site banner
ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   46317 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

106
Top Bottom New Old Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

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.

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.

Ban porn, subsidize prostitutes: a modest defense of whoring

The popular view is that masturbating to porn is fine, and using the services of prostitutes is not so fine. Porn is not a poor man’s prostitute, but instead a cleaner acceptable method of sexual satisfaction. You might joke with a friend, like Markiplier on the Logan Paul podcast, that you gave up porn because the two-hour wank sessions got old. Were Markiplier to say he recently gave up prostitutes, which he had been using for a decade, the conversation would have taken a somber tone. Yet for most of Western history, this moral calculation was inverted. Masturbation was seen as worse vice than than the vice girl. Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, Voltaire, and Richard Wagner all thought the solitary vice more dangerous than the sex worker. Why would this be?

We don’t need to get too bogged down in the historical miscellany and theological glosses. For starters, our ancestors noted that fucking a woman is more natural than fucking a hand. But this was not haughty naturalistic phallicy. This is complex. Due to the nature of human habit and memory, obtaining satisfaction from a woman promotes and orients a man’s sexuality toward women, and not oneself. Let’s flesh this out. On the first level, once you’ve completed the intended act with the harlot, a memory is formed in which all preceding sensations cue for satisfaction of the urge. There’s [urge -> satisfaction from woman], but we can go deeper. There’s [urge -> WOMAN -> satisfaction from woman], with all the sensations of a woman encoding sexual satisfaction: pheromones, tone of voice, clothing, mannerisms, and importantly socializing with a woman, implicating your social personality and hers. This works to develop a craving associated with all the sensations of women, increasing the desire for the company of real women and the formation of relationships and marriages. There is one more social benefit, which is that the [dressing up -> traveling -> paying] is more prosocial than opening a tab on a laptop, and associating sex with money is great salience on the value of money.

If sex were the Milky Way and the earth were a wife, prostitutes would be Venus and porn would be Pluto. It’s very far away, and it’s not even a planet.

But the argument is yet to reach its climax. Prostitutes are seen as dirty, and this again betrays our modern misunderstanding of psychology. Going out, away from your home and work, to purge your desire with a woman is a way to keep your home and work life free from the cognitive “stain” of sex, because the whole sexiness is entrenched in its own unique context. The home and office, and the home office, are clean of memories and cues of intercourse — you have ejaculated these cues far away from your “pure” life. There’s no risk of Toobin-ing all over your keyboard after a zoom meeting, because your computer has no cues related to sex. Instead, your conception of sex is caught up in a web of strong cues, all of which are related to real life women.

Top take. I'm glad you posted this.

Sarcasm ?

Not at all, I just love the contrarianness.

Ban anonymous browsing of the internet. Publicly broadcast all internet users' media consumption habits.

As much as I expect to be downvoted for it, this.

Anonymity is the enemy sociability.

That would also kill this site, and whatever

What is it that that idiot Yudowsky is always saying? That which can be destroyed by the truth should be destroyed?

  • -16

If you're saying something that's deeply out of the ordinary or difficult-to-defend, the next person is going to ask you to explain what you mean.

Setting aside the impossibility of banning porn, let's say you somehow could. Your alternative doesn't feature men forced by the dearth of porn to visit a local prostitute... they just find something else to jerk off to, up to and including their own imagination, or memories of past sexual experiences. Porn isn't cutting into the prostitution industry's bottom line in any significant way, I would imagine, or the explosion of online porn would have put them out of business by now.

How does stripping feature into this dichotomy of yours anyway? It's in person, but it just encourages masturbation.

Overall I question your understanding of typical male sexuality.

I think this would be better, but most of the benefit would come from the banning of porn. Encouraging prostitution seems bad to me, but the energy required to use prostitutes is so much higher than watching porn that it would still be better than our status quo.

Prostitution will never have the benefits that it had in earlier eras, where sex with peers was rare before marriage and men would travel weeks on end. I’d say the ideal is longterm monogamy, but per statistics many men are not having sex at all. So encouraging prostitute visitations is genuinely better for them (and society) than porn habits.

Prostitution is banned because of the impact on those selling sex, not because of the impact on buyers. I don’t think you have to be a feminist to see that this post totally ignores what selling sex could do to the woman’s psychology (and her health in general). Plus there is always the fear that women are being forced into it by pimps. I personally think it should be decriminalized instead of legalized — I don’t think having a McDonald’s of sex would be a happy development.

I'm not sold on the idea that working as a sex worker in a regulated industry is significantly worse for mental health than other low status occupations, especially given the amount of money earned. If you consider someone who works in hospice care, and while this isn't a low status job per se, it's psychologically grueling, stressful, and disgusting. Additionally, we shouldn't imagine the worst case of prostitution in a defense of the oldest profession, we should instead imagine a case that can be reasonably actionable with regulation. Like if someone wants to bring back coal mining, we shouldn't imagine the worst case of 19th century coal mining, we should imagine an industry with regulation an safeguards.

There are many women who already sell their bodies on Twitch, Instagram, Tik Tok, Twitter, and OnlyFans. Sex work entails more risk, even when regulated, absolutely, but the psychological act of selling one's body is not different here.

I think having to make physical contact with someone for money is psychologically distinct from selling pics/videos online. In this I guess I agree with the OP!

