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ZorbaTHut  3yr ago (text post)   48382 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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@ZorbaTHut please steal the commit that makes ctrl-Enter to comment.

@ZorbaTHut ask Aevann how he did it, I couldn't figure it out from going through commit history and he is very proud of that feature.

Yeah it's pretty nice, honestly. The code is kind of a pain to work with; I've put it in our queue, reasonably high up, but it'll take a bit.

Some people have argued that to affirm a trans person is lying. I sympathize with someone who says, "if I call a trans person by his preferred pronoun, it feels like I am lying." If this is all that is meant, then I suppose the rest of this post isn't relevant. To me, the stronger claim is, "if society calls a trans person by his preferred pronoun, society is lying." I never bought that claim, because I never encountered a contradictory set of definitions for sex and gender.

But recently I realized the term passing is actually transphobic according to the definitions laid out.

This is pretty clearly a woman. I can tell because of the hair and clothes. I infer she goes by "she." If I had to publicly address her, I'd do so with she.

People typically speak of passing as a woman. Since I can infer she is a woman, it follows that she passes as a woman. But as far as I can tell, nobody would describe her as passing, because she looks transgender (i.e. male). Based on how "pass" is used, it seems to really mean pass as cisgender. To see passing in this sense, as a good thing, is deceptive. It also seems transphobic. Surely a less transphobic worldview would suggest she passes as a woman because I can correctly infer her pronouns, and that her womanness is just as beautiful as a ciswomans.

Inb4 replies castigating me for just now realizing this: nobody had ever crystalized to me that passing meant to misrepresent a trans person as cisgender because most discourse talks about "passing as a woman"

Am I missing something? Can anyone else steelperson all this?

Passing is mostly used by trans people to refer to "appears similar enough to a biological woman nobody can tell". A (clever) trans interlocutor says - 'woman' does refer to, usually biologically determined and innate - physical and psychological traits, as well as social roles, appearances, ways of dressing and acting, and acknowledging that isn't "transphobic" - it's just that I want to possess those traits! - be cute, feminine, wear skirts, etc. But the entire thing doesn't mean much

If womannees (the social meaning) was actually useful to discuss then passing would be about passing as a woman. Since I can correctly infer most people's pronouns thats what it would mean to pass.

Since passing is actually about passing as cis -- that is, passing as female (the physical meaning) then it is deceptive because its goal to cause observers to make false inferences.

You intrigue me with your clever hypothetical where the terms are defined as conflating the physical and the social into one category. Of course, any category buckets things so that's not necessarily a bad thing. Could you elaborate on that?

Eh, the "nobody can tell" part is subtle given that it also appears to be considered virtuous to be particularly bad at telling. I've had progressive acquaintances react with what seemed like genuine surprise and apprehension when I referred to third parties who in my eyes obviously did not pass as trans (in a non-hostile context; we were having a completely non-adversarial discussion about diversity metrics at our university). When pressed on this, they insisted that they really didn't know and reacted to my reasoning (masculine voice, height many SD above the biological female mean, large hands, impractically feminine presentation (like frilly skirt in a hardware shop setting), uncommon and conspicuously feminine name) in an "wtf, you caused me disutility by planting this pattern in my head" way. It seems to be more akin "passing" as in "passing a college course" - meeting a standard that is itself up to debate, and generally at least in an American setting understood to be ideally determined according to a principle like "as low as we can get away with without causing too many problems".

The blue tribe wasn’t exactly a bastion of gender conformity before all this, either- it’s possible they’re just genuinely bad at reading clues.

Eh, the "nobody can tell" part is subtle given that it also appears to be considered virtuous to be particularly bad at telling.

Not just being bad at telling, the entire gender ideology's concept of gender identity as a purely inbuilt phenomenon that no one can gainsay is making being able to tell irrelevant by stating that what you can tell doesn't actually represent someone's "real" gender.

Embrace the sex/gender distinction. By which I mean—set aside the terms “man” and “woman” for a minute. Let’s use “male/female” for sex, “masc/femme” for gender, and ignore the edge cases.

Your proposed usage of “passing” would be “male signaling femme enough to get femme pronouns.” Conventionally, it’s more like “male signaling femme enough to be assumed female.” “Representing a trans person as cisgender” was a pretty good way to put it.

Yes, this is some level of Problematic, in that it asserts sex/gender mismatches ought to be invisible. I don’t think this is a settled issue. For those who believe social interactions are grounded in gender, not sex, changing perception of the latter is unneeded. For others, decoupling sex from gender is hard enough that they won’t feel satisfied unless they can pass. Naturally, the whole issue is complicated when fighting over the terms “man” and “woman,” which don’t historically handle the sex/gender mismatches.

Personally, I have a hard time blaming those who wish to pass. Avoiding cognitive dissonance seems like something worth endorsing, especially when the burden is mostly on one’s own shoulders.

I already do embrace it, though I'm sad to see many replies to my post seem unable to.

Most of the time I've heard people define passing or talk about passing, they talk as if one "passes for femme."

But most of the time I hear people use passing, it's better described to mean "passes as female"

Certainly I don't blame someone trying to pass - it certainly comes with advantages. But I also wouldn't blame a woman who alters her behavior at parties to avoid being raped. Victim blaming is when society asks women to change their behavior to avoid rape (problematic) right?

Trans people trying to pass reminds me of women trying to avoid being raped. Isn't the ideal activist world one where neither minority has to alter their behavior? What's the difference? Why is one more realistic than the other? Is it just about optics, and what activists can get away with asking society to do?

Leaving aside whether "passing" as a concept is intrinsically problematic (probably? man, hell if I know) I definitely think there's pretty strong (for me) delineations between degrees-of-passing.

  1. I cannot distinguish this person from being a cisgendered man without them telling me verbally.

  2. I can tell this person is attempting to pass as a woman, but my hindbrain is continuing to helpfully inform me that this person is a man.

  3. I can tell this person is a trans woman based off of specific conscious cues, but she passes successfully enough to where my hindbrain perceives her as a cis woman.

  4. As far as I can tell this person's a cis woman.

"Passing", depending on context, either means (3) or (4). I definitely will accidentally misgender people who fall into categories (1) and (2), since talking with or about them involves constantly overriding my typical social scripts for dealing with people I've internally categorized as one gender or the other. I don't think that my unconscious sense of other peoples' gender actually distinguishes between "cis" and "trans".

As an aside, trans people are definitely susceptible to the Gaudy Graveyard Effect where the trans movement tends to be identified by people in categories (1) and (2) because that's where all the controversy is centered. Culture war stuff aside I don't think most people have any visceral problem with trans people in categories (3) or (4).

This is pretty clearly a woman.

We have differences in lived experiences, then. I've said this before, but I really think Hanania nailed it by hypothesising that the anti-trans side cannot be understood without acknowleding how some are simply innately disgusted by what they perceive as abnormal physical features. Or, to simplify, too many people have a disgust reflex against non-passing transsexuals for the movement to succeed.

You can talk about how we should all apply Bayesian reasoning to deduce that an odd looking person is likely to prefer she/her, but that's a tall order for someone experiencing literal transphobia (as in: an instinctive, uncontrollable fear/repulsion) as they look at the person.

As for your commentary on how "passing is transphobic", I think it has been independently suggested a thousand times by some of the more radical trans activists.

I really don't like this line of reasoning, it dismisses a lot of very valid criticism of the movement as mindless revulsion.

How so? What criticism is dismissed simply because the underlying motivation is disgust? Disgust does not make or break an argument.

Because there is plenty of intellectual opposition to it aside from revulsion, such as genuine fear for the children that appear to be being abused.

Mindless revulsion is itself an argument.

Would you eat a cockroach? Why not?

‘Because it’s gross’ is a perfectly valid answer.

It's a valid answer but not a very stable position to rely on as disgust is often found to be malleable or something people should get over if the utility gain is large enough. I'm deeply suspicious of anyone who characterizes one of my positions in a way that places it on unsolid ground be they ally or foe. If the main objection to eating cockroaches is that it's gross repackaging the bugs to be more palatable or hidden in other food stuff can be considered to have addressed the concern. You will not address my concern with transgenderism by making them pass more effectively.

I think for most people "I find X disgusting" = "X is disgusting" = "X is bad". The idea that one's personal sense of disgust is not a reliable guide to morality doesn't occur to most people.

Do you have any links to these radical activists who say that? That's new to me.

Actually, just assume I'm wrong. I don't have the links

We have differences in lived experiences, then. I've said this before, but I really think Hanania nailed it by hypothesising that the anti-trans side cannot be understood without acknowleding how some are simply innately disgusted by what they perceive as abnormal physical features. Or, to simplify, too many people have a disgust reflex against non-passing transsexuals for the movement to succeed.

I mean, you don't have to limit it to non-passing transsexuals. Botched plastic surgery, people of walmart, even a lot of extreme body mod stuff makes me gag. Normally this is an issue between myself and where I lay my gaze, and I'm content to live and let live. But there aren't people out there trying to fundamentally reorder society and groom children into splitting their tongues or trying to get make sure their face lift gets infected.

Although it occurs to me, after trying to write that sentence about a dozen different ways, that society does encourage a lot of fucked up shit. It's so fucking easy to become obese in America, and plastic surgery is very much encouraged and glamorized. And our society is increasingly reordered around obesity. The medical profession is under increasing pressure to stop telling people to lose weight, and just attempt to treat the symptoms.

very much encouraged and glamorized

Show this to the guy downthread arguing that trans acceptance will lead to plastic-surgery acceptance. America already has a significant fraction who are into obvious voluntary surgery; it’s just mostly split on class lines.

I can’t agree on the alleged social threat of trans people, though. Targeting children is somewhere between irresponsible and unethical, but that’s not what they are doing. Literally every trans person I know is an adult and firmly focused on affirmation rather than evangelism. That may lead to a false positive rate by encouraging uncertain members, but this isn’t somehow unique to trans issues. To me that means the live-and-let-live category should apply.

By all means, protect the vulnerable, especially children. One can’t get tattooed before 18, and tight controls on other body mods are reasonable. But don’t mistake the cherry-picked worst examples for a general argument.

I can’t agree on the alleged social threat of trans people, though. Targeting children is somewhere between irresponsible and unethical, but that’s not what they are doing. Literally every trans person I know is an adult and firmly focused on affirmation rather than evangelism. That may lead to a false positive rate by encouraging uncertain members, but this isn’t somehow unique to trans issues. To me that means the live-and-let-live category should apply.

I think there's a sort of equivocation between "trans people" and "trans activists." When people talk about having problems with trans people targeting children, it's in reference to trans activists, and it's hard to tell how much that overlaps with actual trans people. In my experience, the vast majority of trans activists are not trans people, for instance, but that doesn't stop them from claiming that their activism is on behalf of trans people. This is why I suspect that this sort of equivocation is actively encouraged by trans activists as a useful rhetorical tool by which to defend their positions as being what trans people - the actual minority that people care about - want rather than merely what trans activists - just some set of humans who agitate for sociopolitical change - want.

