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Notes -
Following up on this comment, I was recently working on an effort post that was loosely organized around "some people I have known." Specifically, I have been thinking about unenviable lives, people whose existence strikes me as excessively resistant to improvement of any kind, and how the way we structure society helps, hurts, or even creates such people. Some intended figures for inclusion were a man in his 50s who is a permanent American expatriate and recent convert to Islam; a woman in her 60s who lives in her car after burning through a six figure inheritance in the space of a single year; a man in his 40s whose whole life consists of playing video games and harvesting pineapples. All of their stories have culture war implications, I think, but one of them is culture war all the way down. This is Lana's story.
Requiem for a Friend(ship)
Once upon a time, before the world Awoke, I had a friend.
When I met Lana (name has been changed for all the usual reasons) she was a newly-minted attorney, freshly hired to the Office of General Counsel. A few weeks after being introduced at a university function, I ran into her at lunchtime. She was having a political discussion with another OGC employee and cheerfully invited my participation. This basic scenario played out again, intermittently, for several semesters, organically developing into a friendship that extended marginally beyond the workplace.
Over the years I learned that, when Lana first joined the OGC, she'd been married to another attorney--a family law practitioner of no particular reputation. They were religious Protestants but political Progressives. Lana's feminism was very 90s, in a way I find hard to describe today, but you can probably imagine it: makeup good, Barbie sus, "pro-child, pro-choice," but nary a mention of "patriarchy" or "rape culture" or "microaggressions." Critical theory was already a Thing, of course, but the battle of the sexes (as it was sometimes called) hadn't yet been racialized or radicalized in quite the way we see today. Anyway, Lana enjoyed--or seemed to enjoy!--that I was (approximately) an irreligious conservative. I think that, perhaps, by doubly violating her expectations (arguing against her politics without resort to Jesus, being unmoved by her appeals to Christian charity as a justification for bleeding-heart policies) I presented a novelty to her lawyerly (read: contrarian, adversarial) mindset. I appreciated her openness to discussion.
Eventually, Lana took a position elsewhere, but we occasionally caught up using whatever technology was in fashion. Email, Instant Messenger, social media. She proved to be an especially prolific Facebook poster after giving birth to a child and retiring from law practice to parent full-time (what she said then was that she never really enjoyed practicing law anyway--if memory serves, she was a literature undergraduate). Of course, social media is often a distorted lens, but what I saw was a pretty relatable mixture of joy and struggle, interspersed with the discussions of political interest that were the heart of many of Lana's friendships--including ours.
And then it was 2015.
It cannot possibly have been Donald Trump's fault that Lana divorced her husband. The problems she recounted in her Facebook overshares must have been simmering for some time: husband pressuring her for sex more than once a month, being a full-time mother had cost her her identity, raising a kid seemed like an impossibly difficult and objectionably thankless undertaking. But long-running disagreements with her Protestant friends over same-sex marriage came to an apogee in June of 2015, when Obergefell v. Hodges was decided--ten days, if I'm counting correctly, after Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United States. That same month, Lana very publicly, very noisily separated from her husband--as well as her religious community, which she felt had taken "his side." The extended process of an acrimonious custody dispute began.
We sometimes speak of the "Great Awokening" and pin it to 2012 or 2014, but the first time I really noticed it influencing my personal life was during the 2016 election season (and aftermath). And what I noticed was not a vibe shift, but a shocking spate of relationship implosion. I had always thought of "blocking" people on social media as a tool created to weed out spammers, trolls, and perhaps the occasional stalker or abuser--not something anyone would ever do to friends, family, or even acquaintances, certainly not over something as trivial as political disagreement. But as 2016 progressed, Lana's Facebook posts grew increasingly vitriolic, and her tolerance for dissent all but vanished. "If you support Trump, just unfriend me now," she posted once. "Because if I see anyone post anything supporting him, I will block you."
Well, I wasn't a Trump supporter, so I didn't worry too much about it. At the time, I attributed this unbounded anger to Lana's personal circumstances, but by the time Trump won the election, Lana's divorce had been finalized for months. I suppose the official "end" of our friendship came in March of 2017. After months of watching Democrats scramble for any possible way to overturn the results of the election, from inducement to faithless electors to violent protests, I made a social media post highlighting several of the absurdities of the 2017 Women's March (in particular, its deliberate exclusion of pro-life women), and Lana put me on her block list.
