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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   39154 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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Do we still talk about Scott's articles on this site?

He has a new one out about Conflict Theory vs. Mistake Theory.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-i-am-not-a-conflict-theorist

The general thrust of his argument is that conflict theory doesn't explain voting patterns because people vote against their self-interest. For example, rich elites are generally in favor of raising taxes, which affect them disproportionately. And it was young people, not vulnerable old people, who were more likely to be lockdown fascists during Covid.

But I'm not sure if this adequately explains conflict vs. mistake theory. Conflict theory is inherently tribal, and people will do things against their own self-interest, even their tribal self-interest, to own the other tribe. Dunking on the other team is its own reward, moreso than actual spoils.

Nevertheless, I remain a mistake theorist. More of the modern world developed by accident than by scheming. For example, take immigration. Clearly, this is an area of heated tribal conflict now. But it wasn't always this way. When the US opened up the current era of mass immigration in the mid-1960s, it wasn't an effort to change the ethnic makeup or import voters. At the time, demographers projected that there would be 400,000 immigrants a year, of whom 367,000 would be white! In other words, they were spectacularly wrong.

The rewrite of our country's genetic makeup happened by accident while no one was looking.

Gay rights is another area where mistake theory wins. Clearly there was a lot of conflict in this area. But then, something happened around 2010 and one side just stopped fighting. A new consensus emerged: "Love wins. People are born that way. Queer people just want to be tolerated. They don't want to shove it in our face. They just want to love their partners the same way that straight people do. They definitely won't try to convert kids." And within 15 years, almost everything about this consensus was proven wrong. Even if you think this was the plan of the gay movement all along, it still doesn't explain why Republicans went along for the ride. You might say... they were mistaken.

Sports gambling? Mistake theory.

Marijuana legalization? Mistake theory.

De-policing? Mistake theory.

People generally aren't trying to mess things up. They are just wrong about the consequences of their ideas. Sure, there are like 5 or 10% of people who are true radicals who want to destroy society and will lie to achieve their means. But the average politician or corporate leader just doesn't understand how the world works. They'll buy a load of horseshit because it sounds good and it gratifies their ego. The world changes when wrong ideas face no resistance.

To me the post just reinforces/highlights Scott's increasing provincialism. The whole "what's the matter with Kansas" call and response has been done to death but here comes scott to take another whack at the horse's carcass.

I find it mighty white of Scott to just presume that he understands people's interests better than they do and to presume that material interests/conflicts are the only legitimate ones worth examining.

He clearly couldn't be bothered to acknowledge much less engage with anyone outside his affluent blue/grey tribe academic bubble because if he did premises like poor people believing that socialism is good (regardless of whether that belief is as Scott alleges "correct") would fall apart. Eg ask a typical working class guy what he thinks of specific socialist policies, or ask an immigrant from a socialist country why they moved to the US, and then try to square thier answers with Scott's model of Conflict vs Mistake theory without flipping a bunch of +/- signs and tying the model in knots.

I think you'll find that a lot of your other examples, gambling, weed, "de-policing" etc... follow the same pattern. As do Scott's, the SALT cap and Vaccines aren't nearly the "Own" he seems to think they are if you're remotely familiar with the background.

A new consensus emerged: "Love wins. People are born that way. Queer people just want to be tolerated. They don't want to shove it in our face. They just want to love their partners the same way that straight people do. They definitely won't try to convert kids." And within 15 years, almost everything about this consensus was proven wrong.

Uh, how? Are you talking about trans stuff?

My understanding is that the median male homosexual does not "love their partner" in the same way that I do. It's now been admitted that "born that way" was a convenient lie which will now be discarded. LGBT as an ideological movement definitely wants to shove their ideology in my face. And they will in fact try to convert kids; at a minimum, "an unspecified but large percentage of kids are actually LGBTQ+ in their core nature, and helping them discover this through incessant, inescapable indoctrination from every level of society is a good thing". I understand that others might disagree with these statements, but I'm confident I can back all of them with solid evidence.

OK, that all sounds pretty wild to me and doesn't fit what I've observed, but you do you.

It fits pretty well with what I've seen. States will take your son away and have him castrated and call it gender affirming.

But that's mostly gynosupremacist feminist straight women doing that. "Protecting the gays" is just the excuse.

Is it your understanding that the median male homosexual is monogamous and interested in raising children? Is it your understanding that Homosexuality is genetic and fixed? Those seem like two obvious factual questions to start off with.

I mean I think I'm convinced simply by my conversations with a few gay men IRL (plus some science) that "born this way" is a legitimate thing, at least for homosexuality. There are other things that play into it, of course. But it explains mostly to my satisfaction the appearance of gay men historically, there's some suggestion that you're more likely to be "born gay" when born later in the birth order as well. I think it's important to distinguish this aspect of the gay rights movement from other more ideological LGBT stuff (speaking broadly). They have different paradigms going on both in terms of the science as well as the political/ideological piece.

However I don't think I have a large enough sample size to make any particular claims about long term male homosexual relationships. My general feeling is that they still have some kind of desire for lifelong commitment though?

My understanding is that the median male homosexual does not "love their partner" in the same way that I do.

What does this mean?

For one example, my understanding is that the median male homosexual does not practice monogamy and is not interested in raising children. Is your understanding otherwise?

That has more to do with the fact that they’re men than the fact that they’re gay. Male homosexuality is simply male sexuality that doesn’t have to deal with women. How many straight men would practice monogamy if they could have unlimited sex on demand simply by going on an app?

Despite that, there’s still a sizeable proportion of gay men that choose monogamy and raising children, hence the demand for gay marriage and surrogacy.

That has more to do with the fact that they’re men than the fact that they’re gay.

How do we reconcile the concept of the Patriarchy with evident longstanding social norms of enforced monogamy?

Male homosexuality is simply male sexuality that doesn’t have to deal with women. How many straight men would practice monogamy if they could have unlimited sex on demand simply by going on an app?

I'm also a man. My "love for my partner" is founded on monogamy and raising children. I agree that "male sexuality that doesn't have to deal with women" is probably a pretty good explanation for many of the features of male homosexual norms that we can observe. But the fact remains that my relationship with my partner is in fact built around "dealing with women", and one woman in particular, and that as a consequence their "love for their partner" and mine do not appear to be the same sort of thing at all.

Despite that, there’s still a sizeable proportion of gay men that choose monogamy and raising children, hence the demand for gay marriage and surrogacy.

What proportion? 51%? 25%? 10%? 5%? less?

I would contend that the previous effort was to try to create the impression that monogamy and raising children, among other signifiers of "normality", were in fact 50%+. That this was only achievable by lying shamelessly is my point.

How do we reconcile the concept of the Patriarchy with evident longstanding social norms of enforced monogamy?

How do you mean? Traditional monogamy is very advantageous for average men, who might not be able to get a partner in a polygamous society where the richest/highest status men have multiple wives.

their "love for their partner" and mine do not appear to be the same sort of thing at all.

I’m bisexual and if your love for your partner is founded on monogamy and raising children, then fair, it’s not the same as mine. Mine is founded on deep affection for my partner, feeling like an “us” like we’re together through thick and thin, feeling comfortable revealing our most intimate parts to each other. Deeply caring for them even if they become ill, even if we never have children together (although that would sadden me), even if we agree to have an open relationship (although I’m personally more monogamous, it might change say, 5y+ into a relationship).

What proportion? 51%? 25%? 10%? 5%?

According to this survey, 53% of gay men were in a relationship, and 14% of gay men were in a strictly monogamous relationship. I don’t see why the numbers matter, even if there was only a single homosexual couple out there we should still accept them.

I would contend that the previous effort was to try to create the impression that monogamy and raising children, among other signifiers of "normality", were in fact 50%+. That this was only achievable by lying shamelessly is my point.

That’s not what I personally heard, the messaging I got was that it’s fine for gay men to have relationships and to raise children together.

Gay men have been having anonymous promiscuous sex even in the most repressive societies. What would you gain by removing the social acceptance of homosexual relationships and gay marriage?

Traditional monogamy is very advantageous for average men, who might not be able to get a partner in a polygamous society where the richest/highest status men have multiple wives.

Why have wives at all? Prostitution is the oldest profession, after all, and is another example of pursuing male sexuality "without having to deal with women". And yet, monogamy.

...My point is that large portions of the male population have, for a long time and across a wide area, not optimized for maximizing sexual expression "without having to deal with women." This makes them notably distinct from male homosexual behavior, at least in our present context.

I’m bisexual and if your love for your partner is founded on monogamy and raising children, then fair, it’s not the same as mine.

My love for my partner does not begin and end with monogamy and raising children. Rather, monogamy and raising children are two emergent properties of our love. I likewise feel "deep affection" for my partner, am "committed to them through thick and thin", and "feel comfortable revealing our most intimate parts to each other". But these are just words, and I did not use them because I am not confident that they convey the essence. Caring for them if they become ill is more concrete. Continuing the relationship even if we never have children would likewise be more concrete, but my wife's desire for children is considerable, and I went into the marriage with the full understanding that if we could not have them ourselves that we would adopt or foster. But then:

even if we agree to have an open relationship (although I’m personally more monogamous, it might change say, 5y+ into a relationship).

We are committed to not changing in this way. We are committed to working, daily, to ensure that this does not happen, to binding our future selves to our present decisions. And again, it seems to me that there is a fundamental difference here. I think we would each agree that sex is not a small part of a relationship, but it is obvious that we do not agree about what sex is, how it works, or what consequences flow from it. I intend to be married to my wife for as long as we both shall live, to cleave to her and to no other. My community has an abundance of couples who have been married 30, 40, 50 years, and more whose marriages were ended only by death. Is that the sort of relationship you believe you have? Is it the sort of marriage common within your dunbar number?

According to this survey, 53% of gay men were in a relationship, and 14% of gay men were in a strictly monogamous relationship. I don’t see why the numbers matter, even if there was only a single homosexual couple out there we should still accept them.

The numbers matter because we are, necessarily, speaking in generalities. The gay community is not typified by two men in a committed long-term relationship. It is typified by, to put it mildly, extreme promiscuity and a degree of sexual license that would horrify the average American if they were aware of it. That is why so much effort was expended to ensure that the average American would instead form the belief that Homosexual relationships were functionally identical to straight ones, when this is in fact not true.

