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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   31706 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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Greetings fellow Mottizens!

I greatly appreciate those of you who participated in the romantic preferences survey which allowed me to map out our preferences towards women. Thank you!

However, it's been months, and I still have only 189 respondents who've shared their Romantic Preferences Towards Men.

If you're interested in seeing how this turns out, more responses from gay and bisexual men are definitely helpful, and, I would greatly appreciate it if you could also spread the word about the survey to your lady friends so that I could have a balanced representation of genders and orientations for analysis.

I feel like there's something missing in your article, something actionable. If most men like slender women with delicate fair features and long shaved legs, what personality traits should women that look like fantasy dwarves cultivate to maximize their chances? That is, what personality traits do men that don't value the most-liked body traits prefer?

A woman who is genuinely worse off by all possible metrics has no option but to simply settle for less (or not settle at all.) Same logic as profoundly ugly men. But most people have at least something they're exceptional in, and can derive comparative advantage from. Maximize whatever that is. It doesn't matter if you're competing against X other women for X-Y men that care about that trait, it's better than competing against every other woman for traits everyone is looking and optimizing for.

(All of this logic works the same way swapping "women" and "men." It's what I consciously applied to find my current girlfriend.)

This is a better suggestion than GBRK's response implies, because most of the article was dedicated to the clear fact that some people prefer, well, dwarves to elves.

The trouble is A) the article was already quite long, and B) I'm not sure what women with less popular looks should do other than find people who like their look. But I'll think about this at least; there may be a follow-up article where I could include more speculative advice like this. Do you have any ideas of your own?

The fact wasn't that clear to me. You identified five factors, plotted some of them against each other and against the conservative-progressive axis, but some things would've made the message clearer:

  • how much do these five factors correlate?
  • are there distinct clusters of male preferences beyond that tiny group of fat fetishists?
  • as an example, there's a 2D plot of factor 2 vs factor 4 with six clusters of beauty traits, if we break men down into 64 groups based on how much they value each cluster, how big are these groups, do they have any significant biases along political or social axes?

Think of those five dimensions as five indepenent, unrelated personality traits. They aren't clusters, and the fat fetishists aren't really a tiny group, any more than "smart people" are a tiny group. Every person attracted to women could roll up a character on 3d6. For example:

Robert Heinlein
18th level Science Fiction Author
Alignment: Chaotic-Libertarian

Attributes:

  • Curve-Lover: 14
  • Great Personalities: 16
  • Barbie-Lover: 9
  • MILF-Chaser: 11
  • TradWife-Lover: 4
Powers: Write excellent novel, inspire fan base
Vulnerabilities: Nudism, divorce

Are they truly independent? Because I didn't get that from your article.

Welcome to the wide world of principle components analysis, orthoxerox! These dimensions are orthogonal.

Very relevant to BvB: https://instagram.com/reel/DI_ushmMQ86/

So, there's a recurring criticism I see in many spaces regarding various right-wing projects in building parallel institutions, alternative ideological frames to that of the left, cultural resilience, and so on (ranging from critics of "Benedict Option" strategies, to Neema Parvini when talking about why "American nationalism" does not and cannot exist), which is that the thing in question is "a LARP," or "LARP-y," or something similar. Which is to say that it is "performative," that the actions aren't backed by some sort of deep-down "genuine" belief.

To which I say: so what?

First, whence this idea that the "deep-down" internal mindset of a person is more important than the actions themselves? Do a person's deeds carry so little weight, compared to their mental state when doing them?

But more importantly, isn't this how anyone gets started with something? I mean, a lot of the examples that come to my mind are things that I'm only familiar with second-hand, but I'll try to explain.

I'm old enough that back in the first few grades of elementary school, they made us stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day. I think back on us as first graders, doing that. Were we actually earnestly pledging our undying allegiance to the Republic and its flag? We didn't even understand all the words we were saying. We were just reciting what we were told to recite, the way we were taught to recite it, because we didn't want to get in trouble. It was all fake, all performative, all "a LARP."

Those of you who grew up religious, did you really understand every hymn you sang, every element of each ritual you participated in, from the very first time you did it? Or was there at least some "going through the motions" and mimicking your elders, with true understanding coming later?

In one of the replies to that Twitter post on the "homeschool prom" linked late last thread, someone described school dances as "a LARP" of the actual 'courtship' scene/process. Well, how else do people learn?

One common criticism of Pascal's Wager is that, even if you buy the argument, it only serves to persuade you that you should believe God exists, and there's a clear gap between thinking "I should believe God exists" and thinking "God exists." I mention it, because Pascal himself addressed this point shortly after introducing the Wager. And his answer is LARPing. Once you're convinced you should believe in God, then start acting as if He exists. "LARP" as a person who believes in God. If you do it thoroughly enough for long enough, Pascal argues, you'll start to actually believe it.

I've seen similar arguments in everything from job interview advice to dating advice — picture the person you want to be, and then act as they would, even if it's "all pretend."

It all comes down to the same classic piece of advice: "fake it till you make it." And what is the "fake it" stage, if not "LARP-y"? If not "performative" and, well, fake?

The reason given for this strategy is that it rarely stays fake forever. Maintaining a performative pretense, saying and doing one thing all while constantly going "this is silly, this is stupid, this is fake, this isn't me, I don't believe any of this" in your head is hard (at least for non-sociopaths). It's why governments have made citizens recite propaganda slogans over and over, why they made us say the Pledge of Allegiance over and over — because many times, it doesn't stay fake, doesn't stay merely performative. Again, it's fake it till you make it.

And even if an individual never "makes it," never achieves real belief no matter how long they perfectly maintain "the LARP"? Well, when we're talking about a long-term project involving a significant number of people, you have to consider future generations. Which gets to a concept mentioned here on the Motte before: generational loss of hypocrisy. Even if the first generation never get rid of their inner "this is so fake" thoughts… well, the next generations — whether that's new recruits, or their literal children — can't see those inner thoughts, only the outer "act." The LARP will not be multi-generational. To quote @WhiningCoil again:

I'm reminded of some joke about the difference between a cult and a religion. A cult is all made up by people. In a religion, all those people are dead.

So, to sum up, the accusation that a project of this sort is "LARP-y" is kind of irrelevant. Yes, it'll be LARP-y to start with; it kind of has to be. That's how things work. It's a phase — a necessary phase in the process of becoming something more, and if the people involved stay determined enough, and keep it up long enough, that phase will pass, and it will become something more.

Fake it till you make it.

(I'm hoping this isn't too incoherent, and isn't too low effort for a top-level post.)

It's true, accusations of LARPing always discount the fact that literally all revolutions and social movements were LARPs originally.

However, efficient politics requires efficient tactics. And there are many criticisms one can make of the Benedict option as ineffective to achieve one's goals. "It's a LARP" is the weakest argument, but it is not the only argument.

I think "you won't be allowed to exit" is much stronger. People like to employ striking examples like Waco or Ruby Ridge but in truth even milder examples are legion.

Consider the recent Men In Sheds shenanigans. As long as you're not allowed to exclude people out of your organizations in practice, you don't have freedom of association, so you don't have access to the Benedict option. You can't be an ineffectual and inoffensive separatist if the people who rule you want to force you to participate in their society.

Far from me to discourage people from trying to build ground game and organic institutions. I think that's a worthwhile effort and a necessary component of any political or social movement, but that alone is ineffectual on its own. Top down elite power is the much more radical requirement.

The Amish and similar groups exist and are real, and they are arguably more radical than what the Benedict Option calls for. They don't have elite power, either, although they do have elite allies (and I do agree that you should get elite allies if you can).

The Amish are grandfathered in and you could not create a similarly isolated group from scratch. They don't even pay Social Security taxes--just try doing that with a new group.

The Amish are grandfathered in and you could not create a similarly isolated group from scratch.

You can join the existing Amish. Pretty easily actually, if you are earnest about it, you can head to a Mennonite-adjacent community, buy a farm, and you'll be accepted within a few years or so in most cases. I suspect this is more common among the Trad community than its detractors think, but that such folk naturally are never heard from again in public.

I don’t think so? They’re all related to each other and AFAIK regard ‘the English’ with suspicion. Or is that a myth?

You're correct, but so am I.

You can, but effectively no one does.

There are levels to this. There are Mennonite churches that welcome outsiders for worship. If you join one, buy a farm, and earnestly pursue integration for years I'm saying they'll probably accept you. Going deeper into even more traditional communities will require years more of credibility, which is why I'd suggest starting with the "lighter" communities within the plain folk and working your way deeper: it's easier to imagine a tech bro becoming a Mennonite and it's easy to imagine a Mennonite joining an Amish community.

Don't get me wrong this is a ten to fifteen year family project.

The Amish are an interesting example to bring up because they were specifically targeted in the previous administration and organized politically to vote as a block and punish the incumbent inasmuch as they could.

Like others say, much like native tribes they are grandfathered in, but they too still require elite power to sustain that existence. You can't just go innawoods, you need to work the system to let you.

Can you summarize the Men in Sheds thing?

There was a social program for seniors in the UK to get guys together and give them some free tools and a workshop. Something about combatting male loneliness, IIRC. It was originally conceived of as a male only space, so the wives of some of the attending chaps couldn't stand the thought that something might bot belong to them, and they nagged their husbands until they were allowed in.

Not OP but I dug up a single article on MSN - seems like an initiative in the UK designed for men and then in this one local community (chapter?) they decided to admit women. The article is very short on detail about who pushed it through, how much pushback there was, etc. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/we-put-the-pressure-on-to-join-men-in-sheds/ar-AA1Dmt17?ocid=BingNewsVerp

I think this is very related to an observation that has been pointed out for some time now: In most modern places, especially cities, the liberal or even progressive worldview is nowadays the de-facto conservative option in the intuitive sense of the word. What would you call the worldview of your own parents, of the entrenched powers, of the commonly accepted older moral guardians? The default opinion of the church lady archetype around me (to some lesser degree even where I grew up, and certainly where I live now) is some mix of environmentalism (which in itself is intrinsically conservative to some degree) and anti-fascism that many of them have by now been holding since the 70s or so. "Too far left" is to them equivalent to "too pious"; Maybe foolish or impractical, but never really bad or evil. Even if they may technically be part of a religion, they clearly hold their leftie creds in higher regard, often explicitly assuring everyone that no, they actually don't care about the teaching of their actual official religion in particular, they are more on the generally spiritual side and just wanted to be active in some religion in some form. Hell, the literal evangelische Kirchentage (church days organized by mainline protestants) have some great workshops (translated, obviously): "Queer animals on the ark", "brave and strong. Empowerment for BiPoC-kids" or "name blessing for trans*, inter or non-binary people".

This necessarily means that any rival ideology claiming to be conservative is actually at best regressive or at worst wholly unrelated to conservatism, since the de-facto conservatives hate being called conservative. In that sense, the LARP-criticism is correct, since one of the selling points of conservatism is the proof-by-demonstration intrinsic to the ideology that has been dominant for the last decades or longer. It's obviously a general problem also often observed on the left on different topics, but right-wing projects like to have it both ways: On one hand, they recognize they're the rebels organizing a new system, and on the other, they want to leech off the prestige of some old conservative tradition that they were never part of, insufficiently understand, imperfectly copy and which thus may or may not actually work the way it used to. People notice that.

I don't completely disagree with you, however. In my view, most of these right-wing projects need to be more honest they are not really conservative anymore, and lean more into the rebel frame. Nevertheless, as you point out, to some degree unapologetic LARPing is always part of how you create a new system. But it also includes more flexibility and adaption based on what works and what doesn't than many of them want to really practice. Creating something new is hard work.

This necessarily means that any rival ideology claiming to be conservative is actually at best regressive or at worst wholly unrelated to conservatism, since the de-facto conservatives hate being called conservative.

To elaborate on this point: The accusation of LARPing is most pertinent when it's "LARPing as trad", which is a sort of performative contradiction. The original sense of "tradition" (from Latin traditio) is "that which has been handed down", and not (as in colloquial usage) "the way things were at some point in the past" - but this equivocation is significant. The value of tradition qua tradition is in the Lindy effect, but if that's what you care about, a "tradition" that must be "RETVRNed" to is really no tradition at all, but a LARP. If the tradition (as in, the organic chain of transmission) was broken, such that you have to learn about it from old books rather than from your elders, then in fact it did not stand the test of time, and so it can't claim the Lindy effect to its credit.

The value of tradition qua tradition is in the Lindy effect, but if that's what you care about, a "tradition" that must be "RETVRNed" to is really no tradition at all, but a LARP.

My parents, and their parents, were part of a church. I was raised in this church. I decided in my twenties to leave this church despite my parents and siblings all remaining in it, and in my thirties I decided to, as you have it, RETVRN. Was the tradition broken, given that I left?

If I had stayed away, but instead my children decided to RETVRN, would the tradition be broken?

If there's a community of a hundred people forming a church, and 80% leave the church and 20% stay, and then we fastforward, say, three generations, would descendants of the 80% joining the church be LARPing? Would converts with no connection to the church at all be LARPing?

In short, can you join or adopt a tradition in any meaningful sense? If not, where do traditions even come from in the first place?

If not, where do traditions even come from in the first place?

Traditions start as innovations, then become traditions.

The problem here is the claim that one is not innovating when one RETVRNS.

If not, where do traditions even come from in the first place?

Traditions start as innovations, then become traditions.

The problem here is the claim that one is not innovating when one RETVRNS.

One is not innovating when one adopts another's innovation either, though.

It's a distinction of Sense versus Reference. The California hippie who travels the world in search of spiritual wisdom and winds up adopting (say) Tibetan Buddhism is not doing the same thing as the Tibetan layman who practices Buddhism because that's just what their people do.

Which is all well and good, since Buddhism has a core that is (purportedly) true regardless of how one arrives at it. But the irony of "trad-LARPing" comes in when the ideology has no substance or justification other than its supposed traditional status, i.e. tradition-qua-tradition, something of the form: "This society has lost its way because there are too many individualists, people who think they know better than they did in the good old days. Therefore it falls to me, the lone heroic seeker, to forsake mainstream society and devote my life to poring through the ancient tomes (the more ancient the better) in search of the one true ideology." This is the same mindset as that of the wandering hippie, a mindset which (I claim) is more persistent and fundamental to one's character than any particular ideology which one may adopt.

"trad-LARPing" comes in when the ideology has no substance or justification other than its supposed traditional status, i.e. tradition-qua-tradition

I think this is uncharitable. I you look at the examples of tradlarping today, you see people who are specifically unsatisfied with some aspects of modernity (such as the destruction of marriage) and are trying to bring it back by manifesting living in a 50s magazine ad for vaccum cleaners.

It's cargo culting a lot more than it is blindly worshiping the dead.

This specific terminology smuggles its own view of the object. The conservative view, as opposed to the reactionary view.

An alternative understanding, from, say, Julius Evola, is that traditions are perennial truths embedded in the structure of reality, which eternally return. And the point is not being lindy because nothing ever lasts, but to claim the boons of alignment with some transcendental understanding of the universe.

In that sense, innovation can be traditional, and conservatism be anti-traditional, insofar as the behavior can or cannot be embedded in a larger mythic structure. 70 years of materialism did not make the Soviet Union into a traditional institution, however many dedushkas you can find that fondly remember it.

Well yeah, nobody calls actually traditional institutions larping even when it technically fits.

Did you know the cardinals who elect the pope are technically appointed as the more minor clerics within the diocese of Rome who have the responsibility to elect its bishop? Of course canon law doesn't actually allow senior archbishops to actually run the parishes they're theoretically pastors of, and it doesn't allow cabinet-level Vatican officials to act as deacons(except, technically, in the Latin mass) either. But none of this is referred to as larping. The word 'cardinal' even comes from a figure of speech for holding clerical responsibilities in a purely notional manner(the bird was named after the cleric due to their red robes). But being a millennium old tradition that is a direct development from previous practices insulates them from such a charge.

I think you and @RenOS are using a much finer-grained and overly academic definition of “larp” than what most people are using when they accuse someone of being a “trad-larper”. When they say that they mean the accused larper is more interested in making a fashion statement and isn’t really that committed to the ideology in question. For example, nobody is looking at ISIS and saying “well technically those guys are all just larping because the original chain of tradition between themselves and 7th century Islam was broken by 400 years of Ottoman rule and nobody decided to RETVRN to Sunni traditionalist interpretations until the Wahabbists in the late 18th century”

I mean im not sure LARP is always a problem. If a worthy tradition was lost due to force — for example, a culture was forced to give up its language after a conquest, it’s somewhat a LARP to go back to that. It’s also in many cases a worthy effort to do that even if at first it is a LARP. The revival of Hebrew was a LARP at tge time. Now it’s the native language of Israel, and there’s a living culture that grew up alongside it. Irish is taught in schools in Ireland, it is sort of a LARP even now, but it’s an attempt at reviving a piece of that culture.

As usual, it depends on your goals and the details of what is done. In our region, my parents' generation got the local language & culture beaten out of them by the greater german system, which resulted in me and my generation not being able to speak it (despite my parents still talking it among each other; I can understand it, though) and internalizing a more general "cosmopolitan" german culture instead, even if it still has some local flavors to it.

Now some of my old classmates are reviving the old language through "traditional theater" and similar events, but as far as I can see, they don't reject their actual internalized culture at all. I can't help but view it as pointless LARPing, even if they clearly are mostly sincere about wanting to reconnect with their heritage. Then again, I'm not really a traditionalist myself, so you could call my criticism dishonest itself.

I'm holding onto my dialect for dear life. It's a core element of my experience of "home". Somehow I internatlized early on that it was in fact the others, the dialect-rejectors, the ostentatiously high-german who were LARPing, who pretended not to understand and speak the actual natural language of this place and time. And I had the goood fortune to be among others who practiced their dialect shamelessly and naturallly.

But that was long ago.