By all means, protect the vulnerable, especially children. One can’t get tattooed before 18, and tight controls on other body mods are reasonable. But don’t mistake the cherry-picked worst examples for a general argument.

School districts around me have been caught secretly socially transitioning kids, with an official policy of maintaining two sets of documents. Birth name documents for the parents, and trans name documents for internal use. When it's government policy, it's a general argument.

But recently I realized the term passing is actually transphobic according to the definitions laid out.

My understanding is that both historically and today that is how it's treated in the place the term originated: race.

If you looked white, married white then it came out you were not white (by the standards of Jim Crow) you would be seen as having done something fraudulent and having violated anti-miscegenation laws.

If you looked black and acted black, even appearing to be sincere like Dolezal, today but you weren't black you still get excoriated for faking it.

At the moment, all I can think about is: if only "not a racist" were a category as inclusive as "woman."

Disclaimer, while I am accepting of trans people as human beings with rights, I am highly skeptical and in some cases openly hostile to the efforts trans activists to dismantle the concept of gender or biological reality. I'll do my best to explain my perspective on the issue without strawmanning anyone, but given that I don't know your actual beliefs on this, I can only speak for trans arguments I typically see.

It really depends on your definition of "man" and "woman". For hundreds of years in English, and via translation in the majority of historical languages, and still for the majority of the population, there is no meaningful distinction between "woman" and "cis-woman". They don't even use the term "cis", because you can just say "woman" when you mean an adult human female. For anyone who still holds this definition, then to "pass" as a woman means that people to mistake the trans person for a biological female. This is inherently deceptive, because the trans woman is not a biological female, and yet is deliberately causing themselves to be mistaken as one.

I'm pretty sure this counts as transphobic, despite not really being a normative claim, because it ignores/denies attempts to change language that trans activists have been making recently. I personally think all of the "-phobe" words are overused and nearly meaningless, but I usually interpret it as meaning something along the lines of "hinders the trans agenda", which this definitely does.

If you take the opposite extreme, and define "woman" to be purely "anyone who identifies as a woman", and if everyone embraces this definition you end up in circular logic where the word becomes meaningless. Why would anyone care what word they or another person identifies as if the word means literally nothing other than identifying as it. You might as well identify as a "snurxoth". This is consistent, it's just no different from having a name. Someone might identify as "Alex", and it doesn't allow you to infer anything about them at all, it's just a word you can use to pick them out of a group of people with different names.

Under this definition alone, then, it's impossible to pass as a woman or man without wearing your pronouns written visibly somewhere on your person. If gender is purely a construct of the mind and a person's self-identification with no external foundation, then you can't infer that the person you linked is a woman. Maybe they identify as a man and just like that style of hair or clothes. Maybe they're nonbinary. More importantly, why would you think that hair and clothes are associated with women at all? If everyone's gender identity were purely internal, then there would be no reason for all of the biological females, who tend to have long hair and wear that type of clothes, to decide that the word "woman" was their gender identity. If the word doesn't refer to anything physical, then there's no reason for people to divide themselves up into the same two categories that most people are in now. Rather, I would expect most people would identify as random stuff they like like "Dragons" or "Princess", or just their names.

I'm pretty sure this definition is also transphobic from a different perspective, because if you entirely deny the existence of a biological basis for gender, then trans people basically don't exist. Or rather, they're not meaningfully different from cis people. Everyone is just born as a person, has a gender identity, and their physical body doesn't matter at all, so there's no such thing as bodies that men have or women have, because anyone who identifies as a man or woman is equally a man or woman. There's literally no reason for anyone to try to transition or pass, because even if they do, there's no way anyone could know their gender identity afterwards without reading their mind, or asking, same as before. On the other hand, there's no way for this to be deceptive, because claiming a thing is literally all it takes to be that thing. Except in circumstances where someone outright lies (you ask to be referred to as a man but secretly identify as a woman in your mind).

But what I mostly see as the accepted trans activist position is a Motte and Bailey at play. The Motte is the above position, that gender identity is just self identification, the Bailey is that gender identity means a bunch of things that historically it has meant tied to biological sex. Most trans women don't want to be perceived as "someone who identifies with the word woman" or the pronouns "she/her", they want to be perceived the same as biological women, with all of the cultural baggage that that perception has picked up over the centuries. It's only because the majority of the population believe that "women" have meaningful physical and behavioral differences than "men" (a statement which is factually true if gender = sex), that trans women want to be categorized alongside the cis women and trans men want to be categorized alongside the cis men. Imagine if tomorrow all of the cis women decided that they no longer identify as "women", they have a new word, I don't know "snurxoth", and suppose all the cis men decided to go along with it and the word was quickly adapted to regular use and the old one abandoned.

I highly doubt the trans women would continue happily identifying with the word "woman". No, they would want to follow suit. Because at the heart of trans ideology isn't self-identification, it's factual and normatative claims that trans women and cis women aren't meaningfully distinct, and similarly for trans men and cis men. There's no point for trans women to want to pass as trans women but fail to pass as cis women, because it doesn't truly mean anything. Or, maybe there is some point. Other trans activists will use certain pronouns and treat them a certain way because that's what you're supposed to do to be a good ally. But it seems to me the real Bailey is that they want to be treated the same as cis women, and the only way to do that in a society that treats biological males and females differently is to deceive people into thinking you are a biological female: a cis woman.

I guess a society that treats biological males and females differently would be considered inherently transphobic . Your specific question of whether it's transphobic for you to think of passing in terms of passing as cis, conditional on already living in this society, are going to depend a lot on what that word even means for you. Is it more important to advance the trans agenda as a whole by dismantling the gender norms and deny biological differences matter? Or is it more important to help individual trans people try to slip into the existing categories by imitating the other sex? Either could be considered transphobic depending on the priorities of the accuser (which is why I don't think the word has much bite).

All of which just seems like it makes the word 'transphobia' itself, when used this way, utterly meaningless.

I sympathize with someone who says, "if I call a trans person by his preferred pronoun, it feels like I am lying."

This isn't quite it. I don't "feel" as though I'm lying. I am actually lying. I am saying things I don't believe for the sake of someone else's feelings. That is a lie.

But recently I realized the term passing is actually transphobic according to the definitions laid out.

Yes, the concept of passing is contradictory with many other trans related concepts but it's often not seen because the whole of the trans movement is half dozen totally incompatible frameworks glued together while every tries their best to ignore the seams.

Yes, the concept of passing is contradictory with many other trans related concepts but it's often not seen because the whole of the trans movement is half dozen totally incompatible frameworks glued together while every tries their best to ignore the seams.

Either this is self-evident, in which case why post it? Or it's not, and you ought to unfold.

I've gone into detail in the past. There are many contradictory positions.

Gender as essential doesn't square with most of modern feminism and very few trans activists are willing to disavow feminism preferring to just outcast the feminists who noticed that their movements are incompatible.

Any attempt to actually justify self-id undermines the entire concept of transitioning.

There are deep epistemic issues with even making a claim like "I feel like a woman", people only get one subjective experience and thus have no tool that could possible differentiate between

  • genuinely feeling the way that women feel

  • incorrectly believing that they feel the way women feel

This last one of probably the thing that frustrates me most about the whole space and what worries me about teaching children these things. There is no internal or external way to falsify the idea that you might be transgendered. If I put myself in the shoes of a kid that doesn't quite fit in, or hell myself at that age if I had been exposed to this meme, I don't know how they get a better than 50/50 chance of resisting this meme. I am not confident I would not have made a life ruining mistake and stubbornly stuck to it. This possibility haunts me, I think in a few decades we're going to look back on thousands of mangled young men and women.

*bodies of mangled young men and women

The trans suicide rate is probably even higher among those that get memed into it than the ones that would’ve discovered it on their own.

I'd put forth that the separation of sex and gender is a lie in and of itself. Furthermore, the people who you presumably want to convince would simply reject your framing of "transphobia". In the same way that it's not "schizophobic" to say that what schizophrenic people see is not real, it's not transphobic to say that trans women are not women.

Of course, I may have misunderstood your point entirely and you were trying to reach an entirely different audience with your post in the first place.

I think it does make sense.

It does make some sense, which is why normies/naive gender philosophers are so often convinced by it.

Just as today it makes sense to divide "noble" as a social class from "noble" as a moral state. Doesn't mean that, in the Bronze Age or prehistory, they didn't actually "buy their own supply"

The problem is that gender ideologies act like the absolute divide they've invented in academia (since the 50s) actually represents the historical and common view of terms. It simply hasn't. In reality we blur the lines all of the time (which is why the conceptual simplicity of the sex/gender divide is so attractive).

To this day the line is blurred. You can see artifacts of it all over the place where "ladies'", "women" and "female"' are used interchangeably.

In order to sell their naked change of the definition of "woman" to include transpeople they first insist on the sex/gender distinction. But activists act like this is just obvious, not a redefinition in and of itself.

That's not the point. It's not that there is no difference between sex and sex stereotypes. It's that Gender, the dualist concept where you decide in your mind what the reality of your social condition is or should be, has no connection to reality.

One can perfectly reject thoroughly gender theory and still retain a perfectly acceptable explanation for the cultural variance you mention, which I don't even believe to be that large.

"Gender role" suffices for that purpose and isn't contentious.

In the absolute I would agree, but not when that word smuggles in with it an entire metaphysical outlook that's tailor made to promote social constructionism and then self-destruct.

This argument is a soldier.

This is pretty clearly a woman.

By what definition of woman?

I think the whole trans discourse of whether someone "is" a woman is fairly hopeless. The true request is for admission to the social institution of womanhood. And I think a lot of people who are willing to treat the person as a woman -- use her preferred pronouns, not object if she uses the women's bathroom, not give her shit for wearing a dress and makeup no matter how incongruous it seems in proportion to her profile or vocal intonation, etc. -- nevertheless balk at agreeing that she is a woman.

Accommodation is a natural and understandable request. We're used to it in a variety of contexts. It has been a common form of social compromise for longer than civilization has existed. We're used to acting as though there is nothing different about people in wheelchairs, people with congenital deformities, people with dwarfism, people who are extremely old, people who obviously have a terrible disease, etc.

But if someone in a wheelchair wanted me to say they could walk... if someone with dwarfism wanted me to say they were six feet tall, if someone in her late eighties wanted me to refer to her as a 25-year-old... that would be hard for me.

Unfortunately, agreeing that someone is a woman is an unavoidable part of granting them access to the institution of womanhood.

So, it's a pickle.

The demand is that we are treating non-passing trans persons as if they were passing, ie. cis-[the opposite sex]. They are obviously not passing, otherwise the demand would make no sense. And that is what is being seen as a demand to lie.

Both of them could be said to be lies.