But yes, this isn't an issue that I feel I have completely made up my mind on, and I'm willing to be convinced that it could be regulated in a relatively safe way. I do think the psychological impact of selling intimacy has to be reckoned with in any argument for legalizing (or subsidizing!) prostitution. I also think that if you are worried about traditional family formation, as many people on this site seem to be, further going down the road of explicitly turning sex into a commodity is a bad thing.

worried about traditional family formation

this genie is out of the bottle and isn't going back in. A retvrn to Christian moral hegemony isn't happening, the tide is going in the exact opposite direction. Furthermore why do we care so much about the psychological impacts of prostitution when we don't care about how the feelings of garbage men or plumbers are affected by their jobs?

And to be clear, we aren't "turning sex into a commodity", we would be treating sex formally as an interaction or transaction between two people. Right now it is that, but we just pretend it isn't because it makes us feel good.

I'm not arguing for a return to "Christian moral hegemony," and I think you can be worried about family formation without wanting a full on return of 1950s sexual politics. But either way, if you are trying to maximize people being in stable, monogamous relationships, legalizing prostitution feels like a significant disincentive for both men and women for pursuing that -- men because they can get easy sex outside of a relationship even if they are not the type of guy who successfully manages to have casual sex, women because they can have a "side hustle" that will often put tension on any serious relationship.

See, you are arguing that monogamy is preferable to hypergamy or whatever else, and i dont disagree. American culture values individualism too much for marriage and even monogamy to a lesser extent, dedicated relationships almost categorically will require sacrifice for and acceptance of someone else. These are just not highly valued traits in modern popular culture. My problem with your argument is that you will have to change how people value others for change to happen, or to put it more bluntly it won't happen. You can't legislate what people want. If people want multiple partners or freedom from commitment, be it financial or otherwise, how are you going to change that?

Legalizing prostitution may even highlight why people would want a real relationship in the first place. If we decouple sex from the partnership of a relationship then peoples incentives can align way more closely in the dating market. letting all of the sleaziest and most animalistic urges get taken care of leaves people who want more with a more like minded pool of people to choose from.

Even further, if the dating market stays effed up or gets more so, prostitution may be the best some guys are gonna get, and i feel like its kindof a dick move to stand between a willing whore and a guy who legit will not get laid without her.

why do we care so much about the psychological impacts of prostitution when we don't care about how the feelings of garbage men or plumbers are affected by their jobs?

Because they're men and we "live in a society" ... - insert more MRA talking points here -

Sadly true but nothing we can do about it right now.

Furthermore why do we care so much about the psychological impacts of prostitution when we don't care about how the feelings of garbage men or plumbers are affected by their jobs?

It's much less garbage men or plumbers, (the people I know who do these things seem to be satisfied with the job itself) and much more telemarketers, retail/service employees and so on.

I don't think sex work is for everybody. And for reasons, I wouldn't make it into expected work, as in, expecting people on welfare to do it. But at the same time, I can see how it would be some people's cup of tea.

Truth be told, I think the trad-sex elements of some forms of conservatism to be well..missing the point I think. It's not that I think they're misidentifying the problem...increasing amounts of men seem to be incapable of fulfilling roles that are broadly seen as desired (even if people like to pretend that's not the case), but the problem isn't really in the sexual sphere. Because of that the solutions are all wrong. Porn/Prostitution in this way are fillers for people who have internalized ideas that either the male gender role is bad, or lack the skills to perform the male gender role.

McDonalds of sex

"Food, folks and fun" indeed...

Though, this begs the question of how places where prostitution is already legal are fairing. I haven't heard of any major differences between NZ, the Netherlands, Nevada, Denmark, and the rest of the world that are attributable to their approaches to sex work.

There are many jobs that are uniquely harmful for the ones performing them, and this is usually compensated for in some way. By higher pay or greater satisfaction or social praise, for examples. I don't see why prostitution requires special regulation.

Or are you implying that whores are always effectively slaves?

There are many jobs that are uniquely harmful for the ones performing them

Name a job? I can think of dangerous jobs or jobs that require long hours. I can't think of a job that involves selling your own body so a stranger can use you for sexual pleasure. That feels different enough to require "special regulation".

I think there are women who enjoy sex work and can do it without too much of an impact on the rest of their lives, yes. But I think that any woman being forced into it, either through physical coercion by a pimp or because they don't see another way to financially provide for themselves, is a moral catastrophe that we should try really fucking hard to prevent.

Selling access to your body would seem to describe surrogacy, possibly certain forms of modeling, organ sales, and paid blood/sperm/plasma/marrow donation as well as prostitution. And notably we put all of those things in a separate category from working at McDonald’s.

I can't think of a job that involves selling your own body so a stranger can use you for sexual pleasure.

You mean, other than prostitution? You can't think of a job that is prostitution, other than things that are prostitution?

Fair enough, I suppose I set myself up for that. My point is that selling your body for sex feels extremely different from other unpleasant/harmful jobs (like being a garbageman or a plumber, which are two examples another poster gave). Setting aside the risks (abuse, pregnancy, STDs), the work is deeply, unavoidably, personal and potentially alienating in a way that other jobs are not.