It's obvious that young people are socialized not primarily with others from the same place, but above all else with rootless cosmopolitans and their media. The number of those who naturally speak the local dialect are dropping precipitously and, outside of a few isolated villages, are already unsustainably low. Maybe a comprehensive, widespread and sustained LARP might save it, but not nearly enough people have the desire, nevermind the ability, to do it. Things are looking dire.

Hmm, there are lot's of possible criticisms, some less valid than others, and if you are encounting folks calling it a LARP soley on some un-earnest enough mindreading, then your counter is fine. But I think the more germane LARP criticism is not about 'intention', but the fact that a LARP is by definition, not real, superficial, and thus unsustainable.

Like if someone 'LARPed' the middle ages by conquering and setting up an actual feudal state and ran it thus, but on their death bed they left a note saying 'tee hee, twas a LARP', it falls kind of flat. But this is quite different than actual LARPing, which involves temporary, superficial escapism, that's fundamentally facilitated by the non-LARP. Armor that looks cool, but can't stand up in real combat, forts and 'castles' that you couldn't actually maintain, all funded by an email job.

To this point, accusastions of LARPing, rather than mindset, should be accusations against rigor and of fragility, and serve as predictions about sustainability.

I think bringing up the Benedict Option is a bad counter-example, since the trope-maker, Rod Dreher is a pretty damning case study of all this. There's nobody who publically committed themselves harder to this idea, yet he failed to even superficially create even sustainable parts of this project in his own life. The book he wrote, was a cherry picked set of anecdotes, cobbled artificially into a picture he wanted to paint, not an examination of the concept in earnest.

I think bringing up the Benedict Option is a bad counter-example, since the trope-maker, Rod Dreher is a pretty damning case study of all this. There's nobody who publically committed themselves harder to this idea, yet he failed to even superficially create even sustainable parts of this project in his own life. The book he wrote, was a cherry picked set of anecdotes, cobbled artificially into a picture he wanted to paint, not an examination of the concept in earnest.

How do you mean regarding Rod?

are you familiar at all with Rods life trajectory and current state?

I haven't kept up with him too much lately, I last heard of him when he announced he was getting a divorce which has gotta be two years ago now.

In general I remember liking Rod when he was one of the first Hipster Orthodox right wing writers I knew in his TAC days, just before the Benedict Option came out.

I also heard he seems to have noped off to Hungary, but yeah, last time I checked in with him he said he was getting a divorce. I believe there was an argument about "whether the cross can be co-opted." But that's the last I heard of him.

While I really respect his struggles with Catholicism, and I know they were very personal for him (he said that a priest he was personally close with was credibly accused of sex abuse, which broke his trust in the whole institution), I also get the sense that they went full-steam-ahead into Orthodoxy as kind of a second option, the second-most attractive girl at the bar altar rail, and so there's a lot of trauma, conversion, and ideological flip-flopping involved in his personal journey, which reads to me more like desperation than divine ascent. I wonder if that just got to be too much for his wife, especially considering how famously repulsive Orthodoxy is to non-Orthodox women, something I've observed personally. He also just strikes me as quite a depressive, just a very moody and somber person whose view of life and the future is almost perfectly apocalyptic, and I can't imagine that makes a marriage easy to manage. When I think about Dreher, the overwhelming feeling is "sad." He doesn't feel like he's chasing the divine, he feels like he's running away from brokenness. Which is not a bad starting point, but far from anything that measures up to holy Benedict.

the second-most attractive girl at the bar altar rail

I know it's a metaphor but I feel the need to nitpick- the Byzantine rite doesn't have an altar rail. Communion is received from a cleric standing in front of the iconostasis and the service takes place mostly behind the iconostasis.

Yes, I’ve been to orthodox services.

And if we’re going to pedantically pick apart metaphors, most Latin churches these days don’t have an altar rail either.

especially considering how famously repulsive Orthodoxy is to non-Orthodox women, something I've observed personally.

I have not observed this personally. Do you mind giving us some examples? I'm struggling to envision how orthodox christianity would be particularly repulsive to secular women, compared to any other conservative religious belief, such as islam.

Islam is a fargroup conservative belief, Orthodoxy is an outgroup one. If my country went full Handmaid's Tale, it would be the Orthodox putting the women back under the boot sooner than the Muslims, despite the sizeable Muslim subpopulation.

I have no idea what type of orthodoxy you guys are dealing with. The type I'm familiar with (immigrants and such) encourages women to get degrees and high-powered jobs.

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I haven’t observed it either, but it is rather difficult to raise small children Orthodox, everything s long and Sunday School is after Liturgy. It sounds like they have three kids and we’re homeschooling, I could see that being pretty rough if she wasn’t into it. Some Orthodox families I know seem to have the wife going along with homeschooling because the husband has strong opinions, but isn’t that into the actual teaching part.

It's less about Eastern Orthodoxy as a set of beliefs, and more about the practices and people of Eastern Orthodoxy. And we're not talking about secular women here, I suppose they'd just go running in the opposite direction for reasons that you well understand, but conservative-to-moderate, vaguely religious women, in the United States. And it isn't an active hate, it's not that these ladies are obsessed with Orthodoxy and want to cast hexes at it or something, they just have no interest in it and find it a little odd that anyone would.

As I understand it, the median Orthodox convert in the United States is an intellectual, introverted, evangelical, college-educated man, who discovered Orthodoxy through the mysterious workings of the Holy Spirit, also known as Wikipedia. From what I've heard, and seen, the women in this man's life get dragged to the divine liturgy ("St. Nathaniel says 'come and see!'"), and most often do not hear the angels singing the way the man did the first time he witnessed the liturgy.

At my local Orthodox parish, there was a young guy who dragged his entire family to Orthodoxy, and while his parents and siblings were committed, it's obvious he was the one who orchestrated the whole thing. They'd never have stepped foot in an Orthodox church if he hadn't pushed them.

Frederica Mathewes-Green, who as I understand it is kind of the "influencer mom" of American Orthodoxy, said in one of her videos that she just didn't like the divine liturgy the first time she went to an Orthodox church. She grew to like it, but that initial revulsion, or indifference, is what I've generally seen and heard from women who've had experience with Orthodoxy.

Participating in the honored tradition, I dragged both my mother and my girlfriend to liturgy a few times -- neither liked it. Both of them liked going to mass, though. (Definitely not the latin mass -- they can't understand what anyone's saying.)

I think a lot of it has to do with the people. Your framing says a lot, actually -- the intellectual content of faith is the thing that brings our evangelical man to become interested in Orthodoxy, but the women he drags don't know or care about any of that. She's interested in what's actually going on around her: what songs are they singing? What is this strange artwork on the walls? What's the content of the sermon? What do the candles mean? What are the people like? Are they a bear normal, or strange? Are people happy here? Does this seem like a community where I fit in?

And if we're talking about somewhat conservative American women, the sort of women who might be interested in a conservative religious tradition, we're talking about women who are generally very interested in social convention, unobtrusiveness, familiarity. They're very socially-oriented, they want a community that feels familiar, friendly, and safe, not strange, alienating, and unpredictable.

As our female draggee looks around, she sees these weird Byzantine paintings on the walls where people look odd, with strange proportions and almost alien-like ridges and folds in the depictions of their skin (in some icons, St. Paul genuinely just looks like a space alien to me with his giant head). The church bells ring out, and instead of the sweet ding donging of Western church bells, she hears them clanging like a hailstorm. ("Was that an accident?") She hears odd music she's never heard before, no familiar hymns, no familiar cadence -- if the chant is Byzantine-style, it genuinely sounds, to Western ears, like something from the Muslim and not the Christian world -- and she smells weird smells of strange incense, as some guy in an elaborate robe starts swinging it at her. And the worst part? She's not supposed to sit down! "It's for the old ladies," our evangelical man helpfully told her. Well, she's not an old lady, but this just doesn't seem right. She feels like she's put on the spot and has to stand where everyone can watch her, in a situation where she already feels out of place. And now she can't even get comfortable by sitting down and just watching!

The service ends, and, though she's shy, evangelical man starts dragging her around to talk to people, and she can't help but feel like they're just... a little off. There's the man who's wearing a kilt as his Sunday best in the middle of Kansas. There's the guy who wears a bowtie. There's the dude who seems prone to leering, like he's been on a naval vessel for six months and hasn't seen the sight of a woman in that time. There's the guy she can overhear talking about the upcoming Holy Friday service, who's telling his friends, "I just can't wait to stick it to those Jews." (A real anecdote I heard from an Orthodox friend of mine about someone he knew.) And a bunch of the men, including the priest, have a thick, untrimmed beard -- can't they trim them?

Half the people in the church are speaking in foreign languages she can't understand, and are sticking to themselves, avoiding eye contact. She feels like a foreigner in her own country. People are talking about the lenten fast, and are speaking about cheese like they've been on the naval vessel with the leerer with only bread and water -- wait, these people can't eat cheese for months out of the year? The priest is friendly, but seems strange, overly intellectual, and his beard looks greasy. She strikes up a conversation with another convert's wife, and she tells her, "yeah, I didn't like the orthodox church either at first -- it grows on you."

And the overwhelming feeling our dragged-along woman feels to all this is an unadulterated, grade A:

ICK!

My mom told me once, after I'd stopped exploring Orthodoxy, that the Orthodox parishioners "seemed like hippies." My girlfriend was less expressive, but said she thought they "felt like strange people." Neither would have attended the divine liturgy if I hadn't dragged them, and neither had any interest in continuing to attend after I stopped being interested. They just found it overwhelmingly weird.

This obviously doesn't apply to cradle Orthodox -- it is their tradition and they're quite familiar with it. It's western Christianity that seems weird to them. And there are, of course, women who choose to convert to Orthodoxy on their own, but I've never talked to any of them so I can't offer a take.

Sometimes I share my views on Eastern Orthodoxy and people seem surprised by them -- I don't know, maybe I've just seen a tiny sliver of what Orthodoxy in America looks like and it's different elsewhere. I owe a lot to my time exploring Orthodoxy, including a strengthening of my love for the Mother of God, an appreciation for the iconographic tradition (looks over at my icon of Christ Pantokrator), a more reserved approach to the procession of the Holy Spirit, a grounding and softening of my Western 'hard edges' -- without abandoning the juridical lens on Christianity as some Orthodox seem to call for -- and even a belief in the essence-energies distinction, which, interestingly, resolved a struggle I'd had with Western Mariology. And I sincerely and deeply respect the Orthodox tradition as a pathway to communion with God.

But despite all that, my own feeling after sincerely exploring Orthodoxy is that, for all the missionary zeal it's developed in America through conversion, it still feels like it's someone else's church, and I'm just living in barbarian lands an ethnic diaspora of ethnicities I simply am not a part of. And where even the native converts are, respectfully, not always the most 'normal' or conventional people, even if I bear no ill will towards them.

I had a convert friend in the Orthodox church who was quite interesting, obviously very intelligent. But he also had a passion for Orthodoxy and Eastern Europe that bordered on obsessive; he would talk about and cook Russian cuisine for people, despite being as English-German as the rest of us American white people. He had a two-bedroom condo, and one entire bedroom had been converted into what can only be described as a chapel, with icons covering every wall and liturgical books overflowing bookcases. He wanted to be a priest, but had no interest in marriage (which would make him the perfect Catholic seminarian, but obviously led to some stern pastoral advice from his spiritual father). He honestly struck me as the kind of guy who just needed to get laid.

While I respect other cultures and I'm even open to trying their cuisine, I simply have no interest in becoming Greek or Bulgarian or Russian. At times, it felt to me like fitting in the Orthodox church required a cultural self-emptying, not merely a spiritual one. As though to become Orthodox I had to renounce the profound insights of the Western philosophical tradition or the honor due to my ancestors and embrace a worldview that sees them as something between "deeply mistaken" and "the Great Satan of the whole world." I get enough hatred of the West from the secular world, and I just don't care to receive it from my fellow Christians.

And I guess that's what I see in Dreher. He's a Western man, born in Louisiana, and restoring his relationship with his parents was important to him. But he has so self-emptied himself of his culture that he's literally fled the West to go to Hungary, despite writing a book about how Westerners can create pockets of grace within the West after the model of the great founder of Western monasticism.

If I mean anything by this long post, I mean to say that Orthodoxy feels foreign, alien, even converts often feel somewhat odd or unusual, and very often its prescription to Westerners is "reject your people, RETVRN to ours." And that this is picked up by non-Orthodox women more than non-Orthodox men, because of their strong attunement to social signals and preference for the conventional.

I wonder how much of it is literally just orthodox cassocks seeming like the wrong size half the time and the clergy tending to have beards that… don’t look well groomed.

The Latin mass has a lot of the same issues with being literally in a foreign language and attracting plenty of obsessives but manages to be much more female friendly because it looks good. Not just beauty and grandeur but neat and orderly. And I have heard comments from women that it struck them when they first went that seeing immaculate, well choreographed and behaved boys serving the priest made an impression. Aesthetics has two dimensions, after all- there’s a ‘clean and well maintained’ look to go with the classical beauty look and women are very sensitive to the former. It definitely seems like in nonreligious contexts women really care about that stuff- much more than men- too.

Honestly, your experience doesn't match mine at all. For context, I am a cradle Coptic Orthodox in Canada. From my experience, most converts are either converts through marriage or through outreach on the part of Orthodox parishioners. Maybe its because Canada is more catholic, but I do not think I have ever seen a, as you say, "intellectual, introverted, evangelical, college-educated man" convert.

You characterize Orthodox parishioners as "odd" or "hippies", and priests as "intellectuals". This does not match my experience at all. Are there one or two crackpots? Sure, but what organization doesn't? The vast majority of parishioners where I'm from are perfectly normal members of society. The young people in Orthodox churches are even more approachable; they go to the same universities, work the same jobs, go to the same parties, do the same things for fun. The priests are nice, welcoming, and secularly educated. I feel that you've approached orthodoxy from an intellectual paradigm, and that's coloured your perception of the orthodox community. From my perspective, most Orthodox are normal western people, who just happen to be Orthodox. The median introduction to Orthodoxy is from an average young adult introducing their partner/friends to the Church, who play up the history and "connectedness" of the church to society and history in general.

You've mentioned that Orthodox communities seem like social clubs. I'd like to point out that it seems like that because Orthodox churches in the homeland actually are social clubs. They basically operate as NGOs that offer social services, and act as community centers.

Also, you've mentioned that joining an Orthodox church often feels like you're giving up your own culture. Sadly, I agree. Preferably, an indigenous Orthodox Church of America would be established that represents the culture, history and ethos of America. Unfortunately, establishing such a church is a centuries endeavor.

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You give an accurate and quite entertaining description of a certain type of Orthodox parish/parishioner. As a cradle Orthodox Christian who is the child of American converts, my central member of the class Eastern Orthodox is quite different, but I understand how off-putting the types you describe would be if they were one's first Orthodox experience (and they certainly exist).

I belong to the Orthodox Church in America, which was founded by Russian missionaries and has self governed since the rise of communism in Russia. Most churches in the OCA serve fully in English. Priests are required to have secular and seminary degrees and are generally well-groomed. The liturgical chant is the Russian-style four part harmony, so it is basically music sung by a Western-style choir. There are traditionally ethnic parishes, but in many areas (like the Southeast, where I live), the churches are culturally American.

The Greek Orthodox churches in North America might sometimes be less welcoming to non-Greeks (though this is quickly changing in many places as converts come in), but they are generally pretty Westernized and clean-cut (the Greeks Westernized their liturgical/clerical practices in America to give off a more "normal" Catholic/Episcopalian vibe - the GOA church in my city even has an organ).

The Antiochian Churches are also often full of American converts, or, if they are more ethnic, are similar to what TheLoser describes below regarding his/her experience in the Coptic Church.

The type of experience you had sounds stereotypical of ROCOR or maybe an insular Greek or otherwise ethnic parish. To the degree that Orthodoxy has a future in the West, it is probably not in parishes like that.

I owe a lot to my time exploring Orthodoxy, including a strengthening of my love for the Mother of God, an appreciation for the iconographic tradition (looks over at my icon of Christ Pantokrator), a more reserved approach to the procession of the Holy Spirit, a grounding and softening of my Western 'hard edges' -- without abandoning the juridical lens on Christianity as some Orthodox seem to call for -- and even a belief in the essence-energies distinction, which, interestingly, resolved a struggle I'd had with Western Mariology.

I can't believe I missed this post, and I'm really glad it got featured in the AAQC roundup. If I might ask, can you expand on these points some? I find your perspective on the Christian faith to be very enlightening, and I would enjoy hearing more about these topics from you.

Count me as another one who found this through the AAQC roundup.

As an inhabitant of the state with the highest population fraction Eastern Orthodox, I feel like I should say something here; but I don't exactly have much relevant first-hand knowledge, except to note that our Orthodox population is, as one might expect, disproportionately Native (what with many of their ancestors having been first evangelized by Russian Orthodox missionaries, back before Russia sold the place to the USA).

I’m another finding this from AAQC. I’ve always been intrigued by orthodoxy, at least the theological content. But im not entirely convinced for several reasons that aren’t necessarily “the ICK”.

First is that the converts seem to get this weird smug vibe where they decide that ONLY this one specific way of being a Christian is real, and ONLY these particular types of chants are valid. And of course if you don’t fast like a monk and keep a strict prayer rule and build an icon corner (the bigger the better of course). I find them specifically enamored with the trappings of this style of Christianity. What I don’t necessarily find is the faith behind it, concern for Christ Himself. It’s like someone who’s in love with a lifestyle, maybe not completely a LARP, but it’s also not a focus on faith itself.

Second, I do get the ick from some of the “if you don’t do it exactly like I do, you’re a heretic” thing. Like, I do prefer high church liturgy, but I find myself feeling put off when the Orthobros come along and absolutely mock contemporary worship music, “strip mall churches”, and — horror of horrors — having coffee and donuts outside the sanctuary. I’ve never understood the need to try to fit my style of doing church onto everyone else. I like tge British Common Book of Prayers. I’m also generally okay with you liking modern Christian worship if that’s your choice. We come from different cultures, and me trying to stuff you into my box is not good, as I’d rather you find Christ in the most rockabilly smoke machined evangelical church out there than go to a high church liturgy and mentally sleep through it. There’s just a Pharisaical vibe about the whole thing like they’re sort of above the rest of us because they’re the only ones who got it right and the rest aren’t really good Christians and might not even be Christian at all.

