validated in real time. Biden’s misstating polls. Convicted felon Hunter Biden supposedly gatekeeps access to his father. Democrats are increasingly frustrated with the media and pundits are reluctantly acknowledging health issues that they previously called conspiracy theories. New conspiracy theories around Biden potentially having Parkinson’s have popped up. Democrats seek to redirect anger to Project 2025 to keep the heat off Their Guy, even as Trump disavows Project 2025 and instead seeks looser abortion restrictions in the Republican party platform - a direct contradiction of what Project 2025 seeks.

The hysteria over a think tank’s wish list astonishes me on a personal level; the involvement of previous members of Trump’s administration by no means indicates Trump signed onto the project or even knew about plans to direct his platform. Trump isn’t really one who likes to be controlled. But the rhetoric from the Twitteratti (X-eratti?) from “vote blue no matter who” to “vote against Project 2025 at all costs” – even though Project 2025 isn’t actually on the ballot.

I don’t see the Democratic party going as far as invoking the “in all good conscious” clause at the Convention to pick a different candidate, as that hits a level of party disunity I don't think we've seen from either side in recent memory. There’s funding issues that make Kamala the easiest option to continue campaign machinery, and Kamala isn’t very popular. Kicking both Kamala and Biden off the ticket makes it unlikely either one of them will direct their campaign funds back into the DNC. There’s also still enough DEI vibes floating around the Dems to maybe not want the optics of kicking a Black woman off the ticket. A brokered convention is messy, and it feels, in this moment, inevitable that Trump wins. Polls skew towards Democrats, after all, and Biden is still behind. Further intra-party chaos won’t help.

At the same time, Trump is only leading by an average of three points, and he beat Clinton when she was only ahead by four. There’s another debate on Sept. 10 (maybe), during which time Biden can possibly turn it around (so long as the debate is held between Biden's "good hours" of 10 am and 4 PM). Eight days after the second debate, Trump’s sentencing is set to proceed (pending evidentiary issues spawning from the SCOTUS immunity ruling); jail time will surely mess with the campaign, although polling around the impact of Trump's convictions is mixed.

Is there enough time before the election for Democrats to rally around Biden and wipe this mess from the minds of voters? Will Dems rally around Biden, or will the Lord Almighty Himself come down and remove Biden from the ballot? (as a side note - invoking God as the head of an increasingly a-religious party is an interesting choice). Is Project 2025 enough of a Bogeyman to overcome the very valid concern that Biden might not even be currently running the country? Is the average voter’s goldfish brain enough to move on from this mess in time for the election? While the conversation around replacing Biden has become a 24/7 media circus, extending over a week since the debate itself went down, how much is the average voter actually paying attention to any of this?

The most fascinating part of this, to me, are the Democratic attacks on a media that skews left. Turning against one’s historical allies is fascinating at a time when large Democratic donors are demanding Biden drop out. What a fun few months of culture war ahead.

The average voter is assuredly paying attention to Biden being way too old. That includes people who have no intention of supporting Trump but who now can’t support Biden either- no small number. I agree that democrats are between a rock and a hard place but the idea that this can all blow over if they ignore it is not the best of a bunch of bad options.

Instead there’s a senile old man who’s closest adviser is a crack addict and who’s obvious successor is an obvious bimbo widely perceived as selected due to her(frequently disliked by the general public) race and gender. Leaving that in place is probably worse for the democrats than any possible replacement, or possibly even multiple replacements. Unironically it’d be better for democrats to have a Newsom v big gretch v Biden/Harris fight than to have a straight Biden v Trump showdown.

At this point, it's unclear to me that Kamala is worse than Biden. All of that was based on polling from back when the media and party thought the age issue was manageable and so tried to contain it. The cat's out of the bag now.

Though I have to grant that there is a risk that she'll be framed as the worst of all worlds: complicit in Biden's deception but not in his actual successes.

It only a rock and a hard place because they lack the will to do anything about it. If they wanted Biden out, they’d have pushed him out. If these were republicans, he would be out by now simply because republicans are much more focused on winning the election. Instead, they’re publicly hand wringing while the clock ticks down and they lose support from average people who don’t want to be ruled by a guy who can’t string a paragraph together. It’s really hard to sympathize with an entire party too worried about being mean to a guy with obvious dementia to kick him out and take control before their chances tank completely.

Who is "they" in this? Team Biden has all the cards here; any attempt to get him off the convention floor without his consent is likely (certain?) to fail. Even if there were a way to, there would need to be some leader for people to coalesce around as an alternative, and anyone who took up that mantle would be trashing the remainder of their political career. And even if someone successfully navigated all of that, there's still the small matter of actually beating Trump in the wake of a nasty, chaotic convention (losing to him also being the end of a political career).

As someone who thinks Biden should go, I think you’re wrong about the division simply because if they beat Trump they are heroes. And I think given the urgency most of the rank and file feel about Trump, I think once they have a candidate, the sniping stops in short order.

As far as going after Trump, democrats can’t do that now. Biden lacks the mental capacity to turn the conversation to Trump, he can’t even get the focus off his dementia symptoms even on the left (lots of speculation on the cause with a lot of people saying Parkinson’s or Lew Body dementia). All of the energy from the party from here until election night is going to be spent on defense — proving Biden fit — rather than trying to defeat Trump. And all the while, Trump can spin every attack in him as a desperate attempt to deflect from Biden being unfit for the job. That’s unwinnable to my mind.

...Huh? What Establishment Republicans are you talking about who are very good at getting candidates who don't help them win elections off the ticket? The same ones who kicked Trump out, along with Oz, Mastriaono, Masters, and every other nincompoop that threw away a winnable seat in 2022?

I read it as Republicans are disciplined this round. And observably the friendly fire and unforced errors seems pretty D in 2024 in a way it didn't in 2022.

Yeah I’d argue republican elites have even less control of their party. The GOP is captured by the % of the base who loves Trump.

Project 2025 is just a project to develop technocrats of the right.

Exactly. It's a pretty bog standard ThinkTank wishlist of policies and politicos that they want to put into some of the literally thousands of political appointee positions that follow any election. Every other major ThinkTank does this.

The "fear" of Project 2025 is a strange media / twitterati / very-online-people invention. I think it allows a lot of vague gestures to the idea of shadowy planning by unnamed (but somehow very influential) "party insiders." They kind of did this with the Federalist society people after Kavanaugh and Barrett got confirmed. It's quite literally the same as, all of a sudden, telling you friends, "Did you know that the GOVERNMENT is, like, storing all of these old BOOKS in these, like, secure buildings and you have to get an official identification card to ACCESS them?!"