Masturbation was seen as worse vice than than the vice girl. Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, Voltaire, and Richard Wagner all thought the solitary vice more dangerous than the sex worker. Why would this be?

Sterility, which is why your argument that "prostitution orients men towards sex with women" doesn't work. Porn will have sex with women, why isn't that conditioning as much? Hookers dress and act (and recite a script for interactions) in the stereotypical way which involves a lot of 'this is supposedly sexy clothing and behaviour'.

The reason masturbation was seen as worse than common fornication was precisely because it was a solitary vice. Having casual sex was at least open to the chance of pregnancy, it was following the natural path of "men and women have sex, babies result", even if it was being contorted for pleasure (by men) and money (by women). Masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, use of contraception are trying to avoid the natural end of sex and its natural consequence: babies.

So modern prostitution would be as ill-regarded as porn: it's sterile. Prostitutes and their clients have methods to avoid conception. Sex is purely a transaction of money for satisfaction. The problem with modern sex, be it porn or prostitutes or cohabitation or contraception and abortion within marriage is sterility, deliberately avoiding what sex is meant to do. (This is completely ignoring the problem of STIs, which haven't gone away, and as the monkeypox outbreak demonstrates, good old promiscuous sex is still the best way to spread diseases).

So modern prostitution, even if it did orient men towards women, is not orienting them to relationships with women, it's towards the woman as source of satisfaction as you want it. The prostitute isn't there to have a good time herself, she's there to provide a service that you pay for, and since it's a transaction, she has to sell the goods to your demand. Even if that demand is for intimacy, the 'girlfriend experience', it's still a fake. It's not socialising awkward men to be able to interact with women, it's socialising women to be what men see in porn. Because this is what modern sex has become: for increasing novelty, porn has to provide something new and spicy. And after a while, seeing this in porn, consumers want it in real life and glossy magazines are all too happy to write articles on how you, too, modern woman, can be a porn star in the bedroom.

Oral sex was once something only whores did. Now the expectation is that of course your girlfriend will give you a blowjob. Anal sex was mainstreamed via porn, and once the novelty of heterosexual sodomy has worn off, I have no doubt that Cosmopolitan will be writing articles about the best way to perform the new kink.

Possibly incest, there seems to be a lot of interest in brother-sister as step-sibling incest porn? So Cosmo will have articles on "10 Ways To Role-Play Incest" and "How To Play Sister And Brother With Your Boyfriend".

That's modern sex. That's not about socialisation, it's about 'consent is the most important thing' and 'pleasure is the only reason for sex' and adopting "sex work is real work" will still have a stigma, because there was an excuse for men to go to prostitutes once upon a time (my wife would never do this act and I would never ask her to do it) but nowadays, women are supposed to be sex-positive and willing to do anything, because sex is not dirty and no act should be beyond the pale. So it still will be "only the losers who can't get a girlfriend go to the sex workers".

And again, that is ignoring the whole problem of the awkward men who do want the entire girlfriend experience, who do want "this attractive girl is with me because she wants to be and she likes me for who I am", not "I am paying this woman for an hour of her time and access to her body, and she has other clients before and after me". The socially awkward guys may want "the formation of relationships and marriages" but there's more to being with a woman in a relationship than "okay, I've been to hookers so I know how sex works". If all the problem is "lack of confidence" and going to a sex worker helps with that, it may result in "can get a proper girlfriend". If the problem is more than that, it won't solve it.

There are men who use prostitutes who have wives, etc. and it's a matter of convenience for them. They don't need socialisation, they're horny and want a quick, convenient climax where they don't have to bother about their partner's pleasure or anything other than getting off the way they want. They needn't be jerks while fucking the hooker, they can be quite pleasant, but it's nowhere near "socializing with a woman, implicating your social personality and hers. This works to develop a craving associated with all the sensations of women, increasing the desire for the company of real women and the formation of relationships and marriages".

They already have relationships and marriages, they're horny right now and just want to get off and their wives/girlfriends aren't there to satisfy it.

Also, in the absence of porn people will just jerk off to non-porn naked women, and then almost-naked women, and then mostly-clothed women. (in current modern conditions, upon which that depends very finely. no idea if hunter gatherers masturbate or how often, etc). Or they'd just torrent it. A better argument would probably be directly against masturbation as opposed to for banning it.

Due to the nature of human habit and memory, obtaining satisfaction from a woman promotes and orients a man’s sexuality toward women, and not oneself

Why isn't this also true of masturbation? It orients one towards women because it's images of them!

Old World Monkeys and Apes masturbate so I think it's safe to assume that every version of our ancestors spanked the monkey.

But, frequency - i've seen a video of a monkey sucking its own dick, and some humans do that, but neither is common for either. Is masturbation a once-daily or once-weekly thing for monkeys and apes?

Monkeys are notorious for jacking off (as well as shit-flinging) at the zoo -- if it's common enough to see at a random zoo visit I would think that they do it quite a bit? Auto-fellatio is probably anatomically easier for monkeys, which might explain why humans don't do it so much; also the known problem of being more like sucking dick than getting a blowjob. (which is presumably less of an issue if you're a monkey)

Also, in the absence of porn people will just jerk off to non-porn naked women, and then almost-naked women, and then mostly-clothed women

Do you think they'd do it as often? This sounds similar to saying that if you ban fast food people will just gorge themselves on healthy food, except they'd also probably stop gorging altogether.