I would agree that to the extent that homosexual relationships conform to my understanding of what a good relationship is, my objections to them decrease.

That’s not what I personally heard, the messaging I got was that it’s fine for gay men to have relationships and to raise children together.

Yes, in a context where "relationship" is assumed to be, at worst, serial monogamy. The large majority of gay men are not participating in this sort of relationship, and likewise (mercifully) are not raising children.

Gay men have been having anonymous promiscuous sex even in the most repressive societies.

And Christians have continued practicing Christianity in even the most repressive societies. It is becoming increasingly clear which of these is preferred, and by who.

What would you gain by removing the social acceptance of homosexual relationships and gay marriage?

What do they and their supporters gain by removing the social acceptance of Christianity? I was all for tolerance, when I still believed that tolerance was a moral precept. Now that I understand that it is not, and now that I understand that many of them very clearly believe that coexistence is neither desirable nor possible, it seems proper that I and people like me should organize to better preserve our values and interests. Part of that is acquiring and communicating a clear understanding of who is across the table from us. To bring this back to the comment that brought me into this discussion:

Love wins.

"Love" is underdefined.

People are born that way.

No, they probably are not.

Queer people just want to be tolerated.

This may be true for specific individual queer people. It is certainly not true of the ideological movement claiming to speak for them. That ideology has moved past toleration to approval, and past approval to attempting to force participation.

They don't want to shove it in our face.

Again, the ideological movement very clearly prioritizes "shoving it in our faces" at every possible opportunity.

They just want to love their partners the same way that straight people do.

Speaking in generalities, no, "they" do not. Gay sexuality bears little to no resemblance to straight sexuality, in practices or in consequences.

They definitely won't try to convert kids.

This one is the real kicker, and where much of the debate centers. Let us say, at least, that they are very, very interested in securing and exercising as much control over children's education and understanding of sexuality as possible, and that the more kids begin identifying and acting in LGBT ways, the happier the movement is, without apparent limit or restraint.

More comments

How do we reconcile the concept of the Patriarchy with social norms of enforced monogamy?

Just like when it's a Matriarchy; the only difference is which gender gets the better deal by default in the divorce (if it's a Patriarchy, the man comes out ahead, vice versa for women under Matriarchy).

My "love for my partner" is founded on monogamy and raising children

Yes, marriage is the oldest and most respected form of professional agreement: sex for resources. Some people do describe that as love, and I have no reason to believe they are not telling the truth. It is the optimal arrangement for some, likely most, people- and this is how negotiations between husband and wife should function provided both are conducting themselves with the proper amount of self-interest.

The ultimate problem with gay couples is that no such agreement can exist due to them both being the gender that provides resources. Naturally, they cannot be strongly bound to each other. Lesbians have that problem as well- they both have a surplus of sex, so how will they obtain resources? And don't get me started on the people who forsake their natural strengths to the point they cut them off.

All of those relationships can't produce children while still qualifying as monogamy, since sex is when you implant, or run the risk of implanting, one participant's sperm into the other's egg. So, if the sperm or egg come from outside the relationship that means, on its face, it is not monogamous (and claims that it remains so are a farce).

and that as a consequence their "love for their partner" and mine do not appear to be the same sort of thing at all.

No- in the context of "marriage" I think they're very similar. Lesbian "marriages" are less stable than straight ones due to lack of resources and initiative, whereas gay "marriages" are more stable than straight ones due to more of those things- proving that at the end of the day, it is the resources and the proper management thereof that keeps the family together.

I think mistake theory more specifically applies to current progressives and the social left, whereas conflict theory generally applies more to conservatives and the right. In reality, both exist. I believe conservatives are more correct in their approach to the inescapable reality that conflict is inevitable. Even the social left with their utopia-seeking plans often concede that they will need to get through some sort of conflict before they can implement their utopia. With that said, I am not a huge fan of the right wing segment that seems to happily embrace conflict.

Overall, it is a mixture of the theories. Conflict isn’t the result of some grand evil plan, but a natural consequence of competing interests, resources, and shifting circumstances. It is unavoidable. Progressives really buy into the idea that they get a get out of moral jail free card if their intentions are good, even if their ideas create problems. Conservatives, on the other hand, largely accept the unavoidable and attempt to address issues in a realistic, sometimes amoral way that does not interface well into the liberal-progressive framework that is deeply programmed into most of us Westerners. You cannot win rhetorically as a conservative once you start admitting what harsh reality needs to be done to fix problems. The only way to win as a conservative currently is to let the bad ideas of the left reach their logical conclusions, then present those receipts to the public after the damage has been done.

Mistake theory definitely explains the left's drawbacks in the current era, and I think it greatly affected the 2024 election.

I believe conservatives are more correct in their approach to the inescapable reality that conflict is inevitable.

This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If two conflict-theorists disagree, there will be conflict. It's very easy to assume the other side is full of shit and acting in bad faith, and acting as if they are gives you an advantage in the conflict that you are helping to create.

If two mistake-theorists disagree, maybe there will be conflict, maybe there won't, partially depending on how committed they are to mistake theory. It's very hard to put in the effort to find the often-very-nuanced sources of error in your two world models, and assuming the other side is putting in that effort in good faith when they're not puts you at a disadvantage if they end up starting a conflict.

Overall, it is a mixture of the theories.

Both conflict theory and mistake theory bring advantages and disadvantages, largely depending on what the other side chooses to do. Any group needs people with both approaches. The hard part is deciding who to listen to when so you win inevitable conflicts but don't create unnecessary conflicts. There's lessons from game theory there, but everything from above also applies to this decision. Conflict theorists get the advantage when they create the conflict, so they will create it, as dutiful servants to Moloch.

This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I think you are correct, but as I said I think conflict is inevitable whether the sides prophesize about it or not. The extent and magnitude of conflict can be mitigated but it cannot be avoided. I don't want to project any sort of tough guy attitude, or the idea that people should engage in conflict. I also don't want to promote any sort of paranoid conflict theory. I just believe that circumstances will eventually dictate that conflict happens, even if no one actively wants it.

I am completely on board with mitigation, along with more people embracing a mistake-theorist lean over the conflict theory lean. I just have a fundamental belief that some of what occurs, even conflict, is a matter of circumstance and our nature which are simply baked into reality. It seems to me that the dominant Western policy mindset is heavily saturated with mistake-theory thinking, which ironically has created an environment that’s actually more prone to conflict. Some of these left-leaning policies and ideas (particularly the social ones) are driven by utopian assumptions that ignore structural realities. The effect that has had on our institutions and social cohesion have become pretty evident in my opinion.

It’s not the best analogy, but I always think of it: When shit was hitting the fan in 2020 people made a run for bulk items, especially toilet paper. It was absurd to watch people panic buy toilet paper of all things, but it didn’t matter how rational or calm any individual person was. Once enough people started stockpiling the shelves were empty and at that point even the most reasonable, community-minded person had to join in if they wanted to avoid being left without.

The point I’m trying to make is that some conflicts work the same way. You can personally favor cooperation, good faith, and compromise but once a critical mass of people (on either side) start treating the situation as a conflict, you’re pulled into that dynamic whether you want to be or not.

You don’t have to want conflict, or even believe in conflict theory, for conflict to find you. It’s not always a prophecy sometimes it’s just how cascading events play out when people act in self-interest under uncertainty.

Marijuana legalization? Mistake theory.

Look, I don’t like pot. I think it has ruinous long term effects and personality changes that a fifth of whiskey doesn’t. But I also just don’t like fucking hippies and think they need to be beaten by the police. At least a good third of my opposition to just legalizing and taxing the stuff is because I don’t like the people that do it.

I think it has ruinous long term effects and personality changes that a fifth of whiskey doesn’t.

I have seen plenty of people who make me seriously question if alcohol is a form of literal demonic possession.

lol

I have to admit I was pro marijuana legalization when the only people I knew who did it were me and my nerdy Internet friends. It was like some quiet patrician indulgence.

Then I moved to a place where it's been legal for decades and people in the rest of the country moved to almost entirely because it was legal there and I'm ready to turn into a Reagan Republican wrt weed.

I could probably say this about a lot of topics. The Beatles? Great music and I enjoyed listening to them. And I'm ready to never hear a Beatles song ever again and talking about the Beatles should be a ticket for a first offense. Beatles fans ruin me on the Beatles.

I could imagine being gay. Even living in a Chelsea high rise with a rotation of young twinks and staying up until 8am at chemsex or circuit parties. Seems fine. But spending any time walking around in the Castro makes me want gayness criminalized.

I'm in favor of a lot of progressive ideas until I realize how unlike the median progressive I actually am

It took 7 years, but it's finally starting to feel normal again here since legalisation. I think it helps that it was the whole country at once, so there was no effect of attracting all the stoners to one area, but I rarely smell weed anymore in the streets or parks, it no longer feels transgressive to just be able to smoke weed so people seem to know to keep it to themselves now. As for the commercialization, I guess the government taking care of the sales has the benefit of the stores looking nice and neat, rather than like head shops.

Do you think going to an anti-weed position would lose some of the young men the GOP has recently picked up?

Almost certainly

@Lomez had a good take on this, saying "Legal gray areas are good, actually".

Our rules-obsessed culture seems to have little space between "totally banned" and "fully commercialized and celebrated". But there are lots of things that belong in a third category: "grudgingly tolerated".

Vices belong in that third category.

Marijuana legalization has been a disaster. We have ugly dispensaries and billboards everywhere and consumption of marijuana has skyrocketed. I don't even think it's reduced violent crime. Near me, in Seattle, the areas around dispensaries attract the worst people and there have been murders nearby.

We were better off when you had to get some bullshit certificate from a fake doctor and then grow your own weed. Or just get it illegally with the understanding that the cops probably wouldn't bust you unless you were doing something else annoying.

Marijuana legalization has been a disaster. We have ugly dispensaries and billboards everywhere and consumption of marijuana has skyrocketed. I don't even think it's reduced violent crime. Near me, in Seattle, the areas around dispensaries attract the worst people and there have been murders nearby.

As someone who lives in a weed-legal state (Oregon), I disagree with this. A couple reasons:

  1. The weed market is currently crashing hard. The gold rush is over, dispensaries are failing left and right, and weed farms are hugely overproducing leading to incredibly low prices. In 5 years there will be a LOT less dispensaries, billboards, etc.