All you've done is dramatized a dusty old library

Zooming out just a bit however, don't you think it's actually a good thing we are seeing greater emphasis on examining these non-official but still influential groups and what they actually do to policy within governments? Perhaps not, of course, panicking over it and we need to view it all in context, but isn't this still preferable to ignoring the whole thing as is historically the case? For example, if people had paid more attention to the Federalist Society's influence, they wouldn't have been as "surprised" about some of the actual Supreme Court picks that came out of the Trump years. While it's always tricky and potentially unfair to lump non-official positions in with official ones, the simple fact is that these non-official positions that are nonetheless strongly associated with one of the two major parties, and that's relevant info for a voter.

An analogy would be: you don't just marry a person, you marry their family too (in-laws). Factoring in what their family is like into a marriage decision might feel a little unfair, but it's eminently reasonable, because it's actually pretty hard to ignore the family in practice (and, even beyond that, this is the family that raised your potential spouse, so at least some of their ideas and values will have rubbed off).

I think this is what these kind of orgs would want you to think.

My opinion is that, in truth, all of them a far, far less influential than they want to be. I see big think tanks like Heritage, Brookings, CSIS etc. as something more like under performing charities that release ho-hum reports on various issues.

They do often function as halfway houses for former staffers who are (a) waiting for the next Congress / administration to come around and (b) Need to actually make some private sector levels of income before they go back to the goofy "salaries" of Congressional / admin staffers. But even that reveals something; if you have to find a bench to warm at a ThinkTank, and didn't get some actually big time job at a bank / law firm / lobby shop / tech company etc....are you that influential?

I once did some consulting work that dealt with illegal finance networks (terrorists, drug cartels etc.) I was doing a bunch of IT work for it, but wanted to get some degree of subject matter understanding. I asked which CSIS report I should read. The company laugh and introduced me to about four totally under-the-radar specialists in the space. They sell their research privately to firms who need it. It's higher quality, more quantitative, dispenses with policy "recommendations", and is generally delivered by folks who have worked outside of downtown D.C.

I was kinda shocked when Trump felt the need to distance himself from it publicly. Really bizarre behavior. From what I saw, he distanced himself from Project 2025 harder than he distanced himself from a lot of much worse things.

My two competing theories:

  1. Trump read Project 2025 as "telling him which people to hire." Not exactly wrong, but also not right. If Trump hates one thing, it's being told what to do. He'll always slam that.

  2. (tin foil hat) Actually a coordination between Project 2025 and the Trump campaign to create separation between the two. Trump doesn't need them to win the election (they aren't a campaign vehicle at all!) but they can bring along "bad vibes" because the Heritage Foundation always rubs some people the wrong way. Then, after the election, Trump can just ... hire everyone they recommend without every saying "Thanks, Project 2025!"

Trump thinks in terms of zero sum transactions. That's part of his frankly bizarre constant obsession with NATO spending. In looking at Project 2025, there's zero loss to him for bashing them and zero gain to endorsing them or growing closer. So ... just get it off the balance sheet!

Weirdly his obsession with Nato spending is my single favorite policy position of his.

His admonishment of other NATO countries for underspending on defense was prophetic. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine they are doing it of their own accord and non-NATO countries around Russia are rushing to join. The media likes to make fun of Trump saying Russia wouldn't have invaded Ukraine if he was president, but if Europe had built up it's armories back then, Russia would have thought twice about attacking and might have been defeated in the early stages of the war.

if Europe had built up it's armories back then, Russia would have thought twice about attacking and might have been defeated in the early stages of the war.

My impression is that most NATO countries want a prolonged conflict between Russia and Ukraine and so are not sending much of anything.

Here's how many main battle tanks NATO has access to:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1294391/nato-tank-strength-country/

Here's how many they've sent to Ukraine:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1364974/ukraine-military-aid-tanks/

More military investment doesn't make financial sense because there is no real enemy worth fearing. An actual war between NATO and Russia would be little more than a cleanup operation.

Could it be about Trump trying to avoid getting trapped by a faction among his supporters? I'm thinking of a scenario where an independent right wing group publish their own "Here is what Trump is going to do." story. Some Trump supporters like the story and vote for Trump on that basis. Trump gets elected and then fails to do some of the things; they were never part of his plan. But his supporters are upset, claiming that he promised and is letting them down.

Sometimes this is fuss about nothing. Other times it is a bad look and Trump comes under real political pressure. So he wants to get out in front of the problem by being clear that it is not the official Trump manifesto.

Trump has never reacted particularly well to the traditional small-government/social conservative/hawk conservative fusionist tendency, and there's a lot of that - particularly the free market libertarian streak - in the policy bits of Project 2025.

There’s also a lot of actual social conservatism, it’s highly disingenuous to criticize it as some libertarian / tea party thing.

I'm not treating it as a tea-party thing. To the contrary, it's a fusionist document. Trump doesn't like that stuff - he's pushing the GOP to the left on abortion, entitlements, and foreign policy all at once.

Trump needs to distance himself from a number of unpopular items on the movement conservative wishlist to be electable. In particular, he can't afford to be associated with "Cut Social Security and Medicare in order to cut taxes for the super-rich" - something that was a huge part of why he polled better than the Goldman-Aramco Republicans in 2016 - and he doesn't want (for good reasons) to be associated with the likely consequences of actually making an abortion ban stick.

Project 2025 includes entitlement reform and a big federal push against abortion (e.g. enforcing the Comstock Act) so Trump benefits from publicly rejecting it.

It strikes me as a Bad Move on his part, though I will confess that Donald is a significantly better political mind than me, possessed as Asimov put it of a tremendous instinctual understanding of psychohistory.

Attempting to distance himself from it will reduce or blunt Democratic attacks on him precisely zero, any more than Conservatives are less apt to attack Biden about the 2020 riots because of his public denouncements of defunding the police. He won't succeed in persuading anyone who has heard of Project 2025 and can process what it is that he isn't tied to it, he's more likely to succeed in convincing people who like the Heritage Foundation that he isn't a reliable executive for that purpose.

Trump has been an incredible maverick about that kind of thing up to this point. He's notable/notorious for his refusal to full-throatedly denounce some really out-of-the-mainstream support he gets. This is a guy who had Kanye West and Nick Fuentes over for dinner, he's not afraid to charm people who are way outside the norm, he doesn't tack to the middle the way most politicians have, to the chagrin of media blobs and to great electoral success. Appealing to the extremes has gone well for him!