Finally, I think there’s a rather odd thing where a lot of the Orthobros seem to suddenly take on really reactionary political views that have nothing to do with what I understand Orthodox Christianity to be about. They suddenly are unironically believing that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion represents a real conspiracy. They suddenly believe that women need to become trad wives and so on. Like, you converted to orthodox Christianity and suddenly you’re a Byzantine Mencius Moldbug who talks like a groyper? I don’t think that’s the traditional Christian faith. It seems rather the culture of online Orthobros who either come from or are lead into far right politics and somehow see these ideas as the reason to choose orthodoxy.

Women like Byzantine Catholicism about as much as they do any other kind of Catholicism, so it isn’t the rite.

It’s probably the anti-westernism over the dumbest things, a Canadian antiAmericanism-like reflexive anticatholism that narcissizes small differences WRT pews and mariology instead of just going hur dur papists, and let’s not leave out beards. Not that women hate beards per se, but the giant beards that need a trim, and often enough also a combing, are not going to be popular. Add that it’s attached to conservative religion and there’s echoes of Islamic misogyny. It just comes off as a bunch of badly groomed autistic weirdos with mommy issues half the time.

Obviously not all orthodox but it’s enough to poison the well.

I have not. What's happened?

The short story is that his life since writing the Benedict Option has turned out exactly the way the BO is meant to avoid. I don't mean that he's turned away from his positions or been hypocritical or anything. (I'm not trying to calumny his character). Just that literally the trajectory of his circumstances, undermines the credibility of the book as an efficacious endeavor, rather than an intellectual LARP.

Rod is currently an expat divorcee, rootlessly gliding around Europe without any 'home' left in America, somewhat disconnected from his family. Whether begrudgingly or not, he's living an almost cartoonishly rootless cosmopolitan lifestyle, pretty much only possible in the world of liquid modernity, the BO has rejected.

Even if you want to argue that Rod didn't Ben-Op hard enough or something, it just strengthes the LARP point, when if the trope-namer himself couldn't implement it effectively.

And again, I don't know all the ins and outs of how Rod got here, or whatever, this is not a character-attack in the slightest. It is just an observation about the BO and the topic of whether it's serious or a LARP for a certain class of people.

Relatedly, I have general issue with Rod's 'research' approach, and question the kind of 'study' made up of carefully curated vignettes of the point you're pushing, rather than a more rigorous approach to forwarding such a social theory.

That's interesting. I read a lot of Rod probably eight years ago, though even then he was a bit inconsistent, and wrote way too much chaff, making it hard to find the wheat. I would go to his AC blog on my lunch break, and there would be a half dozen new posts, five of which were just blatant culture warring, but it wasn't instantly clear which ones. So I gave up reading him, especially when he moved to Substack, and I didn't care to subscribe. But I was still very much in the bubble that was interested in his work, and my church did a book study about The Benedict Option. I tried looking up what happened, but he's very vague about the whole thing, and seems to be almost entirely paywalled now.

Dreher has always struck me as the kind of guy who desperately needs to stop reading the news, but can't help himself. There's something very tragic about a guy who wrote a book about setting up islands of peace away from the mess of the world, but whose output is mostly hot takes on current events.

@2rafa has hurt my feelings a few times calling religious people LARPers. I was one of them for a while but this process has worked for me, and now I genuinely believe!

No offense to you Rafa hah.

So, to sum up, the accusation that a project of this sort is "LARP-y" is kind of irrelevant. Yes, it'll be LARP-y to start with; it kind of has to be. That's how things work. It's a phase — a necessary phase in the process of becoming something more, and if the people involved stay determined enough, and keep it up long enough, that phase will pass, and it will become something more.

The word that's underlying the LARP accusation is "unserious". Maybe the participants don't have to be serious about it all the time, but certainly if one is trying to build an enduring organisation they have to be serious. It would be a tremendous insult to early christians to call their faith unserious considering the hardships they went through for it. Jesus' crucifixion is certainly serious. The pledge of allegiance being recited unseriously by kids is one thing, but the man who wrote it certainly thought it was a serious tool to build patriotic spirit.

I'm not making a judgement on whether new "right-wing" organisations are serious or not, but I think the idea that the people building them have to be serious to be successful has not been debunked here.

People have no idea how real world change is actually effected. Freemasonry sprung out of a LARP novel about a fictitious Rosicrucian Brotherhood; freemasonry rituals involved LARPing; this organization had a huge effect on the modern West. If you are an atheist, it’s impossible to see Christianity as anything other than a Hellenic / Hellenized-Jewish LARP over the Old Testament — yet it’s the most important movement of religious history. The entirety of the Roman elite were engaged in various “mystery cult” LARP rituals, like the Mithraists who were LARPing their own version of a Persian cult. Hitler, of course, was motivated by Wagner’s Live Opera Role Playing work Rienzi, a LORP, and then joined a LARPing movement filled with LARPing occultists who inflated their numbers, and before all his speeches he neurotically LARPed the gestures to seem organic and impassioned. It was LARPing all the way down, and the last thing you can say about Hitler is that his influence on reality was small.

The thing about the LARP is that the more you do it, the more it becomes true. If I were to throw you into the Chinese military, to do their ritual allegiances, you would be faking it 100%. But when you fake it, there’s invisible peer pressure and then music and ambience which changes your memory of the event… The second time you do it, it’s only 95% fake. After enough times, you wouldn’t be LARPing anymore. Provided that the ritual is actually reinforcing the right things. Not too dissimilar to the techniques used by the Chinese in the Korean War to gradually change a person’s identity. Of course, it’s far easier when you yourself are interested in modifying your own identity.

It’s like if I just repeat an affirmation, that’s not going to do much. But if I repeat it while elaborating upon all the connections in my life, and all the benefits, and I imagine various rewards of the affirming identity, over time I will believe it. Our own identity is constructed by memories, and we can modify our memories and make new ones — ergo, we can construct our own identity. This is akin to sports hypnotism. It works.

LARPing isn’t fake, it’s pre-reality. What’s fake is people pretending that they are in reality, when they are doing nothing. This comprises a lot of posting online. Posting online does little; LARPing identity rituals can change the entire history of the world. I imagine that this is part of the reason why IRL organizations are routinely slandered as LARPs — it is a useful tool to prevent anything that has actual potency from disrupting current structures.

Also, “authentic belief” itself is kind of mysterious as a concept. If I’m some guy online, and I write all these logical reasons for why Jesus is definitely God, but my behavior in the world does not evidence this belief, then do I really believe it? I mean, Jesus says right there that giving away my wealth gives me 100fold in this life and the next. So, why am I not doing it? There would be no better investment or use of my time. The reason no one does it is because they don’t actually believe. Whatever they say they believe, it doesn’t matter, because their revealed preference belief is that they don’t believe. So their criticism of others’ lack of belief is Pharaiscal. They would be more faithful to a Mr Beast challenge prize. And well, of course, Jesus also assumes this, hence why he spends so much time talking about how we need just the faith/trust the size of a mustard seed. I think that, we don’t really believe as we think we believe; we believe we believe, because this feels good; in actual fact, in our soul, we do not believe. And we don’t believe because there is insufficient social reinforcement / identity-rituals regarding the belief. The “faith statements” are something of a stretch or exercise: you practice believing that this bread is real flesh, and that the man was born a virgin and revived from death, in a socially-reinforcing way; and though you will never fully believe, you will at least be convinced part of the way, that it’s a good idea to be kind and a little giving. The faith statement is not a belief statement (we don’t accurately know what we believe) it’s instead an exercise with a mechanical consequence in our behavior.

If you're not careful, you'll think that everything is LARPing. And there is an element of truth to that: "all the world's a stage" and such. Systems in practice are less rigid and formal than they look from the outside: for all the pomp and circumstance, your local sports team is just a bunch of dudes playing a game; most of the magic there is actually imparted by the audience watching it.

If you are an atheist, it’s impossible to see Christianity as anything other than a Hellenic / Hellenized-Jewish LARP over the Old Testament

Hardly. I am perfectly willing to believe that a lot of Christians - and certainly a majority of early Christians - sincerely believe in the objective reality of their messiah and his miracles.

But it’s at least the case that Jesus larped, and then the Disciples larped when writing about specific miracles.

Not necessarily.

Jesus may have been earnestly delusional. We certainly get a lot of schizophrenic self-proclaimed messiahs nowadays; why would the original article need to be anything more or less than the most successful one in history? C.S. Lewis used to say the "Jesus was insane" hypothesis could be dismissed by looking at the overall coherence and sensibleness of his teachings whenever he wasn't declaring himself the Son of Man. But that doesn't track with my, or many others' experiences talking to the mentally-will but well-educated. (See Scott's "Professor T" story for anecdata that's at least adjacent.) Grant that crazy attracts crazy, and whoever originated the more fantastical miracle stories may have likewise just been psychotic at the time, or something.

Granted, it's likely that someone deliberately made something up at some point, but even then I'm not sure I'd call it LARPing if they were attempting to perpetrate actual fraud against would-be followers. A hoax isn't the same thing as LARPing.

Grant that crazy attracts crazy, and whoever originated the more fantastical miracle stories may have likewise just been psychotic at the time, or something.

Or you ignore the traditional narrative that the Disciples wrote the Gospels in which case you don't need a hoax, or delusion. It's just later believers believing what they're told or extrapolating from what the Hebrew Bible says the Messiah will do, an old tactic and not a sign of being insane or mendacious.

Except for the original resurrection claim of course. Strangely, the Disciples may be better candidates for delusion than Jesus. It's possible that Jesus really did think he'd bring about the end of Roman rule in some political sense with God's help like many other unfortunate Jews of the time. But at least some of the Disciples clearly believed that he was resurrected , which is noted by Paul to be very odd by the beliefs of the time, and were willing to be martyred despite having a front-row seat to the mother of all disconfirming events.

I've actually seen this used as a modern version of the Lewis argument by secular Christians who can't appeal to miracle claims: the Disciples had first-hand knowledge and were devout Jews. It's insane for them to go with the divinity of a crucified criminal. Unless...

Oh, I wasn't assuming the Gospels were the direct writings of the Disciples, but someone at some point needs to have originated the miracle claims; either they were later liars, or they were contemporary crazies.

Re: the Resurrection, I'm not convinced it was such a radical notion at the time, since the Gospels themselves allude to contemporary speculation that Jesus might have been a resurrected John the Baptist - and/or that John himself may have been a resurrected Isaiah.

And then there's the thing where Mark's account ends at the mourning-women finding his tomb empty and having a brief, ambiguous encounter with a man clad in white (who is, TMU, generally interpreted by believers as an angel, not even the actual risen Christ himself). There are many plausible non-supernatural reasons for Jesus's body to have been removed from Joseph of Arimathea's crypt a few days after he was placed there; it being found empty would have been plenty good enough to start hopeful speculation that he had returned, especially if Jesus himself had in fact alluded to a future resurrection prior to his death. From there, scattered eyewitness reports of risen-Jesus-sightings are no different from people claiming to have run into a middle-aged Elvis Presley.

Re: the Resurrection, I'm not convinced it was such a radical notion at the time

Paul says the crucified Messiah is the stumbling block and folly, because that bit requires a Messiah claimant to die without fulfilling the prophecies and be raised. If you're reading from a secular POV, you have strong reason to be skeptical of Jesus' prophecies of his own death and resurrection (just as everyone is skeptical of his prophecies about Jerusalem) so you have a yet another Messiah claimant being brutally disproved by being hung on a tree and then followed and seemingly deified by Jews (while every other such movement died out)

it being found empty would have been plenty good enough to start hopeful speculation that he had returned,

The problem is that Paul says that Jesus directly appeared to people like Peter who, unlike the Gospel writer, we believe are probably his contemporaries.

Between that and the reference to the appearance to the 500, it seems like someone had to have had some delusional/bereavement episode that then spread.

But the Christians who make the case - e.g. Habermas - often skip the tomb since it first appears in the Gospels (I think Crossan denies Jesus got a grave at all since criminals weren't supposed to, despite the story having a plausible explanation). They focus on a few "minimal facts" which even critical scholars allegedly agree on.

The half-dozen facts we usually use are these: 1) that Jesus died by crucifixion; 2) that very soon afterwards, his followers had real experiences that they thought were actual appearances of the risen Jesus; 3) that their lives were transformed as a result, even to the point of being willing to die specifically for their faith in the resurrection message; 4) that these things were taught very early, soon after the crucifixion; 5) that James, Jesus’ unbelieving brother, became a Christian due to his own experience that he thought was the resurrected Christ; and 6) that the Christian persecutor Paul (formerly Saul of Tarsus) also became a believer after a similar experience.

With those few facts, it is weird. How weird depends on how strong you think the borders between paganism and Christianity were. But it seems like at least someone, maybe Peter, had a delusion (or lied)

Fact 6 is slightly confusing here. The apostles claimed to have seen a physical Jesus in his actual, resurrected body. Paul's vision of Jesus happened long after Ascension Day and was understood as a vision of someone was not currently living in a physical body - I don't see why it is evidence for a resurrection at all.

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We also have to take into account that none of the accounts of Jesus we have are even claimed to be first-hand accounts - even granting that the person in fact existed and the general story of Jesus-the-religious-leader is broadly accurate, the Gospels are the product of several iterations of sanewashing (by followers who did not need to believe anything more outlandish than the common sense of the era) and selection (as we now know of Christian writings that were nixed such as the fanfic-tier Infancy gospels).

In my own estimation, the likelihood that a historical Jesus actually existed seems pretty low, and the apparent scientific consensus for it fake - looking at the main arguments commonly cited (..."we don't have more evidence about other historical figures considered uncontroversial"? "Some Roman guy writing centuries later recounted Jesus's execution as a fact"?), they seem to be borne of desperation to latch onto anything that will allow the consensus-supporter to dissociate themselves from cringe (internet atheists and professional skeptics?) and potential professional repercussions (would a prominent "Jesus was fictional" proponent have an easy time, e.g., socialising at relevant research conferences or asking to access the Vatican archives?).

they seem to be borne of desperation to latch onto anything that will allow the consensus-supporter to dissociate themselves from cringe (internet atheists and professional skeptics?) and potential professional repercussions (would a prominent "Jesus was fictional" proponent have an easy time, e.g., socialising at relevant research conferences or asking to access the Vatican archives?).

Eh. Whether or not Jesus did exist, I think you're vastly overestimating how much scholars care what laymen think. There are some who make bank off laymen like Ehrman but he's atypical. For most, it's just not that interesting and yields little status or new research. Richard Carrier is actually a historian and even he gets little attention, nobody cares that much what Hitchensfan2909 is doing.

Scholars didn't reason backwards from the cringe. They already believed that Jesus was a historical figure long before the internet cringe started and simply don't want to deal with it.

Professional consequences also doesn't explain it all. Yes, the scholars in religious institutions often have to swear to faith statements and can be fired if they deviate from doctrine. But these people are obvious - Mike Licona lost his job for denying the literal raising of the saints in Matthew. Like...no one is under the impression that he or anyone in his position would deny Jesus' existence.

But critical scholars in more secular spaces have said some pretty offensive and lurid things from the perspective of traditional doctrine (Dominic Crossan iirc denies Jesus was given a tomb and claims that he was tossed into a mass grave and left to scavengers like any criminal) and they get away with it all the time.

If we're going to psychoanalyze, I think you actually accurately represent the general public's intuition that skepticism of Jesus' existence is more radical than the alternative and their suspicion that people are dodging it out of deference to religion (or their underestimation of just how hostile critical scholarship can be to traditional doctrine). And I think this impression is why mythicism is so attractive to atheists despite their usual deference to expertise.

I actually think the thing about the selection is overstated. Most of the "apocryphal gospels" significantly postdate the four canonical ones; the process of eliminating them wasn't much more than "go back to the earliest available sources and discount the dodgy latter-day additions", without much consideration to their contents per se. (I'll grant you that John's Apocalypse being included, out of any number of visionary Gnostic-adjacent ravings, is a bit of a fluke.)

We also have to take into account that none of the accounts of Jesus we have are even claimed to be first-hand accounts

This definitely isn't true!

Even setting aside the authenticity of the Gospels for the sake of argument, (and while I am not familiar with all of the fanfic-tier works, my understanding are that it's generally pretty easy to separate the fanfic-tier stuff from the canonical works due to anachronisms and such) Paul claims to have had a firsthand encounter with Christ and from what I understand mainstream academia typically recognizes many of the Pauline letters as authentic and very early dated.

See for example 1st Corinthians, which as I understand is generally believed to be genuine and originally written about twenty – thirty years after Christ's death, and in which Paul specifically claims to have met Christ (1 Corinthians 15:9).

Some Roman guy writing centuries later recounted Jesus's execution as a fact

This also isn't a remotely accurate description of the historical evidence at play. Here's a short list of non-Christians who wrote about pretty unambiguously about Christ within a single century of His death:

  • Josephus (the exact original passage is disputed but it is generally agreed that he references Christ)
  • Pliny the Younger (referencing the worship of "Christ as a god" around 110 AD)
  • Tacitus references Christ's death at Pilate's hands in his history written around 116 AD

Before 200 AD Christians were a significant enough phenomenon that a Greek playwright wrote a parodic play featuring them. It's pretty clear that Christianity wasn't something that got dreamed up a few centuries after the fact – Romans and Greeks were writing letters and plays that display a clear familiarity with Christians and their doctrines well before that time, and we have some early Christian inscriptions as well that rule that out.

And of course this is all without reference to Christian primary sources, such as the Pauline letters (as I mentioned) or the Didache that are believed to be written relatively recently after Christ's death.

I remember a quote from one of the blogs I used to read.