They absolutely will. Maybe not if you ban sugar entirely.

I should rephrase.

Assuming you can enforce a ban, the further you go along the spectrum of ruling out easy, tasty, addictive, unhealthy foods: the less likely people are to gorge themselves.

And the same for porn, the further you go along the spectrum of removing the easiest, most stimulating porn, the less likely people will be to overindulge.

Yes, marginal effects do matter. Their effects are often a lot less than the perfect solutions one might hope for, but I suspect that it's rare that they have no or negative effect - perhaps compared to what expected, it might feel that way.

It's not obvious that all the anti-porn arguments differentiate that much between masturbating 1x/day and 1x/2 days, tbh. And - from various reading, it seems like, when given access only to 'sexy women' magazines, people still did it very often.

And the problem is it's just complicated - both fast food and health food share issues like having poor nutrient content and tasting mediocre that, locally, lead people to fast food (people say "eat your vegetables", but store-bought vegetables taste flavorless. Heirloom varieties, grown well, of the same often taste great. So replacing fast food (and a store-bought prepared dinner, or even making your own white bread loaf with butter, is still pretty bad) with healthy food still leave people wanting the bad food.

The frequency or characteristics of masturbation could similarly depend on society, but depend on more things than just 'pictures available'. Or maybe it really just is 'pics available'. Wonder if any primitive-ish societies keep around any cosmo magazines.

I would never visit a prostitute, not as much because of morality but more because of myriads of STDs, some of which are highly infectious and very hard to get rid of such as Herpes/HPV viruses against which you cannot protect even with condoms. I sincerely believe that it was STDs that historically made prostitutes "unclean" and made them verboten in loads of cultures/religions. One prostitute infected with syphilis could wipe out half of a small town. In fact, apparently 20% of men in London caught syphilis by the age of 35 despite overall culture denouncing this behavior.

I would argue that this relation is flipped if you compare paid prostitutes to free porn, as opposed to paid porn. That is, paid porn is worse than prostitutes is worse than free porn, because paying for sex distorts everything and makes male-female relationships transactional rather than cooperative. There is a component to many relationships in which men give money for sex, and women give sex for money, even if this transaction is implicit. My belief is that the more explicit this transaction is, and the stronger it is, the worse the relationship is. Or, at least, the lower the ceiling for how good it is becomes. A healthy relationship ought to involve people who genuinely like each other doing things either that they both like, or doing things the other person likes because they want to be kind to their partner who they genuinely care about, not because they expect to get something in return. No real relationship is going to achieve that level perfectly, but the closer you get the better the relationship is (assuming both people are doing it and not just one person slaving away for the other).

Explicitly paying for sex is about as transactional is it gets, and normalizes it in the minds of both parties involved. Men who pay for sex are going to be more willing to pay in the future, are going to believe that they have less intrinsic value as a sexual partner. If they have low self confidence this makes them easier for women to take advantage of in the future and exploit for money, or if they have high self confidence it will make them feel more entitled to sex as long as they have money and respect women less as something other than a piece of merchandise. On the other side, women who are are paid for sex, or sexual content over the internet, will also come to believe that they have less intrinsic value other than their bodies, and/or will view men as having less value aside from their money. It actually sickens me when I see the way some female streamers view their own audiences, just cash registers waiting to be emptied.

While in-person prostitution is probably not as bad as online simping, because it involves some semblance of real connection as you explain, I think the main reason it's less bad is simply because it limits the damage. An extremely attractive woman can only ensnare so many men if she has to spend a night with each one in person, while an attractive woman online can ensnare thousands or possibly millions.

Meanwhile, I don't think free porn has the same damage because it's much lower stakes, and therefore lower emotional stakes. A man is much less likely to fall in love with an actress he saw in a few videos on the web than he is to a camgirl who keeps talking to him directly and thanking him by name every time he donates $100. And a woman who puts up an amateur video on a website is less likely to repeatedly do it day after day week after week until it becomes a part of her life like a camgirl or prostitute is.

It is inevitable that money will be some component of relationships, just like politics. And similarly, the more it can be minimized the better.

Agree on your dangers of simping (great point). I disagree however on the danger of “transactional sexuality”. Ideally, sure, a man and woman would come together because they have found value in each other that is higher than money and all that the dollar represents. Their personalities entwine beautifully, conversations roll off the tongue, and their experiences couple each others. But where I disagree is that (1) many prostitutes and courtesans in history were sought after for these very properties, geishas in Japan or Tyrion’s fantastical whore in GoT, and (2) I don’t actually see prostitution as dangerously more transactional than 21st century intercourse, or maybe history’s intercourse. Purchasing the right apartment, haircut, dentist, photographer, car and clothes will ensure matches. Back in the day, it was inheriting the right title or deed. Sex for resources is a tale as old as time.

I don’t actually see prostitution as dangerously more transactional than 21st century intercourse, or maybe history’s intercourse.

Sounds like the slippery slope keeps on slipping. I don't entirely disagree that there's a lack of categorical difference, but see that more as an inditement of 21st century intercourse.