It strikes me as odd, because I've had the conversation with my wife, far more liberal than I am, and we both found the liberal obsession with Project 2025 groan-inducing. It's a very inside-baseball, extremely-online liberal attack, similar to the ever-idiotic analysis of party-platform positions. We're seeing the Trump campaign neuter the party platform too.

Maybe he's smarter than me, but I always think of this kind of stuff as more editorial page nonsense than having a real impact.

Attempting to distance himself from it will reduce or blunt Democratic attacks on him precisely zero, any more than Conservatives are less apt to attack Biden about the 2020 riots because of his public denouncements of defunding the police.

Maybe, but it could conceivably make him far more palatable centrists anyways. Think of Clinton and his Sister Souljah moment. Breaking publicly with your party's activists can win over that swing voter, if you can do it without making too many of your own people stay home.

I have to be honest, I don't know what sister Souljah means.

Here ya go.

A Sister Souljah moment is a politician's calculated public repudiation of an extremist person, statement, group, or position that is perceived to have some association with the politician's own party.

More comments

It sounds like the Biden Democrats are using the same style of populist rhetoric that Republicans are using to try and deflect from Biden's poor debate performance and his responses to calls to step down.

Biden has never been a favorite of the Democratic elite; he's always been an old white man with a tendency to go off the rails when let off the leash. In 2008 the elite favored Obama and Clinton over him, and in 2016 they (including Obama!) favored Clinton over him. The only reason they ended up jumping to his side in 2020 was he was the only moderate positioned to beat Bernie.

From his point of view, he's always been kind of shat on despite paying his dues for decades, and now these disloyal bed wetters are freaking out because of a couple of bad polls (when his likely replacements show no real signs of doing any better than him). At least Hunter has his back.

Note that I'm not advocating this POV--he is obviously too old, and at the least shouldn't be running for re-election, and from a purely electoral point of view it makes more sense for Democrats to go with the high variance strategy of replacing him with an unknown. But his populist rhetoric isn't cynical and comes from genuinely held feelings of aggrievement.

But his populist rhetoric isn't cynical and comes from genuinely held feelings of aggrievement.

I think you're correct.

It is fascinating how both Biden and Trump do exude what, as far as I can tell, are genuine feelings of personal aggrievement when both of them have had objectively stupendous lives. Biden was either the youngest or second youngest Senator of all time. His initial victory was narrow and surprising, but then was so incredibly solid that he never faced any legitimate challenge to it. True, he "failed" in his prime-age bid for President in the 1980s. But he simply went back to that Senate seated and just waited and waited before stumbling into .... the Vice Presidency.

Trump was not only rich, but he lived a cartoon version of a rich man's life because of his deep entanglements with media and entertainment. He wasn't some financial engineer who spent 20 years in balance sheets and came out of the other side holding a huge fortune. Between opening casinos and flying on his private jet, he was getting cameos in movies and, eventually, turning himself into a reality TV star (personally, I would detest this life, but I admit it at least seems like it could be compelling to those interested in glamour and fame)

Of course, yes, if you jump into the details, both men have had some personal tragedy. Biden's first wife and her car accident, the loss of Beau Biden. Trump's brother drank himself to death and I feel like his mother / father's deaths were maybe harder on him than has ever been reported.

But, still .... how the hell are either of these guys mad about anything? I can understand "I am a political leader and I am emoting in a way that relates well to my base" but neither of them comes across that way to me. These dudes seem bone-deep rageful at life sometimes.

It's never about objective quality of life; it's always about a sense of unfairness. Trump wanted to be accepted and feted by the Manhattan elite, but in the end he will always be the uncouth son of a slumlord in Queens. Biden always wanted to be President, but he was always passed over because he was a not-especially-bright stuttering kid from a small state who went to Syracruse.

I wouldn't be surprised if Trump's entire decision to run was in retaliation to him being humiliated by Obama (so loved and feted!) at that comedy gala in front of all the people he wanted to like him.

I can definitely see this.

If it is the Truth, I feel genuine pity for both of them. Living life with, "Because fuck you! that's why!" as your primary motivator has to be constant chaos.

Someone who mostly wants to be happy can find a low-intensity job and raise a family. Someone who embraces gluttony and lust have much easier paths to satisfy those urges than high level politics.

Bitterness and hatred, however, are impossible to satisfy, and the only thing that even approaches satisfying them is wielding power over your enemies.

Yes, basically. My life makes me happy, but hatred is an entirely separate category. There's no amount of money you could give me to make me stop hating the things I hate, because I hate them for a reason, not because I'm dissatisfied with my bank account/sex life/penis size/whatever sneer is being used.

The idea that "hateful people are just upset about something else/losers/defective deplorables that belong in camps" is just a scummy leftist tactic to distract from people's real, valid grievances. Bulverism, pathologizing dissent, whatever you want to call it.

I'm sure Trump and Biden (and Musk) are similar. They have a drive for power or status or change that isn't satisfied by living the good life or having lots of stuff.

I miss when our elites would just slam an axe into each other's skulls and then payed the weregild afterwards. Made things easier for the masses they ruled over.

Well, I am not longing back to idea of elites being able to slam axe into my skull and pay (much smaller) weregild

But, still .... how the hell are either of these guys mad about anything?

Most people on the internet find getting into the weeds and dirty details of the various bad faith prosecutions of Trump to be unbearable - imagine having to live through them. I'm honestly surprised he isn't angrier when I picture myself in his position, sitting across from someone who knowingly lied in order to start a fraudulent criminal prosecution against me while threatening my family, reputation and legacy. Throw in the fact that he's now a constant target for mockery in public and in culture, and I can absolutely see why he's angry.

I would never have imagined using the word "equanimity" in relation to Donald Trump, and yet here we are. His ability to weather these storms borders on superhuman.

Important caveat I missed up front - I feel like Trump was like this before 2016.

I can understand why he might have a bit of a persecution complex since then.

I thought the usual argument there was that Trump has always wanted to be recognised and respected by New York high society, and he never has been. He's tried to use money and fame to buy his way in, but he's too fundamentally lacking in class or tact. I could imagine that, internally, what it feels like to be Trump is to be always excluded from the inner ring. He wants to get inside that ring, but no matter of power, not even being president, is enough to generate acceptance or respect.

Trump was not only rich, but he lived a cartoon version of a rich man's life because of his deep entanglements with media and entertainment.

The cartoon bit is important, I think. Trump is very rich and powerful, but Trump is also a clown in a way that real high society elites aren't. Trump's status has always depended on his ability to perform, the ability to get a crowd to hoist him on to their shoulders in a rush of popular enthusiasm. That's not how it is for the real upper class. The real upper class may be popular, but they don't need popularity, and in fact ought to mildly disdain it.