"Everything is just a LARP until it succeeds" is a quote I'm probably incorrectly paraphrasing, but refers to a real phenomenon. Then referred to the radical headchoppers in Algeria, who started out as mostly a joke or so people though.

Most social movements start out small and ridiculous but because they're using or exploiting some real social dynamic they eventually succeed.

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I mean LARP as ‘authentic vs staged’ or maybe ‘organic vs AstroTurf’ is the wrong framing. The better framing is cargo cult as in ‘functional vs pointless’.

Take givesendgo. There’s no allegation that it’s anything but a copy of gofundme. But it also works at its goals. It accomplishes things. It’s clearly larping hut also not a cargo cult.

At the end of the day people are made to live in community and in an atomized society functioning communities are very attractive to people. That’s the end goal of a parallel society- is to build high-functioning communities which grow by being functional, either by attracting newcomers due to it or by retaining the young born there. And that’s the framing to use- criticize right wing communities for not working, yes, but not for being ‘inauthentic’.

I think there's a conceptual muddle (everywhere, not just here) between LARPing (silly, low-grade imitation, connoting unseriousness or outright insincerity) and Cargo Cult behavior (imitating superficial elements of something while not understanding what actual produces the results).

When someone talks about the homeschool prom being a LARP, what I think they're really getting at is that the organizers are trying to copy the structure of an adolescent courtship ritual without having all of the actual machinery that powers it. You try to set up a dance, but it doesn't work because not only do these teenagers not have pre-existing romantic relationships, they don't even know each other.

The reason given for this strategy is that it rarely stays fake forever. Maintaining a performative pretense, saying and doing one thing all while constantly going "this is silly, this is stupid, this is fake, this isn't me, I don't believe any of this" in your head is hard

Many of my peers can cite concrete negative experiences as their reason for leaving the church, but for myself and quite a few others in my cohort, the reason 14 years of private religious education failed to stick was precisely that it was abundantly clear to me past the age of about ten how silly and fake the whole thing was. Being made to participate in the rituals negatively impacted my religious identification compared to if I'd done the truly traditional thing and gone to church for Christmas, Easter, weddings, and funerals.

And the thing is: my teachers were not LARPers. By and large they were true believers trying to share their genuine belief. If they had been faking it, it would have been even more ridiculous, though I do think their authentic belief actively blinded them to the absurdity of doing things like asking a bunch of upper middle class white 15 year olds to share their personal testimony of being born again.

Which is to say: it's not that hard to think something is stupid and fake while going through the motions, and that's when the people insisting are themselves fully committed to the idea. I struggle to imagine what it would have been like if the schools had been run by present day tradcon LARPers whose interest in evangelical Christianity was purely instrumental.

It's why governments have made citizens recite propaganda slogans over and over

Yes, because while many people are persuadable, the most important benefit is isolation. The point of making you participate in these rituals is not to convince you that the underlying ideas are correct (though that may be an added benefit), it's to create the impression that everyone thinks these ideas are correct. Many people are pretty milquetoast and will go along with whatever the prevailing opinion is. The Pledge of Allegiance doesn't make you love America; it encourages you to think everyone around you loves America and you'd best get with the program if you don't want to be ostracized. Likewise with widespread church attendance. It's not about faking it 'til you make it; it's about making your preferred belief system the path of least resistance.

Unless you can actually introduce a general preference cascade towards, e.g., religious fundamentalism or at least get your community to voluntarily segregate from broader society, performative piety isn't going to do much. Substantive indoctrination is going to require something more all encompassing and building parallel institutions requires actually building competitive parallel institutions (which is the real sticking point).

Yeah, I'll just endorse this. Reading the OP I kept being struck by a "huh? no, that's not what happens..." feeling - that the description of having difficulty believing the thing you're doing is stupid did not resonate at all with me personally nor many of the peers of my youth as I understood them. It seems to me that while maybe not the standard reaction of the majority, it's still quite common for performative pretense to have no effect or a negative effect.

LARP, Cargo Cult, Skin Suit, The Purpose of a System is What it Does, The Cruelty is the Point, Master/Slave Morality are all terms that are just used as boo-lights when they're used as conclusions or insults without extensive structural arguments justifying why they are true. They're clever memes someone heard and want to apply all over the place wherever their opponents gather.

To whit, I've heard LARP applied to online groups, who clearly fail the LA; to actual violent terrorists who clearly fail the RP; and to everyone in between. It's mostly meaningless, just meant to associate your enemy with losers in capes.

LARP, Cargo Cult, Skin Suit, The Purpose of a System is What it Does, The Cruelty is the Point, Master/Slave Morality are all terms that are just used as boo-lights when they're used as conclusions or insults without extensive structural arguments justifying why they are true.

I'd strongly disagree. All of these have utility in describing human individual and group behavior. I say this even though I strongly disagree with even proper applications. The concepts are coherent, and even if heavily misused, their proper applications are still relevant.

"The cruelty is the point" is a critique of the endpoint that starts with "be nice, at least until you can coordinate meanness". Meanness, cruelty in other words, is the core of many social enforcement mechanisms. Pointing out that some action is "cruel" will often not get people to abandon that action, because to at least some degree they believe that "cruelty" is necessary. I certainly do.

"The cruelty is the point" isn't typically used to describe people who believe cruelty is necessary to serve a greater good (eg as a deterrent) - nine times out of ten, the implication is that the target believes cruelty is desirable in itself. Ends vs means. Some people think we need to punish criminals "cruelly" to deter others, even if, in a perfect world, no one ought to suffer; other people think justice involves making criminals suffer as punishment, even on a desert island. "The cruelty is the point" is typically used to accuse the first kind of people of secretly being the second kind of people, but hiding behind more socially acceptable utilitarian justifications.

The concepts are coherent, and even if heavily misused, their proper applications are still relevant.

Notice how my sentence ends:

when they're used as conclusions or insults without extensive structural arguments justifying why they are true.

The cruelty is the point can be justified in numerous ways as a phrase used to describe some policy or behavior.

It can also be used as a lazy insult to imply that one advocates a policy out of a sadism or hatred without showing one's work.

Sitting around running extra processor cycles justifying why what you're doing isn't a LARP or maybe it's a LARP but that's good actually is fine, but it's a waste of time when LARP is just being thrown out as a lazy generic insult by your interlocutor.

A good point, and my bad for not reading more closely.

Cheers.

Thanks for posting this and defending it for me because I was going to post pretty much the same thing. I'm not a fan of when someone takes a term with a vague but widely understood meaning and then creates a very specific definition and uses the term as if that's the real definition. Academics do this a lot, but I'm afraid you did this yourself a while back with your precise definition of tackiness. I realized that throughout the rest of that thread I was very careful to use alternate language whenever I was tempted to say tacky in a context that didn't fit your definition, which made me realize that, as fun as your definition was, it didn't really reflect how people talk in real life.

Anyway, I think the rule should be that if the people using the term can't tell you what they mean by it exactly, it means nothing. It may make people feel smart to come up with a hyper-specific definition of LARP but then they just find the general public using the expression the way they want. So it's pointless.

but I'm afraid you did this yourself a while back with your precise definition of tackiness. I realized that throughout the rest of that thread I was very careful to use alternate language whenever I was tempted to say tacky in a context that didn't fit your definition, which made me realize that, as fun as your definition was, it didn't really reflect how people talk in real life.

On the one hand I'm flattered anyone remembers my writing.

On the other, this comment really makes me step back, in that I had a lot of fun writing out an elaborate definition of tacky, and thought I was doing so in good fun towards an enlightening descriptive view of reality; when apparently an intelligent reader would interpret the comment as a proscriptive definition.

Raising the questions: Am I bad writer? Or are the people I think are using too elaborate definitions also just having fun and hanging out?

So, to sum up, the accusation that a project of this sort is "LARP-y" is kind of irrelevant. Yes, it'll be LARP-y to start with; it kind of has to be. That's how things work. It's a phase — a necessary phase in the process of becoming something more, and if the people involved stay determined enough, and keep it up long enough, that phase will pass, and it will become something more.

It really depends on whether there's an actual conceptually sound plan to take it from the LARP stage to the actually done stage. Take the white nationalist mass-migration to Idaho thing. There's an actual plan to do it, see:

https://www.gonorthwest.info/

Contrast that with the "repeal the 19th" people on Twitter. I've never heard any of them outline how the 19th is to be repealed. It's just empty venting.

I'm reminded of the Free State Project here, which I think can be roundly called a success overall. And precisely because it had a plan and smart enough people running the stratagem.

Do you have any tips on where one might read about the outcomes of the free state project? I thought it was an interesting idea, but I never really knew what became of it.

NBC Boston had a docuseries on it: https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/life-liberty-and-the-pursuit-of-new-hampshire-an-nbc10-boston-original/2920007/ There's also a documentary called Libertopia: https://youtube.com/watch?v=PXSw0nYKiU8

But most of my insight comes from talking to Freestaters directly. And since it is still going strong, you can just go to their events and talk to them: https://www.fsp.org/

You may also find books criticizing the project, like A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear but I find most criticism of the endeavor from a left wing point of view to be uninteresting since it just devolves into a political argument about the value of the State rather than an analysis of the tactics.

Thank you!

I think your thesis is is worthless because it is both wrong and vapid. Any LARP that doesn't amount to anything? Well they just weren't determined enough to do it longer. It is completely unfalsifiable in the same way as a conspiracy theory normally is. And it doesn't matter how determined and for how long the cargo cults worship John Frum--the cargo is not coming back and it hasn't turned into something more.

Though I think if I take the essence of the idea it can still be applied in some cases. I'm thinking more of the transformations of the norms of communities though. Take for example both Something Awful's forums and 4chan (years ago). Both were places where being edgy and transgressive through things like being as offensive as possible was the norm as a form of counter-culture of contrarianism. Then on SA some people started being meta-contrarian (contrarian to the prevailing board culture), but were probably not being really sincere. Then other people that were not in on the joke followed along and eventually it turned into the neo-puritan society complete with witchhunts that was completely ideologically opposed to the site that the forum is based off of and the entire rest of the forums. Then this spread to /r/srs and snowballed further and further and now the modal progressive on Bluesky would be absolutely horrified that the origins of their ideology was incubated on a site that made fun of JeffK.

4chan had a similar culture and was initially made up of Something Awful diaspora. However, instead of the contraposition becoming the dominate culture the racism-as-shibboleth attracted enough honest racists that were not in on the joke. Eventually, it became enough of a problem that they were quarantined to /pol/, but this obviously did not contain them. And in a very similar way you can still see the echoes of this in various parts of the online right, but I don't think they are particularly ashamed of it.

so what?

Accusations of LARPing are accusations of insincerity. It depends on what you think the LARPer is really after.

In the original usage, the professed belief is "I can throw lightning bolts." There's no secret genuine belief that can make it look good.

In the Wager example, the professed belief is "I believe in God," but the genuine belief is "I should believe in God." These are pretty compatible, so calling it a LARP loses its sting. Your defense has worked.

Let's say I'm professing "I believe in God," except I'm running a con and my true belief is "You should give me your tithe money." If I'm called out, I can't exactly use "fake it 'til you make it!" as a defense. The fact that my project is LARP-y is very relevant.

One common criticism of Pascal's Wager is that, even if you buy the argument, it only serves to persuade you that you should believe God exists, and there's a clear gap between thinking "I should believe God exists" and thinking "God exists." I mention it, because Pascal himself addressed this point shortly after introducing the Wager. And his answer is LARPing. Once you're convinced you should believe in God, then start acting as if He exists. "LARP" as a person who believes in God. If you do it thoroughly enough for long enough, Pascal argues, you'll start to actually believe it.

If there is a counter-pole to the rationality project, then this is it. Where rationalists talk endlessly about biases and how they distort our perceptions, and how we are shaped by evolution to lie to ourselves so that we can better lie to others, and how we can trick our faulty wetware into creating a half-way accurate map of the territory, on the other shoulder you have a little horned Pascal whispering: "or you could just embrace your nature and reject the notion of truth. Pretend to believe what is convenient for you to believe, and the mask will become the face soon enough."

I think for me when I level the accusations of LARPing, it's a synonym for accusing people of being unserious about the thing they are trying to practice/accomplish. It's not enough to pretend, you have to pretend effectively. You see this equally with rad-trad catholics or fundamentalists who conveniently forget that Jesus said that it's easier for a camel to thread the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven (how convenient that my new religion that is supposed to save me from the problems of modernity doesn't require me to give up the material trappings of that same system), and with leftists in favor of degrowth that don't seem to see that actually being serious about that ideology requires you to stop buying everything on amazon and doing gross things like composting your own poop. I would never accuse the Dominicans at my parish of larping, nor would I accuse the hippies who live off grid of doing so. It's the people that stridently profess a certain ideology without taking its tenets seriously that makes me think "LARP".

conveniently forget that Jesus said that it's easier for a camel to thread the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven (how convenient that my new religion that is supposed to save me from the problems of modernity doesn't require me to give up the material trappings of that same system)

Nitpick since it's irrelevant to your main point. As I understand it, the church threaded this needle by differentiating between the not-intrinsically-evil state of merely "possessing material wealth" and the intrinsically evil state of "being possessed by ones material wealth," i.e. not being "poor in spirit."

Of you actually read the entire passage it’s from, that meaning seems like less of a stretch.

In a sort of "it isn't money that's the root of all evil, it's love of money" way?

In a post Sunday night on his Truth Social platform, Trump said he has authorized the Department of Commerce and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to slap a 100% tariff “on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”

“The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” he wrote, complaining that other countries “are offering all sorts of incentives to draw” filmmakers and studios away from the U.S. “This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!”

The White House said Monday that it was figuring out how to comply with the president’s wishes.

“Although no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made, the Administration is exploring all options to deliver on President Trump’s directive to safeguard our country’s national and economic security while Making Hollywood Great Again,” said spokesperson Kush Desai.

First of all: how is this an emergency? I don't follow the logic.

It's quite clear that Hollywood studios search for tax incentives both within and outside the US. That's nothing new. It is supposed to be getting worse. California is supposed to be suffering from this competition due to COL and alternatives., including in animation:

And the decision was emblematic of a trend that’s been accelerating over the last decade or so, according to data laid out in the study. Between 2010 and 2023, California’s share of the highest-grossing animated films dropped from 67 to 27 percent. Between 2019 and 2024 animation employment dropped by nearly five percent in California while other jurisdictions saw major upticks (more than 18 percent in New York, nearly 72 percent in British Columbia and nearly 13 percent in Ontario).

However, Hollywood gets the majority of the profit of VFX dominated films and maintains strong market share worldwide, especially at the higher budget ranges. The stories are still American-made.

The problem for film seems to be the confluence of increasing competition, COVID killing the habit and studios cannibalizing their own product. Would it really help to force all of these companies to produce and film stuff in the US, especially with AI looming? Seems like the problem of Indian VFX firms may solve itself.

I am seeing some takes on the more left-wing side that this is essentially Trump promising to break something in order to get another set of companies, and a perceived left-wing industry at that, to try to curry favor with him (he seems to be high on his ability to cause shocks merely by speaking). Though one wonders why he would. If this is a partisan thing the decay of California as the nexus for film and tv would be a win better than almost anything he could extract from them for the conservative movement.

Unfortunately for our Trade War Commander in Chief, I'm fairly sure movies are not subject to the authority he used for the other tariffs. Since he didn't do this by executive order but is letting the Department of Commerce handle it, probably their lawyers will tell them that. 50 USC 1702(b)(3).

In a post Sunday night on his Truth Social platform, Trump said he has authorized the Department of Commerce and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to slap a 100% tariff “on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”

Well I was never going to pay for the anime I watch anyways lmao.

I remember saying something that if trump actually wanted us to re-industrialize he'd say something like, "china doesn't respect our IP, so we won't respect theirs." I said that not expecting it would ever actually happen because I don't like him, but this could escalate in a really hilarious way. Actually, you know what? I'll make that my official position. If trump gets rid of american respect for foreign IP I will start unironically liking the guy.

Does China even have much IP to steal? The key to their success primarily seems to be 'maximize inputs (skilled labour, R&D talent, state support) and throughput efficiency (massive industrial scale, quick manufacturing/prototyping stage, cheap energy)' rather than 'discover special secrets that let you achieve qualitatively higher quality products'.

The US knows the 'secrets' of building the Three Gorges Dam or Huawei or BYD. You just need a huge amount of concrete and construction workforce and the freedom to move whole cities out of the flooded areas. Or you just need a huge, clever, motivated workforce, cheap energy and well-targeted long-term state support. The US has versions of Huawei/BYD in the Magnificent Seven but struggles at the cost-efficiency stage due to lacking the needed inputs at the necessary scale.

China State Shipbuilding Corporation is just worlds ahead of the US, you'd need a Meiji Revolution to match them there, the necessary inputs just don't exist in America. There's no secret - big shipyards go brrr and produce a third of the world's ships... but replicating it is quite impossible for the US.

Would this mean that foreign films would no longer be distributed in the US? That would put most arthouses out of business.

I mean, the bigger question is whether Hollywood movies filmed abroad or with too much foreign labour will get hit by tariffs, which would screw the entire industry.

It seems lately that within the rationalist / post-rationalist diaspora on twitter and elsewhere, polyamory is starting to come into the crosshairs. I've seen a few 'big' accounts in the tpot space come out against polyamory, but the biggest one has to be the recent post that Kat Woods put on the Slate Star Codex subreddit, Why I think polyamory is net negative for most people who try it.

I wont summarize the whole article, but recommend you go read it. The TL;DR is:

  • Most people cannot reduce jealousy much or at all
  • It fundamentally causes way more drama because of strong emotions, jealousy, no default norms to fall back to, and there being exponentially more surface area for conflict
  • For a small minority of people, it makes them happier, and those are the people who tend to stick with it and write the books on it, creating a distorted view for newcomers.

Also, a rather hilarious quote from the middle:

When your partner starts dating a new person, that person can’t just have drama with your partner. They can have drama with you. And your partner can have drama with their other partner.

It gets complicated fast.