I was sad about that, but by then our friendship had lacked an "in person" component for several years. I still had "in person" friendships with several mutual acquaintances, however, so I would occasionally get a second-hand update. At some point in 2018, Lana remarried--this time, to a woman. She had a couple of bad starts at getting back into law practice before finally settling back where she'd begun, doing lawyerly work for a (different) university. She gained two hundred pounds (ten of that in piercing jewelry), stopped shaving her legs (and started posting pictures of her unshaved legs to social media), shaved half her head instead, and colored blue what remained. Her Facebook posting, I was told, never slowed down, but became a stable mixture of "#NotMyPresident" and "I'm having another mental health crisis today" posts. (COVID-19 apparently heightened the amplitude in predictable ways, but in substance changed little.)
Then, not long ago, I got a message from a mutual friend asking if I knew of any way to contact Lana. They pointed me toward a post (now removed) on a subreddit I'd never heard of--a "suicide watch" subreddit. It is apparently a place for people to post their suicidal inclinations and get "non-judgemental peer support ONLY," whatever that means in the context of an anonymous internet forum. Under a pseudonym I recognized from our Instant Messenger days, Lana had posted that after a year of non-stop fighting (again, mostly over sex), her second marriage was coming to an end. All her friends had abandoned her and all she had left were online discussion groups with internet strangers, where she constantly faced accusations of being an awful spouse, awful mother, and all-around awful person. Our mutual friend was seriously concerned for Lana's well-being, but had been unable to get a response via social media, texts, phonecalls, or otherwise.
My first thought was that maybe I could find a way to get in touch with Lana--surely I owed her that much, for the years of friendship we'd enjoyed? Perhaps she was still active on one of her old accounts. But my second thought was that even if I could get in touch with her, there was a good chance I would only make her feel worse, in any number of ways. That put a damper on any inclination I might have felt to make any heroic effort on Lana's behalf, which in turn inspired some self-recrimination. I had to wonder: was my reluctance down to schadenfreude? Am I such a culture warrior that I would turn a blind eye to the suffering of a friend? After all, at minimum I could roll a fresh reddit alt and just... drop Lana an anonymous message of support. Would she see it? Would she care?
I won't tell you what I did, in the end. The point of this post is not to solicit advice, much less to inquire, with fluttering eyelashes, "AITA?" I will say that if my choice had any meaningful impact at all, I've never learned of it. I do have it on good authority that Lana is still alive, her second divorce final, and another same-sex romance underway. I can honestly say that I hope it works out for her.
Boo Outgroup
It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, in a way that is difficult to discuss anywhere but the CW thread of the Motte. Lana is a person, but Lana also instantiates a personality. She is not the only friend I lost from 2015-2017, but the further we get from those days, the more closely their lives come to rhyme. I have a comfortable life, and often I think that's a g-loaded task (so to speak), but by and large these are not stupid people I see, setting fire to their lives in pursuit (or as a result) of ideological purity. I would say "status games" but they don't seem to be accruing any particular status! Swap out "lawyer" for "analyst" or "educator" or similar and much of Lana's story could be told of a dozen of the relationships I've enjoyed and lost. A cousin at a family function, a high school acquaintance on Facebook, a former student dropping by my office; all rolling in the deep, and every time a Bayesian reckoning lands me on "Leftism is both a cause and effect of acute mental illness" I roll to disbelieve, because I know it can't possibly be that simple--can it?
Of course it can't--conservatives top themselves, too, after all! And this is, like, prime culture war fodder, "boo outgroup" of the most aggressive sort. I don't know whether it's "mistake theory" or "conflict theory" to assert that people who believe differently have a disease of the mind, but--
Seven or eight years ago, I had a somewhat surprising interaction with a colleague at a conference. We were having dinner and discussing politics, and it gradually dawned on him that I was not just being entertainingly contrarian--that I was honestly defending some views, mostly libertarian but some downright conservative, which I actually held. His response was presciently forecast in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality:
Well, okay, to be honest, he didn't actually accuse me of being insane. Rather, he refused to believe I am actually conservative. Weirdo contrarian libertarianism he could understand, but conservative? Never. In fairness, probably a lot of conservatives would refuse to believe it, too; my views on speech and sex and God and the like definitely put me on the outs with the diehards, but nevertheless I'm far too pro life, anti woke, pro federalism, anti public employee unions, etc. to ever fit in on the Left; it is a little difficult for me to even make a plausible bid for "centrist" without appending a caveat like "right-leaning." Even so--I simply was not believed.