  2. A significant cause of violence at dispensaries is that the bank/credit card companies will not service dispensaries because of federal laws. This means that dispensaries are forced to work in cash and that makes them juicy targets for robberies. There's nothing about weed stores that's inherently violence-causing besides this; even consuming the product makes you less violent. If the federal legal complications get cleaned up (aka we get federal legalization) most of the issues with crime and violence will dissolve. And it has, in fact, reduced violent crime by eliminating the black market trade.

That being said, I agree with Lomez about this more generally and am firmly against legalization of all other drugs (holy shit legalizing meth and opiates has been a disaster).

Good points all around.

This means that dispensaries are forced to work in cash and that makes them juicy targets for robberies. There's nothing about weed stores that's inherently violence-causing besides this;

In my neighborhood, there's another issue, which is that shitheads tend to congregate around the large pot shop (which is also a liquor store). So there is lots of crime nearby. Unclear if crime would decrease if the shop vanished, or if the shitheads would just congregate somewhere else. Either way, you don't want these places in your neighborhood.

Up here they're all in downmarket strip malls or one of those parking-lot-and-two-buildings compounds right off a state route. Nobody would tolerate them in a neighborhood, despite something like 80% of them voting to legalize it...

Our rules-obsessed culture seems to have little space between "totally banned" and "fully commercialized and celebrated". But there are lots of things that belong in a third category: "grudgingly tolerated".

There's another "third" category: fully commercialized but not celebrated. Nobody cares what kind of shampoo I use or what snacks I eat at home, and I can buy what I want when I want, for the most part. I'm also not pushing my choices in your face.

I don't know how much weed culture is inherent to the product vs cultivated through the isolation of decades of being illegal. If we have decades of it being legal, will weed culture disappear? If you live in a small apartment, smoking weed in your home is necessarily making everyone else in your building smell it, unlike most of my shampoo and snacks, so maybe there is always stigma that then attracts "the worst people" who don't mind the stigma.

There's another "third" category: fully commercialized but not celebrated. Nobody cares what kind of shampoo I use or what snacks I eat at home, and I can buy what I want when I want, for the most part. I'm also not pushing my choices in your face.

Those things are still heavily advertised.

I don't think weed commercials about how fun and empowering it might be (which I've seen for cleaning and food products) really fits "only begrudgingly tolerated" as OP imagines it

There's exceptions, but most ads don't define people's identity. If we want something that's legal but non-intrusive, shampoo seems like a good enough model.

I think OP wants something like legal but shamed. Given the tendency to want to make bad things illegal, I don't know if that's a stable category. Given the influential weed culture that already exists, I don't know if either legal-but-non-intrusive or legal-but-shamed are really options.

If we have decades of it being legal, will weed culture disappear?

With less than a decade of it being legal in Canada, yes, I believe so to some extent. It took some time because of the "exhuberant release" of legalization lasted a little while, but I rarely smell it in public anymore. In the first year of so, stoners would just smoke anywhere, including places that explicitly disallowed cigarettes, but now I rarely smell it in public. Once in a while you see some guy who thinks he's being super stealthy at a show/event with his THC vape, but you also see that with nicotine vapes.

I remember the memes showing Seattle's Space Needle on a foggy day as "the first day of legalization" so I guess that has calmed down. But I also mean how casual is the average user? How much does using it define your social circle and your free time activities?

I remember the memes showing Seattle's Space Needle on a foggy day as "the first day of legalization"

I still make that joke; I don't really smoke weed, but I appreciate that at any time I could choose to.

It's not "grudgingly tolerated" if it's illegal; it's banned. If you have to commit some sort of fraud to do it, it's banned. If you have to rely on the cops not busting you because they don't feel like it, it's banned.

legal for decades

In no place in the country has recreational use been legal for more than thirteen years. Are you including medicinal uses, or lumping them together? I could see the argument, but there's a difference between finding a doc-in-a-box to write you an anxiety script and simply rolling down to the corner weed store on a whim.

I'm including medicinal use where it was basically a joke to get a card and grow absurdly large bushes in your back yard for "personal use" that were obviously being sold.

Yeah, it seems like a shallow argument. I stand by the comment I left below it -

I think your argument about vaccines disregards the way in which the culture war eats everything. Being pro/anti-vaccines is not necessarily about vaccines - if the pro-vaccine position wins, that's a step towards the Red Tribe being demoralised and feeling that it is not worth fighting for anything because they will expend effort and lose anyway, and if the anti-vaccine position wins, that's a step towards the mirrored situation.

The common commentary all the way back in 2016 that said Trump's election will "embolden racists" had figured out this dynamic on an intuitive level. If you believe that we are tumbling towards an equilibrium where there is no fine-grained object-level policy debate but only an "emboldened" side that gets everything and a "demoralised" side that submits and saves whatever remaining energy it has to plot an overthrow, then anything that "emboldens" the side whose dictate is a bit more in your interest is itself in your interest, to a first approximation.

Generally, I am saddened by the way in which Scott's blogging has degraded since the move to Substack. A big part of his appeal used to be that he was a fairly thorough or at least balanced thinker, and generally anticipated and addressed the best counterarguments to his theses even when the counterarguments were banned from polite discourse (the "$minority is getting worse SAT scores... why could this be? By elimination it must be racism! Or does anyone want to come forward with other ideas? ;)" pattern). He seems to have largely given this up in favour of the standard American pundit playbook where you produce a steady stream of slick essays arguing for one or another aspect of your agenda by setting up show matches against strawmen of competing proposals, seemingly optimised for a usage pattern like "RT: Here's the always brilliant @ScottAlexander thoroughly debunking #ConflictTheory. Can we finally move on yet".

I think your argument about vaccines disregards the way in which the culture war eats everything. Being pro/anti-vaccines is not necessarily about vaccines - if the pro-vaccine position wins, that's a step towards the Red Tribe being demoralised and feeling that it is not worth fighting for anything because they will expend effort and lose anyway, and if the anti-vaccine position wins, that's a step towards the mirrored situation.

Sounds like sanewashing.

Who would be sanewashing what?

(I think most instances of "sanewashing" are in fact also in service of this manner of culture warring - if the crazies on your side win, that's good because it demoralises the outgroup)

Wholeheartedly agree. I don't know what happened but I can barely even finish an article these days and I stopped paying him after the first year was up. It seems like there's a lot of "own-side" bias creeping in but also just some amount of laziness. Your point about straw-men hits, that's something I see a lot of lately. Maybe it's bad incentives? A different type of audience and audience capture? I'm really at a loss, but I've definitely lost a lot of interest in what Scott has to say these past few years.

To paraphrase some musician somewhere: "Everyone has some music in them. Some have a little. Some have a lot. But at some point it all gets used up."

Scott's music is used up. Gone are the anni mirabiles of the past. His articles now have a perfunctory quality. Ironically, during his great years he toiled in obscurity whereas now he is rich and celebrated.

But he doesn't owe anyone anything and we should be glad for what we got.

All of the examples that you list have the culture-war-equivalent of an entire army (NGOs, legal funds, press outlets, media strategies etc.) mobilized to do battle for them.

People generally aren't trying to mess things up. They are just wrong about the consequences of their ideas

Okay, but in what way is this not a conflict? The Communists

  1. very clearly bought into conflict theory - a class struggle!
  2. Definitely were wrong about the consequences of their ideas
  3. Definitely thought they were making the world a better and brighter place through conflict.

It's not particularly comforting to have someone explain to you that they are doing this for the greater good as they level a Tokarev at the back of your head. "This is all a big misunderstanding!" is what a lot of people thought right before being executed.

And while, thank God, we are not so far gone today, you see this in contemporary politics too, whether it's tearing down heteronormativity or "owning the libs." Mistake and conflict aren't diametrically opposed, they feed into each other.

But the average politician or corporate leader just doesn't understand how the world works.

The average politician is, I think, well aware that creating conflict is better for their electoral chances.

Definitely were wrong about the consequences of their ideas

i.e. made a mistake

I feel like conflict vs mistake is poorly named. I don't think anyone disagrees that there's conflict, the question is whether the conflict is due to a difference in understanding of how the world works (mistake theory) or a fundamental difference in values (conflict theory).

There's conflict in both cases, but one side is named "conflict theory".

Theoretically, if you could convince communists that that their ideas would almost certainly lead to poverty and struggle for everyone that they'd stop being communists. They think conflict is necessary, but they only think that conflict is necessary because they think economic wealth is being stolen by the capitalist owner class, and that it's possible to redistribute that wealth more equally without causing economic catastrophe.

Most people who self-identify as communists are firmly in the conflict theory camp. They don't just misunderstand how the world work, they do not just misunderstand capitalism, they also think:

  • US government and more specifically CIA is behind every setback the labor movement experienced in 20th century.
  • Astroturfing, infiltration, wrecking is everywhere and the movement has to be diligent to preserve the ideological purity
  • Everyone who disagrees with them hasn't read Marx.
  • Everyone who disagrees with Marx is an enemy, regardless of whether they are a capitalist or a proletarian.

You can't really convince someone who has built mental walls around their belief that the only salvation for our world is the revolution. This isn't a rational belief.

due to a difference in understanding of how the world works (mistake theory) or a fundamental difference in values (conflict theory).

And, again, those seem to play into each other, I would suggest. Our understanding of how the world works and our values play into each other, each informing and shaping the other.

More of the modern world developed by accident than by scheming.

I don't believe this. Things happen because people want them to happen, and work to make them happen. The things that are exempt from this are volcanic eruptions, divine wind, hurricanes, and so on. Given weather modification abilities that we've known about for decades, even that might not be excluded. It's not things like the law didn't work as intended. The reason why laws don't work as intended is because people see the loopholes or fringes and choose to act on them. That's deliberate, if not on the part of the lawmakers.

For example, take immigration. Clearly, this is an area of heated tribal conflict now. But it wasn't always this way. When the US opened up the current era of mass immigration in the mid-1960s, it wasn't an effort to change the ethnic makeup or import voters.

I will grant that they didn't intend to change the ethnic makeup, but I won't grant that nobody intended to change the racial makeup. There are NGOs and mules and desperate third-worlders who are actively participating in the world and doing things with intention and purpose. This is not accident, and it is not mistake.

The rewrite of our country's genetic makeup happened by accident while no one was looking.