I remember once I had drama caused by my boyfriend’s wife’s boyfriend’s girlfriend’s girlfriend (my meta-meta-meta-metamour)

In general, I think this is a continuation of the vibe shift against social experimentation within the rationalist communities, trying to push them back a bit more towards 'normal' social standards. It has been happening for quite a while, and I'm not surprised it continues to happen. My basic view is that while the experimentation and willingness to shrug off societal norms led to a lot of fascinating and good new ideas within rationalist groups, unfortunately, as always happens with these sorts of things, issues arose that reminded people why these ideas were fringe in the first place.

For those not steeped in rationalist lore, there have been many 'cult-like' groups that have hurt people arising in the rationalist and especially EA space. Some of the early and notable ones were Ziz, the whole Leverage fiasco, and then of course later on you have the highest profile issue with SBF. But these are just the most notable and even news worthy. On top of these there are dozens, probably hundreds, of smaller scale dramas that have played out in day to day life, similar to what Kat talked about above.

I actually think her point about drama scaling with more surface area in polyamory to be quite salient here. In general one of the purposes of societal norms and rules is to make sure everyone knows how they and others are supposed to act, so that arguments over constraints and less annoying and difficult. When you throw out major parts of societal norms, things get complicated very quickly.

Of course the whole polyamory issue ties into the broader culture war in many ways - notably the push back we've seen against wokeism, and the radical left more generally. I think overall the appetite people have for radically changing social norms has shrunk dramatically over the last few years. Sadly, I am not sure that necessarily means we'll go back to a healthy, stable balance. Looking at the people on the conservative side, the loudest champions of a traditional moral order seem to be grifters, or at least hypocrites where they say one thing, and do another in their personal lives.

That being said, I am hopeful that the uneasy alliance between the new conservative, Trumpian movement and traditional Christians is finally fracturing. To bring in another CW point, Trump recently posted an AI generated image of himself as the Pope. This understandably pissed off a lot of Christians, and led to them ending their support for Trump's antics. (I happen to be one of them.)

To which his response is, basically, "why can't you take a joke?"

Anyway, I am curious to see where all these social norms shake out, especially with regards to relationships and dating.

Polyamory might be able to work for some people, but I think it's gotta be a net negative for society. I think it's simply a question of time. Every additional partner that you have creates a time commitment that you could have spent a). strengthening your relationship with your main partner, b). spending time with friends/building community, c). self-improvement/hobbies. A potential counterargument is that polyamory is just a different form of leisure, and so fucking around on the side is just like watching Netflix. I would respond to this in two ways. Firstly, maybe watching Netflix for 5 hours a day isn't great for society either. Secondly, I'm not sure that polyamory comes from the same pool of time as relaxing and watching Netflix. It's an inherently much more effortful activity, and is probably going to replace much more meaningful activities. Anecdotally, one of my roommates, who never practiced polyamory per see, but always had a "rotation" of girls going (maybe this is the cool chad version of poly, idk), never had time for any other hobbies or interests besides chasing tail, which I think has made him pretty boring and socially isolated.

Absolutely! She actually has a section describing some of the arguments she's dealt with, and good Lord it sounds awful:

Imagine every time you started or ended a relationship, you had to establish every social norm from scratch.

Is it OK for partner to have sex with your best friend?

Is it OK to kiss somebody else in front of your partner?

What about them having sex in your bed when you're out of town?

Is it OK to have sex with another person then tell your partner the details?

Is your partner allowed to bring his lover to Christmas with your family? What about your kid’s birthdays?

If your partner’s lover is having a mental health breakdown, is it OK for your partner to go comfort her when it’s your day with him?

The list is endless, and so will your arguments about it.

I especially don't see how you can raise kids in a poly relationship, without having all sorts of humongous issues and problems. With both parents typically needing to work nowadays, having kids is already extremely demanding on a family's time. Add in other relationships on top of that, and it basically seems like a non-starter.

I agree with the net negative on society, for another reason though - polyamory being seen as even slightly social acceptable destabilizes every monogamous relationship. Now monogamous people have endless thoughts and temptations about "oh maybe we should be poly" which fractures and already crumbling marriage rate. It really is just... bad, in my view.

Imagine every time you started or ended a relationship, you had to establish every social norm from scratch.

Does this not describe modern (at least post-Sexual-Revolution) monogamous dating as well? Communication styles, division of labor, etc. are all a mess of uprooted and jumbled expectations about huge issues, but just consider sex first. We live in a world where some people think fornication is a sin, others think you can sleep around with anyone you date until you officially have The Talk with one of them, and there's a big confused middle where a little promiscuity is fine but too much is sickening and people disagree about what kinds or quantities of sex cross the line. (link to 1994 movie clip, because it's not like this is a really new problem either)

I think the difference with poly is scale. Maybe you do this with serial monogamy once every few months to a year (although hopefully eventually you stop serially dating and get married). With polyamory it's a problem (everything) everywhere all at once. You are always looking for new relationships and defining boundaries with new partners. It sounds like it fucking sucks, and I'm not sure why anyone would voluntarily participate unless they were a sociopath.

Its not a real question I'd ever ask, but yeah, what's the 'win condition' of Poly these days?

For monogamy, I'd suggest "have kids, raise them to adulthood, assist them in getting partners, help raise your grandkids, then live out the rest of your life in peace knowing you've got a secure legacy" is the path to 'victory.'

With Poly, there's never a (non-arbitrary) point when you can say you're 'done' and you can declare the relationships 'complete.' You always have the potential of adding or subtracting members, changing up the dynamics, and if kids enter the picture at all then what do you do? Do you just accept that you will be involved in an ever-changing dynamic up until the day you die?

The objective of Poly seems to be expending effort to maintain or develop the Polycule itself. I'd argue the objective of mono marriage is to create a concrete and meaningful platform on which you can build the other aspects of your life.

Yes sadly that’s the case, and I also think it’s a related problem. That being said, once you figure it out once with one person you’re ideally “done” for the most part.

As Kat says, when you bring poly dynamics in you exponentially increase the amount of conversations you have to have.

I especially don't see how you can raise kids in a poly relationship

You can't. You hit cult territory real quick.

And I'm not boo-outgrouping the Mormons here. I'm earnest when I say that the SF EA polyamory people would do themselves some favors by reading up on the history of polygamy within the LDS. Theological arguments aside, the Mormons have developed a thriving community that has endured despite a hell of a lot of persecution. Hell, they have a $124bn Hedge Fund. And they built this community by carving out a separate peace with the rest of the United States. This meant recognizing that polygamy was largely viewed by non-Mormons as "holy shit, what?" levels of weird. So, they instituted a fatwa against it changed their "laws" on it and mainline-LDS, slowly, became a kind of Utah Flavored version of MegaChurch protestantism.

EA, at its Zenith (SBF at his prime, before the fraud) was getting a lot of positive press as a forward thinking, but non-progressive, ideology that serious thinkers could rally around.

Then the fraud hit. Which is always bad. Then, following the fraud, the icky-sticky reality of the polyamory and Bahamas f*ck house came out. SBF == modern day Brigham Young?

Bahamas f*ck house

Wait what?

Link here.

Mormonism is not actually an analogue for mega church Protestantism- Mormons and evangelicals are known for not getting along, Mormon culture avoids influence from evangelical culture and Vice versa.

LDS culture in practice is more like a mix of orthodox Judaism and early 20th century Catholicism, not an evangelical thing.

Thanks for the added insight here. I'll admit I was having a bit of lark when writing the post.

I don't think that Joseph Smith had access to Orthodox Judaism as a model. Anti-anti-Catholicism is clearly a major motivation for Mormonism - Joseph Smith's theology pushes back against the Protestant position on at least two big issues where the Protestantism of his day was over-emphasising their theological differences from Catholicism at the expense of shared Christianity (sacramentally ordained priesthood and total depravity/justification by faith alone). But I think the similarities between LDS and Catholic practice are convergent evolution of a functional hierarchical Church. (In particular, the different relationship between ordained ministry and hierarchy in the two Churches is such that theologically the hierarchy works very differently).

The other major influence on the development of LDS theology is Freemasonry. Joseph Smith came from a Masonic family and most of the early Mormon leaders were initiated as Masons in Illinois before the Church migrated to Utah. The Masonic symbols on the garments and the Masonic elements of the Temple Endowment ceremony are kind of obvious. The official position of the LDS hierarchy was that both organisations have privileged access to secrets that originated in Solomon's Temple before the death of Hiram Abiff, and the shared symbolism reflects this.

Joseph Smith and Brigham Young did not have access to Orthodox Judaism, correct, but there’s definitely convergent evolutionary similarities. Just like with early twentieth century Catholic practice, similar challenges lead to similar solutions.

Now monogamous people have endless thoughts and temptations about "oh maybe we should be poly" which fractures and already crumbling marriage rate. It really is just... bad, in my view.

I've personally observed a bit of this happening.

There's a distinction between

"Couples who try poly as some kind of last-ditch attempt to salvage things" and

"Couples who try poly because one partner (usually the woman) is already planning to leave and wants to smooth the transition." i.e. infidelity with a few extra steps. and

"Couples who are genuinely high openness and communicate well enough to convey their desires and are happy to try new things."

But holy cow, the couples may not realize which one of those they are until they're already engrossed in a messy situation.

And once they dip a toe in, it is hard to withdraw unless both partners look each other in the eye and say "nah, not for us" and can still respect each other afterwards.

In my view you're intentionally creating the interpersonal equivalent of The Three Body Problem.

REGARDLESS of the initial conditions under which you enter the situation you will not be able to predict the medium-term effects and movements unless you happen to luck into one of the VERY FEW 'stable' orbits possible.

If everyone involved is conscientious, maybe it doesn't spin out of control. But if people start competing to be the 'center of gravity' of the relationship, or there's any instability present, the complexity of this 'system' you've created makes it all but impossible to maintain things without absurd levels of effort.

And for the vast majority of people, even those capable of it, I doubt its worth the effort, compared to the world where they just find a compatible partner and stick with them.

Literally every single time I read a pro-poly account of how it works, they're constantly talking about how they have to deal with their jealousy or a partner's jealousy and general emotional volatility and the constantly fluctuating energy levels you have to account for and how schedules collide regularly so constant negotiation and renegotiation is required, but oh my gawd when it works its just awesome!

It leads me to suspect that for many, the emotional rollercoaster is part of the point. Which is inherently unhealthy, in my opinion.

Perhaps there exist polycules where everyone gets along just fine, and there's minimal drama to report, and the extra effort to maintain it is negligible compared to standard monogamy, and these people just don't have much public presence.

If so, I'd kind of prefer they maintain their radio silence rather than try to make the case that what they do can work for other people.

one of my roommates, who never practiced polyamory per see, but always had a "rotation" of girls going (maybe this is the cool chad version of poly, idk)

There's a joke along the lines of "Ah, so you sleep with a bunch of different girls, who each also might or might not sleep with a bunch of different guys - but you really like them, and one of them might be your housemate? Back in my days, we used to call that 'being single in college'."

I flatly don't believe in polyamory being real as I have typically heard it articulated. I don't believe that people who share the sort of bond that happily married people share can ever exist among people that aren't monogamous. They're not monogamous couples with extras bolted on, they're people that are failing to form successful pair-bonds concocting unstable edifices based on their desire for promiscuity and unwillingness to engage in genuine commitment to another person. I really hope there won't ever actually be a push to normalize this behavior with some social obligation to pretend that I believe polygamists have relationships that are as respectable as actual marriages.

I flatly don't believe in polyamory being real as I have typically heard it articulated. I don't believe that people who share the sort of bond that happily married people share can ever exist among people that aren't monogamous. They're not monogamous couples with extras bolted on, they're people that are failing to form successful pair-bonds concocting unstable edifices based on their desire for promiscuity and unwillingness to engage in genuine commitment to another person. I really hope there won't ever actually be a push to normalize this behavior with some social obligation to pretend that I believe polygamists have relationships that are as respectable as actual marriages.

There are three basic relationship scripts seen in primates (and they cover 90+% of non-primate vertebrate species as well): monogamy, harem-holding polygyny, and promiscuity*. Humans appear to have the required instincts to do all three, although monogamy appears to produce the best social outcomes. Most arrangements that exist under the umbrella of "polyamory" seem to be minor variations on one of the three. Most of the Bay Area rationalist polyamorists are in reproductively monogamous primary relationships, so their form of polyamory is basically monogamy with tolerated cheating. There is clearly a lot of "it's not a harem if the women are bi, it's a polycule" going on within polyamory, although the poly community tries to stigmatise it. But the forms of polyamory which are highest status within the community are things like "relationship anarchy" where you somehow manage to sign a lease with a partner while maintaining the sexual norms of promiscuity.

* Note that these are not particularly tied to the patriarchy/matriarchy axis. Monogamous animals are usually egalitarian, but patriarchal polygyny (gorillas, lions), matriarchal polygyny (peacoks), patriarchal promiscuity (chimps) and matriarchal promiscuity (bonobos, elephants) are all common.

  • Note that these are not particularly tied to the patriarchy/matriarchy axis. Monogamous animals are usually egalitarian, but patriarchal polygyny (gorillas, lions), matriarchal polygyny (peacoks), patriarchal promiscuity (chimps) and matriarchal promiscuity (bonobos, elephants) are all common.

Interesting to note that there are also birds that operate with matriarchal polyandry, with very skewed sex ratios and reversed sex roles. (There are other animals that are also polyandrous but I do not know how they work at all — iirc some (but not all) of them were more of a female risk-reduction, either of the female herself or for improved reproductive success)

This is quite funny since your name is Pigeon.

Unfortunately we pigeons are more boring in our pair-bonding!

n of one, but in the two serious polyamory ... groups (couples/thruples? what do we call these associations?) that I've encountered, it was a very obvious case of hyper-sexual female(s) with obvious emotional maladaptive traits paired up with dark triad male(s) who could totally divorce all emotional bonds from immediate physical gratification. To be a little blunt and crude - but, I think, accurate - it felt like the cast in a green room at a porno shoot.

couples/thruples? what do we call these associations?

I believe "polycule" is the preferred term.

Do you think people with open marriages that just have sex and no emotional relationship on the side can still have that pair bond?

Probably not. I suppose they say they do but I don't really believe them.

I recently came across this article that really cemented your view for me.

This woman lives with her husband and two side pieces and she's on her own for a startling amount of time while she's giving birth. Her husband is in no rush to make it to the delivery room:

My water broke at 5am. Plot-relevantly, I had gone to sleep only two hours prior...

I woke up my husband as the very last step – I went into his room and said “my beautiful love,” at 5:30am, which we both know full well is a crime. By nature, we keep similar hours.

He emitted a quarter-awake “you are inflicting horrible crimes on me and you are not forgiven” moan.

When I said, “I think my water broke,” he sort of flipped. Like a pancake but on its own.

“Oh!” he said.

“Nothing exciting is going to happen for a while. So I think you should get more sleep. Partners A and C are driving me to the hospital and getting me checked in.”

Later that day:

In the window where I should have eaten, the boyfriends who had brought me to the hospital had gone home to sleep, and my husband was on his way.

I had the bagel because my husband was near a bagel place and mentioned he could pick some up. It sounded like a treat, so I said yes. At the time he and I were coordinating on what he should pick up, my contractions were very slow, or hadn’t started yet. I had no idea how close the epidural was. Once he started picking things up, I watched his map location, was surprised by how slow he was, and decided not to ask for more things.

He agreed, and I went to the hospital... My husband arrived with some snacks at 1pm.

Husband goes home at some point. Next day:

Around 7am I was really panicked. I needed to course correct sharply to something else. I told my boyfriend to wake up my husband and explain to him what was going on.

To sum up:

But I cry uncontrollably when I think of how the actual moment my daughter came out of me feels like a bad drug trip. I have a blurry picture of that moment, only a few details crisp (like seeing the glowing rod coming out of a metal refinery). I remember being confused, misled, tricked into hurting myself, experiencing the birth of my daughter as a great alien rush of self betrayal, with no awareness of her, and full awareness of the people who had surrounded and outnumbered me, who did not seem to deal with me as an intelligent subject, who demanded my attention by shouting at me throughout the whole thing, barraged me with questions afterwards, questions I had already answered. I remembered the array of uniformed medical personnel around me a bluish blur of enemy forces who had worn me down and conquered me.

Indeed, managing the medical staff is the proper role of the husband in this situation. But I guess he was too tired to fully attend the brith of his child!

I told my boyfriend to wake up my husband and explain to him what was going on.

And today I finally understood the meaning of this verse in the Gospel of Matthew:

Truly, I say to you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town.

The only thing I can think of is that Dear Love Husband isn't 100% sure the kid is his, so he's letting Boyfriends A and B pick up the slack, and they feel the same ("it might or might not be my kid, no need to knock myself out about this"). This is why you have your mother and sisters around for the birth of your child, not the husband/boyfriend/guy you picked up and banged in that shopping mall parking lot.

Oh boy, that article is an entire trip around the solar system. That woman sounds like she did approximately zero preparation reading up on what would happened during labour and delivery, what she should do, etc. She's kinda blaming the hospital, but I bet the hospital imagined "this is a grown-ass woman having a baby, presumably she has her shit together". They weren't expecting her to be trailing three separate guys who couldn't be arsed to figure out "should I get food for the woman having a baby?" or doing anything like "stick around and be helpful", plus she wanted her Ritalin in the middle of delivery? Yeah, no, that's not gonna happen.

The type of person who's on Ritalin for the ADHD (read: to help her push her grades up) and then of course she's on Soylent and gabapentin and coffee and and and... I'm surprised the hospital didn't just leave her in the corridor to get on with things seeing as how she took no responsibility at all in finding out what the hell she should be doing when having a baby. "Oh, you mean I can't get my venti soy latte espresso while my baby is in the birth canal? how unfair!"

full awareness of the people who had surrounded and outnumbered me, who did not seem to deal with me as an intelligent subject

...If I could do it over, I would argue hard to take Ritalin (which would have bought me 3 hours of physical energy) and gabapentin (which would have halted the serious anxiety I was having, and would not have put me to sleep if I’d also had Ritalin). I had both in my backpack. I had been taking both about once every 7-10 days throughout pregnancy with my psychiatrist’s blessing.