If you have an essentialist definition of woman (something based on, for example, gamete size or the sort of body geared towards producing large gametes if it was healthy) it is not a lie to treat someone passing as a woman if you don't know they aren't. Once you do know, it would be a lie (just as it would be a lie to treat a black-passing Indian as a black American).

The difference is that, in the second case of the non-passing trans person, there is no chance of even an honest mistake. It must all be lies.

Yeah, but that would be the same kind of pointless academising of concepts we think gender philosophers are guilty of.

I suppose the difference is that I don't see the "standard" definition as pointless in the same way I see the gender philosophy definition as pointless (i.e. incoherent, leading to harmful real world outcomes with limited gain while ousting a simple and useful system).

I deliberately wrote it out in that stilted way to avoid standard gender ideologist criticisms ("well, what if she's infertile??"). A habit forged in the culture war.

Most people who do have an essentialist mentality wouldn't be as circumspect (they would likely default to "a certain body" or, if raised in a more scientific society, "estrogen" or "adult human female") which is why a lot of the tactics of trans activists work on them (e.g. just trying to force a random layman to draw the exact line where someone stops being a male, pointing out intersex counter-examples) in a form of philosophical shock-and-awe. I don't think it actually makes that much of a difference tbh but it can stump a person in the moment.

Hence I avoid it.

But I don't think it changes my belief in an essentialist definition or that I think most people have essentialist instincts and naive beliefs.

You are saying "this is clearly a woman" because you're redefining "woman", not because this person is actually passing. The clothes and hair just change the situation to "really weird person that doesn't speak and looks like a woman at first glance, but something feels wrong about them".

This is pretty clearly a woman.

Gun to your head, if you had to guess this person's chromosomes, and you would be shot if you got it wrong, what would you say?

I think you are lying in exactly the same way we all say we would be lying to call that person a woman, but the difference between us is that I think you are lying even to to yourself. I suspect you don't actually outright think "this is a woman", but more something along the lines of "this person is sending signals that they would like to be perceived as a woman".

I've said before on Reddit, but I'm pretty sure there's not much actual difference between the "maps" of pro-trans and anti-trans people.

On a whole host of questions, both groups would be in complete agreement:

  • Can the person get pregnant?

  • Does the person have XX chromosomes?

  • If the person recieved no medical interventions would they have breasts or gynomorphic genitals?

The main issue seems to be whether there is a real category of "adoptive" men and women, who have the morphological characteristics of one sex, while trying to assume the social role of the other.

To that point, I'm not even sure the "gun to your head" bit is necessary. It's a it like asking adoptive parents: "Oh, you call Timmy your son? Gun to your head, would you say that Timmy has 50% of his genes in common with you?"

Not every culture has a concept of adoptive parents. (Notably Islam instead has "sponsorship.") And not every culture is going to have a concept of "adoptive sexual roles", but I don't think calling a trans person by their preferred pronouns is "lying", any more than calling an adoptive mother a mom is lying.

Adoptive parents invest significant effort to earn the title of mom/dad -- it's certainly not uncommon for a kid to reject a (bad) step/adoptive parent and refuse to call them that.

"Because I say so" is certainly not a good reason to call somebody by the title they prefer.

That's only an argument against identification as a standard. It would still tend to leave transmedicalism on the table. If someone spends years medically transitioning and jumps through legal hoops, doesn't the comparison to adoptive parents get off the ground?

That would just leave "identification only" as a courtesy of sorts. The same way that a kid whose parents just died, might have their aunt and uncle take care of them for a few weeks before all of the legal paperwork is taken care of.

If someone spends years medically transitioning and jumps through legal hoops, doesn't the comparison to adoptive parents get off the ground?

I don't think it does -- raising, feeding and clothing a child has immense benefit to the child. (also a smaller but significant benefit to society, in that somebody needs to raise orphans)

Going through a difficult medical procedure has no benefit whatsoever to me (and is probably a net drain on shared resources, but no need to go there); so it doesn't follow that anyone should be expected to confer the 'title' of women upon somebody else for that reason. If one's adoptive mother were trans, maybe there would be a sense of duty there -- but I don't see any way it exists by default.

How about from another angle then?

Adoptive parents put in a lot of work to be considered parents, but adoptive children are adoptive children irrespective of how much work they put into the relationship.

Perhaps trans people could be considered adoptive members of their preferred sex, not because of the work that they put in, but because of all the work doctors have put in to their transition. For a post-everything trans-woman, shouldn't we recognize all of the hard work the doctors put in and allow them to be considered members of their adoptive sex?

Again, this is an argument that trans-surgeons are/should be proud of their hard work and consider the end product a "real woman" -- this makes sense and is probably even true.

It's not an argument that anybody else should agree; in art, nobody cares how hard you worked -- others will judge you by your end product.

Sure, but that's usually why the state/power is the "tie breaker." It doesn't matter if I think a white woman is kidnapping a little black child, if the records of the state have her as their guardian, then power will back up her claim.

More comments

I'd say that's someone who is pretty clearly pretending to be a woman. It comes down to this- what's your definition of woman? If your definition, like the pro-trans people, is that a woman is anyone who says they're a woman, then this person would qualify as a woman but it makes the word meaningless. If your definition is that a woman is an adult human female, then this is clearly not a woman. If you definition is that a woman is anyone who is trying to present as an adult human female (as I infer) then this is a woman.( From this point on, I'm going to use the specific definition instead of the word to make the argument clearer.)

But then passing makes no sense the way you use the word. You are saying that she passes because you can tell that she's a woman (trying to look like an adult human female). But her objective, if she is a woman by your definition, is to look like an adult human female (not like someone who's trying to look like an adult human female) which she's failing at- hence pro trans people would not think of her as passing.

Steelman of the pro-trans argument: Woman is defined as someone who would prefer to be an adult human female, regardless of what they actually are. They're passing as a woman if they can pretend to be an adult human female so well that they're indistinguishable from a regular adult human female to the casual observer.

Steelman of the anti-trans argument: Woman is an adult human female. This man is pretending to be an adult human female while not actually being one. The pro-trans people are asking everyone else to pretend that his pretense is successful, to participate in his delusion, and that is unacceptable.

Steelman of the pro-trans argument: Woman is defined as someone who would prefer to be an adult human female, regardless of what they actually are. They're passing as a woman if they can pretend to be an adult human female so well that they're indistinguishable from a regular adult human female to the casual observer.

Except even this doesn't work for current mainstream trans activism since "passing" is seen as an undue burden to demand - this is the entire basis for self-ID (if the standard is passing or surgery most transpeople would fail) and the shift to the dualism of the gender identity view where everyone has an inbuilt non-contestable understanding of their soul gender.

As a steelman it would be politically intolerable to actual trans activists. Which is Why the Trans Inclusion Problem cannot be Solved

There's simply no definition that includes both women (in the traditional sense) and every transperson who wants to identify as a woman.

I always wonder what it must be like for cis-women that look sort of like transwomen. I've known a few women over the years that have sort of a 'trans' look about them, particularly as they got older. I wonder if it is tougher to be in that position these days.

About twenty years ago, when I was in high school, there was a new student. I didn't know jack shit about transgenderism, and neither did anybody in my school (that I know of; it was a rural school). The student looked like a girl, talked like one, walked like one. But there was always something off about her. Then the school year ended and I never saw her again.

Anyways, years later (actually just a few years ago), I was flipping through my yearbook and saw her. And I immediately recognized that she was trans. Googled her, and it turns out she's still trans, openly so, and streams (to an extremely small audience) on Twitch. Heard her voice, and it sounded just like it did when we were younger, but I could recognize that it was a trans voice. It was pretty interesting to me how, not knowing the concept of transgenderism, I viewed her as female. And it was also interesting how something in my subconscious picked up that something was awry. She was 'passing' simply because I knew of nothing else. Today, with transgenderism being taught at such a young age, I imagine the younger generations will be able to decipher between trans and cis people at younger ages, and much more accurately, despite the fact that many young trans people seem to be much more passable to me than 20 years ago. It'll be more and more difficult for 'passing' transwomen to actually be mentally categorized as women.

And it was also interesting how something in my subconscious picked up that something was awry.

Obviously evopsych gets a bad rap for being a set of just-so stories (and my conduct now doesn't help) but I am not surprised by the idea that men may have an interest (and thus a capacity) in figuring out who is legitimately a member of the opposite sex.

The funny thing is: I used to see this raised as a good thing in psychology. Paul Bloom cited research in Just Babies that showed that you could confuse the mind out of racial categorizations but not sexual or age based ones. His reasoning? Race wasn't a fundamental distinguisher (we distinguish outgroups and race is one way to do it, but we didn't really rub shoulders with members of different races regularly until recently) but sex and age were, if a being wanted to reproduce.

Now it makes me worried because of what it implies about how unrealistic this push to ignore sex is.

I always wonder what it must be like for cis-women that look sort of like transwomen. I've known a few women over the years that have sort of a 'trans' look about them, particularly as they got older. I wonder if it is tougher to be in that position these days.

You are just asking "What's it like to be an unattractive woman ?".

I remember a lot of girls getting clowned for 'looking like dudes' (mostly by guys, it was the one thing that guys could really emotionally cut girls with, comparing their appearance to a guys) back in high school. Definitely doesn't happen in adulthood, they just go from 'looking like dudes' to just being a "plain jane" or whatever.

There's a difference between being teased for "looking like a dude" and having people quietly suspect or assume you're attempting to "pass" as the opposite sex has rather different implications.

Not quite. There's a difference between a woman who looks very plain, and a woman who looks masculine. I've known both: women who are plain looking but unmistakably female, and women (biological women, not transwomen) who are like "is this person a man who got surgery". And like @bsbbtnh, I too wonder if it's even harder for them in this day and age. At one point at least nobody would be able to question if they are a woman, but now someone might well do so.

I never encountered a contradictory set of definitions for sex and gender.

As far as I know, the sex/gender “distinction” was invented wholesale in very recent history for overt political purposes. I reject that there is such a distinction.

This is pretty clearly a woman.

To me it’s clearly a man, due to his facial structure. But it’s possible I could be mistaken.

Being a man or being a woman isn’t about what clothes you wear or how long your hair is. They’re biological categories.

This is the fault of the OP for mentioning a sex/gender distinction and then proceeding only with sexes.

It seems obvious to me that “gender” is a useful term, even if not in the way that some trans activists would prefer. Start by treating “male” and “female” as strictly biological terms defined in the obvious way, ignoring all edge cases. Some activities are clearly aligned with one these categories. Males are more likely to do testosterone-fueled activities like lifting heavy things and fighting.

Once we consider culture and perception, we run into some confusion. Not all of the correlations have an obvious biological reason. Maybe there’s a good evo-psych reason for women to be way more into books than TV, or maybe not. And there are plenty of jobs which may have been male- or female-dominated historically, but aren’t anymore.