He's tried to use money and fame to buy his way in, but he's too fundamentally lacking in class or tact.

Money, fame and golfing ability. Elite golf is part of WASP high society (Steve Sailer has written a lot about this), and Trump embraced it and it embraced Trump (rejecting him only after January 6th). I don't think you are excluded from the inner ring if a club like Winged Foot not only grants you membership, but also tolerates blatant cheating.

I can absolutely imagine that Trump needed the single-digit handicap (which he earned legitimately when he was younger) to get into clubs that old money is allowed to shoot 90s at, but if the bluebloods see you as actively undesirable (at the time Trump was learning to golf, "undesirable" mostly meant "Jewish"), you need to be winning majors to get in with pure golfing ability.

Trump is also a clown in a way that real high society elites aren't.

This is a choice. Not many real high society elites make that choice, but the ones who do don't get kicked out of the club.

The real upper class may be popular, but they don't need popularity, and in fact ought to mildly disdain it.

Trump doesn't need popularity for business reasons, he craves it for personal reasons. Fred Trump never courted popularity, and nor do most commercial real estate guys. Trumps third and fourth careers (reality TV star and politician) were choices made by a man who was already rich enough to do what he wanted.

Of course, the ultimate test of whether old money accepts you is who your kids marry, and the results for Trump are interestingly ambiguous.

  • Don Jr married a girl who was "brought up in an Upper East Side townhouse" and went to a posh Manhattan private school. But the white-shoe lawyer who paid for the townhouse was her stepfather, not her father, and both the girl and her mother had worked as models.
  • Ivanka married the scion of one of the richest Jewish families in NYC, but the family was in disgrace when they met after Charles Kushner was jailed for tax evasion and associated process crimes.
  • Eric married a woman from what appears to be a normal middle to upper-middle class background.
  • Tiffany married a billionaire's son, but he's Arab.
  • Barron is single.

Most people on the internet find getting into the weeds and dirty details of the various bad faith prosecutions of Trump to be unbearable - imagine having to live through them.

Trump spent large parts of his career running his business in a way which intentionally invited litigation (of both good faith and bad faith varieties). You can't stay out of court entirely as a real-estate developer, but Trump's "so sue me" attitude to contractors expecting to be paid is an indication that he is more comfortable in the courtroom than the average guy who isn't a lawyer or a career criminal, as does the aggressive tax avoidance.

He is also notoriously sue-happy as a plaintiff - to the point where the ABA tried to spike an article about his litigation history because of the fear that he would sue the ABA for saying how sue-happy he was! And of course he didn't have a problem instructing people to file numerous frivolous lawsuits based on patently false claims of election fraud. (Even if you think the jury is still out on whether there was fraud somewhere in the 2020 election, the specific fraud alleged in the key post-election lawsuits didn't happen, and he probably knew this).

Trump's behaviour is entirely consistent with someone who sees the litigation against him as kayfabe, and is entirely comfortable responding without breaking kayfabe. This is easier for him than it would be for you or me because it was already clear by January that even if he was convicted he could gum things up for long enough that he wouldn't be reporting to jail this side of the election.

Indeed, it is entirely plausible that the whole Trump persecution complex is kayfabe - Trump knows what storylines play well with his MAGA fanbase, and "They're coming after me because I'm fighting for you" with himself as face and Uncle Sam as heel is one of the best. My out-of-posterior probability that when he is around family and personal friends Trump is enjoying himself like you would expect of a rich powerful old man who can buy anything and anyone and expects to be protected from the consequences of his behaviour by his popularity is about 25%. This would explain his apparently counterproductive litigation strategy - provoking judges to slap him around a bit makes the shoot more impressive, and he assumes that any verdict against him is reversible (if necessary after he wins the election, where given what we know about him he will be even more confident of victory than the bookies).

At the same time, Trump is only leading by an average of three points, and he beat Clinton when she was only ahead by four.

While polling errors of that size are entirely plausible, it's worth noting that Trump's structural advantage in the electoral college is non-trivial. If he leads by 3 in the national polls come November, Trump is very likely to win. Realistically, Biden needs to be in the positive column in the national popular vote to have a good chance in the six key swing states.

Going by Nate Silver's model, Biden needs something like +2% in the national polls to have a 50% chance of winning the electoral college. Trump being up by 3% in the polls on Election Day gives a ~99.9% chance that he wins the election.

Still the chances of Trump going till November from here without some sort of scandal either emerging or being manufactured are essentially nil

I have no problem taking the other side for 2 reasons.

  1. He’s gotten smarter
  2. Narratives don’t stick like they use to. Some of this is Musks buying twitter so the algos can be cranked up for this is stupid. The other is too much has been exposed and I think to the median voter at a minimum narratives won’t be assumed but questioned. We just saw the coverup of does Biden have dementia exposed on national tv. The benefit of the doubt is going to Trump and they are going to need actual video of a Russian hooker pissing on Trump.

He’s gotten smarter

Scuttlebutt has it that his campaign discipline is due to his co-campaign manager Suzie Wiles; an accomplished politico who used to be a big DeSantis booster until he alienated her in 2023 at which time she switched to Trump.

He’s also Trump. He’s definitely burnt people before. Maybe grifter types (Cohen, Scarsmucci). I don’t think he was great at listening to people. Even if she’s very good he has also realized he needs that person.

It's too confusing anymore. People I talk to literally think the SCOTUS overturned his conviction because the prosecutor was fucking the judge.

They've been reading ahead to next session.

Don't you put that evil on me, nybs. If we have to hear about a THIRD disgusting love affair in the process of these cases...

Sure, variance is baked into the cake of any reasonable projection this far out. I don't think that's any more likely than something absolutely insane occurring with the sundowner on the other end of things though.

Will a scandal actually hurt Trump at this point? Anyone who's actually willing to vote for him doesn't care how many times he went to Epstein Island.

Yeah, there's not much they can pull. Politically incorrect language? Baked in. Rape claims from decades ago? Baked in. Shady deals? Baked in. Conspiring with Russia? Who considering voting for him would believe it this time?