It happened on purpose, while the people who were supposed to be in charge weren't looking. Someone noticed the law and applied it in a way the legislature didn't intend, but it wasn't an accident, it was people choosing to act.

But then, something happened around 2010 and one side just stopped fighting. A new consensus emerged

This is a textbook case of the power of propaganda and manufacturing consent. Deliberate, not accidental. These messages were promulgated by people who chose to do so. It's not some accident.

You might say... they were mistaken.

They were mistaken in that they took the arguments seriously on their merits, instead of viewing them as useful stepping-stones that their opponents would abandon once achieved. The people who assume mistake losing to the people assuming conflict is not mistake theory, it's conflict theory.

They are just wrong about the consequences of their ideas.

And why are they wrong? Why are they wrong in the same direction, to the benefit of the same party? Because when you walk into a conflict and think there are simple disagreements, you will be manipulated and made the fool.

There's no mistake theory is chimps. There's no mistake theory among wolf packs. There is conflict.

I think that mistake theory and conflict theory are far too simplistic ways of viewing the world, and I reject identifying primarily as either.

It seems clear to me that the world is messy, and that many, if not most, contentious issues hinge both on people believing different sets of 'facts' (and theoretically, if not practically, once they come to a consensus about the facts they'll agree on policy) as well as fundamental conflicts of values.

Someone who thinks that abortion at 12 weeks should be illegal because they believe fetuses can suffer could, at least in theory, be swayed by arguments about embryonic development and our best guess about cognition and consciousness.

Someone who thinks that zygotes have an Immortal Soul and are thus worthy of life is both factually wrong, and also likely an adherent of values that cannot be moved by rational argument.

For a slightly less CW example, think about two people, who both believe that some degree of taxation and redistribution is justified by the support it provides to the poor, but disagree on what the ideal level of taxation should be.

I can see one of them pulling out papers by respected economists (which both of them agree beforehand are trustworthy), where they find that above a certain level, taxes are distorionary, and prompt those wealthy enough to be net tax payers to flee to other jurisdictions, causing a net reduction in taxes paid, and hence aid available to the poor.

On the other hand, if one of them is an unshakeable libertarian, they might be unwilling to stand any level of taxation that isn't voluntary, no matter the justification. They'll only cave when the cops show up at their door, and maybe they'll decide to feed the dog tannerite in advance. If it's someone with a pathological hatred for the wealthy, they might think the poor suffering is a fair price to pay for getting one over those richy riches.

At the end of the day, humans are messy, values are messy, the Aumann Agreement Theorem is hard to instantiate, and people can accept the same facts and come away with entirely different desired outcomes from said facts.

Hell, even "self-interest" is sometimes not a useful metric. Is a revolutionary who takes up arms against what they perceive as a tyrannical government, often not putting other values over their own bodily integrity and well-being? If a concept pathologizes even overt altruism as well as sheer evil, it's probably not the best rubric.

Fortunately, the civilized world has largely found ways to prevent outright bloodshed even in the face of conflicting values, and we have ways of discharging unhappiness or rage at things not going our way, because the alternative is often unacceptable to both sides. This isn't unbounded, and things can and do go awry.

Seems like a generally weak argument in so much that it relies on a premise of self-interest as a central part of its disproof, without having defined self-interest, thus allowing the supposition of what self-interest entails in order to deny its relevance as a way to disprove (or rather, prove) the premise.

But this is practically the 'Limits of Economics 101' example - people are not perfectly rational people if you define their interests in [specific form]. Money, typically, or 'material self-interest,' but other forms too.

It's pretty obvious that Scott is trying to tie 'self-interest' to the material sense, because he drops the self-interest line of argument entirely once he has his 'inflation is bad but not everyone's triggered by their self-interest!' argument. The last reference of self-interest is entirely in the material sense, as part of the transition to 'if it's not material self-interest, what does drive political disagreement?'

And self-interest never rises again, despite the plenty of self-interests invokable in the remaining part of the argument. He just changes the topic to quote-unquote non-material disputes.

So when he ends on this point-

That is, this theory predicts that a faction could vastly increase its chances of achieving its material goals just by making compromises on who it flatters vs. humiliates.

The answer is- duh. Not being humiliated by people in power is a self-interest. It is, in fact, something that strongly coincides with your material self-interest, because a political faction can not only do the material deprivation as a means of humiliation, but repurpose those material interests (assets, jobs) for their non-material interests.

Which makes the more accurate expansion some form of-

A political faction could vastly increase its chance of achieving its material and not-material goals just by making compromises on whose material and non-material interests it prioritizes.

Which, again. Duh. And also- in no way a counter-argument of conflict theory, when conflict theory encompasses political disputes in general.

Which, of course, Scott avoids having to deal with by semantically gerrymandering the subject in the first sentence to exclude conflicts that aren't 'material' in nature.

Which is just a 'no true Conflict Theory' fallacy as a foundational premise.

There’s a pretty strong example of conflict theory in Texas politics right now- school choice. The Catholic Church is a major booster that sends requests to everyone on their email lists to contact legislators and ask for it to pass, with obvious self interest. Totally not union public school teacher associations are strongly opposed, with barely less obvious self-interest. Republicans need to keep the Catholic Church’s criticisms quiet, so they back schoolchoice to the hilt, democrats need backing from totally-not-unions, guess where they land.

The entire analysis, from both you and Scott, is simply one level too tactical. Scott runs through all the psychological reasons why people will always push themselves into conflict with other people, regardless of the issues or the facts. And then says that mistake theory wins because many of the tactical positions taken by the two sides of an eternal conflict are essentially random.

Individual and group status competition is the constant. That is conflict theory, and it is objectively correct as the only reality humanity has ever known. Mistake theory requires something not yet observed.

The individual issues of politics are ridiculous, and the sides often change over time. Basing your view of human interaction on the irrationality of the issues obscures the reality that political conflict is inevitable anywhere there are three or more people.

We may be mistaken about the reasons, we may increase or decrease our level of conflict (social, political, violent etc.). We may change teams or stress different identities. But the conflict will always remain, because roughly half the power of any given society is balanced against the other half, and politics is the result.

All this business of trying to analyze individual political issues as "conflict" or "mistake" is very much missing the forest for the trees. The forest is at war, and always will be. The issues don't matter, they are only temporary battlegrounds for the political will of the population. There are plenty of mistakes in conflict.

Think of any long term relationship. There is always conflict, and it is rarely about whatever incident inspires a fight. There is conflict because it is two different people who have to live together. So it is in the home, so it is in the nation, so it is in the world. Our human nature forces us into conflict with each other, and we channel that into our lives and our politics. Because of our cognitive biases, we make a lot of mistakes, no matter how smart we are, or think we are.

If you want to solve a problem, you have to find ways of extricating your issue from the conflict. This can be done, in the manner Scott describes. But the conflict will go on, using different issues. Many issues that were important long ago are gone from our political conflict, but that has never stopped the politics. Once an issue is "solved" it is no longer useful. Humans are never short of things to disagree about.

Good observation and a wild one. Humans clearly get a high from moralizing and climbing social hierarchies (ie: “own the libs”) versus actually achieving more material or physically grounded success.

His example of taxes is a good one. Especially on the west coast, most people think logically that taxes are too high, they make the cost of living extremely difficult in California, etc. But when it comes time to actually endorse or vote for a new tax hike, the moral framing is like catnip and people cannot resist. More money for schools! Homeless need housing! Screw the 1%!

From an evolutionary perspective, it must be such that “status in tribe” > “status of physical possessions”, since this trait seems engrained in nearly everyone, to varying degrees.

Climbing the social ladder is truly the most Lindy conflict game that exists

He defined Conflict Theory in an unusual way, I think. Scott says that Conflict Theory is disproven because people don't act in their own best interests.

That means that, from his perspective, "The other tribe is attacking us because they hate us and want us to die," is actually a statement of Mistake Theory, not Conflict Theory. Because hate is irrational and therefore a mistake, people being motivated to conflict by their irrational hatred is taken as evidence for Mistake Theory rather than against it.

I think a lot of people use those terms differently, but I also agree with Scott on this one. The logical conclusion of Mistake Theory is that everyone just needs to get smarter and stop making mistakes and the problem will go away. That means that proving that the conflict is irrational really is a knock-down argument against Conflict Theory. If the Conflict is a Mistake, then it can be solved with better policy.

I’m not sure Scott is capturing self interest. For example, the rich liberal wants taxes to raise. That is against the rich liberals pecuniary self interests but perhaps the liberal gets other benefits from raising taxes (eg status). Also, ideally for the rich person is to argue for raising taxes writ large while giving a special carve out to preclude them from being taxed. That’s the home run! See the SALT deduction as an example.

Moreover they aren’t merely voting for higher taxes. They are voting for higher taxes and more government control. The overall package might favor them from a pecuniary perspective.

Most of the time I hear "voting against their own self-interest" it rubs me the wrong way because the speaker is pretty clearly trying to implicitly smuggle their own value system for what "self-interest" means. "Why would [red jurisdiction] vote for [red politician]?" If you have to ask, you're playing out the "No, it's the children who are wrong" meme.

With respect to higher taxes, I will observe that the blue denizens of my local jurisdiction (high on property values, low on children per capita) strongly dislike the fraction of their property taxes that gets transfered within the state to poorer school districts. Which also doesn't really align with the stated blue preference for progressive tax policies and wealth redistribution.

ETA: Probably not completely charitable, but it would be at least coherent to see a revealed preference here of "I want myself and others to pay higher taxes for things that align with my values."

I don't buy it. if you see a mistake in policy you reverse it or stop it.

If I have built 90% of a bridge, and realize that the policy that led to me building it was a mistake, the correct decision is often to finish the bridge regardless of the fact that overall building the bridge was a net negative.

Of all the examples you list when "we were mistaken", the only one that isnt simply leftwing is sports gambling - which ideologically Id read neutral but I think was mostly done by the republicans. Is this your personal bias (where others would not agree they were mistaken), or a humongous miscalibration thats really easy to notice to the point where it seems questionably someone would honestly make those mistakes?

You have to have power to make mistakes.

But it's not hard to find Republican mistakes as well, just going back further. Cheney, Rumsfield and company believed that the Iraq War would be good for the people of the Middle East. They weren't trying to hurt Iraq or steal their oil. They were just buffoons with a flawed theory.