So it makes sense to have a second set of terms referring to these categories and not the purely biological ones. A male or a female can still act “masculine” or “feminine” based on culture and circumstances. These are clearly not hard boundaries if only because humans are so socially adaptable. From a purely descriptive standpoint, sex and “gender” aren’t the same.

Being male or female may not be based on clothes or hair, but being masculine or feminine is.

It seems obvious to me that “gender” is a useful term, even if not in the way that some trans activists would prefer. Start by treating “male” and “female” as strictly biological terms defined in the obvious way, ignoring all edge cases. Some activities are clearly aligned with one these categories. Males are more likely to do testosterone-fueled activities like lifting heavy things and fighting.

Break down for me why you think gender is a useful term. To me it appears almost entirely useless at best, and intentionally misleading in practice. It was more or less invented by activists and saw no real use until the last few decades. And, of course, the guy most credited with inventing it drove a child to suicide with his "treatments".

Being a man or being a woman isn’t about what clothes you wear or how long your hair is. They’re biological categories.

The clothes and hair are signals that one is feminine, not the actual measure of someone being a woman.

As far as I know, the sex/gender “distinction” was invented wholesale in very recent history for overt political purposes. I reject that there is such a distinction.

Yes. The trans ideology proceeds by a double redefinition. The obvious is that males can be women and vice versa. That one is acknowledged as a change.

But, below that, they essentially are brazenly redefining how people even see the categories in order to perform this change. That's where this sex/gender distinction comes in. All of a sudden we hear how "woman" isn't sexed but gendered (so obviously anyone who claims the right gender can be a woman!)

But here they act as if it is obvious and naturally true, not a contingent belief.

It clearly isn't. To this day I am asked on job sites for my "gender" and the options are "male"/"female".

To this day I see signs for the female washroom that are marked with skirts. Until recently nobody thought this meant a man in a kilt was welcome.

To be fair, nobody thinks the kilt makes it okay today, either. That’s still a masculine signal.

To be fair, nobody thinks the kilt makes it okay today, either. That’s still a masculine signal.

Well of course. You wear it with a prosthetic big hairy scrotum. Or big hairy badger, if you prefer to take the principle to extremes.

If we are no longer on Reddit, is a "Culture War" thread really the best way to contain these topics? What about two tabs at the top of the Home screen: Culture War and Regular, with the Culture War than just having a list of posts that can be their own top level posts?

I'm confused about the purpose of non -CW things pre-move. If something isn't CW-radioactive, why post it on TheMotte?

Of course now, I suppose we may develop a unique community that wants to discuss all matter of things.

Things like e.g. the Wellness Wednesday thread shouldn't really be CW.

And there can be interesting things to discuss with The Motte-style regulations that are not CW and could be disrupted by CW topics.

Discussing noncontroversial things is good training for discussing controversial things, because it's a lot easier to discuss dispassionately.

It also provides opportunity for positive, low-stress interaction, which help remind you that you're talking to actual people, not just evil other-tribe defect-bots.

I'd like for this place to be a community, not just a war ring. We survive by making people want to come back; in an ideal world I'd like for this place to grow to cover quite a few more subjects, with people who simply never bother to click the Culture War Thread.

One of the more popular subforums on Something Awful was Pet Island, where you chatted about your pets. Something Awful turned pretty bad, but in its heyday it was a thing of beauty.

Amen.

Compare the book recommendations on the Friday Fun threads vs. /r/books, the relationship advice in Wellness Wednesday vs. /r/relationships, or anything about Small Question Sundays.

I won't say the /r/themotte was better at everything than the dedicated communities, but it at least gave a distinct perspective on things.

Sounds like a lot of development effort and there's a lot of higher priority issues currently.

I don't think it was a great system even on Reddit, tbh. I definitely would be in support of ditching the megathread here. However, Zorba mentioned (in another thread) that he wants to keep things the same for now, as moving off-site is already quite a shakeup.

At that point, why even bother with a reddit-like design? We might as well have migrated to DSL and just become a regular old forum

I can't speak for everyone but I really like the reddit style branching comment/post structure.

I think reddit style discussion works much better when discussions are very large, with many participants. Forums are much better when it's smaller in scale, and you're not constantly producing these monstrous chained quotes. If you get rid of the megathread approach, small scale discussions would dominate I believe

At that point you might as well be on discord then.

Small forum threads are nice because they're easy to keep track of. Discord is just about the opposite of that.

Reddit's style of branching comments is the worst, because discussions get buried and harder to find. 4chan style where replies have direct links to the post they're replying to (and the ability to preview the previous/next post in the chain by hovering) is the best forum style I've ever experienced.

Yeah, I also prefer the free-form style of the chans where you can reference whichever post you like without tumbling ever further down some tree structure. But then again, would that stand up to the thousands of posts a megathread often gets?

I strongly disagree, Reddit lets you follow specific conversation threads much more easily and collapse/skip threads you aren't interested in. That being said what you ask for is available at https://www.themotte.org/comments albeit not segregated into topic threads.

edit: I will say I do find the /comments version useful as the thread matures and I'm just looking for updates on certain discussions. Early on I like the reddit style structure because it keeps everything in context but it does become harder to keep up with where the new posts are towards the end of the week.

I think keeping everything in one place prevents the fracturing of the community into subcultures, who can then evolve independently of each other and then start to fight. Some people might only open threads on one topic, others on others, and eventually one group may get a bad reputation among the others. Keeping us all on the same page literally keeps us all on the same page metaphorically.

I like the thread system, I'm used to it.

Nah single thread is better, I can mindlessly scroll through dozens of different topics without opening new links

Mass immigration is essential for the West. It reduces pressure on wages and creates constituencies that can be played off against troublesome locals

I agree that immigration is essential for the West, albeit for different reasons. Birth rates have declined below replacement levels, and thus, western countries are facing population busts where there will not be enough people to maintain society and care for the elderly. Demography is destiny, as they say.

Throughout the rest of your post I’d replace the idea of “the regime” and “the Leviathan” with “the impersonal forces of global capitalism”, but would largely agree.

This fortifies the elite’s interest in sponsoring forces hostile to inherited social and cultural norms (feminism, gender fluidity, LGBTQI).

Agreed that capitalism celebrates these concepts because they are good for business. Feminism allowing women into the workplace creates a larger pool of labor to draw from. Appealing to identities in advertising and hiring practices (sexual orientation, gender identity, race, etc.) increases consumption and the potential labor pool.

The emergence of a sub-proletariat (by definition either involuntarily unmarried or unable to support stable families) within the working class is in no way problematic for the regime…it reduces pressures for higher wages

I think the class of people unable to support a family is more of a side effect. Global capitalism has unlocked incredible value for the wealthy. There is excess capital to be invested, which results in the prices of assets increasing dramatically (housing, for example). However as Piketty discovered, economic growth doesn’t keep pace with the rate of return on capital, which is why wages have stagnated while asset prices have ballooned. This slow economic growth makes family formation harder.

An unhappy and violent future seems guaranteed

Unhappy? Likely. I think our demographic decline is going to create a massive labor shortage in the coming decades that even a dramatic increase in immigration seems unlikely to solve. It seems to me that capital must bear this cost rather than labor in the form of higher wages, lest they risk the value of their enterprise. I think some larger companies are already realizing this, though the smaller ones may be slower to pick it up.

Violent? I’m not so sure. I’d hope that capital would realize that it must renegotiate its relationship with labor and this would occur peacefully, and given how most of the pressure from the current movement is occurring non-violently online, I think this may be the case. However, previous periods of economic transition have been marked with violence so perhaps I’m being naive.

Sado-Malthusian model

Sado forum is offline (anyone have archives?), I suppose that is where this term is from. Where is this model best elucidated prior to what you've posted here? I understand the Sado forum owner created a Substack, but this term must predate that.

Edit: I was thinking of Salo Forum.

...Salo Forum?

Ah, thanks, Salo != Sado. For anyone reading not in the know, it was a neoreactionary forum ran by Niccolo Soldo. It had an internet famous thread about the early history of HIV/AIDS:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200618004225/https://salo-forum.com/index.php?threads/patient-zero-and-the-early-days-of-hiv-aids.3167/

I'm not sure why it was shut down (maybe to draw attention to the admin's new Substack?) or if everything on there was lost, but I'm afraid of something similar happening to TheMotte someday (though we're hopefully not going to end up in a single admin's hands). Soldo's new Substack is here:

https://niccolo.substack.com

Meh. This just looks like a gloomy and pessimistic worldview that conveniently absolves the one holding it from any need for action, while staying sufficiently vague to resist falsification.

Such people are ideal, from the perspective of Leviathan/Cthulhu.

Leviathan and Cthulhu are mythical creatures - they don't exist. You're talking about vague impersonal forces, but those typically don't act like agents that plan for outcomes - unless there is an actual organization making out those plans and carrying them out. There are two pretty different views:

  • An actual conspiracy, with a shadowy group orchestrating the things you point at

  • No such group, just a lot of people each following their individual incentives.

I find the "individuals and their incentives" story much more believable, and (to me) your post comes off as gesturing towards the "shadowy conspiracy" while avoiding spelling it out.

And the incentives are much more fruitful to talk about - you can actually talk about facts, about things that could be changed. For example, why aren't people having kids ? Could be the cost of real estate, could be the cost of schools, could be dumb laws about car seats, etc. - and each of those are topics that can be analyzed, evaluated, solutions can be found, etc.

Not OP, and I could be reading between the lines in a wishful thinking kinda way, but I took the post differently. You seem to have read it as if they are defining causation for the described conditions. I read it more as observing the conditions and pointing out what results, and who benefits. I don't think that's incompatible with your "individuals following their own incentives" (which I agree with, btw).

As for Leviathan and Cthulhu, it seems pretty clear to me that these are invoked in the same way as Scott Alexander's legendary Moloch.

But here I am putting words in someone else's mouth, which is not usually productive or wise. Apologies in advance if I should have stayed quiet instead.

(minor edit for accuracy)

Maybe it's just my bleak mood today, but this feels pretty spot on to me. And I say that as someone who currently is supporting a traditional family, and a reasonably happy and well-functioning one at that.

The only thing I'd add to your list of malignant factors is the collapse of religion as a force for social cohesion. Despite my inability to believe the absurd supernatural claims, and my full awareness of the vile, so-typically-human machinations and abuses committed by the world's religious power structures, I find myself grieving the loss of shared purpose and higher call religion provided. Grieving for my own sake, but especially for my daughter and for society at large. There doesn't appear to exist anything else that can quite fill that hole in the human psyche, and I find the consequences of that so troubling as I get older that I'm almost prepared to argue that we should keep it around, on balance. But only almost.

Great write-up - I hated it.

This is excessively conspiratorial. It amalgamates neoliberal conservatives with wokist liberals, brands that grouping "elites" who are in favor of "the regime", and attributes monolithically sinister motives to them. Neoliberal Republicans have always been more-or-less in favor of mass migration to drive down wages while they've merely paid lip-service to red tribe Republicans, and yeah they've never really cared about fixing immigration and have thus formed something of an alliance with wokist Ds, but it's an uneasy one at best. Wokists aren't super jazzed about obliterated wage growth, and the neoliberals don't actually care about wokist priorities either, they just want to get rich quick through the path of least resistance.