Because the answer is zero

Josh Blackman reminds us to look "long" backwards when we're taking "The Long View"

Here, looking "long" is still less than a decade. I've been thinking/saying a lot about the legal response to Trump and how many attempts would eventually come back once people take the long view and get past a specific attempt to 'get Trump'. For example, I continue to believe that Trump has a First Amendment defense to the claimed FECA violation that allowed NY prosecutors to bootstrap a misdemeanor charge into a felony, if only the defense is allowed to be vigorously pursued in the courts of appeals and if those courts take the long view of why we have the boundaries in law that we have. Josh Blackman points out how SCOTUS has already, tangentially, repudiated a prior attempt to 'get Trump' by taking the long view and looking at the issues from a high level in a case that still directly involves Trump, but where the connection doesn't immediately jump out and hit you in the face until you see it. But once you see it, you can't unsee it. It's the rare example of one small, discrete observation unmistakably changing the frame of issues past, and it's one that I think will ultimately be part of the history books for how we look back on the events that transpired.

The case is the very recent Trump v. United States, which was much commented on for its judgments on presidential immunity as relates to separation of powers and Scalia's The Executive Power (I can't find a way to directly link to the dissent). Many aspects of the case have been dissected, mostly with forward-looking analysis of what a President may do in the future, but this little nugget reminds us to look back to the beginning of the Trump Presidency and the Mueller Report. Remember that? It was viewed as a huge disappointment, with part one of the two-part volume pursuing any Trump-Russia 'collusion' mostly being seen as coming up empty. But even then, many folks tried to rally around part two, which focused on whether Trump obstructed justice by threatening to fire Acting AG Rod Rosenstein or by actually firing FBI Director Jim Comey.

Blackman points out that in light of Trump v. United States, the entire premise of this part two, all of the investigative work that went into it, all of the hoopla around whether it was enough to take down Trump, all of the effort to put forth a plausible case was all completely wasted and would have been nipped in the bud in hindsight had we had the appropriate long view. Directing subordinate Executive branch officials, firing them if desired, and wielding absolute prosecutorial discretion is a 'core' part of The Executive Power, and the President has unrestricted power and absolute immunity in such actions. "If Chief Justice Roberts is correct, Mueller should have never been appointed in the first instance," Blackman says.

I'm sort of kicking myself for not noticing on my own. Blackman views it as a microcosm of the "lawfare" that has been waged against Trump, serious legal challenges, taken seriously by essentially everyone, perhaps even remarkably close to actually taking him down from the Presidency, yet upon further reflection leaves one thinking the whole matter is actually a relatively trivial case of, "What were we even thinking?! What in the world were we doing?!" I tend to agree. I've definitely gotten caught up from time to time in the minutia of one of the cases, what the probabilities are of different outcomes, how subtle changes of analysis could affect the result, and when/if courts might look back and repudiate what may ultimately even be a successful attempt to 'get Trump' with legal cases. It never feels good to think, "They might actually win the battle, but ten years from now, when it doesn't matter anymore, courts will probably vindicate what was right all along." So, I'm going to try to enjoy the pleasant surprise that only seven years later, before Trump has actually 'got got' by one of these shaky things, the highest court in the land has actually taken the long view and essentially said that at least one of these attempts, perhaps one of the most serious of them, was fundamentally misguided and should have been entirely cast aside before any effort went into the details and minutia of the case.

Blackman points out that in light of Trump v. United States, the entire premise of this part two, all of the investigative work that went into it, all of the hoopla around whether it was enough to take down Trump, all of the effort to put forth a plausible case was all completely wasted and would have been nipped in the bud in hindsight had we had the appropriate long view. Directing subordinate Executive branch officials, firing them if desired, and wielding absolute prosecutorial discretion is a 'core' part of The Executive Power, and the President has unrestricted power and absolute immunity in such actions. "If Chief Justice Roberts is correct, Mueller should have never been appointed in the first instance," Blackman says.

The Mueller commission said outright they wouldn't indict a sitting President. The outcome given Trump v. US would have been the same; Trump's culpability would have still been a political question decided by impeachment. Just as it was for Andrew Johnson the first time Congress got tried to tell the President who they could and could not fire (and Johnson came a lot closer to losing)

I think there's a significant difference between, "We'll go through all the work of pursuing this as though it is plausibly a real, criminal violation of criminal statutes, write all about how it could indeed be a violation of specific, named, criminal statutes and a theory of how such a case could plausibly be constructed, but then decline to make a 'traditional prosecutorial determination'," and, "Oh come on, this clearly and obviously could not plausibly be a criminal matter, because this is a core Presidential power."

You're right that impeachment would still have been a matter of a purely political question, but it would have been vastly better if we sort of collectively realized that the entire Mueller business on this topic was bull honky, told him to close up shop, and just told Congress to do their own investigation and impeach if they want without the dog and pony show.

I think many people during the time of Mueller's investigation were sounding these alarm bells about the ridiculous and novel obstruction of justice theory cooked up by Weissman.

Scalia's The Executive Power (I can't find a way to directly link to the dissent)

This link works. Annoying that they don't have normal labels, though. It actually aims you a paragraph before the dissent because the footnotes have navigation links but the dissent doesn't.

Is a dollar on sale for 40ish cents? Talk me out of maxing out PredictIt contracts relating to Joe Biden, if you would please.

The numbers are super volatile, but right now, PI thinks Joe is 60c for becoming the Dem nominee, so "no" costs 40c. Now, this likely pays out upon the formal nomination at the convention, the final day of which is 45 days away, as the rules clarify that the replacement of the nominee prior to election day has no impact on resolution. But if the daggers are to come out, they really ought to come out before Joe formally nabs the nomination--otherwise you end up with total chaos and only 75 days to select a nominee, raise money, and campaign to the general public. Sure, a hot swap generates excitement, earned media, and a real chance to beat Trump, but if you're going to go that route, you reap way more of the rewards and less of the cost to do it asap.

It looks pretty impossible to me for the dems to let Biden run unopposed. Sure, one Dem rep thinks Trump will win and the sky won't fall, but everyone else is shouting from the rooftops that America will be doomed, and surely a large portion of these are true believers who will do all that they can to avert said Armageddon. Does anyone actually think Biden can beat Trump? He's down more than 3 points nationally, double that in battleground states; he's only getting older with ever more adverse scrutiny, which also shifts the focus away from Trump, which was really the only way to win, to make it a referendum on Trump's character, since his presidency itself is remembered fairly positively by the crucial independents; there is no end to Ukraine or Gaza; inflation is easing but nothing is actually getting cheaper, they're just getting pricier more slowly. Trump is so hated that there is a firm floor for his favorability to fall--what else can you throw at a man who's been called a felon, fraud, fascist, rapist, pedophile, insurrectionist, Russian plant, and democracy-destroyer?