That conversation got much less surprising by the fourth or fifth time it happened--most recently, just last week. I don't think I'm hiding the ball, here. I don't aggressively share my viewpoint in professional settings but neither do I bother to code switch for the benefit of others. And I have learned, over the years, that people really do just see what they expect to see. I'm a professor; once they know that, they make assumptions about my ideological commitments which even my own direct protestations are insufficient to counter. And this repeatedly inspires people to insist that I am putting on the affectation of conservatism; that I am clearly too smart, too educated, and too obviously sane to possibly see any value in right wing politics. Well, there's a lot I don't like about right wing politics! That's fair to say. Even so, I'm pretty conservative, especially as radical Leftism continues to push "classical liberalism" to the right of the recognized spectrum.
The obvious weak man here is just, you know, reddit commenters in default subs. These days it seems I can scarcely doomscroll for five minutes without encountering an entire thread of "no sane person can be a Republican" and "Republicans are all murderous sadists" and "I used to think tolerance was important, but there is no saving MAGA, we need to round these psychos up and put them out of our misery." Radical left wing violence is a thing! Presumably at least some of these posts are coming from Russian and Chinese botfarms, but most strike me as just the products of American public education.
Is there a forum for progressive cat ladies out there somewhere, where Lana is writing about her old friend, the professor? The one who used to be a mild-mannered contrarian scholar but who was radicalized by Harry Potter and My Little Pony fanfic and now moderates a forum for explicit wrongthink? I feel like, objectively, I've got the preferable outlook; I'm not suicidal, I haven't torched any marital or familial or professional relationships. I feel pretty sane, honestly. But I'm increasingly concerned that (1) I struggle to see sanity in my outgroup and (2) my outgroup struggles to see sanity in me.
In 1922, at the end of the Greco-Turkish War, about 1.2 million Christian Greeks relocated from (what is now) Turkey to (what is now) Greece, and about 400,000 predominantly Muslims relocated the other direction. There was a lot of force, and no small amount of death, involved in the process, but even so, the ethnic cleansing of the region (two regions?) has proven... surprisingly uncontroversial. Mostly forgotten, in fact. The "Cyprus Problem" is downstream from that conflict, of course, but even featuring as it does in the occasional Russian oligarch psychodrama, probably very few Americans have the first clue what a "Cyprus" is, never mind the finer details of the resolution of the Greco-Turkish War.
I do not think the United States is likely to be ideologically partitioned in my lifetime. But I am increasingly concerned about why that is the case. Greenland (population: 55,000) apparently warrants sovereignty and self-rule--but not California? Not Texas? (Not Taiwan? Not Israel? Not Palestine? Not Ukraine?) I think mostly that American citizens, fat on bread and satisfied with our circuses, are unwilling to sacrifice. Actually starting a war with the federal government of the United States would be suicidal, but I don't think the threat of military action is the primary deterrent to schism movements here--at least not yet. Rather, our prosperity is in part the result of our outsized global influence. While far behind China and India, we are nevertheless the third most populous nation in the world, an economic juggernaut despite the recent ascent of various others.
What will happen, if that changes?
What will happen, if it doesn't?
It's a problem for future generations, but at the same time I feel the desire to act, to do something about the rift that I see, to "reach out" and bridge the growing divide somehow--even though, if my actions have any meaningful impact at all, I am unlikely to ever know it. Talking about the problem (as we so often do here) doesn't seem to make it better. Not talking about the problem doesn't seem to make it better. Maybe if I were a billionaire, or a movie star, or a successful politician... but I'm not.