So, in Molochian fashion, literally nobody is happy and nobody is able to stop it, it sounds like.

I think what this leaves out is that productivity growth didn't stall- wage growth stalled while productivity continued to rise.

I could google it, but I'll ask you: how is productivity measured? I've always heard that wages haven't tracked with productivity, but the latter seems easy to fudge.

productivity growth

https://www.bls.gov/productivity/images/pfei.png

Looks like productivity growth certainly decreased. There's also sectors and the meaning of productivity to consider. Computing power has gotten exponentially greater. I'd imagine this accounts for much of what growth there was. Computers hold everything up, other sectors might have gone backwards. NASA's coming trip to the moon certainly isn't very impressive, compared to the 1970s there's been basically no trans-orbital productivity growth. SpaceX has only done orbital stuff thus far.

I've noticed how more and more people use the term "ethnicity" to mean "race". Here's an example from 1:26:20 in the latest Honestly with Bari Weiss podcast episode "Has Freedom Failed Us? A Debate" (which is otherwise excellent, I might do another post on its contents later):

Patrick Deneen: "If you read the context it's clear he means a kind of cultural tradition, and not a kind of ethnicity" [while talking about a Viktor Orbán speech]

It might be pedantic, but this annoys me. My understanding is that ethnicity is cultural: If a Hungarian couple adopts a Chinese baby and raises it in Hungary, that child will be ethnically Hungarian when grown up (but it will "have Chinese decent" or more controversial "be racially Chinese" or "be racially Asian").

I understand that people tiptoe around the word "race" since misusing it can get you cancelled but replacing it with another word that means something else is just wrong.

This is the end of this rambling. Has anyone else noticed this?

It's been going on for a while, very much like how I remember being taught to say gender rather than sex ("it means the same thing, it's just more polite"). It is indeed annoying.

The originators may be people who legitimately believed that observed differences between races were due to ethnicity rather than race, but people who want to promote that view should argue for it explicitly rather than trying to smuggle it in via definitions.

"Race" has been a somewhat dirty-sounding word for a long time, and the circumstance that in US context it really seems to generally denote the vernacular categorisation (black-white-hispanic-asian-native american) that is captured by census categories and is not particularly useful unless your main objective is actually to maintain 1950s US culture rather than to make correct inferences about individuals . Since there's no other unburdened word floating around for genetic clusters (and since having plausible deniability when talking to people who strongly believe that it is nurture rather than nature and to think otherwise is evil is actually a feature), "ethnicity" had to stand in.

(Slight similarities to how in our community, "red tribe"/"blue tribe" edged out "democrat/republican" or "right/left", drifting away from its original meaning denoting specific cultural features too)

I mean, I guess languages always drift in this way were terms migrate to related but different meanings. Still, it's a bit annoying that "ethnicity" was a way to not talk about race, and then it suddenly became race-coded anyway.

What about "ancestry"?

Ethnicity is not nationality. The child will still be ethnically Chinese (or Han, to be more precise). Of course, this distinction is exacerbated by the child being of a different race, since, say, no one would care if the child was from Czechia or Romania.

What definition of ethnicity do you use? By all definitions I can find, the grown child would have Hungarian ethnicity. As far as I can tell. ethnicity is always about culture, not decent.

Genetics testing companies use ethnicity to refer to descent.

https://www.ancestry.com/c/dna/ancestry-dna-ethnicity-estimate-update

This doesn't fit how I use ethnicity, how nearly anyone I know uses ethnicity, or how most literature (meaning everything from fiction, articles in the popular press, or academic concentrating on the subject -- Connor, Kaufmann, and the literature on ethnic nationalism more generally being good examples) uses the word. The popular conception of "ethnonationalism" as opposed to, say, civic nationalism with the stipulation of jus soli is further evidence. That aside, you can just look at the word's own etymology.

I would also disagree that it's used an euphemism -- in my own writing (both on the sub and elsewhere), I've insisted on using ethnicity because it denotes more specific groups of the same basis (ancestry) as race, which is important when someone has to deal with international comparisons (where, for example, "black" could denote a group including both African-Americans and Kenyans, or just the former), where the distinction between broader races and specific ancestry-groups will create unnecessary confusions if ignored. I don't think there's a better word for doing this (even something like nationality is better, if still somewhat inadequate, for the sort of relation which OP is describing), or one more commonly used for such purposes.

My understanding is that ethnicity is cultural: If a Hungarian couple adopts a Chinese baby and raises it in Hungary, that child will be ethnically Hungarian when grown up (but it will "have Chinese decent" or more controversial "be racially Chinese" or "be racially Asian").

I would find it a bit weird to label him either "ethnically Hungarian" or "ethnically Chinese", but if I had to pick, I'd find "ethnically Chinese" a bit better. Maybe "ethnically Chinese but culturally Hungarian". "Ethnicity" and "Race" are pretty fuzzy words with debatable edge cases, and that's because fundamentally they're labels about labels.

"English", "Chinese", "Hungarian", "Jewish", "White", "Han", "Mestizo", "Arab", "African-American" etc. are identity labels, and those often have their own idiosyncratic rules - some are defined by a state, some are associated to traditions of patrilineal or matrilineal descent, some are strongly associated to a language or a religion - often, they have a lot of correlated characteristics, such that people will disagree about membership of various people, or about which identities are mutually incompatible. And "Ethnicity" is an attempt to regroup some of those labels, and, sometimes, to resolve ambiguity, i.e. you can use "Ethnically French" to contrast with having French citizenship.

I'd say that ethnicity is a mix of ancestry, language, and self-identity (the three being often correlated), with a bunch of ambiguous cases - are the francophone Quebecois "ethnically French" ? Maybe, I don't know. They usually aren't described as such, whereas German-Americans who don't speak German might be more likely to identify as "Ethnically German" (right ?), which seems inconsistent, but eh, as I said, each label kind of has it's own rules and it's a fool's errand to expect consistency.

What's less fuzzy is that "ethnicity" is clearly distinct from citizenship - one can be "ethnically Japanes" while being a Brazilian citizen, etc. Same for the distinction between ethnicity and religion. I don't think that there's such a clear distinction between ethnicity and race or ancestry.

Are you willing to allow for finer distinctions like 'the Hungarian race' and 'the Dutch race'?

If not, your definition of ethnicity leaves us lacking a term for the noticeable differences between groups within a race* . Maybe this isn't as clear in the US where whites are all mixed together, but a Pole looks different to a Scotsman (even if there's enough overlap that you won't always guess right).

*though I think race could be dispensed with altogether as it just marks a point where the differences between distantly related ethnicities are obvious.

I would say that someone can have Hungarian decent or Dutch decent. Talking about a Hungarian race sounds weird though.

It's not my definition of ethnicity that leaves the "sub-race" term lacking, it's every definition of ethnicity I ever seen. If you need a term for sub-races, find one or make it up, but don't change "ethnicity", which is a perfectly usable term that means something else.

Talking about a Hungarian race sounds weird though.

It was normal to use it this way in the past e.g the Irish Race Conventions.

If you need a term for sub-races, find one or make it up, but don't change "ethnicity", which is a perfectly usable term that means something else.

I haven't dived into its etymology but I don't think 'ethnicity' ever excluded sub-races to begin with, it's just that it also included a grab bag of other ways of distinguishing different peoples.

The awkwardness we feel lumping something biological like race in with arbitrary things like culture seems like something modern. Traditions, styles of dress etc once seemed about as immalleable as facial features, both because culture changed more slowly and because people used to have some weird ideas about how quickly environmental changes would bring about physical differences.

This is interesting. In my conversations, everyone I’ve talked to uses ethnicity to mean a sub-race delineated by common genes. But looking online in dictionaries and articles, the definition says something else: a social and cultural construct. This might be one of those instances where the definition in popular use is not the definition you find in dictionaries. At least I think this is true in Northeastern USA.

If I were to speculate, it probably has something to do with Americans who think of themselves German or Italian, because they have one immigrant parent, but cannot even speak their language. Many such cases. They think that they are part of one of those European ethnicities, which is why they are confused what “ethnicity” is.

It is much clearer in Europe: people of different countries are, by and large, of different ethnicity, and some countries even have multiple ethnic groups within the country (e.g. Belgium or Russia). An Italian living in Italy would find the idea that Italian-American with Italian parent who doesn’t even speak Italian, to be his fellow Italian, rather ludicrous.

That’s because Italian Americans are their own unique ethnos with their own unique culture. But if you were some Irish American living amongst Italian Americans your whole life, you would never say you were ethnically Italian, you would say you were an ethnic Irishman who was culturally Italian. In America, someone might say they are culturally Italian and refer to Italian Americans. This change is similar to how the ancestors of modern Italians would be aghast that they speak modern Italian instead of their regional tongue.

Similarly, I had somewhat idiosyncratically considered terms like these to be extra-specifying taxonomic levels. Something like "... -> genus -> species -> subspecies [-> race -> ethnicity -> tribe? -> family? {already used elsewhere!} -> individual]." As I said, idiosyncratically, so it's not really of much use in communicating with anybody else, but that's the general sense I'd picked up.

Like some others here, I have never heard "ethnicity" used to refer to anything other than ancestry in the past several decades I've heard the term. The person of Chinese descent living in Hungary is ethnically (Han or whatever his biological ancestors were), and culturally Hungarian, if it's important to make the distinction. Or if not, he is Hungarian, and racially Asian.

This may be because I'm American, and the usage is different in Europe. But if it's different, it's not recently different. If a person's biological ancestors are from France, but he's raised by Greek Americans, he is ethnically (some kind of French) and culturally American or (regional) American or Greek American, depending on how much he participates in Greek specific cultural customs. Calling him ethnically Greek would not so much confuse people as simply miscommunicate his background. And nobody calls anyone ethnically American unless they're emphasizing that they don't know where their ancestors are from.

The Census categories in America differentiate between Races and Ethnicities. With Hispanic being the only allowed ethnicity. This is because Hispanics can be pure European in ancestry or any amount of European, Native American or African.

It's especially ironic you use Hungarian as your example. Since the Magyars were originally East Asian Siberians. It's laughable for a Hungarian to talk about the dangers of race mixing.

Yeah, and I find that kind of odd, and refuse to answer that question. Apparently my state is about half and half hispanic and non-hispanic; hispanic is larger by far than non-hispanic white. This seems a little silly. "My abuela speaks Spanish, so I guess that's my ethnicity." Especially since it's asked as a yes/no question on forms, with no other options.

Come to think of it, I have heard "ethnic" used in a cultural adjacent way before -- "ethnic restaurants" serve food that can be traced back to a more specific culinary tradition than non-ethnic restaurants -- be that India or Ethiopia or Serbia or whatever, but are not regionally prevalent. American diners and Mexican restaurants are not ethnic in my region.