Or rather, there is a spectrum. Everyone is different and has different levels of promiscuity and transactionality, and prostitution is on the far end (imo the bad end) of both but not quite an outlier. I don't think pointing out that it has existed for a long historically has much bearing on whether or not it's healthy. Lots of people have done lots of unhealthy and destructive things throughout history. And lots of people didn't, again everyone is different. And I would argue that the people in the past with less transactionality in their relationships had, with positive but less than 100% correlation, healthier relationships.

Additionally, historically in a lot of places going to a prostitute was seen as shameful or taboo or low class. Although this is not universal, it was at least true in the near past, so pushes towards normalizing it are part of a modern phenomenon at least locally. Which I view as bad because people respond to incentives, so normalizing it will increase its frequences, which then funges against healthy relationships. Which we can see occuring in real time. Gender relations have not been going well recently. An awful lot of men are alone and angry and purposeless. And they respond in different ways. Some become angry incels who hate women, some become pickup artists who try to trick women into sex on false pretenses. Or chads stringing along dozens are women. And women aren't happy either, with femcels, and feminists, and the MeToo movement. Things have gotten worse for an awful lot of people within the past few decades, and while I can't say that sex work alone is responsible for all of it, it's both a symptom and a cause of some of these problems.

A prostitute is about as intimate as your hand, less convenient and more expensive. Beyond that, I fail to see how this is argues for banning porn at all.

phallicy

yet to reach its climax

two-hour wank sessions

you have ejaculated these cues

Come on. This post is about as real as the Mouse Balls memo.

Please don't feed the troll.

I think its time for me to admit that I am an ex John and an ex compulsive porn user. I visited well over 20 prostitutes in my life and there were periods where I was masturbating to porn 3-4 times a day. I don't do either of those things anymore. But that's a different post.

Having laid out my past, I would say your post sucks big time.

Bait title (nothing about banning pornography or subsidizing whores), and same old hot take that 50 million people had on the internet before (go visit /r/redscarepod for 5 minutes). Anyways, since I can't just call your post shit and leave it at that, I will try to lay out why I think so;

  • The central thrust of your post, which is that masturbating to porn and having sex with prostitutes are distinct because one of them involves a "real woman". Is extremely naive to the psychology of actually visiting a prostitute. Why do I say this? Because the distinct categories are not {having sex with a mutually attracted partner, having sex with a prostitute} and {porn} it's {having sex with a mutually attracted partner} and {porn, having sex with a prostitute.} As someone who has had sex with a prostitute and someone who did it willingly, its not the same thing at all!

    When I visited prostitutes, the same pathways in my brain were firing as the ones that do when I beat it to porn. There was no need to please the other person, no mutual feedback, no higher order feelings (such as "love" or a genuine interest in the person), it was a pure satisfying of lust. And I don't think any other John would attest against this.

    In fact, one of the reasons I stopped was because I started going to them incessantly and this was getting too expensive, I never wanted to incessantly have sex with my "real" sexual partners. With them, having sex was a nice thing that happened ever so often, it wasn't something that happened ONLY to satisfy my urges as it were with porn and whores. Seriously, I never went to a whore for anything but sex. And those who visit whores for intimacy are still just masturbating, real intimacy isn't paid for, its reciprocal, it's not something you can summon at will.

  • Prostitution is cleaner than masturbating??

    You are aware that whores tend to have are at least an order of magnitude more likely to have common STD's and multiple orders of magnitude to carry the godfather of all STD's HIV. In some cases upto 57% to whores have HIV.

    Also the psychological distinction also doesn't make sense. If you are separating sex from home, do you not have sex at home? Your logic lies on the fact that sex with a prostitute is the same level of dirtiness as having sex with a consensual partner. Without that assumption it wouldn't be any different from masturbation would it?

  • Masturbating and compulsively masturbating to porn are two distinct things along the axis of purity or whatever you seem to care about. Your arguments apply to both of them, not only one of them.

    Also jacking off into a keyboard? Is this a troll? You shit and piss in the toilet, I don't think jizzing into the toilet seat is all that worse, if you think it is, congrats on the advanced solipsism.

I explained why porn is worse for a human than seeing a prostitute, and why prostitution is in prosocial in its orientation. So I wouldn’t say my title is mistitled at all. I wasn’t going to go into the history of prostitute regulation or scholastic theology. If porn is bad and prostitutes are better, I advocate banning porn and subsidizing prostitution. It would be awesome if the RS subreddit made this point often, but I don’t think I’ve seen it, if you can link me that would be cool.

I can’t dispute your personal lived experience, but I do wonder if you’re an outlier. “The same pathways in my brain were firing as the ones that do when I beat it to porn” is extremely improbable given the unique cues associated prostitution. The lack of intimacy is one reason why prostitution is not identical to real intercourse, but this doesn’t supersede the numerous reasons why it is closer than porn. Living in a society where, I think it’s 30% of men haven’f had sex in a year, doesn’t afford us with the counter argument of “just find a gf bro”. Ideally everyone would be in longterm relationships and yet historically cultures saw fit to introduce regulated prostitution.

Re: cleaner, we’re talking about psychological cleanliness involving cues. A girlfriend is a living breathing psychological cue for sex. She doesn’t exist on a tab in your computer. While sure, your bed would associated with sex (with your girlfriend), that still retains more psychological “purity of space” than having porn in the same browser that you work on. The question is what we’re associating together. Associating being alone and the internet with sexual gratification is worse than either a prostitute or having a significant other.