But note that, even today, people think the war was about oil. Conflict theory is addictive.

I thought we were talking about cases where "everyone" agreed.

Of all the examples you list when "we were mistaken", the only one that isnt simply leftwing is sports gambling

The examples listed are progressive, which is related to but not the same as "left wing" (which is more particularly about democracy, or at least republicanism, though at one time this was properly "progressive"). In some sense, conservatives are shielded from mistake theory because they are focused on doing what has already been proven to work. The failure modes for progressivism and conservatism are different. Progressive politicians make mistakes; conservative politicians ossify. It can be a mistake to ossify, but people who are overcautious miss out on rewards (and may thus be outcompeted), while people who are undercautious fail more spectacularly (but may reap more substantial rewards when they succeed).

I don't think it's evidence of political bias to notice that progressives are more prone to costly mistakes; it's baked right into the cake. If they didn't take more risks, they'd just be a different flavor of conservative.

(EDIT: On reflection, this may help to explain the ethos of the "Grey Tribe" somewhat... people in the ratsphere tend to be progressives, sometimes to the point of being accelerationists, but are often not "left wing." The Grey Tribe may be specifically sensitive to ossification in left wing spaces that other left wing people regard as "progressive" but which are actually just re-litigating yesterday's battles, today.)

Progressive politicians make mistakes; conservative politicians ossify. It can be a mistake to ossify, but people who are overcautious miss out on rewards (and may thus be outcompeted), while people who are undercautious fail more spectacularly (but may reap more substantial rewards when they succeed).

If this theory were true, we would notice progressive politicians changing direction when their mistakes were revealed. They do not; they double down, until they start losing as a result. Then they quiet down in whatever area made them lose (they may still DO it, they just talk about it less -- thus less promoting of Drag Queen Story Hour, just as much funding for transgender Colombian opera).

TBF, They sometimes claim that whatever mistake was made by some minor part of the coalition somewhere over there.

They of course never answer why no one checked this minor and irrelevant faction despite their enemies constantly warning them and promising consequences for not doing so.

Do you think these examples dont have a direction in common, besides being changes?

Revealed preference says that a person's self interest is whatever thing is maximized by his choices. Same as "the purpose of a system is what it does.

The San Francisco liberal who walks through feces and endures harassment from junkies every day wants it. He’d rather let it persist than send them to rehab or, god forbid, involve a police officer. This is his self interest.

The rich communist sent to the gulag doesn't regret supporting communism. He wants communism to win more than he wants a hot meal and a roof over his head.

Revealed preference says that a person's self interest is whatever thing is maximized by his choices. Same as "the purpose of a system is what it does.

If I don't defect in a prisoner's dilemma while the other person defects, is it my self interest that I get a long term in prison?

In the most literal sense, yes. You value not snitching more than avoiding prison. If you knew the other person defected or cooperated, you still get less prison for defecting.

yes

Something implying falsehood implies either the argument is wrong or at least one of the inputs is false.

If revealed preference decrees that a person attempting to chase a better-overall solution at their own potential expense is wrong, to me this would imply that the concept of revealed preference is itself invalid.

The San Francisco liberal who walks through feces and endures harassment from junkies every day wants it. He’d rather let it persist than send them to rehab or, god forbid, involve a police officer. This is his self interest.

This ignores the fact that California, like all of America, operates on the two party system. All revealed preference says is that he wants the Dem platform more than the GOP platform. It doesn't mean he wants everything on the Dem platform.

Actually, California is a one-party system. In SF there usually won't even be a Republican on the ballot, so voters are free to vote for whatever party aligns with their interests, without any pesky game theory concerns.

Yet somehow, the non-Democrat candidates, regardless of party, never get more than a lizardman constant percentage of the vote. It's almost as if the voters specifically want Democrat rule to continue.

The point remains that opinions on political issues correlate with one another. Does the candidate who wants to enforce the law against homeless harassers also want to force women to bear their rapists' babies?

Republicans are a lot like Democrats. They think only the popular parts of their platform are what should matter.

There's no party that supports all forms of self-defense against biotrash.

Things are maximized by many people's choices to different extents. Yet the concept of "revealed preference" as used on themotte is not to attribute responsibility (and thus degree of preference) in good faith, but instead to state "my enemies are getting what they fucking deserve" in a slightly more snooty and impartial-sounding way.

I'm generally a believer in revealed preference but I think this takes things too far.

Does the moth prefer to be burned by the flame?

The rich communist sent to the gulag deludes himself into thinking that his imprisonment is all a mistake, not an inevitable consequence of his flawed belief system. The trans activist doesn't think that giving kids hormones and cutting off their breasts is abuse – she's just trying to help!

Of course, sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice. Most people are just really, really bad at thinking through what happens if they get what they want.

Moths are probably the perfect case of Mistake Theory.

The trans activist doesn't think that giving kids hormones and cutting off their breasts is abuse – she's just trying to help!

Yes, but critically, their attempt to help isn't a result of believing a mastectomy will improve outcomes on some widely-agreed-upon-as-beneficial scale, they're helping because they see bodily autonomy and morphological freedom as good in themselves, and preferences to reconcile people with their "natural" bodies as bigoted. This isn't about "sufficiently advanced stupidity", It's conflict theory through and through.

I accept this criticism and I admit some dissatisfaction with my original post.

But let's consider that both the modal republican and the trans activist might share a similar terminal goal: "all people should feel comfortable with their gender identity". The difference is that the Republican thinks gender confusion applies to 0.1% of the population but the trans activist thinks it applies to 10-20%.

Yes, this hypothetical trans activist's position is insane, but I don't see any indication why it would not be sincerely held.

all people should feel comfortable with their gender identity

No, normie republicans do not believe that. Normie republicans think gender identity is stupid bullshit and if you feel uncomfortable with the private parts god gave you you should follow a gender appropriate role until the issue resolves.

That maps roughly to the same thing, though, it just changes who the burden of "feeling comfortable" falls on.

Uh, no. Normie republicans think 'gender identity' doesn't exist, if you're confused as to whether you're a boy or a girl drop your pants in front of a mirror. It doesn't matter whether you're uncomfortable or not; being 'uncomfortable' with being a boy/girl is pure insanity.

That's a rather critical difference.

republican and the trans activist might share a similar terminal goal: "all people should feel comfortable with their gender identity".

Maybe these are Uniparty Republicans. The Republicans in my circle think gender identity is fake and gay. That people who are uncomfortable with their bodies are mentally ill neurotics and to the extent it's a belief that's 'sincere', insane people believe and internalize all sorts of crazy.

I can't speak for every Republican (I'm not even American, so my exposure to them is extremely limited), but my perspective is that even after conceding that it is better for a given person to not feel discomfort with their gender identity, I still think it's better to convince them to accept their discomfort, rather than for them to modify their body.

I'm telling you, it's a difference of values. I have a feeling the mistake theorists have a hard time accepting that such a thing is even possible.

I can't speak for every Republican (I'm not even American, so my exposure to them is extremely limited), but my perspective is that even after conceding that it is better for a given person to not feel discomfort with their gender identity, I still think it's better to convince them to accept their discomfort, rather than for them to modify their body.

Yeah I broadly agree with this.

If a magical pill existed that instantly flipped somebody's gender in a full, non-reversible way I'd be not against an adult who's deeply convinced of their gender identity being incorrect for the body they're born with. Or if in our society all people wearing a blue hat were treated 100% as a woman, and red hat 100% as a man, and somebody wishing to change their hat. But right now it's a ton of surgery, expense and treatment to create something that's a distant facsimile of a man or a woman that doesn't seem to lead to meaningful improvement of the underlying psychological issues whilst creating a bunch of externalities

Once we're in the territory of 'magic pills' why not have the pill allow them to be happy with their natal bodies?

Would your magic pill for anorexia help them loose weight or keep them alive without eating?

A pill that lets one cope with the lack of (bodily, in this case) freedom rather than provide more freedom is inherently more suspect and abusable. Or in other words, it serves the interests of those who reject transhumanist ideals and want everyone to remain in the image that they were born in, and this is why trans people, when queried, generally reject that idea in favor of the free sex change pill.

Similarly I would rather be more attractive than be able to tolerate the fruits of being less attractive; would rather be able to achieve my goals with less work than be able to work more, etc. "Be happy with natal bodies" pill is the proposal of the conformist solution rather than the personal freedom one. It is, although I admit it's a stretch, akin to "curing" the black men's desire for freedom rather than making them more suited for independent life.

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Moral foundations seems like a better fit for most of these issues.

The main area for both conflict and mistake is economics. Most people want to have a bigger slice of the pie for themselves and their fellow class members. The interests of the person who wants a cheap employee or servant and the person trying to get an entry level job are not the same. The interests of the person who wants government housing in a nice part of town, and the person who already owns a house in the nice part of town are not the same. Many people also have bad ideas about how to get where they're trying to go.

The interests of the person who wants a cheap employee or servant and the person trying to get an entry level job are not the same. The interests of the person who wants government housing in a nice part of town, and the person who already owns a house in the nice part of town are not the same. Many people also have bad ideas about how to get where they're trying to go.

I agree with you in general, but I need to nuance on this point. At that specific level of politics, their interests are perhaps not the same, but in the grand scheme of things, I think a critical mass, regardless of social class, race, gender differences, would agree to make some compromises in the optimal assignment of resources for them or the groups they associate with to live in a country where everyone can have decent access to jobs, reasonable housing, education, healthcare, etc... What objection would anyone have to everywhere being the nice part of town? So when you zoom out to that level, I think it is truly mistake theory. And that really is I think the distinction between high trust and low trust societies. Mutual trust in strangers is really a self sustaining miracle; when enough people believe that this critical mass exists, then it does. When not enough people do, when you stop believing that the other guy is willing to make compromises in your favor so that we can all live in a nice place, then suddenly you must start strategically defecting on the arrangement to make sure you and your family are not the ones to be dumped on constantly.

Hence why western remote work expats living like kings in gated enclaves in poor countries is a relatively new and marginal phenomenon; because maximizing your own resources when you're surrounded by violence and poverty still sucks, and it takes a special kind of sociopath to just shut themselves off to all of it around them. And why high class, high education people in dysfunctional countries still often want to move to functional countries when they have the opportunity, even if it means their education is not going to recognized and they will be relegated to unskilled work. While you have more stuff, maybe some servants, being rich in a low trust society is not as fulfilling as being average in a high trust society.