It's especially ironic you use Hungarian as your example.

I used it because the OP did -- I admittedly know nothing about Hungary, and they may well use different distinctions than Americans. If a Hungarian-American said they were ethnically Siberian, I would believe them.

The point is race is a legal term in the USA. It used to be the case up until the mid 20th century that only people of the 'white' race could be naturalized as citizens. There was a case brought against Finnish people who sought naturalization and eventually the judge ruled that they despite being originally of East Asian Siberian origin were of enough Nordic stock to be considered white to be naturalized as citizens.

See also miscegenation laws.

From what I gather, the Magyars were a warrior nobility who converted the central European peasants (who were not really that genetically distinct from the Germanic and Slavic people around them) to speaking Hungarian, but were never that huge in number and were mostly wiped out in wars with the Mongols and the Turks. Meaning today's Hungarians aren't really all that mixed, but ... not in the way you might think.

Anyway, the census categorization that calls 'Hispanic' an ethnicity is using the word 'ethnicity' in a somewhat non-standard way. Perhaps it has to, since the people of Latin America have, like you say, such a wide spread of degrees of admixture, from pure European, pure Amerindian and pure sub-Saharan African, to any combination of the above, that there aren't really neat boxes to put people in where ancestry and culture are tightly matched. But it's not an ethnicity in the sense that, say, Welsh, or Igbo is an ethnicity; more just a hold-all cultural category for 'people from south of the US/Mexico border, at least some of whose ancestors spoke Spanish'.

I don't think you understand that Europeans are themselves descended from extremely deeply diverged races. The Ancestral North Eurasians are as different from the Early European Farmers as modern Chinese people are from the French. There are countless examples of groups that are culturally descended from one group, but who have little ancestry from the original group. Every Uralic speaking people in Europe, the Hungarians being the most prominent, and least Uralic by ancestry, Chadic people in central Africa, even the largest ethnic group in the world the Indo Aryans who originally came from Europe. Genes and culture correlate, but not enough that having different terms to refer to these concepts isn't useful.

I don't think you understand that Europeans are themselves descended from extremely deeply diverged races.

No, I'm well aware of that. Just that after millennia of intermarriage, modern Europeans are a lot more homogenous (and largely distinct from the original Magyars, even though modern Hungarians claim continuity with them). I'm sure that the same would happen in Latin America too, given time, and barring any further large population migrations.

If you read my responses to the original poster he was claiming as an American he had never heard the term ethnicity used to refer to anything other than ancestry, despite the fact any American would have had to fill out various government forms that list ethnicity as something other than race.

We need a term to denote if someone is culturally, genetically or phenotypically like a certain group. Ethnicity seems the most obvious and widely used term to denote culture.

Turks all consider themselves the same ethnicity despite ranging from people who look like Nazi propaganda posters to people who wouldn't be out of place on the streets of Beijing.

Usually in the field of population genetics they refer to people of being of different 'clusters' or 'ancestries' usually using some specific principle component analysis or the genomes of some ancient population as a reference.

We're going through a similar process now. Reddit has become increasingly hostile - we just had a comment removed for discussing the meaning of various types of parenthesis, I'm not making that up, I'm not exaggerating, that's a thing that happened - and if the community is to survive, we need to disengage from Reddit.

I have done a cursory search on both reddit and here but I cannot find the juicy gossip. I really absolutely have to know the specifics of this incident. Yes it is salacious gossip. Yes it is an utterly irrational guilty pleasure. But please please please can someone spill the beans on exactly what went down.?

And please, just this once, can we ignore the usual motte precepts and fully and shamelessly engage in friend/enemy distinctions? Can we embrace sarcasm and mockery just this once? Can we be a little uncharitable to our censorious enemies? Can we pretend that they will never read this because they probably won't?

Please I would love someone to leak all the intimate details of the parenthetical comment being deleted while I engage in apelike disdain of my outgroup.

Thank you in advance, and please forgive me this one time for bucking the very pillars upon which the Motte rests.

This archive of the comment in question was linked in the "The Motte Is Dead, Long Live The Motte" thread.

Someone was explaining the difference between triple parentheses and European quotation marks.

And a Reddit Admin got involved and deleted the comment?

Because that sounds kinda outgroupy to me.

If the outgroup is being outgroupy, is the ingroup allowed to boo?

Just don't talk about it or you will get massively downvoted.

and yet that is exactly what happened. Funny world, innit?

Reddit is very stealthy about this sort of stuff. A comment deleted by an admin looks like any other deleted comment. There is nothing that stands out about it that suggests action by an admin.

I was going to say that reveddit knows enough to distinguish between "removed by user" "removed by mod" and "removed by admin."

But presumably, Zorba wouldn't lie to us. And there was ongoing censorship in other threads. Until I see strong evidence otherwise, I am going to assume it was the Stazi.

They've actually become less stealthy about it. In some cases, including this one, it just gets replaced by the text "[ Removed by Reddit ]".

Zorba explained it here: https://www.themotte.org/post/2/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/778?context=8#context

Thank you. My entire lifetime, teachers warned me that we must always be on the look out for anyone infringing on free speech or authoritarians censoring us and that they ALWAYS try to start small and then move on to bigger issues.

Then one day I woke up and half of my fellow countrymen were pro-censorship. I am still confused by this.

Did you steelman the case for some censorship, though? What your teachers said seems to be a slippery slope fallacy. For exemple, "authauritarians will put people in prisons, and they will start with criminals, so we should have no prison at all".

It needs to be clear that the existence of the "Slippery Slope" fallacy does not mean all Slippery Slope arguments are fallacies. Slippery Slopes do happen and it's a very common tactic, in fact. The fallacy is along the lines of your example but suggesting that censorship, once successful will expand is not a fallacy it's the most likely outcome. It's also an outcome we've literally watched in history on multiple occasions. Once you've been able to stop people saying something small you don't like hearing, why would you stop?

But it seems to me that in countries that implement a strong censorship, like eg Russia, the justice system, including prison, is a lot more instrumental than reddit censorship which has yet to prove dangerous. The justice system has to establish what is true or false (for example did you and did you not murder X?), and this power on truth is the very basis of polical censorship (remember 1984 Ministry of Truth).

Once you've been able to stop people saying something small you don't like hearing, why would you stop?

Because the law is well written and only allows you to ban harmless things? That's like death penalty. If you kill criminal, why wouldn't you kill political opponents? The answer is that you can't because it isn't allowed. Why is it possible to draw a line for the harmless use of the justice system and not for the harmless use of small censorship?

It's also an outcome we've literally watched in history on multiple occasions.

Just like the justice system has been used for repression a lot. Or the army. Russia used poisoned tea to kill political opponent, so is drinking tea a first step toward political assassination? The only thing that could convince me completely is a proof that the censorship as it exists is already dangerous. There are other restrictions on freedom of speech (eg you cannot publish classified material). Is forbidding the word "nigger" really more dangerous than allowing the government to keep secrets that no one is allowed to tell?

You are right, I claimed more than I intended. I would say that basic word-based reddit censorship, like censoring the word "nigger" or even the so-called (((echo))) has not really harmed the debate, even if it gives place to ridiculous cases like on /r/themotte.

There are other cases where reddit censorship is worse than that, like website-level rules against "transphobia". Those rules are very bad in my opinion, however they are nothing close to the Russian system of censorship. It is still possible to express opinion against transgender identity in most western countries, mainly because people can speak somewhere else.

or even the so-called (((echo))) has not really harmed the debate, even if it gives place to ridiculous cases like on /r/themotte.

You do know why we have to post on a separate website, and not the subreddit? Precisely because the slippery slope is real and comments merely explaining meaning atract attention of the AEO.

Then one day I woke up and half of my fellow countrymen were pro-censorship. I am still confused by this.

They were always pro-censorship. Even your teachers were. After all they probably would have stopped you swearing in class, or engaging in blasphemy or calling for violence (depending on location and timing). You just weren't saying the kind of things they wanted to censor.

It's one of the thing I find surprising where people are surprised that majorities of the population support authoritarian things like lockdowns or vaccine mandates or censorship. And think this shows some kind of overnight sea change. This is the the default. Liberalism is a deal in the absence of one side (in whichever scenario) having more power, they agree not to censor pragmatically. Once one side has more power, and you try to say something they dislike then they will favor that censorship.

Standard caveat for the three principled Libertarians in the corner, trying to start seasteading to escape the whole thing. I know you are there.

"There is no problem in the world so complex it could not be solved quickly and easily if everyone would simply do what I say," as Gore Vidal once put it.

I'm not sure you get it. I do not think the important part of it is about "making everybody else live according to my principle". Most people do not care that much about what others do. It's more that my freedom to live some kind of life enters in conflict with the freedom of someone else. For example, if someone wants to live without ever hearing "nigger", this person has to enforce a ban on the word. The person might not really care about what people do everywhere where they aren't, they just don't want to hear it. But the only reasonable way to enforce the "don't say nigger to me" rule is to find allies that do not want to hear it either and to ban it almost everywhere.

You may reply that it is not the same kind of freedom, as the freedom to say something is a freedom to act, while the freedom not to hear something is a freedom to a feeling or a non-feeling. But what about rape? The rapist is the actor, the victim is just feeling something. Or what about smoking in restaurants? A rape acts on the body of the unwilling victim, but so does the word "nigger" with the ears, and so does the smoke with the nose. Politics is often about finding practical compromises between opposed freedom.

If free speech is usually preferred to censorship, it is because without it, some truths cannot be said; that the government can start to live in a fantasy world where everything he does is wonderful. Such a government is obviously doomed. So it has been decided wisely that this should not happen. But it means that as long as every truth can still be said, there is no actual danger with censorship. A ban on the word "nigger" is not dangerous, as it does not change your ability to say any truth. I think that a ban that forbids the use of the word "nigger" as a quote of someone else's words is completely stupid, but it is not dangerous as long as there is some other way to speak, as ridiculous as it might be (like "n-word").

Then, there is the usual argument: if we ban "nigger", they will want us to reduce freedom of speech even further : this is the slippery slope fallacy. What about "if they can say nigger, they will soon try to kill black people"? History proves that limiting freedom of speech can lead to general censorship, but it also prove that racial insults can lead to mass murder. Is limited freedom of speech a worse result than a mass murder? Even if you think that a limited freedom of speech would eventually lead to mass murder, you have to agree that it works both ways: mass murder are a very good way to destroy freedom of speech.

I disagree with your take on why freedom of speech is important. I was taught, and I wholeheartedly believe, that it's important because people are fundamentally untrustworthy. When you give them the power to censor speech, it may well start out as a righteous thing. But ere long that power will be misused (by them or by their successors) to not only censor speech that is genuinely bad, but simply speech that the people in power don't like.