I explained why porn is worse for a human than seeing a prostitute

Sure, I just think its a very naive argument.

So I wouldn’t say my title is mistitled at all.

Neither of those things are trivial.

Not the banning porn or the subsidizing prostitutes. Books can be written on the edge cases and unintended effects of both those policies.

It reads very much as a hot take clickbait title. You don't even seriously attempt to discuss those policies.

I can’t dispute your personal lived experience, but I do wonder if you’re an outlier.

I know many other Johns. And their thought process is the exact same as mine. The sugar daddy, hire a prostitute for companionship trope is not as common in the "Real world" as certain media would have you believe.

Re: cleaner, we’re talking about psychological cleanliness involving cues. A girlfriend is a living breathing psychological cue for sex.

The prostitute is an entity that lives in <Address of massage place that offers happy endings>.

I don't even remember what the prostitutes individual faces looked like. As I said, you can come up with a lot of armchair psychology on why visiting whores is unlike porn, "cues" and all that, but until you have actually been in the mindspace to have done it for real instead of just thinking about it, you are probably filling in a lot of the gaps with pop-psychology hooplah.

A girlfriend is a living breathing psychological cue for sex.

If that's all she is, then you are treating her as a prostitute, and that's not solving the problem you set up.

That is a property of a girlfriend but not the only property of a girlfriend.

we’re talking about psychological cleanliness involving cues

I'm interested in digging in a bit more on why you think this is important.

Okay, I accept that you are Very Smart and Understand Statistics and I am dumb. I really am dumb when it comes to maths.

The rest of your post is just a way of saying "I am very superior stock, science proves it, why is the stupid dumb underclass still allowed to live and why am I not king of my own realm?"

Yeah, well, there's where we part company.

Yeah, it's weird to talk to a 130IQ far-right person who claims "HBD! IQ is everything! White people are 100IQ in the US and black people are 85. The race is all that matters." (not that you can directly compare a "30 point iq difference" and a "15 point iq difference" using '15 * 2 = 30', it's just a rank order turned into a normal distribution, but the difference is significant). However, this just makes the 'problem' worse

Who have you seen saying “IQ is everything!” and “The race is all that matters”? I don’t actually see that attitude from people who talk about this. Perhaps you’ve seen different people from me. I’ll take your word for it. But I want to mention that often I see people say “IQ is very important” and that is strawmanned as “IQ is everything.” I see “IQ is highly heritable” become “IQ is genetically determined.” I just don’t see this among the more sophisticated people talking about IQ. Maybe it’s common among people I don’t interact with.

Oh, I'm talking specifically about a specific segment of the far/alt-right, i.e. open nazis, who claim those things, hence "far-right person", who do that. It's not at all common view on a population basis, and even most HBD people won't claim that. But a lot of white nationalists will. (When pushed, they'll either claim asians/jews are low iq for various poor reasons, or something like how asians are selfish communitarian insects)

-1 troll.

IQ is perceived as a themotte subject by the sneerclub crowd far more than it really is. A long IQ post, especially if it mentions HBD (a term that a random person would not use, but that Sneerclub is aware of), is probably fake. Nobody actually discusses IQ like that.

Also, I absolutely don't believe that post was written from scratch to post here.

If you're allowed to call me a troll, then I should be allowed to call you a fool.

Wrong. Report the post, don't escalate.

Incorrect. Now stop trying to start fights.

I don't mean to quibble with your otherwise fine post but this part is a bit confusing

I want to start with HBD. How many people can actually understand it?

Doesn't this study only show how popular beliefs about genes and racial differences are, rather than raw ability to understand them? I'd expect a lot more people to answer affirmatively if it wasn't thoughtcrime and was instead actually taught in respectable institutions.

I don't think this is a good methodology. Understanding HBD at a functional level doesn't require you to actually be able to plot out the curves or anything. You can understand the basics of compound interest without being able to actually calculate out how much more you'll end up paying over the term of the loan by hand.

Not sure about that. I am capable of understanding that different racial groups have different means for IQ, but that the distributions overlap, such that there are always some high-IQ members of low-average-IQ groups who outsmart low-IQ members of high-average-IQ groups. I am capable of understanding on a vague verbal level what a standard deviation is, or principal component analysis does, in allowing intelligence researchers to conclude that there is a general cognitive ability that undergirds people's abilities on specific intellectual tasks, even if their specific mathematical, wordcel and shape rotating abilities diverge a little (or indeed in allowing population genetics researchers to plot members of different ethnic groups on graphs of two or more genetic clines). On the other hand I do not have the maths ability to calculate exactly how many people from group A will score at the 99th percentile of group A given a mean of X and a standard deviation of Y, and a population size of Z. Nor can I actually carry out a principal component analysis.

I think in this analogy I am the ten year old who understands that if you add 2 and 2, what you'll get will be a number, and that that number will be bigger than two, even if they can't calculate it as 4, which is still better than a ten year old who has no concept of what numbers are, or what addition does.

Yeah the liberal democratic political formula really unravels once you start to seriously ask yourself how all the rubes turn into informed thoughtful statemen through the mystical power of the ballot box. Especially when those invoking the wisdom of crowds are quick to guard against populism whenever things go out of their control.