This is an oversimplification (inevitable, perhaps, when discussing Hegel) but Hegelian philosophy is sometimes explained through the metaphor of an acorn. An acorn is not an oak tree; a sprout is not an oak tree; a sapling is not an oak tree. And yet the oak tree is within those things, somehow. If we think of the bronze age as the sprouting of human civilization, and the renaissance as perhaps a sapling, then we begin to grasp the idea of our species progressing toward Hegel's "Absolute." The primary disagreement between Hegelians is whether we are each individually just along for the ride, or whether there is something we can do to accelerate the growth of our collective oak tree toward its final form. I am not much of a Hegel scholar--mostly I am aware of his work in connection with its influence on others, notably Karl Marx--but if I were a Hegelian, I think today I would side with those who suspect we're just along for the ride. Voltaire's Candide suggests we each tend to our own gardens, to not seek influence in the wider world. The older I get, the more I think that is probably good advice. But once Lana had a role to play in my particular garden, and now as a result of her own intolerance of diverse viewpoints, she does not. And, good or bad, inevitable or not--that makes me sad.
I've had very similar experience with friends, some from childhood; divorce, asymmetric undercut in unnatural colors, attempts at lesbianism and public online displays of mental health issues. I've had the same thoughts about reaching out but ultimately didn't think I'd be heard in a way that added value.
This is where I am, I like to think of it as being Mary, not Martha.
The opposite side of this we are now beginning to see in the online 'white well-being' posters. Some of this I think is just women being more influenced by their perceived peer groups.
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This makes me appreciate, even more tangibly, how sane the countries I've lived in are. I mean sure, Indian politics involves a fair share of riots, gunfire and vote-rigging, but it's almost never this personal. UK politics just puts me to sleep.
I've never had the displeasure of cutting ties, or having them cut, because of politics. It's borderline unthinkable. There might be some bickering, then everyone goes out for tea and forgets it. I even had two uncles stand for (and win) elections for diametrically opposing parties, and they lived together.
Honestly, it's a testament to the stability of US institutions that there's this much rage and disdain circulating in the water, and yet the amount of political violence is, in objective terms, nigh non-existent.
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I enjoyed this enough I decided to bite the bullet and make an account here.
Out of curiosity how did you find this place? I've never really seen anyone link to us from the outside.
Scott mentioned it at some point, I was curious and checked it out, and I've lurked occasionally since. So I've been lurking for a long time I guess? Because I don't remember when he mentioned it.
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Good to have you join us! yeah @naraburns is a gem. There is some genuinely great writing here. I liked your post as well.
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Great post, reminds me a bit of my parents marriage, which has thankfully and surprisingly survived the Trump years.
My mom: heavily pro-choice, bit of a hippy, microbiologist PhD, main breadwinner doing government contracting stuff, likes reading books about myers briggs personality, or deep getting in touch with your feelings type stuff. Sucks at making friends, only talks well with very close friends or family. Can be bossy and annoying unless too drunk. (cavalier culture)
My dad: redneck, carpenter (but doesn't make much money doing that these days), was barely too young to ever go to vietnam and was sad about that, weed and age have helped his anger issues, ocd, generally republican, thinks trump is funny but doesn't personally like him, loves voting for trump, hates political correctness, likes racist jokes and dropping the n-word. Makes and keeps friends easily. Easy for everyone to talk with, fun to be around. (border culture)
Idk I feel like there are multiple scenarios where both of them could have just gone a little further off the deep end on their respective sides and it would have been an end for the marriage. As much as they sort of sound like stereotypes at times (my dad being the redneck stereotype, and my mom being the PMC karen stereotype) they also have the awareness of why those sterotypes are bad and annoying. They both have friends that have fully crossed over into those stereotypes, friends who would never get along with my other parent.
I get along with all of them, both of my parents, and all the crazy friends of theirs that feel like walking stereotypes. I think you are in a somewhat similar spot as me. You are no one's outgroup and everyone's far-group. You might as well be living in a different country. I used to think that I'd just learned some social skills and had the right attitude of "I can't lose friends over politics, because my views are too weird and I will have no friends." But its really more on other people. Having enemies is usually exhausting. Smart, well adjusted people learn to keep their enemies in the hypothetical.
I think it's understated just how much civil disagreement is a skill. It requires practice and conscious effort to be good at. Learning how to have fun with the little differences while knowing when to pull back before things get too heated is hard, and gets harder the more siloed your spcial circles are.