While you have more stuff, maybe some servants, being rich in a low trust society is not as fulfilling as being average in a high trust society.

It’s not just emotionally unfulfilling, it’s dangerous. Being rich can protect you from a lot of the day-to-day violence. But if the whole country tumbles into the abyss because of civil war, foreign invasion, state collapse or ethnic conflict, the gated community isn’t going to do much other than make you a target.

where everyone can have decent access to jobs, reasonable housing, education, healthcare, etc... What objection would anyone have to everywhere being the nice part of town?

In what way is the meaning of that sentence different from if you deleted the word "access"?

The meaning is altered in that a very salient objection can be raised that these things should not be given to those who don't work for them. But that's not different groups' interest competing, it's still mistake theory. It hits a crucial mistake people believe others are making; everyone should be in a nice part of town, but how many ressources should be allocated to helping people who don't help themselves (and their community), even if just to keep all parts of town nice? At what point does those ressources create incentives for freeloading and ruin that part of town?

Ok, but then in what sense does that inspire the altruism you think it requires? Broadly speaking, "you can get healthcare if you work/pay for it." already is the selfish position. Like, I can see how a library card might be giving someone "access to education" - you give them something, which gives them the opportunity to get a bigger thing. But I dont see "leverage" like that in housing or healthcare - those policies are just giving people various amounts of the thing itself with various levels of means-testing. And Im not sure in what sense you think people dont have access to jobs, unless its an immigration thing.

Im not arguing for competing interests here, I just latched onto that word.

Broadly speaking, "you can get healthcare if you work/pay for it." already is the selfish position

I would formulate it more like "I want good healthcare to be available and affordable to everyone". Seems unselfish, and a rather universal proposition. I don't think it's altruism necessarily, people want to live in a place where they don't have to be driven in armored cars from gated enclave to gated enclave through a wasteland filled with roving gangs of dying sick panhandlers. Seeing only healthy people around me has value not because I'm altruistic, but cause it's more pleasant than the alternative, and for that I'm willing to compromise on maybe the speed or the cost of my care.

And Im not sure in what sense you think people dont have access to jobs, unless its an immigration thing.

I think they do too in the west, broadly speaking, but it's something that good or bad policy can influence (by running employers out of town, for instance), and that a vast majority would probably agree they want everyone to have.

I would formulate it more like "I want good healthcare to be available and affordable to everyone".

I just dont see how this would boil down to anything other than paying for peoples healthcare. And if youre gonna do that, its a bit weird to say youre "giving them access to healthcare", instead of just "giving them healthcare".

Healthcare price is not just a fixed amount that has to be paid, it's reactive to policy and social factors, to policies influencing supply and demand of healthcare, to the legal environment around it, to the general health of the population, to the hygenic habits of the population, to socioeconomical factors, to genetics, to economies of scale, etc...

I think everyone, left and right, would be satisfied with the outcome of "healthcare is very available and almost everyone can afford it with the few remaining edge cases unable to pay being either taken care of by the government or by charity".

Whether you get there by single payer or not is a huge part of the question, but it's not a zero sum game.

More comments

The general thrust of his argument is that conflict theory doesn't explain voting patterns because people vote against their self-interest.

I'll have to read his post, but spend anytime arguing for the validity of "voting against your self-interest"? I basically reject the concept, and don't think outsiders get to decide what counts as self-interest for others.

And within 15 years, almost everything about this consensus was proven wrong. Even if you think this was the plan of the gay movement all along, it still doesn't explain why Republicans went along for the ride. You might say... they were mistaken.

Mistake vs conflict theory is about explaining the root of hostilities between tribes - do people have broadly the same goals, but disagree on what is the best way to achieve them, and the hostility between the tribes stems from the high stakes of the issue and the need for getting the solution right; or - do people have diverging goals, and so the hostility stems from each side's abhorrence for the other's goals?

Saying "someone made a mistake somewhere - another win for mistake theory!" is fundamentally dishonest. If the conservatives made a mistake by believing they had broadly the same goals as gay right's activists, that's a clear win for conflict theory.

Sports gambling? Mistake theory.

Marijuana legalization? Mistake theory.

De-policing? Mistake theory.

Surrogracy? Euthanasia? Porn? Prostitution? Transhumanism?

But then, something happened around 2010 and one side just stopped fighting.

Yes that something was a Supreme Court case legalizing same sex marriage across the entire country under the concept of civil liberties. Of course you stop fighting as hard when the supreme law of the land says that it's legal.

And within 15 years, almost everything about this consensus was proven wrong.

What evidence do you have for this? I don't see any large scale proof that a large number of gay people are trying to actively "convert" straight kids into same-sex marriages when they're adults. And don't be citing campaigns based around accepting LGBT students, it needs to be widespread proof that they're trying to convert children since that was your wording.

Evidence could look like a gay version of conversion therapy where straight kids are sent to centers to shame them into gayness, or maybe a large lgbt organization like GLAAD admitting they want to turn straight kids gay. Or something along the lines that there is an active and widespread attempt to take straight children and make them homosexual instead of a genuine (even if poorly executed) attempt wanting gay teenagers to be accepted.

Sports gambling? Mistake theory.

Marijuana legalization? Mistake theory.

Or perhaps, people just have different values for civil liberty like the libertarian viewpoint and the negative externalities of a freedom to gamble or smoke weed is not convincing enough for them to change their mind on that. It's not a "mistake" for people to have different views on a trade-off between freedom from government restrictions and societal health.

Libs of ticktock seems to have gathered plenty of evidence of widespread- if possibly marginal- attempts at grooming in the actual sense.

If your standard of evidence for something being widespread is "I saw it on Twitter" you do you I guess.

Yes that something was a Supreme Court case legalizing same sex marriage across the entire country under the concept of civil liberties. Of course you stop fighting as hard when the supreme law of the land says that it's legal.

That's not what happened with gun control, or with racial quotas or "reverse" discrimination for that matter. Or abortion. Those who fundamentally accept the institution's legitimacy may stop fighting; those who do not, do not. And the latter tend to get what they want, if opposed only by institutionalists.

Yes that something was a Supreme Court case legalizing same sex marriage across the entire country under the concept of civil liberties. Of course you stop fighting as hard when the supreme law of the land says that it's legal.

Supreme Court decisions are decidedly not law, they are interpretations of law intended to set precedent. The deliberate conflation of Supreme Court rulings with laws and "constitutional protections" is part of why we're in this king-of-the-hill conflict over control of the SC, because people believe that capturing the court is a pass to end-run Congress and anchor in the policy du jour without going through the actual process of lawmaking, which would involve that ickiest of things, actually having the House of Representatives represent their constituents.

to set precedent

My reaction every single time I read about a US court case is "boy am I glad that I live in a country with civil law system that doesn't rely on binding precedents" combined with "I hope our politicians are never crazy enough to introduce a constitutional supreme court" (thus far there have been no signs at such).

Do you know what makes abuse abuse- the real why of it being harmful? Because it's forcing the victim into an unnatural/undeserved submissive role they didn't assume.

Sexual abuse is that, but in specifically a way that has to deal with sex (just like how racism is this in a way that has to deal with race).

Now, we know what that looks like when men do it- take the sacrament in your mouth, my child- but men tend to dominate physically, so that's the kind of abuse mode we should expect from them. It's inherently playing the short game- sexual domination here has a clear beginning, a clear end, a clear definition, and a translucent white evidentiary trail.

Pre-20th-century schools and churches are overwhelmingly staffed by men and thus if left unchecked tend towards this failure mode.

What happens when the gender that likes to dominate socially/emotionally does it? Well, women tend to dominate socially/emotionally, so what we should expect from them is types of more subtle abuse over time that prevents boys from developing natural assertive/dominant behavior.

So they're playing the long game of attempting to run [sexual] interference on boys. Which includes things like punishing all physical contact (and what physical contact is allowed is colored as being a gay thing), showing them pictures of gay sex in an attempt to force them to see sex like adults do (and that mostly-innocent-yet-still-definitionally-sexual harassment should be treated as violent rape), making sure that boys who act like girls (not necessarily the stereotypical gay man, but deferring to the proper authorities, not developing their own strengths and ensuring that those who do use them are punished) are favored, and things that will ultimately serve to make them submissive, anxious, and above all unattractive. The worst thing in the world is if a girl exhibits male qualities- that should be discouraged at all costs (and if she fails to desist from that trans-gender behavior, the girl should be encouraged to self-mutilate; boys are also encouraged to do this, but for them, it's a Skoptskyist "cut your dick off to prevent you from sin" thing).

Public schools/daycares and management positions more generally are overwhelmingly staffed by women and thus if left unchecked tend towards this failure mode.

See now that attempts to deal with the second using the tools meant to deal with the first fail. A woman being physically sexually dominant towards a boy is seen as neutral to positive in the collective consciousness- men can't be hurt by women expressing dominance in the male way (popularly, "men can't be raped").

Thus, attempts to hold to account sexually abusive women with the same reasoning, and in the same way, that we do sexually abusive men do not resonate with the general public.

See now that attempts to deal with the first using the tools meant to deal with the second fail. A man being emotionally sexually dominant towards a girl is seen as neutral to positive in the collective consciousness- women can't be hurt by men expressing dominance in the female way (popularly, "trans women are women").

Thus, attempts to hold to account sexually abusive men with the same reasoning, and in the same way, that we do sexually abusive women do not resonate with the general public.

The long game can be punished, but you have to fully embrace equity to do that- men and women act in anti-social ways differently, and only punishing men gives women a blank check to be destructive (as they have been). An environment of equality can only punish men, but an environment of equity acknowledges that differences between men and women require, in aggregate, different tools to deal with.

Thus, attempts to hold to account sexually abusive women with the same reasoning, and in the same way, that we do sexually abusive men do not resonate with the general public.

This is because the average person doesn’t see a teenaged boy having sex as a big deal, and most of these cases are female high school teachers sleeping with their male students. It’s actually just a gendered double standard about sexual innocence.

the average person doesn’t see a teenaged boy having sex as a big deal, and most of these cases are female high school teachers sleeping with their male students

You're not defining abuse correctly here. I do not believe most of these cases are abuse, because [abuse] is forcing the victim into an unnatural/undeserved submissive role they didn't assume. Women are instinctively submissive physically by default, so they'll likely be more vulnerable to this physically, while men are submissive emotionally by default, so they'll be more vulnerable to this emotionally.

Which is why, on first pass, it's generally considered abuse [by the above definition] when it's a male teacher fucking a female student, but not the other way around, even if the motives were the same. The woman's bearing 100% of the physical risk of the interaction; that's why the response to this is generally "nice". You can't rob someone by sticking a wad of cash in their face, and sex [for most people] works the same way.

The problem is that we're only set up to catch and punish instances of physical abuse. So of all anti-social sexual behavior perpetrated by women we're only going to catch the gender non-conforming behavior (that is, women + physical) while ignoring what they actually do, and trying to use the tools we use to punish physical (most anti-social sexual behavior by men is in this group) abuse by relating the two does not, and should not be expected to work.

And don't be citing campaigns based around accepting LGBT students (...)

Evidence could look like a gay version of conversion therapy where straight kids are sent to centers to shame them into gayness,

I don't see why you get to singlehandedly set parameters for what counts as evidence. If schools suddenly started collaborating with campaigns for Scientology acceptance, and as a result classroom walls were covered with Scientology symbols, and teachers started talking to kids about thetan levels, I think that would rightly be seen as a conversion initiative.

P.S:

Yes that something was a Supreme Court case legalizing same sex marriage across the entire country under the concept of civil liberties.

Really? Is that what happened with abortion?

i don't see why you get to singlehandedly set parameters for what counts as evidence.

There is a difference between trying to accept people for what they are and trying to convert them. For your religious example, allowing prayer vs forcing prayer.

The standards of evidence for a school trying to religiously convert children does not include "We don't stop teachers and kids from praying before class on their own"

Really? Is that what happened with abortion?

Yes that massively shifted the abortion conversation both when it happened and for a very long after. You can even see the remnants of how the ruling pushed it into a states rights where Trump won on a platform promising no nationwide bans.

There is a difference between trying to accept people for what they are and trying to convert them. For your religious example, allowing prayer vs forcing prayer.

The LGBT acceptance of your version of the religious example would be more like the school allowing public displays of affection of same sex couples, to the same extent it allows them for heterosexual couples, and otherwise not getting involved in questions of sex and relationships. It would not look like what we're getting now - the school walls being draped with LGBT / Scientology symbols, and teachers talking about sexual and gender identities / thetan levels.

The standards of evidence for a school trying to religiously convert children does not include "We don't stop teachers and kids from praying before class on their own"

We're way past that point regarding LGBT acceptance.

Yes that massively shifted the abortion conversation both when it happened and for a very long after. You can even see the remnants of how the ruling pushed it into a states rights where Trump won on a platform promising no nationwide bans.

That's not a result of conservative stopping to fight. If you think that phrase accurately portrays all the screeching about Roe v. Wade that I heard without even being American, culminating in the ruling actually getting repealed, then you're using wildly different definitions for words than those that I'm familiar with.

What evidence do you have for this? I don't see any large scale proof that a large number of gay people are trying to actively "convert" straight kids into same-sex marriages when they're adults. And don't be citing campaigns based around accepting LGBT students, it needs to be widespread proof that they're trying to convert children since that was your wording.

The CDC says a quarter of high schoolers are LGBT, a dramatic increase from what it used to be. Acceptance (and celebration) of LGBT students has resulted in more of them. That is what happens when things are accepted and celebrated in societies. Why would it not? Why do you think LGBT is a special case? In what sense have those students not been converted? What is your justification for discounting an acceptance campaign as conversion evidence? No justification is given.

The idea of a "campaign based around accepting LGBT students" is inherently political. It was a choice to make this a value of the state, and organizations like GLAAD put a lot of resources and effort and human capital to make it a value of the state.

The CDC says a quarter of high schoolers are LGBT

Except that the vast majority of those are "bisexual" or "pansexual", but are functionally straight in every way. Or nonbinary, but functionally not transgender in any way. It's probably a combination of kids wanting to feel special, and people who are 75% straight now choosing to acknowledge their 25% gayness because the option exists. Either way, it doesn't have any effect on society other than triggering christians.

Bi/pansexuality has the natural problem of being too expansive a category. While it is technically true that if in a set of a million people you might be romantically interested in, one is male, that "makes you" bi, most people who claim to be bi/pan are going "sure, I could conceive of the idea of a man who looks exactly like a woman being a suitable sexual partner" despite no living human matching that description.

It's 2025. There are men who look exactly like women.

You'll have to excuse me; I've never been to Thailand, so I can't properly judge that for myself.

They have been converted to the civic religion of celebrating each other's sexual preferences.

I mean celebrations of deviant sexuality is definitely a rite of Civic Religion, as are denouncing the Old Ways (Christianity, European derived cultural elements, white people themselves, and capitalism). Basically, while a lot of people see it as cultural Marxism, I see Civic Religion as cultural Maoism — it’s certainly pro-socialism, but just as importantly it’s about shaming, blaming, and disempowering anyone who openly supports those Olds.

And if you go into a public school you’ll see most of it happening. Literature classes no longer focus on English or American literature, instead the focus is on teaching the works of other cultures — Arabian, Latin, Chinese, African. Now while some of it is interesting (im fairly big on Korean Drama and music, personally), I can’t help but notice the double standard here. Kids can read the opening verses of the Quran in a public school, but not a Bible. We can spend a month reading a book written from the POV of and African American oppressed by white people, but not the perspective of white people.

The CDC says a quarter of high schoolers are LGBT, a dramatic increase from what it used to be. Acceptance (and celebration) of LGBT students has resulted in more of them. That is what happens when things are accepted and celebrated in societies. Why would it not? Why do you think LGBT is a special case? In what sense have those students not been converted?

How is that "conversion"? A student being more open about their feelings is not the same as a student having previously been fully straight and having turned into bi or gay.

And as you yourself say "Why would it not?". Of course they are not a special case, we would expect at least some amount of an increase in behavior when it becomes destigmatized. But I would never refer to that as conversion, rather that's just more openness. Maybe this is just a disagreement about the wording, I take "conversion" to be more along the lines of "trying to change their actual feelings" rather than "changing their willingness to be open".

Now conversion could be happening alongside it, boosting the numbers up. But that's not evidence for it occuring.

Being open isn’t an uncritical good. My kid being ‘more open’ to experimentation with substance use is an uncritically bad thing, for example.

It was an ideological choice of the state to decide that deviant sexuality is worth celebrating and kids should be open to it. Of course sodomy is bad- penises don’t belong in assholes, go look at one after it’s had a penis in it and conclude it shouldn’t be exit only- but that’s not the point- public schools are choosing what things to promote ‘openness’ to. Imagine a public school promoting ‘openness’ to a traditional marriage with ten kids. You can’t.

I remember in Catholic schools we had endless propaganda(and that is, literally, what it was) about being ‘open to the calling of God’. In other words think about becoming a priest or nun. Somehow this never extended to preparing for getting married even if Catholic doctrine also sees that as a calling from God. There are choices of emphasis(and parents who send their children to Catholic schools understand the emphasis and accept it).

A student being more open about their feelings

That "more open" was a political and ideological choice by the state. Interest groups lobbied to make "more open" happen. Students and schools did not used to be open about sexual minority identities, but now they are. If you change someone's views, you have converted them.

Maybe this is just a disagreement about the wording, I take "conversion" to be more along the lines of "trying to change their actual feelings" rather than "changing their willingness to be open".

We do have a disagreement about wording, because I am using the actual definition of conversion and you have made up your own incoherent definition. A students "willingness to be open" is a students feeling! If you are try to change a students willingness to be open, you are trying to change their actual feelings! That is what it means to convert someone!

But it is not just being "more open". LGBT is a group specifically and deliberately organized around sexual minority identity. The idea that sexuality, and particularly minority sexuality, should be incorporated into identity is a central tenant of LGBTism. So it is not just being open, because a person being open about something is inherently a person incorporating that thing into their identity.

I'm gonna give the benefit of the doubt and assume you aren't a native speaker because conversion in this context would never be used "changing a person's feelings about how open they can be" and more about "changing them from being straight to being gay" like we see in conversion therapy trying to do the opposite and "cure homosexuality" and make people straight.

Most people here in the US (and I assume most of the native English speakers) understand that because conversion therapy has been practiced by religious groups against homosexuality for years. Now the end result has been suppression (because they fail) but no one says "You're trying to convert X!" when they mean being more accepting.

A sexually-reproducing non-eusocial species has 25% of it's population "gay" and we just didn't know it the whole time? At some point, one has to realize one is just engaging in creating "just-so" stories to justify an unjustifiable belief.

Except depending what gay means that is perfectly plausible. Consider that homosexual behavior in prisons becomes much more prevalent, even if those imprisoned would prefer women/men. Consider the idea of being "Lesbian until graduation". The prevalence of men who have sex with men but do not identify as homosexual etc.

"The LGBT slang terms lesbian until graduation (LUG),[1] gay until graduation (GUG), and bisexual until graduation (BUG) are used to describe primarily women of high school or college age who are assumed to be experimenting with or adopting a temporary lesbian or bisexual identity, but who will ultimately adopt a heterosexual identity."

Along with Kinsey reporting that sexuality seems to be somewhat more fluid than just gay/straight for many people (particularly women) and the idea that a quarter of the Gen Z population are LGB in that they would consider sexual acts with their own sex, under certain circumstances even if in general they will prefer the opposite sex looks to be well supported. And would have very little impact on sexual reproduction.

If those people identify as bisexual or pansexual, (so boosting numbers who identify as LGB) generally end up with the opposite sex, the circle is squared. They are both LGB AND will end up in a relationship capable of sexual reproduction. And handily the evidence of numbers we have supports this:

The biggest growth in identification as LGB is among bisexuals and women specifically. If you look at the breakdown in Gen Z, 73% of women who say they are LGB are actually just B. Only 22% of those who identify as LGB are L or G. It is the huge increase of those who are bisexual which is behind the vast majority of the overall increase, indeed the L or G percentage has only increased from 2% among the Silent Generation to 5% among Gen Z. And most of those Bi women will end up in conventional male/female relationships. And historically would have identified as heterosexual even after some experimentation with women. Now they identify as bisexual. Behaviors have not changed much. Just identification.

Back in the early 2000's some 20% of women admitted to same sex contact, but only 5% identified as lesbian or bisexual. Now about 20% of Gen Z women identify as lesbian or bisexual with 25% of Gen Z women admitting some same sex contact. Labelling explains pretty much the entire increase here. Hell upwards of 60% of women admit some same sex attraction. It's quite possible all or most women are technically bi-sexual!

This is no unjustifiable belief. Just a change in how (primarily) women label themselves.

Some excerpts to add anecdote to data:

"Once upon a time in middle school, I came out to my mother as bisexual. Like many girls that age who have non-hetero tendencies, I had a mother who didn’t buy it. It’s normal to experiment with other girls, she told me. "

"In high school, my label shifted to lesbian. Though I felt a rush of nervousness around my friend’s Goth guy pals, in addition to an embarrassing crush on one of my older sister’s hockey-and-football-playing friends, I wanted a relationship with a girl."

"Ten years later, I’m living in San Francisco and married to a man. My existence is still label-free, but my story is a hard one to explain to those who haven’t experienced any fluidity in their sexual identity."

"Research on human sexuality is pretty limited. The evidence we do have suggests women are “sexually fluid” creatures, which sounds like some kind of secretion issue but actually refers to a mix and match approach when it comes to the sex of our lovers, and not necessarily in equal proportion. I’m a member of this group"

Research on human sexuality is pretty limited.

Can't imagine why.

The only people who would even want to research this in the first place are already relatively sexually open [at least, in theory], so the results they get aren't going to be couched in language that makes it applicable in a way to the average man or woman that doesn't instantly just turn into more ammunition for the gender/culture war.

This.

If it looks like a social contagion, spreads like a social contagion, and quacks like a social contagion...

A student being more open about their feelings is not the same as a student having previously been fully straight and having turned into bi or gay.

Isn't that isolated demand for rigor? Can you come up with examples of students having previously been bi or gay and having turned fully straight due to hetero conversion therapy?

We can certainly come up with examples of cultures that have been previously bi/gay and were turned fully straight.

Such as?

Such as ancient Greece and Rome, and yes, I know it was not the same conception of homosexuality that we have now, but the facts are that it was at one point common to bugger young men (and even act as if it's better than women) and later on, very much not.

hetero conversion therapy

This would be outright illegal in many areas.

It’s not hard to find people who are ex-gay.

Evidence could look like a gay version of conversion therapy where straight kids are sent to centers to shame them into gayness, or maybe a large lgbt organization like GLAAD admitting they want to turn straight kids gay. Or something along the lines that there is an active and widespread attempt to take straight children and make them homosexual instead of a genuine (even if poorly executed) attempt wanting gay teenagers to be accepted.

I mean, many people would call these places "public schools" and after the NSA leaks, and the fact that we have seen many teachers, counselors, etc get caught on various social media platforms talk about "hatching eggs" means this isn't some non-mainstream thing.

  1. "Hatching eggs" is a trans thing, not a sexuality thing as the original comment is about and what my reply is for.

  2. I've not seen that much but even if there are a few teachers who do so, as there are apparently 3.8 million public school teachers in the US a few examples would not be much proof of a common issue by itself. Likewise you can find examples of teachers dating students or heck, things like this case of a superintendent trying to mandate a prayer video. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oklahoma-officials-religious-department-schools-classroom-lawsuit/. It's not that they aren't problems of teachers pushing LGBT identification or dating kids or mandating prayer videos (they seem to exist given the articles on it) but if it's a few hundred/thousand people out of 3.8 million it's not much at all. I don't know the exact amounts so I'm open for evidence that suggests it's a decently large percentage.

  • -12

"Hatching eggs" is a trans thing, not a sexuality thing as the original comment is about and what my reply is for.

The gay community has consistently embraced the trans community. They are one and the same. The burden of proof is now on them to show they are different.

To be fair there are gay groups that separate themselves from the trans community, but they're unsurprisingly ejected from the mainstream, and seen as basically Nazis.

I don't know why I'm responding to bait, but if parents had discovered secret school policies about hiding teacher-student relationships from them, it would be sensible to be concerned about it. This is the status of "egg-hatching" teachers.

Hatching eggs is a trans reference, not a gay reference.

If you're opposed to degeneracy and degenerates this is a distinction without a difference.

Edit 1

Despite the ban, there is no 'boo outgroup' here. The distinction being made is only relevant to their 'in group'. I'm not sure if there's some qualitative claimed difference between this particular sort of trans grooming vs. non-trans homosexual grooming. The grooming is the objectionable behavior regardless of the specific sort of devients undertaking the grooming.

Unless and until someone wants to make an effort post on non-trans homosexual grooming being less bad or different than trans grooming I stand by it being a distinction without a difference.

Edit 2

It's not railing about degeneracy at best it's observing and noticing. Nor sadly in current year is it exclusive to homosexuals or other sexual minorities, western culture is largely awash in sexual degeneracy and perversion of all sorts. Homosexuals and other sexual minorities seem especially over represented in education and schools. I don't see anything uncivil in the original or subsequent edits.

'Sexual Degeneracy' is not untactful it's an accurate description of the behavior undertaken by a cohort that frequently attempts to destigmatize the behavior in an ongoing effort to appeal to youth. It's not even the sort of coarse language I'd avoid in mixed company. There are an assortment of uncivil terms to apply to this cohort.

The mod action here was boo outgroup.

If others complain about mod actions for language maybe you should collectively be more precise and explicit about the sort of language you don't want.

I suspect you know I hate sexual degenerates grooming youth. Even when I've not used uncivil language to describe the degeneracy you suspect I'm thinking uncivil things about this cohort and railing against them.

As a former sexual degenerate, I suspect I know this cohort better than you.

You know what, you have the cheek to report your own comment for an AAQC. I have to respect that, if absolutely nothing else.

lol, I used to do that on the subreddit. I don't do it here because the mods can see who reported what.

In response to your edit, you weren’t banned for claiming there’s no difference. You were banned for railing about degeneracy.

Probably the single most common complaint about our moderation comes from people thinking “surely those rules about civility and tact don’t apply here, for my outgroup!”

My man, you've convinced me to switch to the default Motte theme in my profile so I can both flashbang my eyes and also see what kind of record of past rule-breaking you've been up to.

My eyes are burnt, and so is your standing with us mods. I see a long list of past warnings and temp bans, and not a single good thing to counteract that. You've been warned for low effort commentary as well as booing the outgroup more times than I want to count.

Banned for a month, and I leave it open to the others if they want to extend this.

If you are posting on a forum for clarifying shady thinking about culture war topics, it is a distinction you need to make anyway, even if you would rather conflate every outgroup activity you dislike.

It's a real shame that the traditionalist position tends to be trivially reducible to "peepee in but = bad", not that the progressive one (which is just "peepee in vuhgina = bad") is any better.

Honestly, I'm more interested in the mechanisms of why it might come to pass that a child might somehow be "converted" into a Gay. I would rather hear "well, you constantly said Man Bad so I became [a reflection of] a woman instead (coincidentally complete with all the negative attributes, or at least lack of positive ones, thereof)" than it just being chalked up to XXX-rays.

I am continually told it happens but without a claimed mechanism of action unique to sex (since most "grooming" is not, in fact, based solely thereon: how could it be, if convincing you to have gay sex was the hidden goal?)- indeed, the entire point of "grooming" is to make someone do something sexual they do not want to do by psychological tricks that work on those without the self-confidence to resist them- I can only have the elementary schoolboy understanding of why the gayness is bad. Occasionally, I see "well, you can't raise kids with two dads", which is trivially true but similarly taken for granted, and every single relationship failure mode claimed unique to gays are also failure modes when straights do them.

So I notice that I am confused about why sex is magically special, why having a bad sexual encounter is a life-ending event (outside of the sociobiological need/instinct to pretend that it is). And without that understanding I can't pass the Turing test, but if "peepee in but = bad" gets me most of the way there, should I continue to believe there's anything deeper?

Both are the opposition. Does it matter that for the trans it's egg cracking and for the homosexuals it's grooming acceptance / pride? Not really, for both it's indoctrination into sexual degeneracy. I've yet to hear a convincing argument that there are differences other than degree or semantics. Certainly were we to parse out all of the various degeneracies or comorbidities and plot them on a venn diagram for any individual in this cohort there would be much overlap for those on this spectrum of degeneracy.

In the same sense it does not matter you're a balloon fetishist but don't pop them and think the balloon poppers are not true looners.

It may matter in some intra-sexual degeneracy hierarchy but for those on the outside the inner political drama of quarreling foreign tribes is of little consequence, all are the enemy.

A community the gay movement has had ample time to distance itself from, and has, instead, done the opposite.

Here's a story in City Journal about a 10 year old immigrant girl who was groomed and transitioned by her teacher in Olympia, WA.

The teacher and the school tried to keep it from her parents, but eventually the parents found out. The family fled the state and then went back to India. After she left school, the teacher was emailing the student trying to get her to leave her parents and come live with her.

Weirdly, I think even this teacher's disgusting behavior was a form of mistake theory. She probably thought she was helping.

Seeing how horrible everyone here says India is, it was probably helpful to try and keep the girl in America even with the risk of regretful medical operations later in her life.

This is both a single instance and presents little evidence that the child was "converted" rather than a teacher trying to be accepting of a student who said they were trans. You don't have to believe that children or teenagers could be transgender to understand how those would differ in intent.

Also this is about trans people, the original comment is about homosexuality.

  • -17

this is about trans people, the original comment is about homosexuality

If you're opposed to degeneracy and degenerates this is a distinction without a difference.

  1. It's not happening
  2. That doesn't count it's actually the bailey and we're talking about the motte
  3. This is only a single instance
  4. Ok it's happening, and it's actually a good thing.

I assume by being on TheMotte you are aware of concepts like lizardman constant, the Chinese robber fallacy and nutpicking.

Yes out of 3.8 million teachers I'm sure some of them are nutjobs in completely insane and weird ways. The question isn't if you can't find a few instances of teachers doing something insane, but if it's common enough to be worth worrying about.

Even if just .001% of teachers do something, you still get 38 who try it. Which is say don't use a single newsworthy instance to try to argue something happens often.

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

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Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


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