Gosh, they didn't treat her like an intelligent being? Could it possibly be because she didn't act like one? I mean, with the amount of preparation for the entire birth that she and the Three Stooges showed, why would they think she didn't have the brains God gave a doorknob? And newsflash, your psychiatrist is not an obstetrician, they don't and shouldn't be telling you what you can take during pregnancy, her psychiatrist probably just agreed "yeah, whatever" because otherwise she would have bitched and moaned unbearably about it.

What are the risks of using methylphenidate in pregnancy?

Some studies have suggested that there is an increased chance of miscarriage and some types of heart defect in the baby following use of methylphenidate in early pregnancy. Overall, it is very clear that most babies exposed to methylphenidate in the womb do not have a birth defect. It is also uncertain if these problems are due to methylphenidate itself, or to underlying factors that are more common in women taking methylphenidate.

Methylphenidate and similar drugs have been linked to reduced growth of the baby in the womb. This is thought to be because they can affect blood flow through the placenta.

Methylphenidate can potentially cause short-term withdrawal symptoms in the newborn baby if taken in the weeks before delivery. For this reason, a baby may be monitored for some time after birth to check for symptoms such as jitteriness, difficulty sleeping and breathing problems.

Gabapentin and pregnancy

Gabapentin is not generally recommended in pregnancy as there is not enough information about whether it's safe for your baby.

However, from the small amount of information that is available, there's no clear evidence that it's harmful. It should only be taken if the benefits of the medicine outweigh the risks.

If you take gabapentin for epilepsy, it's important that this is well treated during pregnancy, as seizures can harm you and your baby. Keep taking gabapentin, but talk to your doctor urgently. They may recommend you change to a different medicine.

If you're trying to get pregnant or have become pregnant while taking gabapentin, it is recommended to take a high dose of folic acid (5mg a day). You can get this from your doctor or midwife.

Ideally you'll take high dose folic acid for 3 months before you start trying to get pregnant and for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Do not worry if you have not taken it before you get pregnant, but start taking it as soon as possible once you know that you are pregnant. It helps your baby to grow normally.

If you take gabapentin around the time of giving birth, your baby may need extra monitoring for a few days after they're born. This is because they may have withdrawal symptoms from gabapentin.

We do not know what the long term effects of taking gabapentin in pregnancy may be on childhood learning and development. For safety, you'll usually be advised to take it only if the benefits of the medicine outweigh the risks. Talk to your doctor about the benefits and risks.

To be fair, the risks of Ritalin or gabapentin are obviously much smaller when the baby is about to be born. This in particular:

Gabapentin is not generally recommended in pregnancy as there is not enough information about whether it's safe for your baby.

Is the typical medical CYA nonsense. There's not enough information about whether bagels are safe for the baby either.

This is the part I'm more concerned about:

If you take gabapentin around the time of giving birth, your baby may need extra monitoring for a few days after they're born. This is because they may have withdrawal symptoms from gabapentin.

Ms. Smartie wanted "I need my uppers, I need my uppers, and then I need my downers so the uppers won't make me too high" while in labour.

As per the linked information, taking Ritalin is a lot riskier:

Methylphenidate and similar drugs have been linked to reduced growth of the baby in the womb. This is thought to be because they can affect blood flow through the placenta.

Methylphenidate can potentially cause short-term withdrawal symptoms in the newborn baby if taken in the weeks before delivery. For this reason, a baby may be monitored for some time after birth to check for symptoms such as jitteriness, difficulty sleeping and breathing problems.

But her drug pusher psychiatrist said it was okey-dokey for her to keep taking her fixes during pregnancy, so what do I know?

And I would have argued to fuck the blood glucose numbers and have as much apple juice as I wanted. Maybe Soylent too, especially small amounts.

And that's not a good idea because...

Monitoring during labour

It’s important that your blood sugar levels stay in the target range during labour. This will help to prevent your baby’s blood sugar getting low in the first few hours after they’re born.

Take your testing kit with you to the hospital, so that you can monitor your own blood sugar at first. Once you are in active labour, the hospital team will monitor your blood sugar every hour to make sure it stays at a safe level. You might be given insulin and glucose through a drip to help with this.

I'm finding this stuff after some cursory Googling. She surely had an ob-gyn or other doctor during the course of her pregnancy? Who she could have asked all about this? But she seems to have just floated on by in a cloud of "me smart, me not need to figure this out" and then blamed the hospital staff for all being dumb and not even knowing what Soylent was. Four alleged adults in the house, the husband couldn't even be bothered to wake up for his kid being born, and none of them had a clue what to do during the labour and birth.

I think that anyone halfway sane who gets pregnant while being in a non-exclusive relationship would go out of her way to carefully select the father and then have the fatherhood confirmed through DNA testing. The alternative, "I just stopped taking the pill and continued to fuck my lovers, and it does not matter who is the father because we are all one big happy polycule" seems rather terrible.

> going back to sleep after your pregnant wife's water broke

> lollygagging around buying snacks before showing up at the hospital

Surprisingly Chaddish attitude for someone who literally has a wife's boyfriend. Actually, two wife's boyfriends. But then again, as @HereAndGone mentioned, perhaps there was some confusion and motivational issues due to lack of paternal certainty. three_spidermen_pointing_at_each_other.jpg or Braun-Westbrook-Murray-almost-losing-uncontested-rebound.mp4, which could very well be a fresh meme from yesterday.

the people who had surrounded and outnumbered me, who did not seem to deal with me as an intelligent subject

Hmm... surely the hospital staff had no probable cause to proceed under such an impression?

Regardless of the author's particular cognitive ability (I suspect it's materially higher than average, especially higher than that of the median woman giving birth nowadays), I imagine hospital staff are trained to give clear, concise directions when things are chaotic. I suppose where the hospital staff may have failed, was to flatter and indulge her self-perceived intelligence during the birthing process.

To return to a basketball reference, if I'm coaching a basketball team and one of the players gets the ball unguarded in a corner, I'd be yelling "SHOOT IT! SHOOT IT!" and not saying "Please shoot the ball. Your true shooting percentage suggests you're a good shooter and analytics have long shown that corner three-pointers are one of the most valuable shots in the game from an expected value standpoint. This ask to attempt a field goal from your current location on the floor is time sensitive. Thank you for your understanding."

Particularly if the hospital had to deal with three different guys showing up with her - "so you're family?" "oh no" "spouse?" "he is, we're just her significant others". And then all three of them bugger off and leave her on her own.

If you're a nurse on a maternity ward full of women about to give birth, in the middle of giving birth, or just after giving birth, you don't have time to deal with all that drama.

Author certainly does think she's smarter than the average bear, but given the way she describes how she and her partners acted, and how none of them seemed to have researched "having a baby: what happen when?", e.g. "I have gestational diabetes, what does that mean when I go into labour?" for one, I think she's not that much more clever than the ordinary woman.

Who gives a shit though? Like you say, maybe this jury-rigged relationship is the best they can get. So good luck and god bless.

I dislike the use of the word ’normalization’, I feel it grants the woke frame of living under ‘hegemonic heterosexuality’, and all the other axes of oppression. Ie, that the abnormal are oppressed. The alt right/woke right otoh, believe they should be. So they angrily debate whether normalization is a good thing or a bad thing.

But to me it is nothing. Because modern society does not, and I especially do not, oppress anyone for not being normal. So the stakes are very low.

That's what I would have said about gender woo until it swiftly moved from just being left alone into conscripting everyone else into participating in it. If people want to do something I don't approve of with their own lives, sure, that's their call, whatever, but I am now leery of pushes for normalization.

It turned out that gender woo was way more memetically contagious than (it appeared|its advocates thought|its advocates were willing to say). I think poly will prove to be as contagious or worse; we just haven't seen the floodgates from legal recognition yet so it's still "a weird SF/alt-lifestyle thing". Poly requires new people to be poly with, once the people you were seeing have moved on, and that means evangelizing to normies. And if you believe that most people are not capable of practicing poly without causing xkcd#592, this boils down to going up to people and saying, "hey, have you tried this sweet new infohazard?"

I was once briefly involved with an attractive ENM girl who only wanted something casual, and while that might sound the start of a salacious story that'll makes the reader say "tfw", it was the most stifling period in my dating life. Anyone else I wanted to see, I would have to have the "poly conversation" with, and I couldn't bring myself to do that. It just felt too much like peddling bad memes to decent women, and after I missed out on a couple of relationships with decent girls that way, I decided it was better to be single than help worsen the modern dating world.

And once I broke things off, it turned out that even a relationship that casual couldn't go back to being a friendship. Either she was only keen to hang out as friends because of the possibility of adding a sexual element to the friendship, or breaking things off hurt too much to stay friends. Whichever was true, poly opened a branch of the decision tree which only had bad outcomes.

I don't believe that people who share the sort of bond that happily married people share can ever exist among people that aren't monogamous.

This seems like a strong categorical claim.

Consider

  • A, B and C are in a pairwise sexual, mutual and otherwise exclusive relationship.

  • A and B are married, but also work in porn and both have sex on the set with other people.

  • A and B are married, and sometimes they agree to invite a stranger to their bedroom and both fuck them.

It is far from clear to me how all of the above lack something which happily married monogamous people have.

I am sure that there are claims of the form "X couples can form a special bond in a way that people in other forms of relationship can not", which someone somewhere has made for X being "lesbian", "same-race", "dominant-submissive", "straight", "enlightened", "Christian", "black", "child-producing", and so on.

It is far from clear to me how all of the above lack something which happily married monogamous people have.

I don't think I'll be able to convince you then, but it's pretty obvious from where I sit, even though it's a subjective view rather than empirical.

I am sure that there are claims of the form "X couples can form a special bond in a way that people in other forms of relationship can not", which someone somewhere has made for X being "lesbian", "same-race", "dominant-submissive", "straight", "enlightened", "Christian", "black", "child-producing", and so on.

I have no issues with someone expressing such views. I'll disagree with them but I don't really have some ironclad way to knock down their ideas. I might share some of them, I definitely don't share all of them, but I think it is broadly fine to say that not all relationships are equal.

I'll just copy part of a very recent post which mostly encapsulates my view of polyamory (contrasting it with other alternatives to monogamy):

Ironically, this is also why polyamory is imo by far the worst for a functioning society; It's basically expanding the dating period of many young people's life to the entirety, with all the anxieties, drama and labor it entails. If you have work & kids, you just don't have time for that. Since work is usually necessary for all but the richest, that means you skip the kids. Communes often have similar problems but to a lesser degree, and as long as they're not too large and have clear boundaries to everything else, can be made to work. I don't like the intrinsic inequality stemming from Harems, but from a practical PoV they work just as well as traditional couples since the boundaries and expectations are simple and clear.

Listening to some of the stories, that may even be to charitable to polyamory; Even the regular dating period for most young people had clearer expectations and less drama.

Absolutely. I think the kids part is especially important.

If your goal for life is to just be hedonistic and enjoy yourself, I suppose it’s fine. But if you care about society as a whole and future generations, it seems very problematic.

Some of the stories about polycules I see online are not about the happy, well-off couples having sexy new partners like the NYT lady with her book. There's a lot of "I'm disabled, neurodivergent, and unemployed, and without my polycule I wouldn't have people to help me pay my bills and look after me when I'm ill".

For some (a lot?) of people, it's not about sexy new partners but a support system of "I help you out when you can't walk because your joints are flaring up, you help me out when I'm having one of my mental health crises, the others chip in to buy groceries and pay rent, etc."

As ever, this comedy song is apposite more than it should be.

As ever, this comedy song is apposite more than it should be.

It must be said, I've met a handful of people who were poly, and not one of them was someone I could even imagine going to bed with.

This meme continues to be an important statement of this.

it's not about sexy new partners but a support system

That's it. That's the whole thing. Romantic involvement and religion are the only part of society modern technology and economics have yet to fully atomize. Polyamory offers both, in a way, to a certain kind of atheist. Polyamory forms a community and ideology at the same time. Of the rat/poly/atheist people I know IRL, two of them single mothers with apparently little to lose, and one of them actually tried Protestantism at an earlier point but couldn't manage to swing the "belief in god" part.

Listening to some of the stories, that may even be to charitable to polyamory; Even the regular dating period for most young people had clearer expectations and less drama.

Hm, could polyamory of the non-harem type be a way of prolonging the dating period for those who are into it? There are probably borderline people around for whom "settling down" sounds like a death sentence. Sex on a schedule, chores and bills, taking your partner for granted... Forming a polycule means the fun part of serial relationships is always on the table: flirting, dating, etc. Even drama for those who like it. And if you don't, breaking up with 33% of your partners sounds less painful than breaking up with 100% of them.

Conservatives pooh-pooh "magic dirt theory", but I think there may be something to it. Polyamory isn't really a rationalist thing; it's a San Francisco area thing. It got into rationalists because they're in the San Francisco area. Possibly rationalism is also a San Francisco thing, but even then, it's common cause, not one causing the other (despite rationalizations of same). If rationalism had begun in LA, it'd be all about hookers and blow instead.

I don’t think it’s magic dirt, I just think culture has strong effects and the founding culture of a place influences future culture there quite a bit.

Relevant historical point -

A big part of the the sexual history of SF (gay Mecca, summer of love, polyamory etc.) is that in WW2, you could get kicked out of the Navy for being gay and that was the port they discharged you in. So, you have a bunch of young, fairly in shape gay men in the same spot.

"Magical dirt" isn't wrong, it's just a lazy causal method. Magical dirt is real, it's often just the product of historical randomness.

Unless one is a superior being (read: top 1% in IQ, conscientiousness, compassion etc. etc.) the only form of polyamory which works is a harem.

Not even then; being the mother of the current sultan was highly influential and powerful position, so all the wives/concubines competed to make sure their son was the chosen heir. This included killing off other wives/concubines, killing off their kids, engaging in conspiracies, faking conspiracies to get rid of rivals, etc.

Being the favourite of the sultan or emperor meant the concubine or wife's family cashed in on the opportunity to gain power, status and wealth; in the Tudor court of Henry VIII, the great families jockeyed to put their daughters before him as possible mistresses and potential queens, and their fall could be as spectacular as their rise.

An ambitious concubine could even work her way up to being empress in her own right.

So it was never as simple as "guy on top gets to bang all the hot chicks", and even under systems where men could have multiple wives, that didn't prevent jealousy or power struggles - see the story of Dhruva, famous devotee of Vishnu. Even though he was heir to the throne, his father's preferred second wife drove him away in favour of her son.

See also the current dramas playing out with Elon and his various concubines.

I think polyamory works best if everybody involved is bisexual, and therefore everyone in the polycule can loosely be dating everybody else.

Or if the circle is/stays very small? Then you can have two bisexual + one straight person.

Oh, all sorts of configurations can work. But in your configuration the straight person might still feel jealous when one of the bisexuals is sleeping with the other instead of the straight one. The jealousy problem is however obliterated if everybody's screwing everybody.

He meant that, if you have 1 heterosexual and 2 bisexuals of the opposite sex, everyone can still sleep with everyone else. If there's nobody else of the same sex being heterosexual doesn't affect the number of combinations.

I think this works with one straight man and two bisexual women, but might not work with the average straight women and two gay men. I think jealousy is much more likely if your partner is having other sex to which, by definition, you're not invited - sex the very thought of which might enrage you. If you're all bisexuals, and your other two partners are doing nothing together that they haven't also done with you in the mix - who's counting? But a straight woman with no interest in watching Boyfriend One sodomize Boyfriend Two might get upset if they're spending too much time together instead of on her.

I don't see how bisexuality changes that. If you're a woman with two bisexual boyfriends, how does being interested in other women affect whether you're "by definition not invited" to M/M sex? Without adding a girlfriend you're not having sex with women either way. Bisexuality isn't required for a woman to be interested in two men having sex, as seen by (for instance) the market for yaoi.

Bisexuality isn't required for a woman to be interested in two men having sex, as seen by (for instance) the market for yaoi.

You misunderstand- yaoi isn't quite a match for yuri since most of the appeal (and remember, that's why it's called yaoi) comes from self-inserting as the bottom [edit: this isn't entirely what happens, but I think it's a useful first-approximation in this case].

So the attraction from an otherwise-straight woman seeing two dudes having sex would generally be that self-insertion. If her husband is the bottom, he's assuming her role, and women don't tend to like that very much -> "feels like you're not invited".

If that was another woman instead the dynamic is instantly and instinctively different, since she by definition isn't going to be topping the man and the "invitation" comes in the form of "watch his attractive might and dominance without being replaced". The distaff/mirror counterpart would be if a woman brings a boy home (as in: young/inexperienced enough to dominate [and not replace the man's role in the relationship], cute enough not to be aesthetically repellent), but the average age of such a participant quickly creates practical problems [it ain't the '70s no more].

Two women doing it, from the male perspective, extend the "invitation" by "come and watch the show" (and the other woman gets some variety out of it that the man himself cannot provide- women are generally more aesthetically pleasing than men are when naked), which is why MFF/MmF threesomes are inherently stable if all the participants are nominally straight, but MMF/MfF threesomes are not (the latter inherently replacing the woman's submissive role).

I mean, straight women fucking love seeing hot men railing each other, so this doesn’t seem like that much of a problem to me.

Do they? Last time I saw data on this I thought it said straight women didn't really consume gay porn.

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Uh, can a harem work in a society which cares about how the women involved feel about it? All the historical examples are societies which didn’t.

Yes. It's shockingly functional.

I know that there is that one family in Hokkaido that is explicitly a harem, but otherwise I’m kind of drawing a blank.

Unless we are counting the “rich/hot dude screwing multiple women and not committing to any one of them” as similar…?? I don’t think it’s the same though.

I’d appreciate if you could elaborate.