I've personally felt my muscles atrophy in this regard in recent years. As the group of people I spend most of my time with has become more politically homogeneous, I've found myself grow less politically tolerant and less willing to live and let live. Now, other people have genuinely become less agreeable, but I can feel it in myself as well, especially compared to when I was in school and spent half my time with the college Republicans and half my time with my socialist roommate and his hipster friends.
"How to disagree with your friends and loved ones without growing to resent and despise each other" should be a mandatory class in middle/high school.
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You briefly alluded to a system of culture classification i haven't heard of (cavellier, border). Where does it come from?
Not cjet but this is from Albion's Seed. A book analyzing American culture through the lens of British groupings. Cavaliers would be ex-gentry and influence plantation culture, Scotch-Irish borderers, working class rural types, then the more known Quakers and Puritans were the main 4 I believe.
The idea was that many of America's current sub-cultures can be traced back to the groups they descended from. (Southern gentlemen, Appalachian rural folks, and so on and so forth).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed
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This reminds me of one of my grandpa’s top pieces of advice- life’s too short to make enemies.
Then again, he also recommends eating an unhealthy diet to avoid having to deal with senility.
Since alzheimers is probably type 3 diabetes, not the best plan
He believes doing this will cause him to die before it manifests.
hope nobody tells him how heroin addiction correlates with dying with Alzheimer's
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I don't think I've ever specifically had this thought! I usually say something like "the lefts think I'm too far right, the rights think I'm too far left, and the centrists think I'm way too political" but "I'm just in everyone's far-group" has a ring of truth to it... most of the time, anyway. Every once in a while I get picked to be someone's nemesis; fortunately, it rarely seems to last.
Far-group just means no one thinks you are able to present a threat. A mongolian goatherder is, presumably, both of our far-group. Xi Jinping is, presumably, both of our outgroup. You are far-group to everyone because libertarians lose almost all the time(sometimes they have chainsaws and cloned dogs). If Elon was actually Trump's puppetmaster you'd be lots of people's outgroups.
It's not differentness, it's unworthiness of notice.
Yeah, I occasionally get the impression my left-wing friends view me with an almost anthroplologic curiosity. Like, I was at a party hosted by an old law school friend recently, and he walked around introducing me half jokingly as "the token libertarian" like he was Columbus showing off his indian prisoners to Ferdinand and Isabella.
To be fair, I'm guilty of the same thing. My best friend is a socialist labor organizer, and the number of times I've used him as a prop to win an argument or come across as worldly and tolerant is probably a little embarrassing. And much of the reason our friendship works is because we're both extreme enough to know neither one will ever actually be in a position to inflict our politics on the other. We joke about how im definitely going to be put up against a wall and shot come the revolution, but it's fine because we both know the revolution ain't coming.
So I guess, despite my first paragraph, count me in favor of far-group friendships!
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Not OP, but one of my favorite party tricks is to critique Ronald Reagan from the right by taking the left's criticism of him as accurate (Tell a Boomer that Reagan was a continuation of Carter with a more optimistic demeanor and remind the social conservatives that he legalized abortion and no-fault divorce as Governor of California along with screwing the pro-lifers by nominating O'Connor to the SCOTUS. Heads will explode.). Really though, while my beliefs best map at whatever JD Vance is stabbing at (I'm not sure he even knows at this point.), I'm not overly ideologically certain compared to my youth spent as a firm member of the Ron Paul camp. I can be polite, though, and as long as their arguments are well-reasoned instead of being cable-news tier crap I'm willing to listen to and respect anyone.
As for my parents, they divorced long ago but they're both shrieking harpies when it comes to politics. Mother has been a Hillary Clinton Democrat of the worst sort as long as I can recall while Dad went from caring little about politics to being a Catturd following Trumper who worships Elon Musk. I just don't talk politics with either of them.
Ask him what his opinion of the new rift is between Musk (no more debt) vs Trump (trillions of new debt)!
He's probably tired of winning at this point
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It might be helpful to break down different angles to attack symptoms of the rift.