This is inevitable. It will happen when you allow any kind of censorship. The only defense, the only way to prevent it, is to not allow censorship in the first place. Human nature means that even the most benign censorship will ultimately turn ugly, so you have to cut it off before it starts.

But this is the same with the justice system then : you give people power to put others in prisons, but then it will be misused. It has been. Why is that that we should have total freedom of speech but not close the prisons? Censorship, like prisons, can be controlled by laws that define precisely when it is possible to censor and when it is not. After all, there are cases where we allow censorship (saying falsely that there is a bomb in an airport, death threats,...)

You're right that prisons (and the justice system more broadly) are prone to abuse. The big difference here is: we need a form of justice to have a society. We don't need a form of speech censorship to have a society.

There have been societies without prisons. The native americans had no prisons, up to my knowledge. I think there have been more societies without prisons than without censorship in the history of humanity. Even in the US there has often be some kind of censorship enforced by the society itself (not by the state).

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Most people do not care that much about what others do.

I reject your premise -- most people care a lot about what others do; it's just that previously they haven't had the power or the social acceptance to enforce their will on the masses. We are at a dangerous juncture.

Its not really a premise. I'm just saying it's an unnecessary hypothesis, you can explain the behavior in another more rational way.

Same thing can be said eg about prisons. So you shouldn't have prisons...

There shouldn't be.

Fines, disfigurement/dismemberment, death. Those should be the only punishments.

Taking decades off someone's life is vastly more cruel than taking a limb, and the dilution of killing someone across 50 years by making them waste in a prison dilutes the resistance you get.

If every life sentence or decades long interment had to be replaced with a public execution or a public cleaving of limbs with the judge in mandatory attendance... there'd be a hell of a lot less of it, and a very good shillings point for public outrage and resistance.

Prison is like all bureaucratic solutions, it exists to dilute responsibility for the decision and to impose the costs of the decision with a minimum of potential for resistance.

But that is the same with death. If you give people the power to kill others, they will certainly abuse it. They can abuse it for censorship reasons, for example: I do not like what you said so I will find a false reason to kill you. How is that any better?

Well, my personal problem with libertarian arguments is precisely that they are absolute and unbounded. I think it is actually a trade-off between freedoms. Most of the time freedom of speech must win but sometimes it is harmless if it does'nt.

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Cross post: the_ivory_tower (rdrama.net) :

The limitations of humanity:

In the 21st century we saw the exponential scaling of human capabilities. Our ingenuity has led us down a path of a million miracles. The capacity to not just harness the resources around us but to go as far as to alter them and apply them to our purposes. On this design uniquely singular in it's extreme propensity in human beings, we have created entire civilizations, tech trees, ecologies, social systems, ideologies, none of which would have been possible in the past.

However even through the age of miracles and seemingly infinite growth one question persists, what if humanity is not infinite in its capacity, what if it's nowhere close to fulfilling a neverending greater purpose. What if we are just another branch on the tree of life that goes so far and nevermore?

Are we the greatest child of this Earth, or are we the harbingers of something greater, whether it be an elevated species other than ourselves, or an AI master race. Or perhaps, we are simply a dead end.

Today I write to you to discuss the slow downs in human society and the hurdles that lie ahead of us. The limitations of humanity:

  1. The fatdemic. One of the greatest threats to the future of mankind. Every year the percentage of the world's population that becomes fat keeps rising. Till date there has been no reversal in the trends and it is likely that the only way to reverse it would be an authoritarian hand over the people's choices in food. With the abundance of food, as a species we have become weaker, stupider, more lethargic, with a higher propensity to heart disease and other comorbidities and an increased economic constraint over the system than is naturally deserved. In our fatness we have put ourselves in a position where we are almost regressing back in humanity's growth and potential. In our fatness is the clear cut sign of our lacking self control as a species.

  2. The peaceful stupidity - It is said that some of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind come during times of war. Where the nation is put at risk and all resources are put into maximizing upgrades to ones technology or any capacity to beat the enemy. It was war that boosted the process of splitting the atom. It was the pressure of war that sent satellites into space. It was war that sent men to the moon long before they had any right to be there. That is not to say that there is no creation during a time of peace. Many things are invented during times of peace. Yet in the previous lines there is a symbolism which we see once again in the fact that in the most developed societies of the west we have now begun to see people get dumber over time. A society wide fall in overall IQ. A warning of the possibility of bad days ahead. Even a possible sign that we in the past century went way past the point of our natural capabilities and now find ourselves in a world that none of us understand.

  3. The culture wars - There is utility in conflict. In an openly hostile setting where ideas come across each other, only the best survive. However, the 21st century appears to be way past that point of competing cultures and has instead fallen into a trap of trying to place equal value on all cultural systems. It is of course a polite impossibility. Our cultures define how we live our lives, how we live our lives defines the outcome of our lives. Then how can it be that all cultures are expected to provide equal results? It is a lie. However this is not the worst of it. We find ourselves in conflict with different systems of human life even when within nations themselves the ideas once again split apart along irreconcilable lines. We find ourselves fighting both within and without, but never breaking into open conflict. So now we are as animals forever drowning, falling further and further into the pitfalls of a culture warfare where there is no release, so we keep digging deeper and deeper, until all sanity and values that hold us to reality are lost on the path. The end product, the risk of it is simple enough, a collapse of society under it's own decadence without any release of the turmoil in time.

  4. Loss of growing up - Imagine you are 10, you now find out that for your entire life you could keep being 10 years old and acting the part and life would still work out for you. Would you then take the hard path where you fall and get hurt and learn and change? Or would you rather remain the 10 year old that can watch cartoons till he is dead? In a society that is so deep in success that a man need no longer be forced to lift a single finger, the man seems to prefer the latter option. All growth is lost, because the man can subsist even remaining within his childish nature. Society is put at risk, for any group or individual or external entity that chooses to grow up or learn greater maturity is now in a position to take advantage of the naive and innocent, which is all that we are filled with now, the sheep flocks so huge there is no longer enough grass for them to graze, nor enough wolves left to lessen their numbers. A death by decay of the spirit.

  5. Pace of progress - This one is the hardest to track of all the points made. However a simple way to think of it is this, a thousand years ago one man could revolutionize multiple fields, today it takes thousands of men to simply collate the data from the past. Often times the lack of progress is not even due to the information not being available, but the fact that two fields of science have their specialists never interact with each other. Which slows down progress as well due to all the relevant information not being available with the experts as the amount of information has far outpaced the amount of time available to a man to educate himself and even his intellectual capacity to collect all the data in the first place in a multidisciplinary way. Worse still, all the low fruit in inventions has already been picked up for the most part, so the only way to keep moving up is with higher effort with diminishing returns. Anyone who has taken an economics class knows how that graph looks, at some point those diminishing returns will always reach zero, and at that point either something new would be made to boost progress again or humanity will stagnate at that point.

Conclusion - The first four points regarding the fatdemic, lowering IQ's, the culture wars, and the loss of growing up when it is one of two or more options all display a limitation of our current cultural trends. As far as we have come, and as much cultural evolution as we have gone through, we find ourselves now faced with a wall that we are in this generation unable to overcome. Only time will tell how we surmount this obstacle and what the future after will look like, or if we even surmount these obstacles at all and haven't yet reached past a breaking point we do not yet recognize.

My final point as to the pace of progress primarily focuses on the increasing amount of time, energy, and education required to create new things to progress society. So far at the top of society, our capabilities at the top have kept up with the demands for further returns, the question that comes to mind is, with the failures of our current cultural peak, will we be able to keep progressing as a society? Already the soldier has fallen and military's see their numbers decline each year, if it could happen to the military, then why not the sciences in the years ahead?

Thank you.

That's a good summation of the ruin that our civilization has become. I would add the poverty of art to the list as it seems as visceral a symptom as the others of our spiritual bankruptcy.

I have lamented this to myself, that it feels unjust to be trapped in history and condemned to strife when our ancestors had the opportunity to squander what was given to them.

Yet this is not a fruitful scorn. The beginning of wisdom it is said it to forgive one's father. And the hate you see lobbed at boomers for their egoism, real or imagined, doesn't help us in any way.

Worse yet I've seen people use this resentment as an excuse to engage in a looting of their own, even as there isn't much left to loot of our culture and institutions before striking at protections from the monstrous.

No I'd rather see it as opportunity. We get to shape the heritage of the next civilization in more ways that is usual. If strife is ahead beyond our years we should at least fulfill our own duty to the future in preserving that which hasn't yet been destroyed for the benefit of our descendants, whoever they may be.

If this is really our twilight, and it definitely feels like it, I want to ask:

What would you want the last Romans to have done? What was their best service to us? What are we glad they gifted us, even as we are not Romans ourselves?

What was poison better left forgotten?

And what did they overlook?

Yet this is not a fruitful scorn. The beginning of wisdom it is said it to forgive one's father. And the hate you see lobbed at boomers for their egoism, real or imagined, doesn't help us in any way.

I think blaming boomers, or any generation , is counterproductive, but people hate the boomers not because of ego but rather they are perceived as being out of touch. They, the boomers, don't understand or are not empathetic to how the younger generations 'have it harder' (even though I think this is debatable). True, homes were much cheaper 50 years ago, but so mortgage rates were way higher and I don't think 20-30 year mortgages existed. Jobs didn't pay that well even adjusted for inflation. The 6-figure white collar job didn't really exist in the 70s like it does today. Or the 7-8 figure 'exit'. YouTube, blogs, podcasting, apps and other ways of making money also didn't exist. It was better for highly conscientiousness people that Jordan Peterson talks about, who can put in long hours at a low-skilled factory job.

YouTube, blogs, podcasting, apps and other ways of making money also didn't exist.

On the other hand, you could earn a living writing for a newspaper that was distributed in physical paper format.

Substack..true, you have to build your audience, but a lot of people are having success with it. I think writers for top and mid tier publications still make decent money though.

That's part of it but the other part is that they hold direct responsibility in the destruction.

On the right you'll hear complaints about the sexual revolution, May 68, and ruining marriage and morality in general over short term bliss as well as handing a whole bunch of power to the state.

On the left you'll hear complaints about ex maoist neolibs crushing unions after benefitting from them, ruining the environment and turning the world into the car first concrete sprawl it is now.

Ironically these are sometimes the same exact people at different stages of their lives.

The frankly understandable and normal way in which old age makes them unable to understand the issues of the current world is just the trigger I think.

I question the relevance of your numbers though, given inflation. Boomers may not have had six figure jobs that often but they had cheap houses, job security and a whole lot of actually valuable things that you can't get easily today even with a whole bunch of paper

On the right you'll hear complaints about the sexual revolution, May 68, and ruining marriage and morality in general over short term bliss as well as handing a whole bunch of power to the state.

I think people tend to overstate how old the boomers are. They are people in their early 60s to 70s. So even as recently as 1990 boomers were finally entering politics and busines in stride. True, boomers grew up in the 60s but they didn't influence policy, nor did they have much influence in the 70s either. The blame instead is mostly on the silent generation.

