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Notes -
I. How does straight sex work?
Evolutionary psychology* tells us that women want to reproduce with the most fit man that she can find. This creates a situation where most men are outcompeted for reproduction by fitter men. For simplicity’s sake, from here on out I will refer to any male who is more fit as “alpha” and any less fit male as “beta.”** Non-monogamous societies are nearly always polygynous (one male with multiple wives) rather than polyandrous (one woman with multiple husbands.) Polyandry doesn’t generally happen because women simply choose the most fit male and the other men don’t really want to stick around having dick measuring contests with each other all day. Women are rewarded by going after higher quality mates while men are rewarded by going after a larger quantity of mates.***
Whenever more than one man is present, you can rank each man’s fitness as a sexual partner. The only thing that matters in this hierarchy is physical dominance. When judging the hierarchy between men, imagine them fighting. The one who would likely win in a physical fight is the alpha. To judge this we look at physical characteristics: Height, weight, muscularity, dick size, waist/hip ratio, meanness or neotony of face, baldness, and so on. Traits like intelligence, kindness, virtuosity, and so on, are important in other situations but not in sex. This hierarchy of men is so ingrained that we don’t realize it. When you walk around in crowds, smaller men move to the side for larger men. If you don’t, larger men get irritated at you. Smaller men often subtly bow and fawn to larger men. Once you notice this you won’t stop noticing it.
II. How does gay sex work?
Gay sex is downstream of straight sex. People imagine gay men to have a “female” and a “male” partner but that isn’t really accurate. When two men have sex, they are two men having sex. They are competing for the same roles. Most gay sex acts have a dominant and submissive position: In anal sex the bottom is submissive and the top is dominant, in oral sex the dick sucker is submissive and the oral top is dominant and so on. During gay sex you must sort out who is going to do what. Here are the ways that gay sex can happen, in order from most positive to least positive.
Positive gay sex experiences from your perspective:
Neutral gay sex experiences:
Negative gay sex experiences:
In the positive experiences, the most important aspect is respect, and mutual understanding. You both have to understand where the other person is in the hierarchy. The worst experiences are when one or both of you misjudge the situation and do something to upset the natural order. The best experiences are when you both see each other for who the other is and can have sex together while comforting the insecurities of the other and celebrating the others’ strengths as well. It is similar to a well played game of strategy or wrestling.
III. What makes a man gay?
I don’t know what makes a man gay. It has been shown that statistically a man is more likely to be gay if he has more older brothers. The cause of this is unknown but I wonder if part of it is a socialization, wherein younger boys surrounded by more dominant/aggressive males can not as easily adopt heterosexuality as the more alpha males around them. Speaking personally, I was raised by a rageful father and had a bullying brother and another older brother who was more neutral and an abusive stepfather all while I was young. It’s easy to imagine that these frightening males caused a fawning response in my adolescent brain that developed into homosexuality as I aged. Indeed I see a lot of fawning from gay men, especially younger gay men toward older gay men. I even catch myself fawning at stronger more dominant men though I feel some shade of disgust toward myself when I do this as it triggers memories of earlier years when I felt stuck as only a beta and primarily tried fawning at older men for affection/sex. That said it’s an effective strategy when a beta man fawns to you it’s very attractive but when an alpha fawns at you it’s rather irritating and awkward.
When analyzing why a man is gay we usually focus on the attraction to men but I think just as important is the lack of attraction to women. When I see women I imagine that they won’t love me. I find their ability to discriminate between men irritating and feel that it points to my lack of physical appeal and don’t want to suffer the indignity of not being attractive to them. I strangely have a habit of watching straight porn but I only look at the men who mostly behave confidently as alphas in straight porn, whereas in gay porn there is usually the alpha/beta dynamic and sometimes the real hierarchy is reversed (especially in commercial porn) which I find irritating and unrealistic. Relatedly, I once dated a bisexual man who said that he used to only be interested in women, and imagined that men would never be interested in him. But his male friend confessed his attraction to him, they started having sex and now he’s bisexual. I can imagine situations where if a woman was attracted to me and I really believed it, I could have sex with her, but it is basically not something I want to seek out because my attraction to men is so much greater.
IV. How does culture affect all this?
The Middle East is very interesting to me. Muslim countries have the reputation of being the most homophobic countries on earth. But in my (admittedly very short) experience in the Middle East, my experiences were very different. In fact I was hit on by men there constantly, and I am never hit on anywhere else. Never in the USA, once I was catcalled in Europe but I suspect they were making fun of me, and never in Asia. But in the Middle East I was overtly hit on by men everywhere I went. I don’t know if it’s because they see white men with blue eyes as so beta that they aren’t practically considered male, or that they believe every rich western country person is completely LGBT globohomo, or if they are all really horny all the time with each other and their homophobia is a ruse that they put up to keep everyone else from thinking they’re gay, but I suspect the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The Middle East is the most polygynous culture that I’m aware of- centuries of harems would naturally produce tons of alpha male offspring from relatively few men. In my opinion Middle Eastern men are very masculine, handsome, and alpha, more so than anywhere else in the world.
Speaking of the Middle East, most of the homosexual relationships between men that you’ll find there are intergenerational. It is nearly always an older man with a younger male. Anecdotally I think these are the strongest types of gay relationships that there can be. Increasingly as the older I get, the less I want to be with someone my own age. What would I as a full grown man want to do with another full grown man living in my house? It really doesn’t sound great, even as a homosexual. When I was young, under 25, I dated almost exclusively men in their 40s and 50s. I drew the line at a man who reminded me too much of my grandfather, but otherwise was happy to date men my father’s age. I suspect this also reflects some resentment toward my father which I didn’t recognize until after his passing as well but it’s hard to say.
Now, speaking on East Asia. I have spent at least a few months each in Thailand, South Korea and Japan. From my perspective, these cultures are very hierarchical. These countries are so ethnically homogeneous that everyone seems to be completely aware of their hierarchy and since social order and harmony are valued no one seems to step out of line or be uncomfortable with their place in the hierarchy. In Japan, the gay bathhouses have huge rooms full of mattresses where men sleep naked. Alphas approach betas and betas rarely ever refuse the alpha. I have seen betas sleeping or pretending to sleep be approached by alphas who have anal sex with the beta, all while the beta doesn’t open his eyes or move. This is not done outside of Asia. Men in Japan tend to be bottoms compared to South Korea where they are more conformist and competitive and have a more pressing military threat to the north. South Korean men seem more likely to try to be alphas than Japanese men, though they will still generally fawn to white men.
Gay dating today in America is pretty frustrating because the vast majority of men do not see themselves as alpha. It does not bother me just when American men are my alpha, it bothers me when they are my alpha but see themselves as not an alpha at all. This is really the worst because it puts us in the “neutral” or “negative” sex experience categories above. If you have sex with a man who is your superior but doesn’t act like it, you are either going to come away feeling like you’re taking advantage of him or no sex is going to happen at all. Imagine a younger boy who wants to play a game with a bigger boy, but the bigger boy is depressed or doesn’t feel like playing, either the younger boy irritates the bigger boy or they just don’t play a game at all and both parties are sad. This is what it’s like to try dating among men with low self esteem who don’t realize the position they hold. This is so common in America and Western Europe but so uncommon in the Middle East and Asia where men seem to be much more self aware of their masculine traits and comfortable with it and respect others’ traits as well.
V. Race and sex
So, if all men are judged on their physical characteristics and sexual fitness, how does this extend to race? Basically, some races are more physically dominant than others. If you charted all men, with physically dominant traits on the Y axis and nonphysically positive traits on the X axis, you would have most black men in the upper left and most East Asian men on the bottom right. (For example, black men are generally taller and more muscular and better at sports than other races- see NFL roster stats if you don’t believe me. Asian men are better at certain types of intelligence but are smaller and less physically aggressive than blacks. I realize this is a controversial portion of my thinking and can provide further evidence if needed.) White men would probably be broadly in the middle of the graph, with Latino men and Indian/South Asian men being somewhat closer to the origin of the graph, with Latino men being closer to white/black/ or Asian men depending on their specific admixture of white/black/native blood. (Mexicans/Peruvians are closer to Asians, while Cubans/Dominicans can be closer to whites/blacks etc.) Of course there are countless exceptions to all of this- a black midget would be to the bottom right of an Asian linebacker, and so on.
This graph would be a sort of reversal of the hierarchy of race in society today. Statistically blacks are the poorest and least educated, whites are richer and more educated while Asians are the richest and most educated populations in the USA. In this way I envision mainstream society as a sort of “losers hierarchy” situation wherein the sexual losers become society’s champions in a sort of David & Goliath inversion of base reality.
I should note that age somewhat complicates the entire hierarchy. Older men, up to around age 55, are perceived as more attractive to women and other younger men. It’s not hard to imagine that age can be an indicator of status and fertility among preindustrial societies and we seem to have kept the instinct today.
VI. Conclusions
Am I racist? I am making broad classifications of people based on their physical characteristics and their ancestry so I would probably fit someone’s definition of racist. But I do not see myself as racist. I love traveling abroad and do it every chance I get. I am genuinely repulsed when I see people treating other people poorly based on their race. I am not racist, really what I want is to harbor mutual respect between people, and immutably, race is one aspect of their person that can’t be avoided. When I am in Asia, people see me one way, because of their own experiences and backgrounds. When I am in the Middle East, people see me a totally different way because of their own experiences as well. And I see Asian people differently from Middle Eastern people, because we relate to each other in a different way. We are not all blank slate interchangeable human beings, and we should steer ourselves from thinking that way. Really what I want to propose is mutual respect, seeing each other for who we are as we are, and understanding that about each other. I think so much of modern society is dysfunctional because we are encouraged to ignore the physical characteristics of each other for the sake of social harmony, but it’s impossible because our physical characteristics are so much of who we are.
Relatedly, physical power is essential to understanding relationships between people. As I’ve grown older, my parents have naturally waned in their power over me and among the entire family. Of course when I was a child they were able to make all my decisions, and my independence grew over time. At some time in my early 30s, my father had a health problem, he became quite weak and frail, and I was his caretaker for a few months. He continued to treat me like I was a child, not respecting my adulthood and the power I held in the situation. I put up with it out of respect for him as my father, but at some point it became so degrading that I had to assert my power over him. He didn’t like it but after I stood up for myself he had more of a respect for me that I hadn’t been given previously. I had a similar experience with my mother a few years later. Relationships where someone is abusing the power of a stronger person really are toxic and it is up to the stronger person to assert their power in the situation if both parties want to come out with dignity. Similarly, men need to assert their power and strength, see themselves for who they are, respect themselves in their position in the world and respect those around them for who they are too.
I wanted to start my post with an introduction about who I am (a white American gay male in my mid 30s, average height, a bit overweight, and so on) but it’s rare on themotte and may have felt a bit too identity driven. I dislike identity politics as it’s defined by the left but on some level I find it to have a redeeming quality if it can enable mutual respect between people and understanding of where we fit with each other. I don’t need to be the most powerful strongest hottest person, I am happy being grateful for what power and strength and hotness I do have, and to have the opportunity to see others for the strengths and weaknesses that they have as well.
*Everything I know about evolutionary psychology I learned from Satoshi Kanazawa’s blog [ https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist?page=11 ] and otherwise assumed from my experiences with real people and watching straight porn. Feel free to tell me I’ve got it all wrong.
** I know these are loaded terms and probably carry connotations in the meme world that I’m unaware of but I think it is effective at illustrating my point.
*** Further reading: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200802/the-paradox-of-polygamy-i-why-most-americans-are
Edit: Formatting
Do you have experience with long term relationships? I know that gay men on average aren't known for being in monogamous long term relationships, and I don't think these dynamics really apply in long term relationships.
Also, anecdotally, I have an older sister and no older brothers and I'm still gay.
And in regards to anal, I enjoy masturbation and especially being the bottom, and I've never felt any pain. Here is a really detailed guide for it. It's not like it'll change your mind, but it might be interesting at least.
Not a huge amount but I have been in two longer term relationships. I disagree that the dynamics don't apply in long term relationships, when I think of my own relationships and those of friends, as well as non-romantic relationships, they all seem to fit the power dynamic I've outlined. Even relationships with friends, parents, other family members, and so on. I suspect if you don't see it you're shielding yourself from seeing it, I don't know if I would have believed any of it 10 or 15 years ago but once the pattern emerged I can't unsee it now.