Mosca is right, in practice you don't elect politicians, politicians have themselves elected by you.

But it's a well worn road at this point, modern criticisms of democracy are plentiful, Hoppe is probably the most popular on the right but the left has no shortages of noticers that public opinion is a massive sham (presumably orchestrated by the liberal bourgeoisie, which was at least originally accurate).

No the real mystery here is what to do about this. Because any attempt to replace the formula drawn up so far ends up looking wacky as fuck, impractical to the extreme or straight up tyrannical. I guess it's to be expected when one proposes political alternatives. Republicanism must have felt wacky in it's time.

But the question remains. Once you know democracy is a bunch of bullshit that masks an oligarchy because the voters so obviously don't decide what's going on, what is there even to do about it?

Seconding @daezor.

Democracy is most useful as a safety valve for unrest. Removing an executive peacefully is much more efficient than burning down the Reichstag to gain power. We get to funnel our tribal lizard brains into flag waving and campaigning rather than murdering our neighbors and taking their stuff. The longer we hold on to the rule of law the better.

Using the “wisdom” of the crowds as a hedge against certain sorts of bullshit...it’s a distant second.

I think it's reasonable to assign rights to people with the function that maps their IQ to the age that I was when I had that IQ. Or to the age that someone with a 130 IQ, if we set that at the minimum to be independent, was when they had that IQ.

Why are you the privileged baseline? Or why is 130?

Therefore people with IQs of 86.7 have the rights currently afforded to 10 year olds, 95.37 -> 11 year olds, 104.04 -> 12, 112.71 -> 13, 121 -> 14. This means serfdom, they'd all be entrusted to adult guardians, only people over an IQ of 112 could have internet accounts, etc.

Why is the current rights-by-age distributions the correct one? Why not that of 1840 or something, when 10 year-olds could work and live independently?

This whole scheme just seems like an ad-hoc exercise in curve-fitting to get the distribution of power you already wanted. But then why not just say, “This is the distribution of power I want”? This IQ-to-rights function is really no more compelling than simply asserting your bare desires.

The solution is the equality, fraternity, and liberty of mental adults and the gentleman's agreement to end the constant High-Low vs. Middle dynamic.

Except if you actually knew much public choice theory, then you’d know that that’s not a stable equilibrium for precisely the reason that you mention above: breaking the agreement and giving the ‘children’ a say expands the political coalition of whichever group of ‘adults’ does it first.

Namedropping some theory you clearly hardly have studied while assuming I've never heard of it is pretty skeazy epistemics. Your problem is literacy and numeracy.

No personal attacks, no matter how many SDs your ginormous IQ is above the mean.

I think it's reasonable to assign rights to people with the function that maps their IQ to the age that I was when I had that IQ.

And who makes you the arbiter of what a human should be? All children that fail to reach the same benchmark as your throbbing massive brain at the age of two are declared unpersons and may be hunted for sport or broken down for parts?

This is the Harrison Bergeron universe, just from the other side, and it's no better or more palatable when it's the Smug Smart doing it.

As repugnant as you find his stance, he does not say people should be hunted for sport or broken down for parts.

If we assume your IQ starts at 0 at birth

Sort of tangential to your main point, but IQ doesn't have a known zero anchor point, like temperature or height do. The figure of 100 as the average was arbitrarily chosen, as was the figure of 15 points to represent one standard deviation. It is therefore theoretically possible to have a negative IQ (though that would be as unlikely as having an IQ over 200). That also means that if you are anchoring your mean and your SD to the population as a whole, some subgroups will end up not only with average IQs higher or lower than 100, but also with a larger or smaller SD if their cognitive abilities are more or less widely distributed than the population as a whole.

Perhaps it would have made more sense to set the average at zero, then it would be simple to see that negative IQ just meant below average, and the number of people with X points below average would be mirrored by a comparable number of people with X points above average

Alfred Binet created a test of cognitive ability for French school children. IQ was previously a quotient of scores that correspond to mental age over chronological age for children times 100. That doesn’t work well for adults. They changed it to the standard deviation method where the norm was just 100. I think the reason was likely that 100 was already the norm for a child of perfectly average mental age. I’m not certain though.

Yeah the liberal democratic political formula really unravels once you start to seriously ask yourself how all the rubes turn into informed thoughtful statemen through the mystical power of the ballot box.

Liberal democracy has a solution for this: checks by experts and judges. The senate wasn't supposed to be elected.

The problem is that, if you drive this too far, you can actually encourage the very enervation of the democratic energies of the average voter.

Why care if judges and bureaucrats will decide everything? Why care if there's no fundamental belief that a citizen must maintain a good understanding of their polis but instead is free to do whatever they like and pursue happiness however?

Seems like the whole ideology is trapped on the horns of a dilemma.

I'm sure "do nothing" is technically an option.

But if you need political power to be secure, which in our increasingly acrimonious times is unfortunately required, it isn't.

The desperate reach for populists like Trump even though they realistically stand no chance to drain the swamp as it were is there for a reason. The checks and balances are having fewer and fewer effect as all the actors of the system have slowly adapted against them and consolidated themselves and the compromise the formula stands on looks less real every day.