Boomers may not have had six figure jobs that often but they had cheap houses, job security and a whole lot of actually valuable things that you can't get easily today even with a whole bunch of paper

If you include compensation the picture improves a lot https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/hcc-.png

Adjusted for inflation, today's college grads still earn more. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_381.asp

An MBA in 1976 made $10,200 ($52k in today's dollars) compared to $96-130k today. Even with student loan debt, this is way more.

You're overstating the role of the Boomers. In '68, the oldest Boomers were 23; my mother was 17. Many were even younger. It was their parents and grandparents who were building the "car first concrete sprawls". If you want a point of comparison, the Boomers of the late 60's were like the Zoomers of today.

The marriage-ruining stuff was mostly Silent Generation, who tended to marry much younger than either preceding or following generations at 18-20, and in the 1970's experienced a massive, pan-generational sex FOMO, causing them to go divorce wild. This, in turn, did a lot of damage to their children, Gen X.

Aren't Xers normally categorized as the children of Boomers?

There is some overlap at the margins, but members of Generation X are typically children of members of the Silent Generation, and Millennials are typically children of Boomers.

The peaceful stupidity - It is said that some of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind come during times of war. Where the nation is put at risk and all resources are put into maximizing upgrades to ones technology or any capacity to beat the enemy. It was war that boosted the process of splitting the atom. It was the pressure of war that sent satellites into space. It was war that sent men to the moon long before they had any right to be there. That is not to say that there is no creation during a time of peace. Many things are invented during times of peace. Yet in the previous lines there is a symbolism which we see once again in the fact that in the most developed societies of the west we have now begun to see people get dumber over time. A society wide fall in overall IQ. A warning of the possibility of bad days ahead. Even a possible sign that we in the past century went way past the point of our natural capabilities and now find ourselves in a world that none of us understand.

I don't see much evidence that things are dumber per say. Math, medicine (certain cancers are now curable), physics (like James Webb telescope) , computer sci, AI (like Stable Diffusion, machine learning), etc. is making a lot of progress; the caliber of research today is greater than in the past; papers are longer, more complex....today's child prodigies are starting college at earlier and earlier ages, much like how the mile times and weightlifting records also keep being beaten despite a lot of Americans seemingly being obese and out of shape. Math research much more complicated, kids taking calculus at earlier age. YouTube guys routinely lifting weight that 50-60 years ago would have set records. I think rather there is a greater bifurcation between the smart and the dull, the fit & strong vs the fat or weak...High school seems dumbed down because it's designed to accommodate a lot of dull kids (blame demographics).

https://georgefrancis.substack.com/p/dysgenics-by-the-numbers

I think that is sort of the point.

Sure we still have exceptional things, in fact they are so optimized as to be even more exceptional than were previously.

But those are few and far between. Is the average man really smarter, more well adjusted, stronger, fitter, etc than his grandfather at the same age?

Another thing is that we've had a tendency to optimize along metrics that get gamed. Tons more people go to colleges, but are they really better educated and more well read than in the past? Or do we just give them a pass?

Are we really better people than our forefathers? I'm not sure either way honestly.

Is the average man really smarter, more well adjusted, stronger, fitter, etc than his grandfather at the same age?

Ofcourse not. Most people have badass grandfathers because of survivorship bias.

On average, some skills definitely might have decreased, but we live in a kinder and wealthier society that allows for weaker people to survive and even thrive.

Interesting. The ratsphere started with fears of AI risk, so declensionist, stagnationist, or collapse-oriented arguments like this tend to get a frigid reception here. Then again, maybe that's just reality having a rationalist bias.

The fatdemic. One of the greatest threats to the future of mankind. Every year the percentage of the world's population that becomes fat keeps rising. Till date there has been no reversal in the trends and it is likely that the only way to reverse it would be an authoritarian hand over the people's choices in food. With the abundance of food, as a species we have become weaker, stupider, more lethargic, with a higher propensity to heart disease and other comorbidities and an increased economic constraint over the system than is naturally deserved. In our fatness we have put ourselves in a position where we are almost regressing back in humanity's growth and potential. In our fatness is the clear cut sign of our lacking self control as a species.

I think you're confusing the cart and the horse. Rising obesity is not a problem in of itself. It's a visible symptom of technology outrunning the self-control, prudentia, and conscientiousness of the population — or of technology hurting those, directly. People looking like orbs out of WALL-E doesn't prevent an advanced technological society. It only causes retired pensioners with obsolete skillsets to die earlier.

The peaceful stupidity - It is said that some of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind come during times of war.

I don't know about this. WWII is the most salient event in recent memory, so I think people generalize it to the whole human experience, and in WWII war did drive progress. But, to offer a counter-example, probably the most dramatic period of social and technological progress in human history was the Victorian era from 1815 to 1914. (Looking forward to Vicky 3!) That century is marked by an unusual lack of any bloody general European wars, certainly none that were existentially threatening to England, where the progress was most extreme.

My final point as to the pace of progress primarily focuses on the increasing amount of time, energy, and education required to create new things to progress society. So far at the top of society, our capabilities at the top have kept up with the demands for further returns, the question that comes to mind is, with the failures of our current cultural peak, will we be able to keep progressing as a society?

Read Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. You might find it interesting.

That century is marked by an unusual lack of any bloody general European wars

Yeah but, and as a vicky player you should know this, that's only really because Europe had a whole lot of other avenues for war than the homeland.

I don't think the Zulu appreciated how peaceful a time that was for some reason.

Yes, but @dont_log_me_out was talking about Necessity-Is-The-Mother-Of-All-Invention total wars which supposedly drive progress. You'll agree that mobilizing the nation to fight the Wehrmacht is different from sending expeditionary forces to mow down Zulu tribesmen. NATO does tons of stuff like that second thing these days, so the Victorian era would qualify as "peaceful stupidity" by OP's metrics.

I see. Yeah that's a fair argument. Colonial wars probably don't create as much pressure, that said they also helped Europeans get exposed to a lot of things previously unavailable to them, which must have at least offset that somewhat.

I think you're confusing the cart and the horse. Rising obesity is not a problem in of itself. It's a visible symptom of technology outrunning the self-control, prudentia, and conscientiousness of the population — or of technology hurting those, directly. People looking like orbs out of WALL-E doesn't prevent an advanced technological society. It only causes retired pensioners with obsolete skillsets to die earlier.

Obesity is an interesting subject. I think a distinction needs to be made between childhood/teen obesity and adult obesity. People tend to gain weight as they get older, at around 1-2 pound /year, up until around 60. I think looking at childhood/teen obesity gives a more accurate perspective of the situation. Childhood obesity is particularly bad because the complications later in life are perhaps worse.

People tend to gain weight as they get older, at around 1-2 pound /year, up until around 60.

Closer to 1 pound/year on average, IIRC. Not that that's not bad enough.

Though, I'd love to know for sure whether "tend" in this sentence is a law of nature or just another modern abnormality. One of the most astonishing claims from that Slime Mold Time Mold series was:

Common wisdom today tells us that we get heavier as we get older. But historically, this wasn’t true. In the past, most people got slightly leaner as they got older. Those Civil War veterans we mentioned above had an average BMI of 23.2 in their 40s and 22.9 in their 60’s. In their 40’s, 3.7% were obese, compared to 2.9% in their 60s. We see the same pattern in data from 1976-1980: people in their 60s had slightly lower BMIs and were slightly less likely to be obese than people in their 40s (See the table below). It isn’t until the 1980s that we start to see this trend reverse.

K

  • -10

None of these one-word (or one letter!) responses, please.

The peaceful stupidity - It is said that some of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind come during times of war. Where the nation is put at risk and all resources are put into maximizing upgrades to ones technology or any capacity to beat the enemy. It was war that boosted the process of splitting the atom. It was the pressure of war that sent satellites into space. It was war that sent men to the moon long before they had any right to be there.

Yes there are some very visible technological achievements during war, but what's the counterfactual? More capital to invest in research, fewer short term economic decisions, fewer collapsed states, fewer dead scientists...

It's hard to believe that a Europe which didn't spend a decent portion of the last century blowing itself to bits isn't far ahead of where we are now. Where's our Austro-Hungarian space program?

They were ahead of you, then they wasted it all away since WW2. that's 75 years of wasted potential.

Fiume, the Erzherzog Karl Albrecht has landed! One small step . . .

With all due respect, where was China's industrial revolution then? How come they got conquered by the warlike people who keep murdering each other over small bits of land and not the other way around?

I don't know why Europe industrialised while China didn't, the latter are in the same boat as other more warlike peoples for failing to do so.

Ian Morrison's Why the West Rules - For Now offers the following explanation

  1. China is at the heart of East Asian civilization. At the very least, it is where civilization spreads outward from, and other nations in the area are at its periphery.

  2. The people at the periphery tend to be fairly good at fighting the people closer to the civilizational center as they can exploit institutional weaknesses more dynamically. The adoption of better war-making technology or theories is not an easy thing to do, especially if politics is lethal.

  3. When you conquer the center, you become it and thus start succumbing to the same flaws you exploited.

As for your question about the IR, he argues this.

  1. Parts of China were on par with Europe's most industrialized areas even as late as the 1700s (edit: 1600s, not 1700s. My mistake).

  2. You need both willpower and the ability to industrialize. China had so many people that it could simply add reliable human power instead of capital-heavy machinery that might be unreliable. Europe, on the other hand, was caught in centuries of war which encouraged nations to and their citizens to constantly try to improve their technology. The phrase "Necessity is the mother of invention" also works in a genetic sense, as what you need influences what you make. If you don't need to industrialize, then you won't.

Parts of China were on par with Europe's most industrialized areas even as late as the 1700s.

Do you know where to read more on this?

Whoops, looks like I misremembered. It was the 1600s, not the 1700s. My mistake. First, I'll quote Morrison:

Calculating Eastern [energy capture] scores is more difficult still, partly because scholars such as Cook and Smil were concerned only with the region of the world that had the highest energy capture, not with regional comparisons. We can begin, though, from the United Nations (2006) estimate that in 2000 CE the average Japanese person consumed 104,000 kilocalories per day (less than half the Western level). In 1900 the Eastern core was still largely agrarian, with Japanese oil use and even coal-powered industry in its infancy. Japanese energy capture may have been around 49,000 kcal/cap/day (again less than half of Western consumption). Across the previous five centuries coal use and agricultural output had risen steadily. In 1600 productivity was higher in the Yangzi Delta than anywhere in the West, but by 1750 Dutch and English agriculture had caught up and Eastern real wages were comparable to those in southern Europe rather than wealthy northern Europe. I have estimated energy capture in the Eastern core around 29,000 kcal/cap/day in 1400 and 36,000 in 1800, with the bulk of the increase coming in the eighteenth century.

The context here is that he's basically trying to estimate the "advanced" nature of a civilization by how much energy it uses.


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