So, if Biden can't win, and the Democratic Party thinks Trump must not win, then there is only one logical conclusion, which is Biden can't run, and so he won't be the nominee. Now, I understand the big money is outside of prediction markets. But I'm not smart enough to calculate the secondary effect orders to trade options on macroeconomics or individual stocks as they relate to who wins in November. Sticking strictly to the $850 limit per contract on PredictIt, then--

Tell me why I shouldn't max out Joe Biden "no" for being the dem nominee. The $850 limit at 40c will return 2.5x, minus 10% PI's cut and 5% withdrawal fee (partly diluted by credit card points) in less than two months. How could I lose? Why aren't you heading to PI yourself right now to claim your free money?

(I mean, I know the literal answer is somehow the Dems just ratify Joe's nomination in 45 days, but can even Dr. Strange with a time stone find such an implausible outcome?)

You can get better odds on a black jack table if you want to gamble. I thought it was certain that the Democrats would dump Biden a week ago; but, he, somehow, is hanging on. That's why the bet is so even. Most of the time, if you think you've found a mark, you are the mark.

I initially thought that this post would be that Biden being nominated was clearly underpriced, and there was free money being left on the table by people not concretely playing out how "Biden is too old" turns into "Biden will not be the nominee."

But, go for it if you have 100% confidence that Biden will not get the nomination. As your math shows, it would be free money, even with the substantial cut of the house.

(My guess of a fair price would be closer to 60c than 40c, and that's not enough of an edge to make it worth my while to go through the effort to place a bet and freeze up $850. It's probably better to take the $850 and dump it into UPRO if you think Biden is going to be replaced.)

Yeah there's a big gap between 'Biden is not the fittest candidate for the Democrat nomination' and 'Biden will actually be replaced with the mechanisms available at this point in time'.

Biden seems determined to hold on right now, and there isn't any easy process to oust him by other Democrat leaders. I think it's likely he won't be nominee, but I'm not super confident on it.

The markets are definitely super volatile though, you might be able to find some good arbitrage opportunities that will be just straight free money

Does anyone actually think Biden can beat Trump

Definitely, there's a lot of game left. Trying to call it before October seems a fool's errand. Anything greater than ~80% confidence seems like pure hubris to me. We have two people born in the 40s running very volatile campaigns.

Rape charges would move the needle. The FBI/CIA are still in play and, I don’t think there is any way to push out Biden if he doesn’t want to go. Biden has stated he doesn’t care what pundits think, he doesn’t believe in polls, and doesn’t really care what other leaders in his own party think either - it would literally take the direct intervention of God to get him to step down. I’d buy Biden at those odds.

You should think twice because the formal mechanism for denying him the nomination relies on either pledged delegates breaking their pledge, or him giving up voluntarily.

Also, it could make more sense to have him drop out after the convention to prevent an open convention and an open intra-party civil war that could ensue.

These things are opaque and unclear. The politicians seem to be lining up behind Biden even as the media revolts. There are surely power groups who want a vacant presidency so they can advance their agenda without any limits or controls.

What about a special electoral operation to keep Trump from the presidency? A hell of a lot of people have been entering the US in recent years, why not practice a little ballot harvesting, organize some reliable deputies to enfranchise the right people and help them vote? Bring in some mail-in ballots! Or just practice legitimate vote-buying by running down the US strategic petrol reserves to lower prices. Trump also did this kind of thing with his 'massive deficits to pump up the economy' approach and a platinum plan to buy black votes. Trump was only running 4% deficits in a growing economy, Biden's pushed it up to 6%. It's a race to the bottom.

I'm not saying I believe anything for certain here, just that there aren't any clear no-brainers. This isn't technology or business, this is politics.

PredictIt just seems like a joke of a site, for multiple reasons:

  • banned for anyone outside the US
  • each market limited to 5000 traders and max $850 bet
  • huge "rake"- 10% of winnings + 5% of withdrawal

Do it if you want to gamble and have some fun, but the format means it's hard to make any serious money there and I wouldn't expect the odds to really predict anything.

Plus, in this specific case... Biden himself is saying repeatedly that he's staying in the race, and there's no clear mechanism for the party to remove him.

Yeah there's way better ways to get down with varying levels of KYC. Polymarket, some Crypto Casinos etcetera.

Biden staying in and dropping out will look the same until he makes a decision. If he wavers before hand, then things will look really crazy as the feeding frenzy belongs in earnest.

Potentially, but it looks like the people trying to oust him have lost a lot of momentum at this point and most of the potential challengers have flipped to supporting his candidacy.

He could always have a change of heart, but why now instead of last week?

My only point is that what Biden says he is going to do is not strong evidence of what he in fact will do given that he would say he is staying in until seconds before he announces he will drop out.

And maybe momentum has stalled. It’s hard to tell.

There is signalling value in taking 850 dollars of money and burning it to show your commitment to a candidate. The prospect of winning money is just a bonus.

Especially if you can actually move the prediction score because the other side is prevented by that maximum bet rule to call you on your bet.

Buying shares to hype up your candidate in the absence of an efficient market might not even be the least effective way to spend money on them, outcome-wise.

So, if Biden can't win, and the Democratic Party thinks Trump must not win, then there is only one logical conclusion, which is Biden can't run, and so he won't be the nominee.

Problem 1, to quote Zvi:

They are on what I call simulacra level 4, and they are moving symbols around without a direct connection to the underlying reality. Mostly, presume that politicians are incapable of means-ends reasoning or thinking strategically or engaging seriously with the physical world, and what comes out of their mouths is based on a vibe of what would be the thing one would say in a given situation, and nothing more.

Problem 2:

SJ activist-politics worsens these tendencies. The SJ model of the world is that choices are supposed to be (morally) easy; tradeoffs are mostly fake and made up by people who want to take the immoral options. Hence, there should be a way to win without pulling shenanigans.

I would argue that politics operate much on level 4 because the stakes are so low.

The life of the median US voter will not be affected drastically by the outcome of the US presidential election. They are unlikely to get fired or imprisoned or even have their income change by 10% no matter who sits in the White House. Trump will not turn the US into a totalitarian dictatorship. If Biden drops dead in a year, Harris will likely become an unpopular one-term president, not the downfall of the US.

Most people can be somewhat rational when they have skin in the game, but here they don't have that. It is like supporting a football team. If every fan whose team won the cup got a 20% raise, there would be an actual incentive to figure out if fan support can affect the outcome of a match, and what their optimal behavior regarding the object level should be. Instead, it is just performative, vibes, kayfabe. Politics is mostly the same, only the hatred for the other team is stronger.

Probably the best reason is that I honestly wasn't sure until I got to your third paragraph whether you were arguing that it's definitely 100% obvious that Biden will or will not be replaced before or at the Democrat convention.