But yeah liberal democracy is inherently trapped in the contradictions of it's own myths such as the idea that the State could be neutral or that powers can be meaningully separated without converging together eventually.

It pains me because I like the liberal political formula a lot, but I don't really see how you could solve the insecurity without jettisoning it altogether. Even if we pretend the bureaucrats would let you tweak it.

The whole point of democracy is that the rubes and idiots do have a vote, because they're still our fellow citizens (even if we don't like the idea). I support the disenfranchisement of felons, but by the God who made me, I'd change that to giving guys still in jail for selling meth to six year olds not alone the vote, but five votes sooner than go to 'let's drop the pretence and just rule by oligarchy'.

We take away the vote from felons because, by breaking the laws of society and causing harm to their fellow-citizens, they have deprived themselves of the right to be part of the polis. Now you want to take away the right to vote from citizens merely for not being as smart as you are? To give up the governance to an elite?

G.K. Chesterton has an essay about choosing juries, and while he pokes some mild fun at the process, he comes down in the end of the side of yes, the ordinary man-in-the-street:

The trend of our epoch up to this time has been consistently towards socialism and professionalism. We tend to have trained soldiers because they fight better, trained singers because they sing better, trained dancers because they dance better, specially instructed laughers because they laugh better, and so on and so on. The principle has been applied to law and politics by innumerable modern writers. Many Fabians have insisted that a greater part of our political work should be performed by experts. Many legalists have declared that the untrained jury should be altogether supplanted by the trained Judge.

Now, if this world of ours were really what is called reasonable, I do not know that there would be any fault to find with this. ...The Fabian argument of the expert, that the man who is trained should be the man who is trusted, would be absolutely unanswerable if it were really true that a man who studied a thing and practiced it every day went on seeing more and more of its significance. But he does not. He goes on seeing less and less of its significance. In the same way, alas! we all go on every day, unless we are continually goading ourselves into gratitude and humility, seeing less and less of the significance of the sky or the stones.

...And the horrible thing about all legal officials, even the best, about all judges, magistrates, barristers, detectives, and policemen, is not that they are wicked (some of them are good), not that they are stupid (several of them are quite intelligent), it is simply that they have got used to it.

Strictly they do not see the prisoner in the dock; all they see is the usual man in the usual place. They do not see the awful court of judgment; they only see their own workshop. Therefore, the instinct of Christian civilisation has most wisely declared that into their judgments there shall upon every occasion be infused fresh blood and fresh thoughts from the streets. Men shall come in who can see the court and the crowd, and coarse faces of the policemen and the professional criminals, the wasted faces of the wastrels, the unreal faces of the gesticulating counsel, and see it all as one sees a new picture or a ballet hitherto unvisited.

Our civilisation has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. It wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.

The appeal of democracy makes a lot more sense when you think of it as civil-war-by-proxy rather than as a method for harnessing the "wisdom of crowds" to achieve some idea of good government. The whole reason we do politics in the first place is precisely because we don't agree on what a good outcome would be. We therefore try to create a system that roughly reflects what would happen if we did fight a war over every issue, without actually having to do so.

But a problem arises when reality marches on and the proxy doesn't catch up. Take for example the English Civil War: the actual power of the monarchy had already declined relative to that of the parliamentarians due to economic and military developments, but on paper the king still had all the powers of his medieval predecessors. Eventually, a few centuries of war and struggle reduced him to a mere figurehead.

In our own time we may see the emergence of a "technocratic ceremonial democracy" where appealing to popular sovereignty is as quaint and absurd as appealing to the Divine Right of Kings in the UK today.

Understanding of stats or HBD is irrelevant. The strongest opponents of HBD tend to be people with above average abilities, at least from what I have observed.

Publicly stated opposition, at least. In private, they tend to go for other people with above average abilities. That tendency is even stronger when they're e.g. choosing anonymous donors from a sperm bank.

Publicly stated opposition, at least. In private, they tend to go for other people with above average abilities

As groups sort on IQ, they are creating their own sub-cultures, and this means they have an incentive to "go to other people" within their own group (just like all groups do). This should not be seen as evidence of a private or even implicit belief in IQ.

When you say in private in response to stated opposition, it suggests that they privately admit to this. But they don't even do that in private, in my experience. But they do often behave as if they believe it, yes.

tendency is even stronger when they're e.g. choosing anonymous donors from a sperm bank.

i ... doubt you've seen sperm bank statistics for "high IQ people who are committed opponents of human biodiversity", so this is just using a general population statistic to against a small subpopulation, which isn't that useful.

In private, they tend to go for other people with above average abilities

and in public, just because if you're doing statistics on iq tests, even if you're doing them poorly to get antiracist results or whatever, you're going to be around higher iq people! that doesn't mean they think IQ is genetic, or that IQ <-> intelligence, they may also think it's mostly environmental / random, or not ponder that at all.

Obviously there are few to no statistics on "people who are strong opponents of HBD." The population I was referring to isn't strong opponents of HBD; the population is people of above average abilities.

They comprise the majority of sperm bank clients. And sperm banks put a very high premium on sperm from elite universities, which only makes sense if most clients use university attendance as a proxy for intelligence and think intelligence has a genetic component.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

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

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats