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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8363 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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Normal Christians outside of Silicon Valley wouldn’t even know who Aella is, or that polyamory is a thing.

They “know” her from outrage-bait reactionary twitter. On sunday they meet in a pointy house in the sticks and sing hymns about the whore of babylon. They go home and have wet dreams. Then they come to themotte and write posts wondering why anyone cares about her.

I can’t tell if this supposed to be humorous or if it’s just genuinely delusional. No one who goes to a “pointy house in the sticks” has even heard of Aella. Her fans and her haters are both among the terminally online.

You said the motte works in SV, that is incorrect. I haven't claimed that the motte is full of normal christians, just that some christians living in flyover country are here and know and complain about aella.

Look buddy, if Pastor McGee’s sermon ever causes me to have a late night premonition about the Whore of Babylon, it’s going to be a sweet wholesome REAL AMERICAN Jezebel harlot like Taylor Swift playing her, not some E-lectronic Celebrity from “California” who posts naked tik-toks on the OnlyFans.

I see, I did not mean to question your taste in family values thots.

To get back to your original point, I don't live in the US, I don't work in tech, yet I think unions are a scourge. The first, and main thing they do, is make it extremely hard to fire people. So the company stops hiring. Outside, unemployment rises, and the normal job market gets very brutal and cuttroat because all the good jobs have been cordoned off. The union employees work less and less for more and more, and then the entire industry goes bankrupt. Classic european industry life.

Nah, your model is totally off here. The Aella-posters on the Motte are rationalist guys, some of whom have actually met her IIRC. I only know of her through the rationalist stuff and find her generally weird, off-putting and unworthy of extended commentary. In real life she has 1/1000th of 1/1000th of the reach of someone like Andrew Tate.

who's talking about general reach? I'm talking about this sub. Your opinion of aella is by far the most commonly expressed here, and you're not in Silicon valley.

But I don’t hear about Aella from reactionary Twitter, I hear about her from the people who post about her, who are Rationalists and the Rationalist adjacent. In other words, people who are disproportionately not normal Christians and who are weighted towards Silicon Valley.

Also, let’s be honest, your post was very clearly accusing people of being hypocritical perverts who denounce Aella in public whilst having wet dreams about her private. I have many hypocrisies but that is not one of them, and I am telling you plainly that I think your model is wrong.

‘Fun is bad and you’ll pay,’ ignores the very real dissatisfactions and disillusionments that have spread through society in the wake of Free Love. Some people have turned to reactionary and/or Christian sexual ethics in response, others who already held those ethics are pointing out that they said sex was not purely harmless fun and behold, it turns out not to be purely harmless fun.

The rat and reactionary twitter have a lot of overlap. The people here don't live in silicon valley, neither are they normal christians.

I think my criticism is about as deep as the usual take about people being "clearly dissatisfied" with the sexual revolution, modernity, neoliberalism, house prices, health care, etc.

I feel the hostility for aella and polygamy is higher than is warranted. Despising people does not require so much communication. Too much protesting versus “I don’t think about you at all".

Every normal Christian in America has heard of the Mormon church.

And? That’s completely orthogonal to the point I’m making. Joe Sixpack from Indiana didn’t hear about Mormon polygamy and then because of that decide to log on to the Motte and write a 2000 word essay about Bay Area rationalist polycules and what that says about Scott Alexander’s moral fibre and views of society. That’s clearly a very inside-baseball take from someone who is immersed in the rationalist milieu.

I’m not from Indiana, but certainly from flyover country. I became aware of polyamory through the internet, the same place where I read Scott’s essays and am talking to you now. I do not identify as a rationalist, have never identified as a rationalist, but I enjoyed a lot of Scott’s writings in 2014 about the culture war (as I am a relatively conservative man from flyover country, and he was criticizing the left), and discovered them from a Reddit recommendation on a subreddit recommended to me by a high school friend, also from flyover country.

Polyamory is also widespread, yes under that name, among gay zoomers just about anywhere, so if you’re young and know anyone who’s gay (and there’s a lot of zoomers who identify as gay), you have a good chance of coming across it.

This is a second-hand anecdote, but my mother does hiring at a small organization here in flyover country and had a hilarious, if disastrous, job interview where the candidate told her he was polyamorous. He did not get the job.

This stuff is spreading. It’s not just in San Francisco any more.

I disagree with Tree, but what he said isn’t entirely false about where the criticism comes from. But all the gory details definitely suggest some of the posters are insiders.

Sure. But "someone who is immersed in the rationalist milieu" and "someone who works in Silicon Valley" are not synonymous, as numerous commenters have taken great pains to explain to you.

Maybe not a 100 percent overlap on the Venn diagram, but certainly a very strong correlation. Frankly I don’t know why you are so perturbed by the idea that you feel the need attempt to employ such casuistry to push back against it.

I'm not "perturbed" by anything: it's simply that your assertion that everyone on the Motte works in Silicon Valley is extremely obviously erroneous.

I don't know if we've ever done a user survey here, but Scott does one of his readers every year, and only 58% of his readers live in the US, and less than 50% work in computer science-related fields. If you assume that there's a lot of overlap between the kinds of people who read Scott and the kinds of people who post here, I'd hazard a guess that at most forty per cent of Motte users work in Silicon Valley - quite a long ways from "all" or "a very strong correlation". I wouldn't be remotely surprised if the real figure was as low as twenty per cent, or ten.

TracingWoodgrains did a user survey back in the Reddit days and only two-thirds of posters lived in the US (I don't know how much the demographics have changed since the migration from Reddit).

I will admit that there are few types of fallacious argument I find more obnoxious than sneering Bulverism, especially when it's based on an untrue assertion.

I made a rather uncontroversial (if snippy) assertion that many people on the Motte hold tech jobs of the kind found in Silicon Valley. Which is something that many many other conversations on here basically take as a matter of fact. Suddenly you and ten other people angrily surge out of the woodwork to gish-gallop me with user survey statistics and bizarre and nonsensical arguments about Mormons. And now I am uncharitably accused of “sneering Bulvarism”.

No shame in admitting you made a factual error and moving on.

You keep making these assertions, and I am willing to tentatively grant that Aella specifically maybe isn’t on the radar of “Normal Christians,” but hearing about polyamory is unavoidable, even out here in deep flyover country.

Do “Normal Christians” have more than a surface-level awareness of the concept and a desire to grant debating the concept any more time than “That’s just fornication with extra steps?” Probably not, but I would anecdotally state that they do know it is a thing.

Frankly, I don’t even think college students at liberal universities in most of the country would know what the hell you were talking about if you started going on about your polycule.

Okay, I can’t speak to liberal university college students, not having gone to college, but that wasn’t the original assertion.

I can tell you anecdotally, n=1, that while “Normal Christians” in flyover country won’t know the jargon, they are definitely aware that people are out there, both on the coasts and in flyover country, trying a new spin on justifying sexual sin.

So? Those aren’t the people making long winded analyses of polyamory and the efficacy or lack thereof on the Motte dot org.

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