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Quite literally, this isn't true- interracial relationships are overwhelmingly white man/nonwhite woman(and the one exception is there are more black men in relationships with white women than white men in relationships with black women, but this is probably just obesity on the part of black women making them undesirable) and black men are on average shorter and in worse shape than other races. You see lots of them as football linebackers because no one cares if they get concussed, and outside of the NFL and NBA American sports are dominated by white men. Higher black partner count is probably due to lower average IQ's/impulse control combined with cultural views rewarding male promiscuity more strongly.
I originally had a short paragraph about how the sexual graph for men is an inversion of the sexual graph for women- basically Asian and Latina women would easily outcompete white and black women which would explain this.
I doubt it's just obesity making black women undesirable but rather their more masculine traits generally (Michelle Obama is a man, anecdotally, according to white men) and fewer desirable female traits
Because white men have the money and time to commit to sports
Baseball, soccer, hockey, etc are pretty widespread and have lots of public dollars behind them, similar to football and basketball. Still white and hispanic(many of whom are white).
And I mean, yes, obviously black women are seen widely as unattractive due to their features(kinky hair, african noses, etc), but it seems like the huge disparity between black women and men in ability to get interracial relationships has to be driven by something different between them- black features don't seem desirable on a man either- and the black female obesity rate is much higher than the black male rate.
AIUI women care less about facial features (on average), so even if the direction's the same, the strength of the effect on overall attractiveness might be less.
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Clumsily. (Like krogans.)
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I don't believe you. Last time I checked black men are generally shorter and weaker*. Do you have any data here?
Re: NFL rosters there's a simple reason for that. A white man who could maybe go pro in football also probably has a lot of more-sane options compared to a black man of the same general physical capabilities. Getting into the NFL is astronomically unlikely even for very good players, careers are often short, and the physical punishment can easily haunt the player through the rest of his -- often short -- life. Someone who has better options is likely to take them. A class of people who can't do much else is more likely to angle for a position in the NFL to begin with, especially if they don't actually grasp how unlikely they are to succeed.
Similarly, I'd guess that whites who make it into the NFL disproportionately tend to come from lower-income backgrounds.
Put another way, my offhand guess is that black men are also disproportionately-represented among lottery winners.
EDIT: Checked, and,
Source
Couldn't find sources on race of winners, but in the case of the lottery I'd be willing to bet that it probably tracks pretty closely with the race of the general player-base.
* I recall looking up average height and finding that whites are a bit taller on average but also that a lot of the numbers are skewed by groups like latinos and middle easterners being counted as 'white'. Also, re: strength, I once found a grip strength study which indicated this but haven't been able to find it since.
I remember ilforte of all people pushing back on the blacks vs whites argument that I tried putting forward a year or two ago. I don't know how to even respond to it really because in my experience black men are so obviously stronger and more dominant/aggressive than white men that I don't know what kind of evidence I could point to that would change your mind.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1167935/racial-diversity-nfl-players/
The stats are that 53% of NFL players are black while making up 15% of the American public. White men are only 24% of the players. Asians are 0.1% of NFL but 7.3% of the US population. This is all the evidence I need to reassert what anecdotally seems true in my experiences, maybe someone else can chime in.
Besides that I think white men were fine with the enslavement of black men because they perceived black men as physically dominant/superior in some way. They didn't enslave Asians or natives to any significant degree because enslaving someone smaller than you makes you look bad and doesn't jive as well with Christian theology (see David and Goliath, Nietzschean slave morality etc)
I think is a miss reading of history. Africans where enslaved because they where the most convenient population available that European powers could enslave. Native populations where often enslaved first, but this wasn’t sustainable because there weren’t very many of them and they died very quickly from exposure to diseases from the old world. Asians where not enslaved because there wasn’t any short route to Asia and Asian polities where powerful enough to resist Europeans until the ~1850s.
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You're getting a lot of pushback, but frankly those people are gaslighting you.
NFL defenses are nearly 100% black for a reason. On average black men have higher testosterone, more fast twitch muscle, less body fat, larger hands, longer arms, thicker skin, and higher propensity for violence.
My guess is that a lot of people here have never played sports.
That may be so but it's also true that whites are taller and stronger, only those things do not matter as much (on their own anyway) for many popular sports.
What should be said is that fast twitch muscles are very important and west Africans have more fast twitch muscles.
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Yeah, no. The nascent latifundia used unfree labor from white people (usually called "serfs" or, in the U.S., "indentured servants", or later "sharecroppers" or company-town folk), native americans (in latin america just look up the "encomienda" system and shudder in horror), and, when they started coming over, chinese immigrants (check out labor conditions on railway gangs in the 19th century) as long as they could; black people were just evolutionarily less likely to keel over dead of malaria (thanks to the sickle-cell mutation) and other tropical diseases than white people in the caribbean and/or US south, couldn't run away back to their tribes like indians, and in the 17th and 18th centuries were flooding the market thanks to very rich and aggressive slave-trading kingdoms on the west African coast. Notably, the places where there were a lot of native americans to enslave, like Mexico and points south in Spanish (as opposed to Portuguese) Central and South America tended to not see a big importation of black slaves and tend not to have large african-descended populations today; there was no need to go to the expense of shipping them in when other unfree labor sources were right there.
In that case, why am I (and I’d imagine, your average American citizen) not familiar with these terrible slave trades and exploitations of labor while I’m reminded of American black slavery nearly every day? If this was football, and your weak team had a miracle one year and beat the strong team in the next county, I imagine you’d be happier to recount the glories of beating the strong team while ignoring the glories of beating all the weaker teams. Similarly white Americans have had a history of making their enemies out to be strong, portraying the native Americans they conquered as powerful because if they portrayed them as weak it would make them look unchristian and evil and sadistic. My historic understanding of the facts in my other comment may have been incorrect but I think the broad philosophy behind it is sound
Because leftists in the press and academia remind you of American black slavery every day. Remember that the root of "slave" is the same as the root of "Slav". Serfdom was extremely common in Europe. Indians in what became the US tended to make lousy slaves because it was too easy for them to escape, but that the conquistadores enslaved the South American Indians is indisputable.
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Because Chinese median income exceeds the white median income, and the black median income does not. Simple as.
The philosophy is based on the facts, right? Otherwise you wouldn't need to mention them.
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In part because we have a substantial black population that conceives of itself as needing to guilt benefits and sinecures from the hands of whites, while the hispanic and chinese populations do not do so, and the native americans were functionally destroyed aside from a few remnants. Thus, black slavery is politically useful in a way the rest is not, and most politics is whig history in service of contemporary political ends. And the rest is because we have terrible memories of our high school history curricula (or grew up in states without a significant history as part of spanish america. In California we learned all about the encomienda system as part of the Colombian exchange, and conditions in railroad gangs and early-industrial factories as part of early-20th century labor history. For the more advanced stuff you'd actually have to read some college-level scholarship (or just Scott's review of Albion's Seed), but it's not exactly hidden. This is all bog-standard 20th century progressive historiography that the elite are happy to teach to kids; it's hardly forbidden, red-pilled secrets.
Yes, but this is not football, and even if you were right and the metaphor holds, this rationale wouldn't have anything to do with why the actual slavery-supporting Americans imported black slaves because they were convinced that the black people, specifically, were physically superior. You've given a just-so reason for why such mythologies of physical dominance might spring up after the fact - i.e., for your own assumption.
A lot of the natives were very strong and impressive, for nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes. The white generals who fought them (Sherman, Sheridan, etc.) were quite open about the fact that yes, these impressive people were going to get steamrollered by industrial modernity, and that was sad, but such was the march of civilization. Not all christians believed that power = evil.
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Your terminology here seems a bit confusing.
You start out defining “alpha” and “beta” for the scope of this post as comparative terms based purely on fitness, which seems ambiguous... I guess that since reproductive “fitness” obviously isn't on the table, you mean rather health? Specifically strength and non-obesity?
But then you imply that the comparison isn't between the partners, as you say that a relationship between two “alphas” would be positive... so I guess that you only mean that an “alpha” is fit relative to the population? Or at least relative to their own genetic and environmental potential?
That seems weird. Surely a “beta” (unfit person) would feel even more melancholic after “trying to be the top”? Or would you consider that necessarily an attempt at “taking advantage of” a fit partner?
So, is whether someone is an “alpha” based on their fitness, or their mindset? If someone is “your” “alpha”, but they don't “see themselves” that way, and that's a significant and “frustrating” part of your experience of the world, why did it not factor into the model you introduced at the start of the post?
You enumerate out seven different prototypes of gay relationship:
but you conspicuously leave off several possibilities from your enumeration:
are these just not relevant? Do you think they statistically don't occur that much versus the seven cases you highlighted? (The claim would seem astonishing to me that two fit men getting together in a healthy, mutually fulfilling relationship is more common than two unfit men getting together in an asymmetric, somewhat dysfunctional relationship...)
Really, this feels like it could have been the whole post, and even it seems ultimately subjective — 3,200 words to ask “Why aren't there any REAL Man's Men / psychological tops in the United States?” — I dunno, maybe we like cuddling more than “acting like” the other's “superior”?
@aiislove To expand on that a bit: From my own perspective, a gay relationship is supposed to be a pleasant escape from the Red Queen’s Rat Race. As someone who doesn't seem to be eligible for the runner's high, strength training is fucking miserable; the only enjoyable part of strenuous exercise is being massaged while sore afterwards; why would I bother for anyone who isn't packing gametes capable of co-producing an actual child with mine?
If you think that this relationship is really such an underrated delight, and vastly superior to the asymmetric relationship you're “frustrated” at seeing Americans, Western Europeans, and the Japanese bidding en masse for one particular side of, why not make the case for that per se, leaving out the speculative tangents about racial trends in sex roles and your own power struggles with your father?
It seems like the case would need to be made in 2 legs, which are separate and each quite a hard sell:
*So you might consider making a case against all the low-testosterone Americans, Western Europeans, and Japanese…
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/
https://web.archive.org/web/20220813174845/https://zerohplovecraft.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/god-shaped-hole/
…and convincing them for, maybe, a renaissance of “real”, spiritually-charged, Greek-style homosexuality?
https://www.greek-love.com/general-non-fiction-pederasty/the-symposium-by-plato
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The term "power bottom" is such a cope.
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Are women who are surrounded by more dominant/aggressive males straighter than the average? That would be a point in favor of that hypothesis, and if we assume women who return to physically abusive relationships for the stated reason of "because I still love him" are telling the truth (along with, uh, every dime-store romance novel out there that's literally just this), maybe it's a data point suggesting it's correct.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this is because very few people today have any experience in the exercise of power (along with the standard reactions to people misusing it- which I believe is far less prevalent than people say it is specifically because "saw it on TV/read it on the Internet"). Old people will complain about "kids these days not knowing how to do anything" but their failure to make ranks available and fucking delegate for once means men and women don't understand what it means to be in the middle of the dominance hierarchy. My father failed to do that, my bosses all failed to do that, my friends fail to do that (and it has a very obvious negative effect on their kids). Nobody over the age of 40 gets it.
Oh yeah, and then you have the general room temperature of "beta good alpha bad", which is
because women-as-statistical-distribution are betas and vice versa for men. Which combined with the above makes the problem even worse. You can tell people how to exercise power that way if they don't know it, but you can't talk about it if you don't know they don't know it. And when the people in power really don't want anyone to discuss it (i.e. they're all alpha-hating betas) that obviously gets harder.
I read a story once about how in (either WW1 or WW2, can't remember) one of the questions a potential officer had to answer to be considered for the position was how he answered how he'd dig a trench. The ones that failed would start talking about dimensions, how deep, tactical implications, etc. [as if they were going to do the work themselves]. The correct answer was, is, and always will be "Sergeant, build me a trench!".
And while one can argue "well you know it or you don't" that's a cope answer, and we'd be better off population-wise if everyone knew at least a little bit of how to do that. If you shun selfishness qua selfishness you won't know how to use it correctly, rationally, productively.
I think betas call that Nice Guy Syndrome.
Yeah, straight relationships work like that too. People who pretend they don't are usually betas who actively resent being assigned beta at birth.
I find it extremely odd that most of the more "alpha" women I meet (as in, they might as well be gay men in thought/action/general attitude towards life) have higher than average facial neoteny. By contrast, most of the "forever a beta, and very angry about that" women have very masculine faces (the 'model' look). I've come to find that I care about that more than if it's a woman or a man (and I suspect is where the "traps are/n't gay" meme comes from people who have also noticed this about themselves).
I find this to be true in employer-employee and friend-friend relationships too. I find it difficult to deal with a lot of the time; while I eventually figured out my proper role in these relationships it took me way longer than it should have.