Despite it being such a loaded term, smaller harems can be pretty functional for people in their pre-kid life. I think women (people?) are generally much more comfortable with this sort of arrangement than most expect.

Now available in Substack form!

I think this is an obvious and inevitable result of the rat-sphere growing and expanding, to the point that it includes many people who are "normies" along many if not most axes (a category I'm happy to include myself in). The first-generation rationalists were genuinely weird people (disproportionately likely to be autistic, gay, trans, asexual, vegan or all of the above), for whom maybe polyamory really did "work". But it's misleading to draw conclusions about what works for the general populace from such an atypical, heavily selected sample. As rationalism got bigger and bigger, it started attracting more and more normies, for whom polyamory is far less likely to work.

Within the rat-sphere, one of the most prominent evangelists for polyamory is Scott, who's also asexual. I don't think this is a coincidence. Some poly people like to pat themselves on the back about how romantic jealousy is just a bad habit that they've managed to transcend. But let's be honest: 90% of what we call "romantic jealousy" is just sexual jealousy, and it stands to reason that a person who doesn't experience sexual attraction in the conventional way probably doesn't experience sexual jealousy in the same way either. To reuse one of Scott's own points*, you don't get any Virtue Points for "transcending" an unpleasant emotion if it's an emotion you literally don't feel. I suspect many of the early outspoken advocates for polyamory were asexuals (or at least people with atypically low sex drives) who were inadvertently typical-minding the more conventionally-sex-driven people in their vicinity, assuming that - "well, if I could easily overcome my (vastly lower than typical, if not nonexistent) romantic/sexual jealousy, why can't everyone else? Must just represent a massive character failing on their part." This is a bit like someone who doesn't even like drinking alcohol marching into an AA meeting and announcing "I just stopped drinking, what's the big deal? You guys must be weak - skill issue". Katxwoods's point about "low baseline of jealousy" is exactly what I'm talking about here.

(Alternative/complementary hypothesis: maybe if you literally don't feel at all jealous when thinking about your girlfriend getting railed by another man, it might mean that you don't actually love her as much as you claim to? Perhaps you even have an avoidant attachment style, and you're deliberately seeking out romantic partners who it wouldn't bother you to lose, as a defense mechanism? Just a thought.)

Meanwhile, all of the conventionally-sex-driven people being evangelised to about how amazing polyamory is - they wonder why they're really struggling with feelings of sexual jealousy in a way the low-sex-drive people don't seem to be at all, and feel guilty and ashamed of themselves that they can't overcome this "moral failing", unaware that they're playing a completely different ball game to the asexual/low-sex-drive polys. I mean, Jesus, even puff pieces about what a wonderful alternative lifestyle choice polyamory is still make it sound miserable and even emotionally abusive:

[My girlfriend] started seeing this dude who was an absolute stud, having sex with him and having a great-ass time, and I felt totally lame and inadequate.

That was really hard for me, for obvious reasons. I felt like, I’m a hundred percent replaceable. It took a lot of conversations. She was like, There’s nothing wrong with you, this is going to pass, therapy will help. Lots of tears were shed. But medication helped me, talk therapy helped me

Just imagine feeling sad and upset that your girlfriend is fucking another man who's more attractive than you, and thinking "Yes, obviously this is an unhealthy emotional response, I need to dose myself up with antidepressants". I pity this poor man, and hope he realises he's being manipulated and gaslit sooner rather than later.

Follow-up thoughts here.

*Google highlighting doesn't appear to work on this page, Ctrl-F "virtue points".

You know what helps there? Not therapy. It's finding a hot girlfriend to be poly with, and spending all your time and attention with her, and telling your current girlfriend "wow I'm so glad you persuaded me to open up our relationship, New Partner is so fantastic!" If current girlfriend gets jealous, you can lecture her about how she needs to get over this and maybe she should try therapy?

If she's genuinely a believer in polyamory, she'll be happy for you or try to persuade herself that she should be happy with the situation. If she's having fun with the new hot guy but didn't think you'd find a possible replacement for her, she'll either try to talk you back into "maybe we should be monogamous" or you break up and both of you can now be happy with your hot new replacement partners.

Yeah but degree of difficulty between 'find a hot guy for low commitment casual sex' versus 'find a hot girl for low commitment casual sex' is a Dark Soulsian difference in difficulty curve.

Most of the experiments in open relationships and polyamory I've observed have generally been defeated by this biological reality. If the original pair is at all matched in sex appeal and not both 12/10 international athletes, the girl will generally be able to procure sexual partners far more easily

Yeah but degree of difficulty between 'find a hot guy for low commitment casual sex' versus 'find a hot girl for low commitment casual sex' is a Dark Soulsian difference in difficulty curve.

Skill issue.

Being that Machiavellian and manipulative sounds mentally and physically exhausting, not to mention time-consuming (rather similar to how I think I'd find polyamory, come to think of it). In his circumstances I think I'd rather cut my losses and put my energy into finding a partner whose relationship style matches my own.

If she's having fun with the new hot guy but didn't think you'd find a possible replacement for her

Sure, but now you're into the "this is just cheating with extra steps" failure mode.

Note that this is a failure mode because "being poly" is being used as a weapon/to get one over on the original partner and not actually in that partner's best interest at all. But then again, it's that [attitude], and not necessarily the object-level, killing the relationship; other than shits and giggles/not actually liking the partner I don't understand why anyone would do this.

Well, I genuinely don't think "I should get therapy for my normal human emotions" is a good prescription. If he was being possessive and controlling and unreasonable and accusing her of whoring around with guys just because she looked at a guy on the street, that's when you need therapy. Being in a relationship where you expected or hoped for monogamy but then you were persuaded into being poly - or letting your partner be poly - and having difficulty with that? That's normal. "Oh get therapy, go on medication" is the crazy stuff here.

Now if they've decided the game is worth the candle, that's their decision and good luck to them. But the talk about "all the female presenting persons are leading and are so empowered and queer" and the wife of the guy who got depressed about being replaced by the stud is a self-described "radical alien witch academic nerd" and they treated the entire thing like some horrible blend of the worst kind of management speak work situations: "We learned a strategy from the Multiamory podcast called “agile scrum,” which was adapted from business-meeting models. We utilized that format. We did that for a year and a half, at least once a month, sometimes six to 10 hours of hard poly-processing" - I just feel like shouting "man, get out of there and find someone normal who will be happy to be monogamous with you!"

It is cheating with extra steps, except the women are patting themselves so hard on the backs for being in charge and rebellious and all the rest of it. If the men decided to stop being the acquiescent partners/spouses and left, or they decided to be 'radical alien witches' themselves, I feel the entire house of cards would collapse.

I suspect many of the early outspoken advocates for polyamory were asexuals (or at least people with atypically low sex drives) who were inadvertently typical-minding the more conventionally-sex-driven people in their vicinity, assuming that - "well, if I could easily overcome my (vastly lower than typical, if not nonexistent) romantic/sexual jealousy, why can't everyone else?

You aren't the only one who has come to that conclusion.

I still believe this, for that matter, especially that last part about "if you're doing this, please just shut the fuck up and enjoy the sex, you're scaring the normies with your Ace Pride". Not having a strong emotional response to this stuff can be an absurdly powerful relationship tool, but incredibly destructive if paired with a personality type given to using that as a weapon (normies, predators) or as a means to go 'lol, I'm smarter than u'.

maybe if you literally don't feel at all jealous when thinking about your girlfriend getting railed by another man, it might mean that you don't actually love her as much as you claim to? Just a thought

The implication that I'm still invited in that case would be doing a lot of the heavy lifting; but there are relatively specific/unlikely circumstances that would need to be fulfilled for that to occur (and "fucking some random dude for basically no other reason" does not qualify).

It seems lately that within the rationalist / post-rationalist diaspora on twitter and elsewhere, polyamory is starting to come into the crosshairs

Always has been, this happens every few years. Was Kat's post the origin post for this round, or was she prompted by something else? It's been over a year since poly did the New Yorker/NPR/etc circuit.

issues arose that reminded people why these ideas were fringe in the first place.

There's a few issues around it. One of which is the typical-minding by the WEIRDest people around, and outside of a small, hyper-selected group influenced by the Berkeley egregore, such experimentation has a much higher failure rate. There's also the "what is the rationalist community for" question that was asked and left largely-unresolved several years ago, by Sarah Constantin and Zvi part one, Zvi part two that explicitly says polyamory is bad. Zvi's post always struck me as so idealistic it crosses well into arrogance, but I get that was also the atmosphere at the time- changing the world in wild ways and encouraging adoption of poorly-tested social technologies that may not generalize is something to be incredibly careful with, and broadly, they're not.

For those not steeped in rationalist lore, there have been many 'cult-like' groups that have hurt people arising in the rationalist and especially EA space.

Didn't Sam Altman suggest that in Yudkowsky's efforts to inoculate against paperclipping AI he basically hyperstitioned the field into existence? The anti-human branches of AI researchers are almost certainly a rationalist-descended cult-like phenomenon.

It's never really been clear the degree to which rationalist/EA spaces are prone to certain kinds of sex pest, or just unusually public at writing blog posts about them rather than quietly jettisoning them.

Looking at the people on the conservative side, the loudest champions of a traditional moral order seem to be grifters, or at least hypocrites where they say one thing, and do another in their personal lives.

Exceedingly few "true conservatives" are able to win in the attention economy. This says something important about communication of conservative ideologies, though I'm not entirely sure what, and perhaps says even more about the terribleness of ideologies that are able to win within the attention economy.

This says something important about communication of conservative ideologies, though I'm not entirely sure what, and perhaps says even more about the terribleness of ideologies that are able to win within the attention economy.

I think the problem is that the attention economies cater to what people want to hear, instead of what they need to hear.

Depending on how you define "true conservative", it's surely relevant that human attention responds very powerfully to novelty. RETVRN can do well because it is or was novel, but it's very hard to actually live that way in modern society because there are so many non-RETVRN options available and the social forces that prevented people from failing to live up to expectations are now absent.

Thus RETVRN is full of grifters and the less-novel conservatives are absent.

Didn't Sam Altman suggest that in Yudkowsky's efforts to inoculate against paperclipping AI he basically hyperstitioned the field into existence? The anti-human branches of AI researchers are almost certainly a rationalist-descended cult-like phenomenon.

I've certainly seen similar thoughts suggested in places. You can certainly question whether Musk would have helped create OpenAI without having encountered Yudkowsky's ideas, but it's hard to reason on how much OpenAI particularly pushed forwards the current AI paradigms. Would they have been discovered elsewhere? It's worth remembering that machine learning models had a renaissance several years before LLMs, with self-driving cars being the initial ignition factor. This was back when LessWrong and associated platforms were still super niche.

There's also the question for AI doomers of what the cost/benefit would be. Let's say that Yudkowsky's writing brought forward AGI by 10 years. However, what would be the state of AI safety if he never started writing? Having an extra 10 years for a far smaller AI safety movement could easily be a worse outcome.

Personally I think the question of what the purpose of rationalism is has been answered: it was to create the AI safety movement. Yudkowsky built up rationalism into a "big tent" to attract more interest and provide intellectual scaffolding. Over the years rationalism has splintered into various more effective sub groups, including AI safety but also EA and its associated movements. Rationalism was never coherent enough, but these smaller groups have accomplished important things.

Rationalism accomplished its job in creating these, and now the original husk still just soldiers on, oblivious to it's obsolescence.

Personally I think the question of what the purpose of rationalism is has been answered: it was to create the AI safety movement.

This was never a question - Yudkowsky set up the so-called rationalist community with the explicit purpose of creating a future generation of AI safety researchers. Or rather AI researchers more generally, because at the point when he did it (LessWrong was founded in 2009) AlphaGo was still years away, academic AI (both the GOFAI and neural nets factions) was in a long-term rut, and the state of the art was machine learning algorithms for recommending viral content. As of 2009, Yudkowsky thought that the problem was "build an aligned AI slowly and secretly" because nobody else was doing anything he expected to lead to working AI.

My assumption is that an underrated source of weirdness in the rationalists community is that the first thing Yudkowsky did to promote this community was to write a viral Harry Potter fanfic, meaning that the 2nd generation of rationalists (after the Overcoming Bias readers) were pulled in from Harry Potter fandom, bringing everything wrong with that community into "Rationalism".

To which his response is, basically, "why can't you take a joke?"

My response is basically "why can't you take a joke?".

As an anti-Catholic act, posting a picture of yourself as the pope is pretty weaksauce. It isn't even saying anything bad about the pope, except maybe "the Pope is only human", which a lot of people do sincerely believe, and Trump doesn't seem to be a Catholic.

This... led to them ending their support for Trump's antics. (I happen to be one of them.)

I'm inherently suspicious of "this minor act is why I can't possibly support this politician any more!" Yes, there's such a thing as a last straw, but something like this shouldn't be a last straw unless there are substantial unrelated reasons why you no longer support him. If that picture is the major reason why you don't support him, you're way, way, overreacting.

My response is basically "why can't you take a joke?".

What' the joke? Haha, Trump in a Pope outfit? Forget about offense, for the moment. Where is the humor even hypothetically supposed to be coming from?

“Everyone’s speculating about who it’s going to be. But there’s one guy you never considered…”

I admittedly laughed when I saw the Trump in a pope outfit and a headline about what he said.

Hard to explain humor. It was just someone ridiculous doing something ridiculous.

I can also understand that plenty of people might not find it funny at all.

I mean, the ‘oh no’ meme with orange smoke coming out of the chimney is genuinely funny even if the Pope Trump I AIslop isn’t. And I think the actual comments from Trump were something along the lines of ‘of course I’d be a good pope but they can’t elect me’ and an endorsement of Dolan.

For people who've taken to semi-ironically referring to Trump as the "God-Emperor", depicting him as the literal pontiff is sort of like the ne plus ultra of that. Sort of like the political equivalent of a Chuck Norris joke, or perhaps those memes where there's an election in a country other than the US and someone makes a meme depicting every electoral district in the country being won by the ultimate dark horse candidate - JEB BUSH! In fact the more I think about it, the more I think the latter example illustrates the humour - it's funny because it's completely implausibly ridiculous, and yet the person is keeping a straight face.

The idea of Trump becoming Pope is just funny in its own right, both because of its incongruence and because it's so on brand for a man of such limitless arrogance - and yet whose arrogance, oddly enough, seems strangely warranted (after all, people laughed when he said he was going to be President, and he sure showed them). The picture of him as Pope is only funny insofar as it visualises an already funny mental image.

It's tasteless, but that's Trump. I wasn't offended, more "can you please not?" The Onion ran a series of joke articles about Pope Francis both during his illness and in the period up to/after his death, some of which would be way more offensive to a serious Catholic.

He had illegitimate kids? What a funny thing to say!

While we are sincerely touched by the outpouring of condolences from across the world, we request that you respect our family’s need for space so we can navigate the loss of our beloved father,” said Ignacio Vásquez of Argentina, one of Francis’ 16 known children, who were born on six continents to at least seven different mothers.

A skit on the most sacred sacrament of the entire faith, likening it to drink driving? How hilarious!

“Our autopsy found the Holy Father had a substantial amount of Eucharist in his system— roughly four times the legal limit—at the time of death,” said Ruini, who added that measurements of the pope’s blood of Christ (BOC) were consistent with those from someone who had communed with Jesus for decades.

And of course, this charming photo.

It’s crazy to think that there was a time when the Onion was genuinely funny.

The lone and level sands stretch far away, I guess.

It still is, sometimes, but yeah it goes hard in the wrong direction on some things. When you're losing a battle of wits with the Babylon Bee, it's time to put down the bottle and decide "I should quit drinking methylated spirits".

I think that there is nothing wrong with holding the POTUS to a higher standard than some random satire website or social media shitposter. If a top Democrat had been making such a joke, then the GOP would likewise try to make political hay with performative outrage.

hay with performative outrage.

Yes, but it would be performative outrage.

Pretty much nobody would actually say and mean "well, I used to be a supporter of that top Democrat, but now that he made a bad joke, I can no longer support him!"

IDK, that would be really out of character for them, an that alone might be a problem, irrespective of how bad that joke really is. Trump has been "unserious" from the start, so he can do it.

Looking at the people on the conservative side, the loudest champions of a traditional moral order seem to be grifters, or at least hypocrites where they say one thing, and do another in their personal lives.

This is boo outgroup.

I'd say the loudest social media voices right now are Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro. Who specifically do you mean are hypocrites and grifters?

Hypocrisy has always been a lazy accusation. Better to be a person who believes there should be a standard and personally fails to meet it than someone who rejects all standards.

This is boo outgroup.

Conservatives are my ingroup bud. I am an Eastern Orthodox Christian, lol. I don't know about Matt Walsh but in my experience Shapiro is extremely nasty and judgmental in person, which I see as hypocritical if he actual follows Christ.

Wait isn't he Jewish anyway?

He is. Very openly.

Not to beat a dead horse, but that is a less than convincing defense.

This essay is bad and I should feel bad.

I should feel bad because I made exactly the mistake I am trying to warn everyone else about, and it wasn’t until I was almost done that I noticed.

How virtuous, how noble I must be! Never stooping to engage in petty tribal conflict like that silly Red Tribe, but always nobly criticizing my own tribe and striving to make it better.

Yeah. Once I’ve written a ten thousand word essay savagely attacking the Blue Tribe, either I’m a very special person or they’re my outgroup. And I’m not that special.
Just as you can pull a fast one and look humbly self-critical if you make your audience assume there’s just one American culture, so maybe you can trick people by assuming there’s only one Blue Tribe.

Gotta love vintage Scott.

Hah ok yeah perhaps they’re not my in group. Oops. ;)

I'm personally of the opinion that a polycule where everybody involved got on and was in perfect alignment would be a fine thing, and yet the general complexities of human personalities, motivations and the inherent moving targets that life events present mean that this is incredibly impractical.

I'd thus rather just stick to monogamy to ultimately simplify my life. There's nothing wrong with driving in automatic instead of manual, especially when manual in this sense has about 20 ejector seat and suicide bombing buttons on the dashboard with no labels

Far be it from me to defend Trump’s picture, but it was more ‘in bad taste’ than it was actually offensive. Certainly the voices crowing about it being offensive are mostly offended by Trump rather than the actual image.

I mean it was a bad joke, but it wasn’t an offensive one.

Yes, based on my priors, if you had told me that Trump had outraged Catholics by comparing himself to an important character of the RCC, I would have been surprised to learn that he has merely settled for being the pope.

The holy spirit is in all of us, so is it really wrong for trump to call himself god?

The holy spirit is in all of us, so is it really wrong for trump to call himself god?

  1. The Holy Spirit only indwells within Christians; in Catholicism this is mediated by being in a state of grace, which by all appearances Trump is not.
  2. Yes.

The issue with rationalist communities is that they arose at the point in time where there still existed a remnant of Gatekeeping for the internet at large, even as the midwit hordes were beginning to clamor over the gate.

As such, everyone who got into said movement existed in an environment where most of their peers - the remnant of the old guard - were still very much on the far end of the bellcurve, if not in intelligence, then in terms of habit, mannerism, or philosophy. Things such as the (comparatively)early gay rights movement, aethism, polyamory, ect, ect - factions that were far from mainstream yet still had an active, often intelligent voice on the internet, because the people speaking about such things were often very intelligent and/or industrious, creative, and self-motivating. They had to be. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been there.

The rationalists did not - could not - understand that they were the johnny-come-lately to the various alt/punk/counterculture movements of the time, or that they were(imo) ultimately a transitory movement as a whole. They sought to mimic their betters in alot of ways, striding through open fields where chesterton fences once lay, not questioning where the rocks under their feet came from. The constant flow of individuals taking up the shield of rationalism continued to be watered down from the first moment it was established, as each successful wave of people brought an overall shift in the environment, both internet and IRL.

And so here we are. We've seen the alchemical crucible at work, we've seen the results. People have wandered the field until it's barren and the only thing left to do is dig, only to stumble across the base of all those fences and realize they were present for a very good reason. That while certain and single individuals might be able to hop across said fence and even deal with the consequences thereof, that despite looking up and admiring those people for various reasons, the horde wandering said field now has to contend with the revelation that they are not those people. They are not their heros, they are not special, and those rules existed not as a way to restrict or punish them but to tell them what to have for breakfast tomorrow.

Or, even worse, they have to come face to face with the revelation that despite them handling the trials and tribulations of no fence to be seen, that other people cannot.

So, now we've seen the end-game - a group of people with a very tenuous relationship on sanity whom carry the shield of rationalism by murdering their enemies, and the same people whom have considered themselves rationalists are now stuck in a very uncomfortable position with some very awkward questions to answer. This was an end-game that no one could have foreseen - had someone wrote a book about this, said plot-arc would likely have been received as 'cute, but unbeleivable'. Or, if you like, 'boo outgroup'.

As for where we'll go from here? Well. I don't know. I guess we'll see.

You could write the exact same thing about classical liberalism, except the relevant time period was the late-1800s/early-1900s (objectively, the freest time period ever to exist on planet Earth- rich enough for people to rapidly distinguish themselves, scientific progress was making quantum leaps [ironically, the discovery of quantum mechanics actually marks the end of this era], demand for industrial labor was so high that even single-digit-aged children were gainfully employed, and very little effective State capacity to enforce any sort of morality whatsoever).

Actually, you can do that with sexual liberation in the '60s and '70s, too: yes, some people are capable of maintaining the kinds of relationships categorically called evil by some tradition or other, but those people are not you. And the tools and concepts we left laying around have been misused as weapons in their hands; words like "homophobia", "consent", and "orientation" are incredibly useful/necessary tools when minds like ours talk amongst ourselves, but they're thermonuclear-grade infohazards to normies. (And just because someone is in a special sexual category, that doesn't mean they're like us.)

that despite looking up and admiring those people for various reasons, the horde wandering said field now has to contend with the revelation that they are not those people

And now they're resentful of the people who went before simply for having dared to go before- you can usually identify this group through their virtue Georgism (they believe things can be "ruined for everyone" for that reason).

So, now we've seen the end-game - a group of people with a very tenuous relationship on sanity whom carry the shield of rationalism by murdering their enemies, and the same people whom have considered themselves rationalists are now stuck in a very uncomfortable position with some very awkward questions to answer.

Those people are generally called "Jacobins" (also "progressives"). Liberalism in France never truly recovered after the Revolution.

As for where we'll go from here? Well. I don't know. I guess we'll see.

At this point I'm mostly just focused on self-defense- defending both my right and responsibility to be better than everyone else, one person at a time. It's not sustainable, and it tires me out, but I do what I can.

That being said, I am hopeful that the uneasy alliance between the new conservative, Trumpian movement and traditional Christians is finally fracturing. To bring in another CW point, Trump recently posted an AI generated image of himself as the Pope. This understandably pissed off a lot of Christians, and led to them ending their support for Trump's antics. (I happen to be one of them.)

May I ask why? I'm a Catholic, and not a particular fan of Trump, and I found the picture both inevitable and mildly amusing. I'm seemingly one of the few big fans of the late Pope Francis, and of the papacy in general, but "I should be pope" just seems in the universe of a mildly irreverent joke. In the same way that a local church used to have a sign up saying they were looking for a new pastor, and I joked about applying. If anything, joking about becoming the Pope is, in my mind, a positive in that it places the papacy as a position of value.

I have been increasingly souring on Trump's mockery of the faith for a while, this was just the straw that broke the camel's back. He clearly does not care about Christ at all, and only cynically signals his Christianity in an empty way.

Also, I'm curious for your thoughts on the polyamory debate? I actually considered tagging you but didn't want to call you out hah.

I have been increasingly souring on Trump's mockery of the faith for a while, this was just the straw that broke the camel's back. He clearly does not care about Christ at all, and only cynically signals his Christianity in an empty way.

This is a surprise to you? I've never seen him exhibit even the most basic form of contrition or repentance. I've never seen him admit fault in any substantive way. The man is a walking monument to the sin of pride. As for cynical signaling of Christianity, this seems the norm for modern presidents to me, with the exception of W and Carter, two of the worst presidents of the modern era. I don't disagree with your assessment, but I do wonder how any of this is new information.

h the exception of W and Carter, two of the worst presidents of the modern era

What was so bad about Carter?

Jimmy Carter had a way of messing up the USA. (To the tune of the Oscar Meyer theme song, which probably only makes sense in America)

Inflation. Unemployment. Energy crisis. Iran hostage crisis.

Not sure, I suppose I’m a fool. Perhaps I just was naive or was willing to wave it away. Perhaps I have begun to focus more on Christ. Could be many reasons.

I have been increasingly souring on Trump's mockery of the faith for a while, this was just the straw that broke the camel's back. He clearly does not care about Christ at all, and only cynically signals his Christianity in an empty way.

I say this as someone who actually kind of likes Trump as a personality (though not a politician), but ... say what? If you asked me to write down a million qualities about Trump I don't think "cares about Christ" would ever make the list. How did you get here in the first place? I must know.

You might be surprised at the number of evangelicals (I am not suggesting that's where TheDag is coming from) who claim to see Trump as a godly man. I am unsure how, or if it's just because of the bible-holding charade of a few years ago.

Yes, this is very true. I personally know people like this. Typically there's the belief that he was a philanderer and a cheat, but had a conversion experience.

I guess it's just the vain hope that someone, anyone, will stand up for their belief system in the public square. I believe Trump's views on Israel have also influenced this -- it's hard to overstate how much a large segment of American evangelicals are passionate about the state of Israel and believe defending it to be essential for the fulfillment of Biblical prophesy. The only way I can explain it to non-evangelicals is to say that they view Israel with the same quasi-cultic fervor as many Catholics view Fatima: this is the revelation of the end-times!!!!!

So when Trump moves the embassy to Jerusalem, it's seen as a statement of affiliation with Biblical prophesy.

Typically there's the belief that he was a philanderer and a cheat, but had a conversion experience.

At the very least, a near-death experience has been known to have that effect before. I wouldn't rule it out.

And this is the logic they use to justify it. Not "here's evidence of it" but "maybe it could be true."

And this is the logic they use to justify it.

I'm right here, thank you very much. My "maybe it could be true" was based on my hazy remembering that Trump literally said "Now I'm more of a believer" when interviewed a month after the assassination attempt. In general, I'm pretty amenable to the idea that a sudden mortality check may in fact make people reevaluate their lives. "Maybe it could be true", indeed.

There are many evangelicals who believe that Trump is the fulfillment of some sort of prophecy.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FCGfE9yMnXc

I remember seeing, at the start of Trump's first term, a meme on Facebook with a picture of Trump walking on the beach with Christ and the caption "Obama kicked you out, but I brought you back in" or something similar, and there have been several preachers of standing unknown to me who have stood on stage with Trump and called him Christ's vessel here on earth. The first item was probably the work of redneck fringe Christians who don't bother going to church or leading lifestyles that could be described as anything approaching biblical, and the second is probably from the wackaloon end of actual practicing Christians, but these poles are far enough apart to suggest that there's a broader element among religious people who think that Trump is doing God's work in a way that they don't attribute to normal politicians. Even openly religious politicians like Mike Pence or Rick Santorum never seemed to receive the kind of awe that Trump does, probably because they're humble enough to realize that such adoration is kind of sacrilegious.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jeremiah%2027%3A6-8&version=NIV

Now I will give all your countries into the hands of my servant Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon; I will make even the wild animals subject to him. All nations will serve him and his son and his grandson until the time for his land comes; then many nations and great kings will subjugate him. If, however, any nation or kingdom will not serve Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon or bow its neck under his yoke, I will punish that nation with the sword, famine and plague, declares the Lord, until I destroy it by his hand.

Several of Trump’s inner circle of pastors(eg Robert Jefress is essentially an ayatollah for a certain kind of southern Baptist at this point) are actually a very big deal among the evangelical mega church Protestant set.

Would you mind expanding on this a little? In Pittsburgh everybody is Catholic and the few who aren't are some kind of mainstream Protestant. Megachurches weren't really a thing here until the late '90s and even now I probably know more Jehovah's Witnesses (and a lot more Greek Orthodox) than Evangelicals. The upshot is that anything I know about what the actual "religious right" is getting across the pulpit is more my own interpolation based on media reports rather than the actual cultural experience of living among these people, so it's hard to figure out what's widely believed versus what's overhyped by the media.

It's probably not a shock to you that Protestants in practice tend to reinvent church authority by 'whose interpretation of the bible is the best' or that megachurch Protestantism, whether denominational or not, is an outgrowth of Baptist Protestantism. Baptist Protestantism(and Baptists insist by their own description they are not a denomination- the SBC is a confederation of 'local' 'individual' churches with fairly wide theological variance explicitly tolerated. Other Baptist conventions are very similar- that's why they don't call themselves a church, that's reserved for the 'local' 'individual' churches) in turn separated from Anglicanism through a radical rejection of the more high-church features of Anglicanism- in addition to the radical independence of Baptist churches, they also don't believe in the sacraments. Not 'restricted list of sacraments'- they full blown don't believe there's any such thing as a sacrament. Baptism, communion, marriage, etc are seen as commandments from God to mark a change the faithful have already made within themselves and not as actions that actually do anything. That's why they insist on adult baptism by full immersion; it showcases a commitment made individually which a child is incapable of making, and with that mentality an insistence on full immersion makes a lot of sense because the important thing is imitating what the bible shows and not the minimally effective form which an ex opere operato theology would point to. This is naturally orthopraxic, obviously, and one of the unspoken orthopraxies is that the senior pastor of an independent church needs to be followed in biblical interpretation absolutely(see 'Protestants in practice tend to reinvent church authority').

Enter the megachurch- an extremely large church, often with satellite branches, with a single senior pastor, many of whom are essentially hereditary. This sprung up around the same time as evangelicalism- which is really an approach to soteriology emphasizing the relationship of the individual with Jesus, naturally fitting the orthopraxic and internal-spirituality emphasizing nature of Baptist Protestantism(nondenoms are just Baptists light). But I think they're separate trends. There's lots of tiny Baptist/nondenom churches with a senior pastor who has a day job because the church isn't big enough to cover his salary which have the same soteriological approach. The soteriological approach also allows Protestants having it to reach a truce with Catholics, Orthodox, confessional Protestants, etc- the internal spiritual relationship with Jesus is more important than having a particular theological belief.

TLDR if you go to your nearest non-black megachurch on Sunday there's a decent chance one of the sermons will be livestreamed from the principle church(probably located in the south somewhere). A lot of Trump's megachurch pastors in his inner circle have congregants across the country, not just in their own city- I pointed out Jefress because he's based in Dallas, but there's other examples.

The soteriological approach also allows Protestants having it to reach a truce with Catholics, Orthodox, confessional Protestants, etc- the internal spiritual relationship with Jesus is more important than having a particular theological belief.

Yes, I have heard the common refrain from people of evangelical upbringing that "it's okay, as long as you love Jesus." As you said, this is almost certainly a huge part of why American evangelicals are much more open to good relations with Catholics than confessional Protestants: for the evangelicals I know, the tension with Rome is less "they believe doctrines I believe to be heretical," and more "I do not believe that Catholics love Jesus Christ."

Also, I'm curious for your thoughts on the polyamory debate? I actually considered tagging you but didn't want to call you out hah.

Well, now that you're asking, my current opinion on Polyamory is very 2007:

Labels are for soup cans

Any attempt to create new rules for human sexuality seems to me to ultimately turn into an attempt to create opportunities to rules lawyer around human sexuality. A certain class of person tries to use the creation of a community or a movement around human sexuality to find opportunities to badger people into having sex with them even if they don't want to. Free love, polyamory, parts of the gay rights movement, much of the trans rights movement.

I never really had any interest in the community aspects of polyamory, or the whole lifestyle/polycule thing, for that reason. It mostly seemed like an elaborate way for people to take advantage of each other. There was a time in college I enjoyed reading stuff like Dan Savage or Sex at Dawn, and I don't think much of the theoretical case can be easily brushed aside, but I was never a true believer in the concept.

For me and my wife, bringing a girl home for a threesome occasionally was a lot of fun, but is now largely a hobby we no longer have time for, like golf or backpacking. Our adventures in bringing in an extra girl were fun, formed excellent memories and long lasting friendships, and lead to remarkably little drama. I highly recommend it if you get the chance, much like the Grand Canyon, it's one of the few things in life that doesn't disappoint.

I do have to laugh and think of Solon's advice to Croesus when I read these rose-tinted takes on the joys of lifelong monogamy in posts dunking on the plyggies.

Why are you recommending extramarital sex right after invoking your religious affiliation?

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?”

"My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many."

Okay that was pretty great.

Hmm you make it sound so nice, but idk man. I still have a lot of trouble squaring the religious proscription toward monogamy with casual sex with an extramarital partner.

proscription

*prescription

"Proscription" and "prescription" are approximately opposite in meaning.

For me and my wife, bringing a girl home for a threesome occasionally was a lot of fun

I really did not expect to hear something like this from you.

Have your wife never asked you to bring a boy home for a change?

No. She's never been interested in that, for a variety of reasons.

I'm a Catholic, and not a particular fan of Trump, and I found the picture both inevitable and mildly amusing.

Only mildly amusing? I found it holy amusing!

It's funny when the ingroup jokes about the ingroup. It's disrespectful when the outgroup jokes about the ingroup. Simple as. Trump isn't catholic, so I don't want him making even relatively harmless jokes about my religion.

Are you Catholic? And if so: were you raised by and around other Catholics?

Being offended by this seems really forced to me. I wonder if the people taking offense just come from a different culture?

Are you Catholic? And if so: were you raised by and around other Catholics?

Yes. Yes.

The performative outrage by my non-religious ingroup (liberals) is unnecessary and overblown, and I'm not super offended, but I think Trump's post was stupid, and annoying, and I didn't like it.

If anything, joking about becoming the Pope is, in my mind, a positive in that it places the papacy as a position of value.

Yeah, this is exactly how I felt about what Trump meant by it -- "Man, wouldn't it be great if I were Pope! Look how cool the Pope looks!"

Probably most of the commenters weren't born when Benedict XVI was elected, but the amount of "pope Palpatine" imagery going around then was way more offensive (at least, if like me you were happy a traditionalist got elected).

The Bush admin also didn't post any of those images, making this a strange comparison.

The one you linked is pretty lame, but I liked the meme overall. IMO the good version is the one thats just him with lightning coming from his hands, eg 1, 2. To me at least the "evil" part of it isnt relevant, its that the picture looks consistent in a way it wouldnt for a lot of people. In part because of the ritual setup, and in part his body language - he seems confident in a way that Francis for example didnt.

Some of the spicier ones seem to have been scrubbed and the milder ones were all I could find, but I remember. Oh yes, I remember.

Every Catholic I have asked in person has said some variation of this.

I think non Catholics have a really difficult time modeling the way that Catholics actually think about stuff.

I think it's more people who hate Trump, and probably also hate traditional Catholic teaching, jumping on this about "see what the guy you like is really like? isn't he horrible? you should be offended!" because of their fixed notions that he appealed to the Evangelical Religious Right Vote and they've been trying ever since to drive a wedge between him and that support by "but he's not really religious at all, in face he's a sinner!" posting of examples. You don't say. Remember the fuss about the blue suit at Pope Francis' funeral?

It was dumb, but if I'm going to be offended by social media posts about Catholicism, this is about 9000th on my list of "I am shocked and appalled".

Given that Katxwoods explicitly mentions crying herself to sleep while her boyfriend is out banging "falling in love with" other girls, it would be remiss of me not to mention this immortal tweet:

When you see two people are in an open relationship it’s like which one of you came up with the idea and which of you cries to sleep at night

I find it interesting that, despite being an extremely open-minded person who always been interested in finding different ways of doing things, this has never applied to anything regarding sex. I have always been instinctively repulsed anything even slightly aberrant in that domain.


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