I have a very hard time believing that Trump has any chance at losing this election if it’s anything close to fair. If he loses this time I would think it requires real direct vote fraud. Hacked machines. Dead people voting.

If the betting markets are at 30-40% the Dem wins then my opinion is there is a 30-40% chance of direct provable voter fraud.

Trump years were not that bad. And everyone just saw on TV that the Dems tried to pass off a non-functioning human being. No one will trust them anymore.

Is Hunter Biden the defacto POTUS right now?

Even if you swap him out you can not undo the brand damage. That’s going to a point or two hit to whoever the new guy is. Was Bill Clinton in his prime America’s most talented politician? You would need someone of that quality to pull it off.

At this point Trumps best strategy is likely Joe’s 2020 strategy of hiding in the basement. I think Trump has gotten better at politics but he has no reason to take the field again.

The easier bet to me is to vote on Trump winning because I do think there is a real chance Joe stays on the ticket but I can’t see a way Trump loses.

Edit: it just hit me. They should nominate Hunter Biden. He’s still a Biden. Everyone knows his name by now. Go full reality show. Maybe the American people will vote for the they find the most entertaining.

The smart play would be Dean Phillips. He has a good story that he tried to stand up to Biden so he’s not in the oligarchy. You would need someone outside of the Party to try for a serious campaign, but he has zero name recognition and I would guess only 2% of the population know the name.

They should nominate Hunter Biden.

Saves on yard sign replacement costs, significant experience in Ukraine and China relations, and he only has three felonies. Sign me up.

Funny enough if it were a race between RFK jr and Trump I think RFK Jr probably wins.

If the Democrats can swap out their candidate, they can get rid of all their negatives. Then turn the entire media machine on promoting the Democrat and denigrating Trump (as usual). The Ds still vote for the D, the MAGAs still vote for Trump, but the squishy center which says such things as "I just want a competent adult running things" votes D, and the squishy Republican-leaners who mostly believe Trump is the Devil (because the media keeps telling them that) loses their excuse (that Biden is incompetent) to vote for him anyway.

However, they would have to swap out their candidate without breaking the party long enough for Trump to win anyway. And critically, I think they have to swap with someone other than Kamala (who as part of the Biden administration wouldn't lose all the negatives, and isn't much of a politician)

I disagree because I think the Dems have shot their credibility. Anyone connected to the establishment is going to be taking on these credibility issues.

I don’t think you can swap in Newsome and people will view him as an outsider. He even has his own issues here of the French Laundry incident where he’s out in public and about to shut the state down.

This is why I mentioned Dean Phillips because he was calling Biden senile in the primaries. You need a guy whose disconnected from establishment.

RFK is taking the liberal but outsider spot, though.

He is.

But Dean Phillips is the liberal outsider who still seems like a normie. RFK has some weird views.

There literally isn't a mechanism for anything you're describing without Biden resigning (at which point he likely strongly recommends Harris which would be path of least resistance) or dying (again, most likely Harris) in the next 2 weeks.

I think Trump is not unbeatable, even by Biden. Biden could pull out very convincing performances in the next two debates. Trump could get clobbered in one of his many trials. The economy could upturn. All of these things are maybes, and there's no reason there couldn't be bad news for Biden. But there is a narrow but plausible road to the presidency.

I'll remind people that for months - basically the whole campaign, in fact - Hillary Clinton, supposedly the worst election candidate ever, led by similar margins over Trump. Where is she now?

I don't think any of those paths are plausible. The economy doesn't have much room to improve without overheating. The things that cause negative economic perceptions are mostly structural issues that will take decades to fix. Trump's trials are too manifold and confusing to really go that badly, if there were just one it might work, but every Negress prosecutor on the east coast filed a weak case and the scandals cross each other up. And there's no reason to believe Biden will get younger in time for the second debate.

every Negress prosecutor on the East Coast

This kind of generalization is definitely in the “more heat than light” category.

Watergate was a manifold, confusing mess that unfolded mostly ignored by the American public. Then suddenly exploded. Nixon was around in politics for over two decades before his enemies in the press finally got their killshot. You're right to wonder if such a thing could exist for Trump, or could be found. I say it could. Trump is a fat, ugly, crude slug of a man, crooked, has terrible policies even from the perspective of the Right.

Biden is not going to get younger, but he'll have good days and bad days. I suspect hiding him away is doing more bad than good - egoist politicians like Biden draw strength from rallies, not from being sequestered with aides and drilled. But then, every hour Biden spends out of his cloister is a chance for him to shit his pants, and if the guy gets too excited he might actually try a pushup contest. I reckon Biden might have one more performance in him, even if it's his last, and if he can perform in the next debate he might get away with weaseling out of the third.

As for the economy, it's as much a matter of vibes and animal spirits as it is real data. On paper, as you say, there is not much room for improvement, but that's not how people feel and that could change.

Trump is a fat, ugly, crude slug of a man

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XGe2uPLgL28

I suspect hiding him away is doing more bad than good - egoist politicians like Biden draw strength from rallies, not from being sequestered with aides and drilled.

I see this argument all over the place, and it seems to be classic WFAN caller "the coach is stupid, why doesn't he just play the good players?" I generally despise everyone I know who moved to DC and went into politics, but don't doubt that the consultants that surround him know that he should be doing rallies, that rallies would be good for him, less than a coach knows that he has to score more points than the other team. He's not doing rallies because he can't do rallies. This is a case of running a projection model that doesn't take injuries into account.

On paper, as you say, there is not much room for improvement, but that's not how people feel and that could change.

It's not just that there's no room for improvement on paper, it's that any improvement on paper probably leads to increased inflation. We're running near frictional unemployment, and the stock market is hitting record highs. Any increase in employment or wages is going to push prices higher, which upsets people. The only way prices are going to decrease is a recession, which will upset people. Biden's best hope is that everything stays the same for another few months. But running your game hoping that suddenly Americans will realize what's been going on around them for years is insanity, and hoping that Biden suddenly improves his salesmanship while in the state he's in is insanity.

But Biden's biggest problem is that the narrative is running against him that he's senile. Every slip up or routine action will be taken as a sign of senility. I was joking with my wife that, under a microscope and facing an assumption of senility, you'd find ample evidence in my life. Just yesterday, we had the septic tank pumped at one of our rental properties, which must be done every three years by township ordinance. I last worried about this three years ago, and I vaguely thought the tank lid might be out back somewhere. The guy pumping it remembered precisely where it was, on the side of the house, off the top of his head, because he did a repair on it seven years ago. Oh my God my memory is terrible!

Biden is gone. He is not winning a debate. He could not even do that in 2020.

Trump has already been convicted as a felon and as a rapists. Trials are not saving the Dems.

The economy could upturn? Unemployment is low and while inflation is too high it is better.

I see one positive catalyst. Russia collapses on the battlefield.

Joe Biden is nominee unless he resigns or gets hit medically. There's no mechanism for removing him. I agree he would not get the nomination if it was a fresh contest, but he has essentially already won it. I'm quite large on Biden at the equivalent of 30c for nom and 10c for presidency for full disclosure, but the window for replacement has largely passed.

The Dems if they really wanted to could invoke the 25th which whilst not cancelling his nomination would render it impossible for Biden to win effectively forcing Biden to withdraw.

I guess they could impeach and remove Biden (eg for covering up his extreme mental decline or for Biden corruption) but would need republican support.

That's Pandora's Box and Democrats can not open it.

It's pretty telling that even criticisms from the establishment are near uniformly disciplined about making this about the campaign.

If they admit he may be incompetent in his duties everyone will be dragged forward and asked what they knew and when.

As an outsider I think it’s the right move. A view Trump as unbeatable at this point. Invoking the 25th would make it look to me like the Dems are reforming which will massively help them in Senate and House races.

But what do I know. I thought Dems saying the GOP should abandon Trump the last few years and I thought it was a bad idea and now I’m expecting a route in 2024 led by Trump.

I want Biden as the Dem nominee. And expect that my side will win big. With Trump being quiet it seems as though their view is the same.

I do understand why they have some uniformity right now. Whatever you do in politics you do need to be unified. Having different factions fighting doesn’t work.

A view Trump as unbeatable at this point.

He really isn't on polling, though. The margin of victory in these things isn't that big.

Oh, he is.

Biden barely won last time with a >4% lead in the popular vote. He's behind now by ~3% I think.

That's before we get into specific swing states, at which point you get why there were allegedly tears in meetings from swing state Democrats who have to be stuck with him at the top of the ticket.

Invoking the 25th would make it look to me like the Dems are reforming which will massively help them in Senate and House races.

I don't agree with this. Invoking the 25th would make Democrats look weak and their administration look incompetent. Because it would be a declaration that its headman is incompetent, in the literal meaning of the term. Invoking the 25th also normally requires the consent of the President -- that's the only way it has been used in the past -- and to do it over his refusal would require a whole rigamarole where the Cabinet tries to argue with the Congress and Biden attempts to convince them he's actually competent. It would be an absolute shitshow of constitutional and political maneuvering that would make even the most insane Brexit deliberations across the pond look like normal legislative operations, with the executive fighting against itself and the Congress held up from all other activity while members get prime time TV slots grandstanding about the administration. In the worst case, this would lead to the nuclear football being tossed back and forth between Biden and Harris like an actual football.

Meanwhile Republicans look on uproariously laughing at the magnificent incompetence and Trump gives rallies where he talks about the Democrats as unstable and so fractured they can't even get a senile old man to step aside without causing chaos. Expect numerous comparisons to the impeachments, and if Biden were actually confirmed as unable to discharge his duties as President by the Congress, expect Trump to use it to wash his hands of the entire impeachment proceedings -- after all, the other guy actually got removed.

Although, to be clear, it would be different, in the 25th procedure Biden would still technically be the President, just one without the powers and duties of the President. What that means is little understood. The 25th was designed for a president in a coma, not a living president vigorously (well, as vigorously as Biden is capable of nowadays) defending his ability to exercise his office.

It would also make Kamala Harris the acting president. And she is unpopular, moreso than Biden. Presumably it would put her at the top of the ticket too -- there's no precedent, but it would be suicidal to run as candidate for President of the United States a man who has been unprecedentedly removed from the powers and duties of the Presidency for incompetence as a candidate for President of the United States! And even then, I could easily see the convention being fractured, giving Republicans another incredibly massive win in the months leading up to the election.

If they have Biden's consent, he can just do the normal, expected thing and resign. Which would also put Harris at the top of the ticket, but at least without the insane constitutional boogaloo that the 25th Amendment process would require. But the 25th Amendment process is pretty involved, to prevent coups. Harris can't just up and declare herself the Big Cheese.

The 25th invocation suggestions aren't serious to anyone who has taken even a cursory glance at the actual text. No senior Democrat would ever call for it. It would be the biggest unforced error in the history of the American republic.

I mean, there are mechanisms to remove him, they're just not super likely to be invoked. The dem electors can hypothetically invoke the "in all good conscience" clause at the election and remove him. He could be impeached and convicted and thus cannot hold public office ever again. The cabinet invokes the 25th amendment and all hell breaks loose, although it's unclear if invoking the 25th would remove him from campaigning as well.

Now, this likely pays out upon the formal nomination at the convention, the final day of which is 45 days away, as the rules clarify that the replacement of the nominee prior to election day has no impact on resolution.

I am not sure this is correct. The DNC is looking at doing a virtual nomination of Biden by July 21st. This has been planned long before the debate performance and is due to the state of Ohio's requirement that party candidates be nominated 90 days before the election (August 7th). In the past the Ohio legislature has done special sessions to extend this date when party conventions have gone later than it but I understand why the DNC doesn't want to risk it this time. Biden doesn't have to hold on 45 days to the convention, he has to hold on about a week and a half. At which point replacing him (short of his death) will probably be a logistical impossibility (I don't know the rules in Ohio on replacing candidates on ballots). If someone's plan to replace Biden involves a fight at the Convention they will be about a month too late.

Ohio moved the date back to Aug. 23; Dems still want the roll-call vote early because they don't really trust Ohio (which is fair but Ohio changing the date again would also create easy litigation re: promissory estoppel concepts that would likely still protect Aug. 23 as the date).

The Democrats are not in charge of the situation, Biden is. He has to be the one to make the decision to step down, he can't be forced out. And Biden is echo chambered to an extreme degree, and ego-pilled to a very large degree.

Also, think about a raw pro/cons list. The Democrats have lost elections before and will again. Even an election to Trump himself. They are still here. It's not existential, despite the rhetoric. You know what is existential? Opening the door to an open convention. These kinds of things do create hard feelings beyond "oh man we nominated the wrong guy".

I say this despite a strong pro-replacement bias. If you want free money, maxing out "Yes" is the call. (Sadly)

He can be forced out at the convention.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.)

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

@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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.))

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'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.

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.

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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.

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.

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...

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?

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)

I was asking after leadership, not marksmanship.

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.


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