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Nice post, thanks.
Interesting! And I wonder to what extent modern parenting & lifestyle - having few kids that don't spend as much time outside with other kids as in previous generations - is contributing to that. If you're used to unstructured play with kids of all ages, you adopt a wider variety of social roles than if you spend a lot of your "free" time at home with parents and older siblings.
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This seems to me a somewhat narrow view of gay sex.
For instance, you assume that to bottom is necessarily to be taken advantage of somehow. Just because you don't enjoy bottoming doesn't mean no one else does, or that it is only enjoyable in a psychological way. As evidence consider the market for anal sex toys and prostate massagers, many of which are advertised to straight men. Consider the endless stories of people needing to go to the hospital to remove large objects they've gotten stuck up their butts. These men were seeking a mechanical sort of gratification which may be correlated with submissiveness but which should be thought of as independent of it.
Maybe I'm just autistic or something but I've always thought that gay relationships and sex had a lot more opportunity for egalitarian bonds. To me it seems that in hetero relationships, no matter how loving, there is always the lingering tension of transaction and compromise, given that men and women generally have different needs and desires and often don't understand each other. But gay relationships don't require an asymmetry and can be closer to purely positive-sum, like friendship. Maybe that makes the relationship cheaper in some ways and more genuine in others.
Yeah, as before I'll caveat that this alpha top stuff, while a common kink, is far from a universal one. Even for people who do appreciate it, it's not always something you're gonna be feeling up for. Things like frotting, mutual masturbation, or some forms of oral don't really have top/bottom in the same sense, and there's a lot of times where providing oral to someone is fun because it's fun, not because you're submitting to them, especially with that whole oversensitivity deal you can kinda play with.
There is a lot of mechanical vulnerability to bottoming, even to women (arguably, because strapons give less feedback, more vulnerability), but being physically vulnerable isn't the same as being emotionally vulnerable, and it doesn't have to be tied into this framework of submitting to someone Better than you.
That said, I think there is a risk of romanticizing the unknown. There can be a lot of asymmetry in a lot of gay relationships: while there's less difference in sex drive on average, there's a lot more mechanical preparation to bottoming; where there's a lot fewer of the big gendered differences in expectations or interests, a lot of things that look gendered in het relationships are cultural or upraising in gay ones.
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On the contrary I think that to imagine sex between two human beings as "mechanical gratification" is the narrow view of sex. I personally don't mind being fingered or having small toys up my butt, I do think they feel good, but at the same time this is essentially a degrading act that you must accept or reject. A finger or object is entering your body, this can be violating, or if you have a respect for your partner it can be a positive experience.
Your last paragraph is interesting to me. In my opinion homosexuality is less egalitarian because when you are both the same thing you are inevitably hierarchically compared. One is bigger, one is smaller. With heterosexuality you have greater balance because you are both looking for something different and can offer your unique strengths to the other in a more naturally equal way.
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Is this where the desire for "straight acting" men comes from in the gay community, or is it orthogonal?
I guess, if you're a gay man who sees himself as a beta and imagines a man as "straight acting" then you're imagining a guy who is confident and secure in his masculinity and isn't effeminate. Effeminacy is a whole other thing that would take forever to unpack and it inevitably veers into trans/gender ideology which I just don't want to think about right now, not to mention that effeminacy is not limited to homosexual men really.
So, to try to parse your question, you're asking if the fact that most gay men do not see themselves as alpha that it makes them want straight acting men? Well, yes, because any gay man who is seeking an alpha has degraded himself as a beta on some level, he's not going to be "straight acting" enough to be someone else's alpha, and thus that's the problem, when he's inevitably surrounded by men more beta than he is who he can't provide love to because he doesn't have the love for himself he needs to give away. (It's getting late and I've sort of lost the plot, hopefully this makes sense.)
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Count me skeptical that having a nice cock (bro) is an advantage in a fight.
Imagine a guy with a big dick and then imagine the same guy with a tiny dick. Which does your monkey brain pick as the winner instinctively? (You could say, well the bigger thing gives you more to attack, maybe it's a disadvantage, bla bla) but in this instance I'm purely talking about who in a split second decision is more physically intimidating to the viewer. I personally would give the edge to the bigger dick guy
What I'm saying is, I'm not sure that your imaginings of cocks and physiques actually has any bearing on reality.
If it's the same guy I don't think that there is anything to even discuss here.
What is the evidence?
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what about a giant with a giant dick vs a human with a human dick, how does that change the calculus?
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Most monkeys and apes have very small dicks.
Great point. Who would win in a fight, a silverback gorilla with his 1.25 inch (erect) micropenis or a human with a 6 inch monster cock?
The human, because we have weapons and advanced societies to coordinate effort and now have to make an actual effort not to incidentally kill all the gorillas.
A theoretical straight-up fight for dominance is a weird fake aberration; society with all its nuance is the state of Nature.
For similar reasons, weaker, smarter, more socially adept humans are fitter. That's why humans evolved to be so much weaker than other apes in the first place.
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I don't imagine there's any good evidence to support this claim but I believe it completely
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I believe the actual explanation for this is that the nice cock is a reflection of less visible qualities. A person's digit ratio isn't going to have a direct impact on how aggressive they are, but they both reflect subtler processes and qualities that have an impact on both.
This is assuming the conclusion.
Sorry for being unclear - I meant that I'm trying to model the thought process that leads to this belief. I'm not sure of the actual relationship/mechanisms behind cock size, but I am sure that a lot of people view it as a signal of virility/genetic quality.
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Sorry, I stopped reading your wall of text here. Humans form alliances. We use these big calorie-hungry brains to navigate social systems. The winner in a fight is not the bigger, stronger man, but the one with the most allies.
Yeah. Charisma, Intelligence and Status are extremely important for female mate choice. If given the options, the average woman will almost always choose a popular CEO over even the most ripped man imaginable. Provided the CEO is barely taller than her, of course.
For a relationship, sure. For a one-night stand? I reckon the jacked dude is getting lucky. (The incel phrase "alpha fucks, beta bux" has something to it.)
A super-jacked dude is rare enough nowadays that he is reasonably high on the totem pole to reliably land one-nighters, yes, as long as he has some charisma to match.
But from my experience, CEOs and other high-status men are still higher even on this count.
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I found this an interesting read, but I’m a little puzzled about the alpha vs. beta distinction you’re making. At the start, you make it sound like the alpha is just the bigger, taller, and more muscular partner, and the beta is the shorter and weaker one, but later on, you seem to be hinting at a psychological dimension as well. In day to day life, that would make sense. I’ve certainly known men who are physically not all that impressive but who exude confidence and authority, just as I’ve known men who could beat most people to a bloody pulp but who are nevertheless obvious betas (and there are plenty of men who are dominant in one social group and passive in another). Are you saying that in the gay dating world, the physically weak but self-confident and authoritative men should be submissive to anyone who’s physically stronger—that it just comes down to brute strength? And so the problem is just that too many physically imposing specimens are too meek for their own good? If so, how do you square that with younger men preferring an older partner, given that a 55-year-old is statistically quite likely to be weaker than a 25-year-old? (Also, surely that can’t actually be true, can it? “Older men, up to around age 55, are perceived as more attractive to… other younger men.” I was under the impression that youth is almost always the single most highly-prized characteristic among gay men. I swear I’ve heard that dating is almost impossible after 30 for most gay men, since everyone is always chasing the 20-year-olds.)
Also, with regard to the birth order effect,
My understanding is that the effect holds true even when the younger brothers are raised apart (when, e.g., the youngest was adopted), which would point to a biological cause in utero, rather than anything from socialization.
Basically, you have to begin by squaring the physical situation between yourself and the other person. There is fundamentally a difference between any two men that is 100% in the physical world. In a fight between two men, one will win, or there will be a draw. If I met a guy a foot taller than me with fifty pounds more muscle who was super bad at playing Cooking Mama for Nintendo DS and I was super good at it, it doesn't make me his top, it makes me better at a little game than him. If we had sex and I was using my super good abillities at playing Cooking Mama over him to make him suck my dick, it would be humiliating for both of us. If he was using his foot of height and 50 pounds of muscle on me to make me suck his dick, it would not humiliate either of us, I would have respect for his physical state. Later on, if he wants to play Cooking Mama together and I beat him, then it will make me feel good because we are both seeing each other for who we are. He is physically superior to me but I have these other traits that he can admire in me, whether it's being good at Cooking Mama or being smarter or richer or whatever.
Well, I'm not saying that it "should" be that way as a prescriptive norm or something, I'm saying that basically you have to give credence to the brute strength between the two of you or it isn't going to work.
Yes, this is one of my frustrations with gay dating, that men who are physically superior to me don't see themselves as such. They compare themselves too much with men they imagine to be bigger or stronger than them and fail to respect themselves for the qualities they possess.
This sounds like a sort of dated concept, I do remember hearing this idea back in the early 00's or so but I really haven't heard gay men say this sort of thing in a long time. Anecdotally I am much more popular the older I get. I can imagine if a man wants to be a bottom that he is concerned he is getting too old and would have this perspective, but he really should just man up and be a top for the sake of everyone around him and his own dignity.
That makes sense, it is my understanding as well that it is considered by science to have more of a biological cause but there is also a great bias against socialization related explanations of homosexuality so I wanted to present my theory from my own experiences.
So in the gay dating world, would it be fair to say that there is an element of—is coercion the right word?—when it comes to sex? Like in the ideal world, you’d wrestle and then the loser would have to pleasure the winner, rather like the loser when two boys wrestle might be forced to eat grass? If so, that is… rather different than what I would have expected. It sounds rather like the dynamic feminists imagine when they say that all sex/rape is just about power.
Also, though I’ve never considered it before, I think I see the cause of the problem right away. Presumably most gay men are gay because they enjoy being the receptive partner, leaving a dearth of men who enjoy being the active partner (possibly more of whom are bi than gay?). Is that a fair assessment?
No, it's not coercion. Ideally in the situation in your first paragraph, the boy who loses at wrestling is not being forced to pleasure the winner, he is pleasuring the winner because the winner deserves it. I do not want to pleasure a man who would coerce me into having sex, but I would respectfully pleasure him if I felt he deserved it.
In a way sex/rape IS just about power, but between two men you have the chance to respect the power or lack thereof between the two of you.
No no no, well personally I don't find pleasure in being a receptive partner. (Granted, I particularly don't like being an anal bottom because it hurts me physically and feels degrading.) In romantic relationships I've had in the past where I've been the top, the bottom usually isn't that pleased with being a bottom either. He'll go along with it for a while if he really respects the top enough or disrespects himself too much. (This is where the age gap relationships comes into play, most adult men are ready to drop being a bottom in a relationship more quickly than younger men.) Most of my friends I've grown up with who were in long term gay relationships where both partners were in their 20s seem to break up when the bottom gets older and stops wanting to be the bottom.
Besides that, being a top is really more dangerous to the ego than being a bottom. The bottom gets to play a discriminatory role generally, and performing as a top is harder. Porn makes it look really easy but I'd say that topping anally is one of the most difficult things to do in sex- you have to stay hard for a long time, you have to find the hole, you have to do all these things, it's stressful and can be embarrassing. It takes a lot of confidence to feel like you deserve to top another guy. The problem is that today most men never achieve the confidence to top, even in oral sex.
Based on what you've said, it sounds like you imagine that even in the ideal situation, a long-term gay relationship with partners in stable sex act roles isn't possible, or couldn't continue to be mutually beneficial?
Why is it that you (and apparently your past sexual partners) think someone has to "deserve" particular sex roles? How much of that is just contingent on you and them happening to physically not enjoy being the passive partner?
That seems like a very bold claim; I'd be interested to see you expand more specifically on why you think that is true.
I am sort of agnostic on this point, if I had to tell you exactly what I believe, it is that it is possible to have a long term mutually respectful relationship between two men that is mutually beneficial, but it is very very rare and requires huge amounts of respect and humility from both partners who also understand the true dynamic of the relationship. And that this is not exclusive to homosexuality but really to all long term relationships.
Because when you are doing sex acts with a partner, as two men, unless you are kissing or 69ing, there is fundamentally an alpha and a beta position. Because you have to, usually subconsciously and even unknowingly between the two of you, work out how the act is going to go, and to violate the order can hurt both of you if you don't understand that it's happening as a violation of the order between you two.
As I've pointed at before I don't really "not enjoy being the passive partner" (aside from anal sex which I do not enjoy bottoming,) indeed I don't mind being a passive partner orally for either a man who is my top who I respect, or a bottom who I also respect and wants me to blow him.
In seventh grade, I went on a trip with other seventh graders. There was this girl, let's call her Brooke. We were all like 13, Brooke was a skinny, hot, popular girl. But she went around all the time complaining about how fat and ugly she was. It drove the rest of us kids all crazy because we all thought she was hot and skinny, and if she was fat and ugly then that made us all obese and hideous. Dating today in the US is like meeting a million men who act like they're Brooke who thinks she's fat and ugly when really they're hot and nice and need to see themselves as hot and nice in order to share their hotness and niceness with the people around them who want to enjoy it as well, and this can't happen when they're stuck feeling badly about themselves. (And before someone accuses me of acting entitled to someone else's hotness or niceness or whatever, I try to practice what I preach and share my good traits with those around me too.) It's so elementary, read The Rainbow Fish if you don't believe me.
What “hurt” can come from “violat[ing] the order”?
You opened your original post up claiming that you only meant “alpha” and “beta” as referring to who'd win in a fight, saying that you didn't want to import the “connotations in the meme world”[sic] of those “loaded terms”, but that claim — that “hurt” can come if the “[physical superiority] order” is “violated” (whatever that means) — is not at all self-evident unless you're importing prison rape power dynamics, even if I grant* that there are certain pleasures available from physical and behavioral asymmetries in a same-sex relationship.
*And even this, I don't understand your position on so I'm not even sure if I'm granting exactly what you meant to communicate. If you think somehow acting in accord with the “order” of a same-sex relationship — which you define in relation to physical power / force — is so desirable, then why does your highest-ranked relationship prototype involving any serious power asymmetry between the partners have one leg ranked as not even “positive”?
I appreciate your bold desire to express your perspective from a clean slate, but that means that you need to specify your axioms. I see that you clarified in a later post that you think any kind of physical penetration is “essentially a degrading act that you must accept or reject”[sic], but why do you claim this? Do you claim it by analogy from the assumption that heterosexual penetration is “degrading”, or from some other line?
What exactly is wrong with a “beta” contributing a shy, smouldering consent & an “alpha” contributing a bright, doting energy into a bridal chamber of ecstasy, affection, non-judgement, and mutual trust that happens to include sex acts that violate your prescribed “order”?
If it's just not your cup of tea, and you would simply prefer to homoerotically wrestle out your unresolved parental conflicts with a self-confident middle-easterner who's approximately the same strength as you despite a sizeable age gap, then I'm glad you found something you like, but that doesn't seem to be any kind of “motte”.
This complaint is completely comprehensible and I have no objections to it, but it seems almost totally orthogonal to your power dynamics model.
I could grant that the U.S. is full of neurotic bottoms who are refusing to accept themselves as sexually worthwhile, and grant that that's hamstringing them in their ability to “be happy and have healthy relationships with themselves and the people around them”[sic], without granting your much more specific claim that the cure for this is for them to “see themselves as tops”[sic].
If you're struggling with finding enjoyment and fulfillment while viewing gay relationships through this weird power dynamics lens and seeing recurrent “clap back” at your ideas whenever you verbalize them, the obvious implication (which might or might not be correct) is that the “difficult aspects” are actually with your perspective.
For what it's worth, I don't know that I “like” the limited preview of your model you've shared so far, but I do “wish” to see it explained in enough detail to be able to actually evaluate it.
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I was responding to the “make him/me” in your previous comment. I think I sort of get where you’re coming from now, though it still seems like a much more power-focused dynamic than I’d have expected.
Doesn’t this contradict your initial post (“Gay dating today in America is pretty frustrating because the vast majority of men do not see themselves as alpha”) and even the end of this last post (“The problem is that today most men never achieve the confidence to top”)? Or was I misreading you? I thought you were using “alpha” and “beta” as synonyms for “top/active” and “bottom/passive.”
Incidentally, I’d like to second doglatine. This isn’t a subject I would have guessed I’d have found interesting, but it turns out that I do. Kudos.
Err, no I don't think this contradicts it. Basically I think men who see themselves as bottoms need to see themselves as tops to be happy and have healthy relationships with themselves and the people around them.
Sorry the terminology is kind of convoluted. Broadly, alpha = top = active while beta = bottom = passive. I used alpha and beta because it's more relevant to straight people and carries less of a specific meaning than the other two sets of terms which might make people think top/bottom = anal sex only whereas I am trying to describe the relationships more broadly.
I'm glad you found my post interesting, thanks for engaging.
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Just to say, this was the most interesting post I’ve read on the Motte for a long time, so thanks for sharing your experiences, very different from the typical fare here. In case anyone else is reading, I’d be similarly interested to hear from others whose identity and experiences give them insights that others may miss.
Thank you, I appreciate this comment a lot.
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I seem to recall there was a massively upvoted "Quality Contribution" here a while back, where a gay man wrote a similar post. Basically arguing that all gay sex was about these power dynamics. But then a bunch of other gay men clapped back at him and told him he's wrong, that's just one niche/stereotype, and there's lots of other gay men who are loving and equal. So I don't know what to think now.
That was me, I'm back. I would say on the one hand that I don't know how you can read my post and think that the entire point is that it's a one sided stereotypical power dynamic concept when really what I am trying to get at is the need for mutual respect between partners and how that happens. The fact that other gay men don't like to hear anything I have to say and "clap back" at me further illustrates the frustration I feel with gay men, I am not here to sugar coat the experience or present the mainstream homosexual view of love and relationships and sex but rather point out the difficult aspects that underlie the entire situation. Besides that my post isn't really about gay sex at all but rather I am using something I think about all the time that people here aren't as familiar with to make broader points about power and relationships.
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Women would prefer a 90s-era Jude Law or a Timothee Chalamet over any MMA fighter. Most prime-fertility age heartthrobs are not physically imposing or good at fighting, but instead possess obvious indicators of health (which is a fitness) plus social grace (which is a fitness in civilization).
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(I posted this in last week's thread in error, having forgotten that today was Monday. I've now reposted it in this week's thread.)
Nowadays, whenever I meet a woman or gay man who's millennial or younger, I'm counting the seconds until they ask me "so, what's your sign?" Among young Western women, belief in astrology seems to be right up there with an interest in true crime podcasts and Taylor Swift.
I have the impression that this is a fairly recent development, like in the last decade or so. When I was in secondary school I don't remember any of my female classmates expressing any interest in astrology, and I sort of remember the general opinion was that reading your horoscope in a tabloid was seen as a low-status spinster thing to do.
Three questions:
Has there actually been a recent resurgence in interest in astrology? Or is my gut feeling actually mistaken, and interest in astrology has actually been constant over the past twenty years?
If "yes" to the previous question, what are the underlying causes? If astrology underwent a resurgence in popularity over the last decade, why so? Is it a "god-shaped hole" effect (when people give up organised religion, they immediately start looking for something else to take its place)? I've heard that there was a lot of VC money floating around for astrology apps a few years ago, could that be behind it? Or is that an effect rather than a cause?
Why is it such a gendered phenomenon? I literally don't think I've ever been sincerely asked what my sign is by a straight man - 100% of people who've asked me have been female (or far more rarely, gay/bi men). Is this true everywhere, or am I in a bubble and it's a less gendered phenomenon in other regions? I wonder how it ties into a tendency among women that they seem to enjoy the act of classifying people into "types": a few years ago when I was single, something like half of the dating app profiles I saw had their Myers-Briggs listed somewhere.
I have seen nothing of that here in Sweden so perhaps you should restrict yourself to American women rather than western women?
That said, of the people reading horoscopes and pursuing things like alternative medicine it seems like the overwhelming majority is female. I would imagine this has to do with agreeableness. Agreeable is a short distance from impressionable and some % of people will be conned into astrology. Then, when you reach critical mass of followers then others will simply engage in the activity because others are doing it, especially those vulnerable to social contagion.
Men have other gender specific failure modes, like chronic contrarianism and overconfidence, leading to things like falling for crypto-scams.
Same in Finland.
Perhaps I'm just in some kind of anti-astrology bubble or what did you mean was the same in Finland? That astrology is or isn't rising among women?
Same as in I've seen nothing of the sort among young women.
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I live in Ireland.
Anglo-sphere women then.
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Pew Research Center did a comprehensive poll in 2023 on spirituality (aside from religion) in US, with intention to periodically repeat it. They say that there aren't any good longitudinal surveys on the subject.
Glancing through the breakdowns on spiritual beliefs, there are indeed some gender differences once we get past the stuff of organized religion, like:
85% women / 77% men: "there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we cannot see it"
on the flip side, 12% women / 21% men: "the natural world is all there is"
22% of Americans are "spiritual but not religious".Among those, 57% women / 42 % men.
Could it be that you're being subtly hit on? Asking "what's your sign" is a low-stakes maybe-flirt, in my observation. It's asking something about you that you probably don't mind sharing, general time of year when you're born, and it's a starter to a conversation about you (or your interlocutor) that is mildly personal.
Unless the ladies are pulling out star charts. That would bust my hypothesis.
Potentially, but I've even had female colleagues who are happily co-habiting with their boyfriends and/or engaged ask me about my star sign.
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Chuck Todd wrote a fantastic op-ed about the current state of our political polarization: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/chuck-todd-unite-nation-trump-harris-election-rcna171303
It comes down to (1) Our acceptance embrace of inflammatory rhetoric to "own the [other side]", (2) our ever-present, chronically online culture, and (3) the spread of inflammatory rhetoric and disinformation propagate by big tech.
Some notable quotes:
"The problem with political discourse in America right now is that we are all stuck in a social media funhouse mirror booth. What we see isn’t what is, and how we’re seen isn’t who we are. And yet, here we are."
"But just because Trump started it doesn’t mean his opponents have the high moral ground when they single out him and some of his supporters for personal derision. I still want to live in a society where “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
"Come Jan. 21, we all are going to be living in the same country and sharing the same group of people as our elected representatives. We need leaders who accept that there are major political differences between us and that governing needs to be incremental and not radical.
"Right now, our political information ecosystem doesn’t reward incrementalism or nuance, instead punishing both and, more to the point, rewarding those who make up the best stories.
"Most Americans have an instinct of de-escalation when things get heated, and yet most elected officials in the modern era are incentivized to behave the opposite way."
I always wonder which people are really that historically ignorant. Noise, signal, so hard to tell. So little worth listening to at all?
This stuff kicked off at least as early as 2012, and it was more "nerd wars" and professor/student social media drama than politics to start with. (Tumblr isn't "big tech" either, though prior Twitter certainly made things even worse...) Trump is obviously a symptom of a problem that won't go away when he does.
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Just..big tech?
Are you really saying it's big tech's fault blacks and many liberals whites believe what's basically blood libel - that is, that police kills thousands of unarmed blacks every year ?
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Chuck Todd routinely degraded American politics. Why should I listen to a thing he says unless it starts with “I am a huge part of the problem—I’m sorry.”
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Just as “watermelon” has come to refer to politics which wears a green skin to smuggle in red outcomes, I want a word for politics which wears a nonpartisan skin to smuggle in Dem hackery. What’s something that’s grey on the outside and blue on the inside? Something something haemocyanin.
Horseshoe crab
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I think that's just called depression.
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I disagree with you. This editorial is very bad, and Chuck Todd should feel bad for writing it.
This isn't new. Herbert Hoover's magisterially-dyspeptic magnum opus goes into microscopic detail about all the ways various FDR-administration officials and allied journalists lied and slanted the truth to manage and manipulate public opinion during the depression, New Deal period, and WWII, and the number of people who remember or care today round to zero. Heck, even the "really famous" examples like the NYT lying about the Holodomor in Ukraine, or rabidly defending the Lindsay administration in NYC at the time, then excoriating it in Lindsay's obituary, are just cocktail-party trivia and not seriously internalized lessons.
How do you get "incrementalism" from "the country is politically-divided"? It really smacks of "we just need to make sure we boil the frog slowly so it doesn't jump out." No instinct towards actual compromise or even honest open conflict; just dishonest slow-rolling and gaslighting about ultimate endgames until it's too late and the fait accompli can be imposed on a prostrate foe. Of course, this strategy also has the side-effect of not being at all concerned with actual quality of governance in the mean-time...if you're suffering from a gushing stab wound, incremental care, one bandaid at a time, won't stop you from bleeding out even if stitches or cauterization would really hurt in the short-term.
Our political information ecosystem is primarily geared towards rationalizing already-extant beliefs. That's how you get in people's customized algorithms - feeding them plausible-sounding affirmation of things they already believe. It's not a question of "nuance" or "incrementalism" - what do those even mean in the context of journalism? That you shouldn't report facts if it looks like they lead to an "unnuanced" conclusion or one that is a radical departure from current consensus? And why do we think that our information delivery system should be characterized by the same qualities as policymaking in the first place? To even ask the question betrays the degree to which unbiased investigation has been subordinated to ideological preference.
A nitpick, but Hoover’s magnum opus was definitely a certain translation project.
Yo I forgot Lou and he did that!!! Thank you for reminding me; one more reason the Hoovers are among my personal heroes.
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Weren’t they also responsible for translating and publish “Always With Honor” in the west?
One of my favorite books. A short memoir of Pyotyr Wrangel, the most famous and successful general in the white army during the Russian civil war.
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Yea this is a delusion the dems have been trying to sell themselves ever since Trump. They see themselves not as a specific group fighting for it's members interests, like the republicans do, but more like a religion like messianic figures that will bring about utopia if they can just get enough control and "eliminate" the external things dividing us. Reality is that Trump didn't start anything and the divisions had been brewing for a while. The things dividing us are us. Globalism has clear winners and losers, 20k Haitians get dumped on a rural town of 40k, but two bus loads would overwhelm Martha's Vineyard, etc.
Due to this they need a rationalization for why their universalist solutions aren't working or their self conception would break down. Similar to that Muslim meme people always post in regards to Europe where the bureaucrats are desperately asking what the Muslim wants, more healthcare, better housing and the Muslim says they just want Shariah. It's clear what the man in the meme wants, the increasingly desperate questions aren't for his sake. It's funny they made diversity one of the pillars of their ideology when they don't really believe it exists in the first place.
I think this hints at the root cause of our national malaise: pro-fargroup bias.
The Martha's Vineyard crowd cares more about poor undocumented workers than they do about their own countrymen. They see themselves as global citizens with no great connection to a particular place.
The Haitian immigrant is better than the lazy American, why shouldn't we replace one with the other?
The problem with this situation is that it's inherently unstable. It's tough for elites to rule when they despise the people they rule over. And it's tough for working class types to be pro-social when they feel the game is inherently rigged against them.
The MV incident to me, showed just how bubbled the elites are. I’m not sure whether or not it ever occurred to the elites of those enclaves that importing people with no resources has a negative effect on community. They interact with the world through news media whilst living in gated exurbs where the only interactions they have with the rest of the world are transactional. They don’t talk with the lower clases, they order their services and when no longer paying for that service, they kind of forget they exist. I’m not sure it’s even contempt, it’s summoning a workman or servant, hiring their services and banishing them back into the ether where they don’t think about them until they need the air conditioning fixed or order door dash.
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I disagree entirely with the premise that political polarization has anything to do with social media or big tech. It is an absurd claim on its face, because human history is littered with countless examples of extreme political polarization long before smartphones or the Internet. It's a waste to even name them, because basically every historical event learned in school would qualify. Relatively speaking, the current period isn't even particularly highly polarized.
The only semi-charitable way to interpret these articles is to interpret them as apologia for why the current regime's systems of control have failed. Before the latest technology wave, the regime had everyone's opinion under control because they could make sure that all three news channels were broadcasting the correct messages. They cannot control social media as a whole, therefore, it must be social media's fault because people are able to exchange information and ideas without their consent.
The article itself is self-contradictory. In one paragraph, it's attacking Fox News for "cherry-picking" quotes from Democrats, and in the next says the only solution is to "stop big tech" from using their current algorithms. I guess it's left as an exercise for the reader how "big tech algorithms" caused Fox News's programming. Yet Fox News's current state could not possibly have been "caused" by social media, because as I recall, Democrats hated and mocked Fox News more in the 2000's than they do now.
The fundamental mistake the article is making is to mistake correlation for causation. While a relative increase in polarization has coincided with the rise of social media, this does not mean that one caused the other. In fact, there is not even a common cause. They are completely unrelated. All civilizations oscillate between periods of division and periods of cohesion. America was in a period of relative cohesion, but it could not last forever.
How did the US government forcefully insert bias in news broadcasting before?
By not inviting the channels’ major shareholders to the cool cocktail parties if they took a heterodox editorial position.
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@CrispyFriedBarnacles gave an apt example of JFK using the Fairness Doctrine to censor right-wing radio shows.
Thanks, that’s just what I was looking for. The Fairness Doctrine has long since been repealed though. Is there much to suggest that this was more than an isolated case?
Here's one from less than a decade ago:
One of the reasons I come to The Motte is that occasionally someone posts a link to a historical or recent event that's not at all known within my circle, but is alive and well in the memory of others. It helps me understand where people may be coming from.
Ditto. Thanks!
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I think the comment makes more sense if you interpret "the regime" to be not identical to "the US government" but rather what's referred to as "the Cathedral" or "the elites", i.e. a class of people who comprise newspaper editors and politicians among others.
A delightfully nebulous category, reminiscent of the “rootless cosmopolitans” of old.
Would looking at statistics of which party the journalists employed at the networks donate to make it less nebulous?
Let's say that reference to "the Cathedral" or "the Elites" is not a good way to approach this conversation. What would be a better approach? Reference to Blue Tribe?
The post two levels up adds the word "forcefully" to a description of such a coalition that did not previously contain it. How did that insertion add to the conversation?
It seems to me that @sulla's critique is on point and @MotteInTheEye's point is likewise a reasonable attempt at communication. I don't have nearly as much time as I used to for reasoned argumentation, but if you or @mdurak think the thinking here really is fuzzy, I can at least attempt to throw my hat in the ring as an interlocuter.
Blue Tribe is probably even worse, because almost certainly the vast majority of the Blue Tribe didn't have anything to do with journalist or tech company decisions and the like. Elites is at least a bit more specified, but there are non-Blue elites. As our own statement above says, we should try to be as specific as possible, so maybe Blue Tribe Elites would be better. But even then almost certainly not all Blue Tribe elites were doing X or Y. But every level of specification takes work, it would be crazy to expect you to find the exact people who did x or y. We'd never be able to carry out a conversation. So perhaps settling for some Blue Tribe Elites did X or Y is the balance. It indicates allegiance and position and that it is not all of the group.
Mind you, I'm as guilty as anyone of just saying Red or Blue, when I know it wasn't all of Red or Blue. Trade offs between saving time and mental effort with short-hand and generalizations vs accuracy is a real thing.
I think the Inner Party / Outer Party distinction is pretty good.
The Outer Party is clearly a lot of blue tribe climbers with some red tribe elites mixed in.
The Inner Party is all blue tribe elites.
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I interpreted “under control” of the government as “forcefully.” How else would the government bring something under its control?
I looked up the Cathedral. Interesting idea, but how does “the regime” (by this do they mean Democrats specifically, or the federal government regardless of who holds the executive?) select for an academia and journalism that reinforces regime viewpoints as opposed to viewpoints that increase the power of academia/journalism (the “dominant” ideas)? I don’t see how the mentioned examples of race war or tolerating crime are dominant ideas for the regime — if anything, you’d expect a “regime” to tamp down on internal conflict and use a crackdown on crime as an excuse to expand internal security forces.
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I think this kind of article is just braining, the author has something he thinks or wants to talk about so he has to make up reasons to justify himself. This is really easy in politics. A million things are happening all the time and it's easy to remember a few and string them together. But Chuck Todd is not that smart and articles like this are really not worth much of anyone's time.
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What’s causing the divide is the utter failure of the current system of delivering anything the people want from their leaders.
It can’t deliver on economics, in fact the standard of living seems to be getting worse. People are cutting back on things that were once considered normal. The hoops necessary to get to a decent wage and lifestyle are higher every decade. In 1950, a kid could barely graduate high school and still get a pretty decent job at a factory or something similar. He could expect at least a small house, a car, and to be able to support his wife and kids. That same lifestyle in 2024 requires a good college degree from a good university and quite often unpaid internships just to hope that if you and your wife work 40 hours a week, you can maybe have what your grandparents had with one less worker and less education.
It can’t stop crime. The number of anti-crime measures you take without thinking about them is crazy especially once you see how good it is in functioning societies. In Asia, it’s common for stores to leave their deliveries on the streets for hours. In some parts of Europe, people leave babies sleeping in strollers on the streets. In America, it’s common knowledge that you politely leave your car unlocked to prevent would be looters from having to smash windows to get at any valuables in the car. Porch piracy is a known problem. Personal safety often dictates when and where it’s advisable for the good people to go out. And police are basically told they aren’t allowed to stop a crime until it’s too late.
Education? About half of Americans don’t read above a 6th grade level. Many struggle with math more complicated than 10th grade algebra. All we can do with these kids is teach them The Narrative, encourage them to go into massive debt for the job training that K12 can’t give them and hope it turns out okay.
To me, it seems pretty clear that the problem is that what we have isn’t working, and everyone knows it, and so they’re grasping at the straws offered by radical and radically different ideologies to try and find a way to what people actually want — that the median American can live a modest but decent lifestyle in cities where crime is low enough that it doesn’t dictate how you live. They want their kids to have a good education and have the opportunity to be successful and happy. We have none of that, and the oligarchs in charge can’t give us that. So people are looking to other ideas: maybe socialism, maybe Christian theocracy, maybe some form of traditionalist society, maybe fascism, maybe some other idea.
The fact that we’re all so tuned into politics and it’s becoming so central to everything itself is a problem. If things were good, we would not care. People in all societies all over the globe got on very well in functioning societies without even trying to understand world affairs. They didn’t care that much even when given the vote. It was a small part of life, and probably came far behind other concerns like the health and welfare of their own family, sports, religion, and so on. Common people really only get super into politics when they are neither left alone nor helped. And this is where we are. Some 40% of the income earned by Americans goes to the government. And not only do we get what Moldbug calls “bad customer service” (meaning that the government doesn’t improve things for those taxpayers) but spends vast resources on harassing people about what they should think all the time (with their own money of course). Normies getting involved is a reaction, and polarization is the result. I contend that the only solution that will actually turn down the polarization is results.
Of course, a key part of this formula was the fifties having a far lower standard of living.
Yes, and in reality fifties houses were below the standard most working class Americans expect today, both in terms of being tiny square footage single floor houses and because they lacked air conditioning and were extremely flimsy even by the standards of modern US single family housing.
I mean, I live in a 50’s built house. It’s been refitted to accommodate central HVAC, dishwasher, laundry, etc. But a lot of that is pretty doable if often major repairs(hvac entailed redoing a bunch of drywall to get access to it, and cutting a hole in the floor to run the lines through the foundation, +sacrificing a closet).
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In another reality, there's a ton of them in my neighborhood being occupied by working-class to upper-upper-middle class Americans. Many now have had air conditioning added, but flimsy? They're made of wood, not ticky-tacky.
I think there’s a real demand for sort of basic housing, I think the whole “standards have gone up” is a bit of a cope unless it’s specifically a complaint about building codes blocking new construction.
Myself and my medium sized family live in an 1000 square foot apartment. An 1100 square foot town home or duplex would be an obvious upgrade to work towards but stuff like that is simply not on offer in many places.
Eh, even in DFW these houses sit and sit until upgraded to modern standards with things like actual breaker panels. There may be demand for uber-basic rental units, but not as a house- and certainly, there's not a lot of demand to own them.
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Some municipal zoning codes explicitly forbid any new house under a certain size. For example, the capital of New Jersey has a minimum of 1200 ft^2.
For single-family detached. For rowhouses it's 900 per unit, and for duplexes (included in "semi-detached") it's 1000 per unit, so nothing forbids building what @MaximumCuddles wants. The biggest problem would be it's in Trenton.
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Yeah, if anything the average wood quality was better back then because we hadn't run out of old-growth forests yet. It's really obvious when you compare antique furniture to most modern stuff.
It's Douglas fir and other softwoods. You won't find timbers in post-WWII houses around here, and very little in the pre-WWII stuff.
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Perhaps, but it was a time when standards of living were rising and life was pretty good.
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Yeah, no one got shot, and no one but law enforcement even got shot at. There's nothing strange about a muted reaction to the Secret Service chasing off an assassin.
Ah, yes, the Trump campaign. That is, the organization whose raison d'etre is to elect Trump as President. It's hardly surprising they're trying to do so.
How many attempts have been made on Harris's life, again?
I don't know what "otherize" is supposed to mean here; I mean, Haitians ARE different in various ways from both Miami natives and other refugrees. But I don't think accusing people of eating wildlife and/or pets is dehumanizing them. It's exactly this sort of overblown meta-rhetoric (and the speech policing which follows from it) that prevents any discussion of this topic across the left-right divide.
Looks like someone never heard of the Arab Spring.
The uncharitable take on this would be that the author and his allies have done wrong and now they want to avoid the blowback.
Trying to get the other side to pre-commit to not actually making major changes in the direction they prefer isn't going to work any more.
And that instinct has been exploited over and over again. If by getting hot you can get the other side to concede, getting hot makes sense. Trump's habit of getting just as hot if not more instead is why he has taken over the GOP. If Todd doesn't like it... that's tough. The alternative to polarization his side offers is "Do it our way", and that will no be agreed to.
Ideally we wouldn't know even if the answer was greater than zero, to avoid inspiring copy-cats. The press coverage of the Trump assassination attempts is good for transparency and public discourse, but does have costs.
We're not in that situation, though, so it's irrelevant to the question.
I actually don't know if we're in that situation. It would not surprise me if the Secret Service took incidents involving a Dem VP significantly more seriously than incidents involving Trump.
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People will kill for their pets.
Somebody harming our pets is a sick and severe crime to most of our moral systems.
To accuse an ethnic group of eating our pets is explicitly setting them up to be the targets of violence.
Those people are going to be in harms way, there’s no two ways about it.
By analogy you've just placed responsibility for the assassination attempts against Trump on those Democratic politicians who called him an existential threat, just like the Trump campaign itself has. However, even granting that arguendo, it's STILL not dehumanizing them.
I agree you can also promote violence against someone by making Hitler comparisons or similar.
What would be required to dehumanize somebody?
I feel that trying to paint someone as a pet snatcher and eater because of their ethnicity is pretty close.
The classic example is calling them "vermin". Or literally "subhuman".
It is not.
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I predict that zero Haitians in Springfield will be murdered by someone who is angry about pets.
We’ll see, hopefully not.
But, I don’t think a person has to be murdered to have been dehumanized either.
Can you imagine being a Haitian in Springfield right now?
It must be horrible. They should be given a new residence in Martha's Vineyard, where they will not have to suffer such vile bigotry.
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I am a white man, so I can imagine it, since white men have been dehumanized for years now by various people.
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Can you imagine being a Springfielder already close to poverty who suddenly has to deal with wages dropping and car insurance rising because the government imported tens of thousands of foreigners to your backyard and de facto exempts them from laws?
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Can you imagine being a Springfielder with a third of your town suddenly replaced by foreigners - your schools swamped with ESL kids, your car insurance tripling - because your mayor wants to bilk the feds out of craptons of money on his shitty apartments?
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Can you imagine being a Haitian in Haiti?
I don't think being treated in a dehumanizing manner is anywhere near as bad as what they fled from. They come from literal starvation to a land where there are pets aplenty and delicious wild geese are running around, why not take advantage of the free meat? If there was an endangered elk or buffalo running around Springfield, they'd carve it into steaks too, there's no question about it.
The question isn't about whether racism is an issue, it's about the Springfield community's ability to absorb these people without suffering any deleterious effects. If they assimilate and go to eating packaged precut chicken breast and cheez-wiz, good for them. But you have to prepare for the eventuality that one of them goes 'wait a second, why would I do that when meat is running around for free'?
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Ironically I think this defense of potential pet eating is a deflection. Migrants ARE different from locals and from each other, and not always for the better. By emphasizing that Noticing the pet eating is itself a 'dehumanizing' act, all Noticing is thus reflective of the Noticers dehumanizing intent and thus can be categorically dismissed.
This is why the pet thing is so damn stupid. Migrants ARE committing crimes at elevated rates relative to their demographic, violent crimes at that. All the statistics about migrants being good for the economy and good for safety are due to large numbers of women inflating the denominator of crime/migrant ratios. Thanks to this stupid pet thing, the haitian who drove illegally or migrants robbing in NYC or the other instances of actual crimes are dismissed by the polity. Harris absolutely fumbled the border during her time as border czar, and the only reason people don't care right now is because the ones suffering are deep blue sanctuary cities that normies don't particularly like anyways.
Source?
I’ve never seen this shown, despite all the times it’s claimed.
Would you accept a European source, or would you say it's irrelevant to the conversation you're having in America?
I think immigration dynamics tend to be pretty different in Europe vs the US, for whatever reason.
But yes you can post it.
The Germans used to have a "crime by nationality" chapter in their annual crime report, where all the stereotypically criminal minorities turn out to be actually criminal. Though the last in year for which the full report seems to be available is 2020.
I think this was true in the past moreso than it is now, though obviously you have different nationalities coming over, which might have it's own impact.
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Didn't have time to do this earlier. Here's a spreadsheet (I tested it from a few browsers - it should be persistent) with the data from table 7.2-T03 (page 91) of the report ("Non-German suspects by nationalities – total offences excluding offences against foreigners’ law"), and table 12521-0005 from the German statistics office (for total population sizes for 2020).
Might do the same with the data from your study, if it has this level of detail.
UPDATE: Oh shit, I fucked up!
I didn't notice that the % share of suspects the report provided is the % share of non-German suspects, skewing the overrepresentation numbers pretty massively. Though not changing the conclusion that certain minorities are still waaay more criminal than the Germans / other minorities. The spreadsheet is updated, and here's the screenshot with the updated correct numbers:
https://www.themotte.org//images/17268257393208947.webp
Here's the old screenshot for historical purposes:
https://www.themotte.org//images/17267681316119363.webp
I am a bit amazed by Italians and French, there, with crime rates 4.75 and 5.91 times the German citizens ones.
From a US perspective, we are all close neighbors, it would be like if people from Utah committed crimes in California at five times the rate of the natives.
France is a close economic ally and Germany has a few big joint ventures with them, so I would expect most of the French in Germany are not drug mules or the like. Heck, they are more over-represented than Russians.
For immigrants from European countries much poorer than Germany, my priors would be that higher prosperity attracts a lot of small-time criminals. Breaking and entering is likely more lucrative in Germany than in Romania. I would also assume that Switzerland has more small-time German criminals than their native base rate for exactly the same reasons.
A general caveat with police statistics is that they generally tell you about the activities of the police, not the criminals. Especially with crimes where no party has an incentive to report them, like the drug trade, police reports are only the tip of the iceberg. If you want to know how much people are using, analyzing the wastewater is much more reliable. Murder is a good tracer, by comparison, because most murders get detected (unless they get misclassified as a natural death or stuck at the level of disappearance because no corpse surfaces) and solved.
Another caveat is that while offenses against the foreigners' law (which Germans can mostly not commit) are excluded, that law might still be the initial reason for investigation of non-EU nationals.
Oh, and the correct metric to measure criminality would be average conviction length per person, not 'number of suspects'. If most of the French suspects are accused of crossing as pedestrians on red, that paints a very different picture from them being accused of aggravated assault. Of course, IT-shy justice system is likely utterly incapable of aggregating the convictions for crimes committed in 2015 by nationality.
Doesn't this start having issues if judges have different levels of leniency for different demographics of offenders, or other confounders that vary between demographics (like age or wealth)?
I think you'd want to instead do it by the average sentence length for the crime they were convicted of, regardless of what they were actually sentenced to. That should eliminate the confounders while maintaining a relative scoring that roughly maps to society's view of the crimes' severity.
If you're worried that those numbers don't match up, that there are crimes that carry a sentence of 5 years but no one's ever given more than 6 months, you could instead use the average actually-given sentence length for all people convicted of that crime.
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If you tracked interstate migration the same way each country in the EU tracks their migration, patterns like these might very well show up, though personally I'd be more suspicious of Californians rather than the Utahns.
As for the French, they have their own high-crime minorities, fully equipped with French passports, thanks to their colonial past. I can't tell you what is the deal with Italians, though.
Russians have a long way to travel, and are not part of the Schengen Zone, so that's hardly surprising.
I'd be more than happy to limit the data to crimes with incentive to report, like murder, assault, rape, etc. I even remember some internet autist going over the German crime by nationality stats. I don't know if that's something they used to publish but stopped, or he had to FOIA them to get it, but if you click on the pdf from my other comment you can see they present the numbers on each type of crime, as well as on suspects by nationality, so they very clearly do have the data on the activities of criminals, they just choose not to aggregate them in a way that would be useful to this conversation. This has nothing to do with them being "IT-shy", European governments can hardly be described this way to begin with, and you can rest assured all this data is already stored in a digital database, and it's only a question of writing the right
GROUP BYstatement. Most likely this information is not published deliberately, for the exact same reason Germany hasn't published the full crime report since 2020.Nah. I'll take "convicts" over "suspects", but the length of conviction is a silly metric, if you know what they've been convicted of. Especially given certain European judges proclivity to let gang-rapists off with a slap on the wrist.
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@Jesweez, @quiet_NaN , Just so no one misses the correction, I'm adding this as a comment. The broader point is unaffected, but I originally overestimated the numbers by a lot.
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It's actually quite similar. Pre-selected immigrants generally have unusually low crime rates, free and in particular illegal immigrants have unusually high crime rates. This is true for both europe and the US. It's just that a mexican in europe is more likely than not legally pre-selected, highly educated and highly conscientious, while the opposite in the US. It's vice versa for other groups, such as eastern europeans.
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The big difference between the US and Europe is that the US has a native high-crime subgroup which is large enough (unlike European gypsies) to materially skew the crime statistics. A group of immigrants can commit more crime that white Americans and still commit less crime than heritage-Americans as a whole, who are 15-20% black. And in fact this appears to be true of by far the largest group of immigrants (i.e. Mexicans) - if you don't trust the MSM or academia then the most recent analysis on this point from an unquestionably right-wing source is Ron Unz.
There may be specific high-crime subgroups of immigrants who are worse than ADOS blacks, and Haitians in Springfield may even be one of them (although nobody in Springfield is saying this). But the only cat to have been eaten was eaten by a mentally ill ADOS black woman.
In the America that actually exists, poor Mexican immigrants make cities like LA safer by displacing poor blacks, and their US citizen children elect Democrats to local office who don't feel white guilt about black crime.
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This feels super online. The battle isn't trying to score debate points with the moderator. It's trying to get people to NOTICE.
A 4000 word think piece in the Atlantic is just not going to move public opinion. The whole cats thing got regular people to notice how deeply fucked up things have gotten.
Imagine explaining all this to a gas station clerk. That's the level of discourse we're dealing with.
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Illegal immigration is deeply unpopular and becoming more so. The pet thing didn't massively polarize people in favor of immigration. Maybe you're traveling in unrepresentative circles.
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Trump is a symptom of polarization, not a cause. He suspended his campaign in 2012 when it was clear he wasn’t going to go anywhere, in 2016 he cleared the field and hasn’t had a serious GOP rival since.
Why? Well, I would point to the actions of the center-left establishment as pushing conservatives into hostility. Obviously there’s the just, blatant, lies about everything from the media. But in Obama’s second term you also had fast and furious, you had democrats aggravating racial tensions for shits and giggles, you had the IRS targeting scandal, you had Obama himself moving from a polarizing but broadly popular figure into a progressive ideologue partisan. Then you’ve had the Biden admin targeting conservatives, with EG going after pro-life activists for three-felonies-a-day stuff while ignoring attacks on churches and pregnancy resource centers.
I recall reading a CNN journalist once writing, with great concern, that 40% of Americans think democrats want to take their guns away and force them to let trans in their bathrooms. It didn’t seem to occur to her that this was because democrats keep saying they’re going to do those things.
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"we" "we" "we"....
We?
I think there's a very, very strong case to be made that the birth of the entire New Deal state and its subsequent massive growth (along with all its cousin forms of government in the mid 20th century, be it social democracy or communism or fascism or what have you) relied intensely on real time, overwhelming broadcast media. No radio+national periodicals+Hollywood movies+(later)broadcast tv -> no New Deal state. And more particularly, no polity that could even make sense to the New Deal state in the first place. And then throw in ever more centralized public schooling and the role of ever more dominant national university systems in finishing off the process of population... "massaging", let's say. Add in the draft and military service, too.
There's your "we". It has always been a technologically created Frankenstein monster... which, to be honest, is kind of the Western Enlightenment thing anyway. Can't have the Protestant reformation and the 30 years war without the printing press.
One deep problem "we" face right now, I think, is that current year American liberals in positions of social authority often very much have, I think, a "born on third, thought they hit a triple" sense of recent history, the 20th century, and the actual contours of sense making institutions in America in the 20th century. The stories of, say, the Red Scare in the 50s are still a memory they keep alive, but the similar role of the New Deal state in snuffing out conservative / traditionalist / reactionary broadcast media in the United States from the 30s until the 80's is largely unknown to them, and thus it seems like just a natural state of affairs, of them "being on the right side of history". So things like J Edgar Hoover's and FDRs actions against American "isolationists" - like here - or JFK's relationship to right wing radio - like here - are stories that are unfamiliar. Thus you end up with oblivious claims like, "Fox News and Rush Limbaugh were the aberration after normalcy, brought into being by the dastardly end of the Fairness Doctrine".
I think there's a similar undercurrent to the frustration with social media from people who desperately want to go back to the broadcast news environment I remember from the early 1980s as a kid. I recognize where it's coming from. And I know exactly why my conservative family abandoned its catechizing, scolding, and noxious (to them) values the moment they had the opportunity to have any other options for news, too.
I don't even disagree, at some object level, with all sorts of critiques about social media, their business models, and pervasive phones more broadly.
But we are living through a broad collapse of shared authority. Because they have been the unquestioned and unquestioning inheritors of a lot of that shared authority, this experience is apparently especially shocking to a lot of American liberals. Social media and new communication technologies certainly play a role in that process. But, at least to me, it seems like that collapse is a much bigger story, with a lot more moving parts, than just social media, and it's not so clear which direction casual arrows point.
I think this is a strong perspective, especially in light of previous perspectives going into earlier communication technology revolutions. One of the early motives / aspirations of the printing press, for example, was framed not in terms of 'think of what it could do for newspapers' but 'think of how many more Bibles the world could had.' An early advocacy group for radio were, again, religious interests thinking in terms of spreading the message / sermons / hymns to wider audiences.
The point here isn't about the susceptibility of religious types (though the parallels between ideologues who substitute ideology for religion is interesting), but rather that the 'current' dominant ideological consensus types often imagine new communication technologies as a way to spread their consensus, rather than challenge it. Twitter and Social Media would inspire pro-western/democratic/progressive/etc. movements. Telegraphs would allow power centers to better assert their control over distant parts of their countries, rather than help new power centers arise. International communism/socialism would allow the Soviets to lead the global revolution, rather than splintering and schisming as local communist leaders usurped the foreign advisor factions that often helped them rise to power. Etc. etc. etc.
Your 'born on third, believes they hit a triple' aligns to that historical parallel, as does the contemporary pushback on uncontrolled information parallels the historical examples. Once expanded, once-unquestionably dominant factions try to re-assert their authority by regulation / reconsolidation / attempts to reassert exclusive authority.
This thought had extremely different valences depending on your opinion of the commonfolk; the Church hierarchy was corrupt, yes. But they were also right that proliferation of the sacred text in the vernacular would cause an absolute riot of absolutely uncontrollable radicalism, with not-infrequently horrifying consequences.
The Church hierarchy was the original market for printed bibles.
Not in the vernacular.
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And they were wrong that such chaos wasn't worth it, and indeed that it could even potentially be avoided in any case.
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The mistake Todd makes here is that he seems to recognize the characteristically Trumpian mode of lying — repetition of crude falsities — but not the mode preferred by the progressive establishment — capturing sense-making institutions and turning them toward promoting ideologically-driven narratives. The latter predates Trump, is far more consequential, and is propagated primarily by the likes of the NYT and CNN.
So then, to you, what would not be an ideologically-driven narrative?
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Last night I talked to a pretty intelligent female friend of mine about various things, and the subject of how men commit the vast majority of violence came up. She was eager to admit that yes, men do. I pointed out that a subset of men commit the majority of all this violence, and that the men in that subset tend to target men as well as women. She was less eager to admit this, but she went along with it. I then made an analogy to the fact that blacks on average commit more violence than whites do, but it is a subset of blacks who commit the majority of all that violence. She started to question me, wondering whether my evidence such as the FBI crime statistics is trustworthy or not. She's not some naive college student, either. She is over 50 and has been living in the US all her life. But she still has a hard time realizing the to me pretty obvious fact that blacks are on average more violent than whites.
THAT is the power of leftist propaganda.
One might even say the dogma lives loudly in them.
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Unsurprisingly, the FBI has nerfed its crime data under Biden making it much harder to get useful information. So the epistemological situation is only getting worse.
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I love the saying "Trump lies like a used car salesman, Democrats lie like lawyers". Did someone here come up with that? If not, where did it come from?
It perfectly encapsulates the current meta.
Do lawyers lie? They try to craft different narratives with the available facts at hand, sure, but I don’t see that as dishonest.
To me it’s somewhat more dishonest. A lawyer lies by recasting the facts so that they tell the story that best serves his purpose, even when the clearest telling of the facts points in the exact opposite direction. They often do so by leaving out crucial context and details that would lead a neutral observer in the opposite direction, thus making people believe something is true that isn’t.
We’ve all been talking about the Lebanon pager explosions. Some people here have speculated on how it was done and how it might be detected or hidden. And on the political side, I would find it fair to say that the comments on this site have a lean towards conservative and neo-reaction. Now if someone who frequents this site is prosecuted, any good lawyer would have painted this site as a reactionary and even fascist site where terrorism was discussed pretty openly. Ripped from context, as lawyers tend to do, the discussion of how Israel blew up pagers juxtaposed with a bit of juicy reactionary or HBD talk paints a picture of this place as a Proud Boy type site. Left out is the crucial context. It’s against the rules to recruit for any cause, liberals post here fairly often, and the discussion of pager batteries was talking about a news story and discussed by people who work n tech.
Lying by recasting the facts is worse to me because it can cover itself with the veneer of truthfulness. You can cite a fact, and people who check will see that the actual facts cited are true. But stripped of context, the facts tell a very different story than the events they’re used to describe. A lie, on the other hand, is easy enough to sus out. You look it up, and it’s not true at all. And so it doesn’t get deep enough into the culture to affect how we see the world. But tell a sort-of-truth, and your fact-checking will help the narrative stick because it’s not obviously wrong. It’s just not an accurate and honest telling of the facts and designed to elicit a belief that isn’t accurate.
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I suppose you can claim that technically it's not a lie (knowingly putting forward a false statement), but the whole rub is that a lot of people (myself included) see "crafting narratives" as dishonest.
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Yes, lawyers lie. If you knowingly deceive your audience, you are a liar. That counts even if your words can be artfully construed to not be false.
We even created a whole new religion to deal with this hypocrisy. In the time of Jesus, the Pharisees were obsessed with following the letter of the law while neglecting its spirit. We invented the social technology to solve this problem 2000 years ago, but some people still don't get it.
Can't you just say that Trump lies, the democrats deceive, if that's what you mean?
Would fit well with general rightwing memeplex of casting the democrats as the great deceiver(s). It would also be an opportunity to own the fact that Trump lies. Truth or lies isn't the primary issue, it's deception that's the issue (in politics, in news, in science, etc).
The position that you can be a habitual liar without deceiving seems like a difficult needle to thread!
You don't have to do that. You can say that truth isn't a good safeguard against deception, with the biggest deceivers being the ones telling you the "truth".
Lying isn't good but at the end of the day deception is worse. Its kind of like how betrayal is worse than opposition. You don't even have to play defense at all.
Your average democrat might lie less often than Donald Trump but they are much, much more dishonest in my opinion. It’s not even close.
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There is a case to be made that few if any people treat anything Trump says as being on simulacrum level 1. This may be the typical mind fallacy, but if Trump makes noises which sound like a factual statement of the world (i.e. level 1, 'Haitians are eating our pets'), I just don't parse it that way. Likely it is not even level 2 ('I want you to believe that they are eating pets (irrespective if it is true) so that you will vote for me') because that would assume that a significant fraction of listeners will mistake it for a level 1 statement. It is either level 3 ('I am anti-immigrant. Nobody is as anti-immigrant as me!') or level 4 ('I make sounds which I think will help me get elected').
If I am running through the streets saying "The sky is green, plants are orange, Elvis is alive, I am Elvis, 4 is prime, ...", then I an telling a lot of lies, but I will not deceive anyone, because most people will conclude 'based on past statements, that person is so unreliable a source of information that I should not update on their claims'.
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It all comes down to the expectations of both parties.
If there's a street promoter outside of a club trying to convince me to pay a cover fee and go inside he might tell me things like it's the best club, that they have the biggest crowd inside of any bar in the city, everyone's having a great time, probably ever. Yuge night! Maybe they even say that they've heard rumors that there's a movie star who was planning on coming tonight. If I go inside and find it to be not all that, was I decieved? I wouldn't say so, because I was talking to a club promoter; I know what they're like, they know I know what they're like, the expectation was that they would exaggerate everything to try to get me to go inside.
There is a distinction though if they say something like "after you pay the cover fee your first two drinks are free" and it turns out not to be true. Because I don't expect them to be allowed by the bar (to say nothing of the law) to say something like that if it isn't true.
Also, I would consider myself decieved if I (before marriage of course) got in touch with a girl on a dating app and she insisted on meeting me at a club, and I found out after getting there that she was a promoter using the app to bring in clients to the club, even if she never said anything technically untrue. This is the kind of lying I associate in politics with the activists that masquerade as unbiased subject experts.
God. I hate that. I can't function in the presence of promoters like that. I think it's fairly obvious that many people can't. If the advertiser is succeeding at getting people to go inside who otherwise wouldn't, and those people end up disappointed, then he's committing attention fraud against those people. Maybe that's fine and marginal for most people. But williams syndrome-adj ADHDs like moi don't have the spoons or filters to cope with this.
We've taken to pointing at the screen and yelling "Consume product!" every time an advertisement comes on TV in my household to counteract the damage it does to our brains. It's awful. The other scenario is no better to be clear. I have to distance myself from both of those things to function.
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The democrats also just straight up lie a lot. When Harris kept saying “Trump’s Project 2025” that isn’t “technically true but misleading.” That was straight up lying.
I’m not sure it is really fair to say Trump is unique in lying. Where he is probably unique is that when he doesn’t need to lie he exaggerates.
Yeah, they straight-up lie quite a lot actually. Worse, they repeat the same lie so many times that people start to take it for granted as baseline reality, like the “fine people” line. In the debate itself Harris only implied that Trump called neo-nazis fine people by mentioning them right before saying trump said “fine people”, which is not a lie by the barest technicality, but the message rests on ad-nauseam repetition of an actual lie.
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My favorite was the “no US soldiers in an active war-zone” lie. Just a few weeks ago some US Soldier got shot by ISIS.
There was a viral video uploaded basically the same day of the debate that ended up getting millions of views of the debate on TV when she said that, and it pans out to like seven soldiers in a forward operating base being like “Wait… then where the fuck are we right now?”
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Say there are two people. They both meet a guy who is 6’9” (2.05m) tall.
Person A says: “He’s the tallest person I’ve ever seen! Huge guy! At least 7’0” (2.13m) tall!”
Person B says: “He was probably above average height. I’ve seen taller. People before.”
Person A’s answer is a lie. The guy they saw wasn’t quite as tall as they said and it’s probable that they’ve watched a basketball game or a film and have seen a person who is taller than that before.
Person B’s answer is technically correct. They’ve probably seen basketball on TV, they’ve seen extremely tall people before. And the guy they saw was certainly taller than average.
But Person B’s answer is basically dishonest. The guy they saw was indeed extremely tall! They failed to convey that, all while being technically correct.
And Person A’s answer, while a lie, managed to be more accurate and honest assessment of the subject at hand. It was a much better answer if you wanted to know something about the subject.
Given a choice between them, I’d much rather deal with a person A, a liar who is directionally correct, than person B, a person that maybe rarely lies but also rarely conveys any useful information.
Person B’s answer is worse than useless; if taken seriously you would probably come to a conclusion further from the truth than Person A’s answer.
This is a rather simple and direct example but there’s ample situations like this on the real world. There really are a lot of Person B’s in the world, and once you see them you start seeing them everywhere.
Huh, that’s a good point. Thanks, you’ve changed my perspective on this.
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Yes, this is a good way to put it. It's in some ways even worse than that; If a person C turns up, who states that the tall guy looks REALLY tall & wants to measure him, person B has the tendency to first try to stop him, and if successful, to complain that person C makes claims "without evidence".
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It interesting that although we all understand the intended meaning of this expression (and it is true when given the meaning that people expect), it is not an accurate description of how lawyers and used car salesmen lie.
Creating a false belief using a carefully-curated set of technically-true statements is no more effective in an adversarial environment like a courtroom or a negotiation than creating the same false belief using false statements. The normal technique of a lawyer representing a rich-but-obviously-guilty client is to flood the zone with shit. This works best in criminal trials, where if the jury can't understand the case they are supposed to acquit based on reasonable doubt, but it also works in civil trials if the other side can't keep up. Lying by omission is explicitly prohibited in litigation (this is why discovery exists) and in some but not all negotiations.
Used car salesmen working for commercial dealerships, on the other hand, are trying to outnegotiate unsophisticated parties, which is exactly where "lying like a lawyer" is helpful. Making a technically-false statement creates legal risk and isn't necessary if you are good at your job. The people who tell blatant lies when selling used cars are private sellers, who are effectively gone once the cheque clears. Real estate agents are in the same boat - they will tell blatant lies, but they would much rather mislead you in legally safer ways.
So who does lie like Donald Trump? In my experience, the main groups are cheating spouses, toddlers caught with their hands in the cookie jar, and actual conmen. Trump, of course, belongs to at least two of these groups.
Who does "lie like a lawyer?" Well the main group is politicians not called Donald Trump. Politically biased journalists do, as do tendentious academics. Basically, exactly the people who form the "establishment" Trumpism is against. In each case it is because it is a lot easier to work a sympathetic ref if you got caught making a true-but-misleading statement than if you told an outright lie. But working the refs in that way doesn't work on normies, and doesn't work on neutral or unsympathetic refs.
Unfortunately this means that the saying reduces to "Trump lies like Trump, the liberal elite lie like liberal elites." This is tautological, but to someone who has been paying attention it is even truthier than the original. It also avoids calumnising innocent lawyers and used car salesmen by associating them with politicians and journalists.
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The best part about it is that everybody here seems to agree with it, and we're just fighting over which type of lying is better/worse.
Yes, and it also gets at a preference that is more primal than political. Would you prefer to hang out with a lawyer who selects their words carefully or a sales guy who's always bullshitting?
Seems closely related to the old finding from the okcupid blog (here's gwern quoting it, can't find archives of the original right now) that the question "Do you prefer the people in your life to be simple or complex?" is a good predictor of liberal vs. conservative US politics, with "simple" being the conservative answer.
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I said two months ago
I don't recall seeing it formulated close to that before saying that but I absolutely could have, I don't think of it as any kind of personal insight, I see it as trivially derived from other insights I took elsewhere (taking Trump seriously not literally, him talking like New Yorker, being directionally if not literally correct, etc...)
Something only just occurred to me about that. If it's a crime to make an agreement with a bank about the value of your property as collateral, how is it not a crime to straight up lie about the prospects of a startup?
Laws are specific. Laws about lying in the US have to be particularly specific, because the First Amendment protects some, but not all, lies.
There are laws which broadly criminalise lying to federally regulated banks. There are laws that broadly criminalise lying about publically-traded securities. These laws don't apply to private lenders or shares in closely-held companies, where the only lies which are criminal are ones which constitute common-law fraud. (Obviously lying about your startup can reach the level of common-law fruad, as Elizabeth Holmes learned the hard way).
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Lying about “prospects” seems pretty hard to prove because they’re predictions. And founders definitely tend to be a little crazy.
So's estimating the value of an asset. Until you put the asset on the market and find out how much someone is willing to pay, you are only trying to predict what someone is going to be willing to pay for it.
There are certainly tools one can use to have a basis for estimating the value of their assets, but that is also the case for valuing a startup.
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It seems to me that a question we ought asking is "is Trump really lying?". Not in the sense of whether a given statement is false? so much as in the sense of is he really deceiving any one or otherwise behaving dishonestly?
I'm hardly the first person to make this observation but it seems to me that Trump "lies" the way a used car salesman "lies". Sure, he'll tell you that Nissan Altima with bald tires at the back of the lot is a good deal, the best deal even, the sort of deal he wouldn't give his own mother, but if pressed he'll admit that its kind of a shitbox and knock 10 - 20% off the price. Normal people who interact with other normal people on a regular basis get this, they even expect it. After all the salesman's job is to sell things and few working class persons are going to begrudge another working class person for doing thier job.
In contrast a lot of what Trump's opponents seem to do is not "lying" directly in the sense of speaking falshoods so much as they are setting out with a specific intention to push a specific narrative and things like lying through omission, false pretenses, and spreading rumors/hearsay are just tools in the tool box.
There seems to be this belief that so long as you are never actually caught in an outright lie you are by definition a good and honest person. If someone is decieved by your intentional misrepresenting of a fact or lie of omission the culpability is not on you for trying to decieve them, its on them for not being being savvy enough to see through your deception.
I think that what we are seeing now is the downstream effects of this attitude. You see politics is by it's nature a multiple itteration game. Unless your plan is to litteraly exterminate everyone and anyone who might disagree with your policy decisions (and to be fair, a number of regimes have actually tried) you're gonna have to cut a second deal with someone at some point and when you do its only natural that they will factor how the first deal played out into thier calculus.
This is the bit that I think Todd and the wider media/managerial class have failed to recognize or othwerwise factor into thier thinking is that a lot of regular people have come to recognize that they got manipulated and are now on guard against it and rather than solving the (alleged) problem all the talk about how normal people are stupid, easy to manipulate, and need to be saved from themselves for democracy's sake is exacerbating it.
As Instapundit would say, they have chosen the form of thier destructor. For the Ghostbusters it was a marshmallow kaiju, for the beltway it was a reality tv star.
"They're eating the dogs" is a statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners that immigrants are stealing and eating pet dogs. Even if the rumours Trump based the claim on had been true, they were about cats, not dogs.
The fact that Trump doesn't care about the factual truth or falsity of the words that come out of his mouth to the point where he says "dogs" when he could easily have said "cats" and been making a defensible claim about facts that were in dispute at the time is a perfect piece of smoking gun evidence as to what is actually going on. In the Harry Frankfurt sense, Trump is rarely lying but he is constantly bullshitting.
I'm at work at the moment but effortpost to follow.
I assume he thought that was true, though.
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No, it is a statement intended to induce the true belief that at least some immigrants have been stealing and eating pets. More generally it is a signal that he is aware of and willing to give voice to his constituents' concerns.
As @Jiro points out below, normal people arent going to care that the pet in question was somebody's kitten instead of somebody's puppy. If people in the US are eating pets, something has gone wrong.
As i said above...
It seems to me that a question we ought to be asking is "is Trump really lying?". Not in the sense of whether a given statement is true or false, so much as in the sense of is he really deceiving anyone or otherwise behaving dishonestly?
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Oh, come on!
- Did you hear about the Haitians eating people's dogs in Ohio?
- Don't say that! This is a completely false statement, spread by bigots!
- Oh shit! Sorry, I didn't know.
- Yeah... everybody knows they're eating cats, not dogs.
In this case it's "'they're eating the dogs' is a statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners" that is a false statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners, and this is precisely why people have had it with "lying like a lawyer" types.
You take a sentence I posted out of context (I go on to point out that bullshit is a better framework for this type of statement than lies), and respond with a bunch of barely-parseable word salad that looks like (and is, when finally parsed) an allegation of dishonesty, and you accuse me of lying like a lawyer?
Trump said that immigrants in Ohio were eating dogs and cats. As a result of him saying this, some of his target audience of low-information swing voters now believe that immigrants in Ohio are eating dogs and cats, and are therefore more likely to cast an anti-immigration vote at the election in November. Generating this change in belief was a major purpose of making the statement. Given background that motteposters know and the debate audience probably didn't, the fact that Trump said "dogs" and not "cats" may reveal interesting information about his thought processes that I hope to elaborate on in a later effortpost.
I am making the conjunction of the above claims, with the intention that they be taken seriously and literally. If you disagree with me about the facts, the spirit of this board is that you should identify the claim you disagree with rather than spewing insinuations.
But the lying part is where you impart a false belief into an audience. And Lawyer lying does much the same in a much more insidious way. Telling people that people in Ohio are having their pets or geese or whatever is obviously on its face false. But the reverse, that the integration of 20K Haitians into a town of 40K is going just fine, actually is also false and based on cherry-picked good reports (for example the factory owner saying that the Haitians are hard workers, which likely elides labor issues like wages and working conditions that the natives didn’t like) or the lack of reporting of things like crime, education strain (this town likely needs a whole lot of resources because they suddenly need to educate a bunch of ESL students who speak French) traffic congestion and accidents. Sure you can say that these aren’t serious problems and if you cherry-pick just right, you can get “Fact Check: True”. but you’re spinning the situation in a dishonest way to get people to believe what you want them to believe. Trumps lies are less sophisticated, but I contend that both are lies, and it doesn’t stop being a lie just because you happen to be using manipulated facts and statistics to tell the narrative you want people to believe in.
This is why I tend to be much more skeptical of the second sort of narrative than the first. Make no mistake, both are ultimately lies and meant to deceive an audience. But for all the faults Trump’s style of lying has, it’s easy enough to detect and therefore ultimately less harmful to the body politic than the kind of lying where it’s manipulated facts and thus hard to attack and debunk. That means the damage done will be harder to undo (especially since doing so is “racist conspiracy theories,” and thus impossible to bring up in polite society.
Finely tuned deceitful narratives deliver much more information and can be nitpicked with fruitful results. Importantly there is a shame+update mechanism whenever sophisticated lies become too obvious. Whereas pure Trumpian bullshit must be simply ignored. There is no path to anything better, if we allow it to dominate public discourse.
Update? Maybe, but only in the "abandon the indefensible position!" sense. Where exactly have you seen shame?
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I'll step in here and say it a little more clearly: Nobody beyond the lizardman constant thinks there's any meaningful difference between immigrants eating cats and immigrants eating dogs. Saying that "it's really cats, not dogs, so Trump is a liar" is itself lying like a lawyer because you are nitpicking a detail that nobody cares about in order to attack Trump. It doesn't matter that "dogs" is literally false if the truth makes no substantive difference.
It's like going into a restaurant and complaining "this food tastes like sewage", then getting told that you're a liar because the food doesn't taste like sewage, it tastes like feces, so tasting like sewage is a literally false belief.
This isn't a perfect analogy, because feces is a major constituent of sewage, and indeed is a large part of what makes sewage noxious. I don't know how one would taste the difference between sewage and feces, whereas is an obvious meaningful difference between cats and dogs - try throwing sticks for a cat to fetch. What you mean is that there is no difference in the political impact, if true, of immigrants eating cats and immigrants eating dogs. You are obviously correct about this, possible quibbles about traditional Korean or Vietnamese cuisine notwithstanding. If the immigrants were, in fact, eating cats, then you could call "they're eating the dogs" directionally correct, but that appears to be a Motte-specific usage and truthy is what most very online people would call it.
But in an environment where people care about the factual truth and falsity of statements and not just the political impact, a cat is not a dog. If you report a cat theft to the police and it turns out that the missing animal was actually a dog, you are going to get in trouble for, yes, lying. Trump could have misspoken, but saying "dog" when you mean "cat" isn't a particularly common mistake. If Trump meant to say "dog" when the social media posts he was signal-boosting said "cat" because he didn't care about the difference this says something about his communication style - namely that he is 100% concerned about the political impact of statements and 0% concerned about their factual content. If the ratio was 90-10 like it is for most politicians, he would have said "cat" because, as you point out, "they're eating the cats" is no less politically impactful than "they're eating the dogs".
There is a saying which people use to acknowledge that they are mainly concerned about the political impact of statements vs their factual content: "it has the added advantage of being true". Based on Trump's beliefs at the time, he had the opportunity to make a politically advantageous claim that had the added advantage of being true, and didn't take it. Given the discussion on this thread, there is a non-zero number of people for whom this is a positive signal - Trump is implicitly saying "I am not like those smarty-pants intellectuals who care about the factual accuracy of sufficiently truthy political claims."
I explicitly didn't call Trump a "liar". We all agree that what is going on is more complex than that. The whole point of this thread is to discuss how a man whose statements frequently evaluate as "false" when parsed using standard English grammar has a reputation as a straight talker among his supporters. I am proposing that "bullshit" is a better framework for understanding it than "liar".
That's another version of the same nitpick. If you like, make it "this food tastes like feces" and "this food tastes like rotten skunk vomit".
There is not a meaningful difference between cats and dogs in this context, even if there is a meaningful difference when you're reporting a missing one to the police.
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