Interpersonal Exit Veto (aka flight or fight, aka sorting, aka freedom of association)
I. Exit as Meme
"If Bush wins, I'm moving to Canada." We can trace the heritage of our modern Culture War to 1968. Young, progressive people really did flee to Canada to dodge the draft and exercise an exit. This exit was practical, so as to avoid the draft, but also a valuable tribal signal.
This meme, and the war that made it possible, cleaved open generational and tribal faults. Moving to Canada was a way for the professorate to escape imperialism, but it was also perceived as a way to stick a giant middle finger to the post-war American unity.
Move to Canada, as I experienced it, was not interpreted as a rebellious taboo. It was a light weapon in the culture war to voice displeasure that only returned to a state of national distribution with Bush 2, Election 1. One would find the meme in light hearted barbs on late night talk shows, the punch line in SNL skits, and among the sneer class in earlier internet forums. German publications even misquoted famous people's wives, because meme. The meme could be taken neither literally, nor seriously.
A bump in usage was captured by Google Trends during Bush 2, Election 2. Shown in the graphs are all the following elections where a Republican won, but notably absent in those where they did not. Its value to tabloids was double. When Famous Person didn't leave, writers got to generate a second, even snarkier article on how silly it was for Famous Person to say they were going to do a thing they didn't do. An unserious, performative part of a memetic virus.
II. Exit as Illness
Anxious people loathe confrontation. Anxious people like the internet. The spaces a person congregates and the ideas and beliefs they soak. allow them to generate profits in the form of moral gains based valued at the spectacle.
One might protest to a Racist Uncle at Thanksgiving, "Racist Uncle, if you don't stop racism'ing at Thanksgiving I'm not coming." This escalates, and somewhere along the unforgivable takes hold. I have to imagine this, so I imagine this this is a or rationalized as a moral act of self-preservation. Once it's done once, doing so again is easier. Until you're giving the Racist Uncle treatment to your former acquaintance or your friend from high school. I wonder if Lana thought about this as a sacrifice, a necessity, or thought about it much at all.
It is easy to sneer at redditors who appear to want to give advice for the Lana's to cut off relationships. Alienation, isolation, and fatalism are all symptoms and expressions of depression. In addition, our perceived enemies can easily surround us -- even threaten us -- at all times through a small, 6" screen. The interpersonal exit veto is a product of our time, more normalized by some types than others.
I don't consider the practice of isolation, alienation, or intentionally destroying relations as a genetic inheritance for the progressive psyche to pass down. Lana experienced a life-sized collapse. To us readers, the psychological immune system she found comfort in consumed her. There's a lot of coherence and stability in ideas, even if those ideas are a false sort of immune system. As written, they consumed her. There is comfort is in praxis.
III. Exit as Veto
An exit veto due to weariness is not the same as a veto exercised due to principles, or driven by circumstance.
The choice to reciprocate a withdrawal and accept a detente is natural. Engagement requires two-way interaction. There's no parity in this anecdote until the end, where there is a parity of no-contact. Yet, here you are, caring and considerate. You are a decent person, as are many of us who have not yet lost the ability to care, to consider, to reciprocate with those of different beliefs.
In my experience, most people are not so principled or ideological. They are persuadable. They are responsive. Memes, like Move to Canada have influence. This is perhaps more worrying, but people don't actually have that much in the tank for Lana's type of crusade. We are driven by the young of the horseshoe closer to the edge. Ideally, not over it.
The fear is we sort until we will share nothing in common and lose an interest in commonality. What if all the associated sorting protects us from a point of no return?
I think interpersonal exit is an evolved form of the teenage door slam. It’s almost always done publicly, either online or in person, and if done online and the program doesn’t generate a satisfying message that tells the audience that they’re blocking people who say or do X, don’t worry, they’ll announce it. As such Theres a certain level of narcissistic behavior involved — the person must be validated in some way for “having the courage of their convictions” to remove someone from their lives.
To me, I think that at least a partial answer among friend groups is to not give them the narcissistic supply. Don’t support them, don’t acknowledge it happened, make a point of including the shunned in group activities. After a while it stops being fun because nobody’s calling them “stunning and brave anti-racist.” They’re just throwing a teenage girl temper tantrum, and they’ll get over it once they realize that they’re not getting their way.
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What happened with your post? I found it kind of hard to read in an "am I getting a stroke or is sleep deprivation finally getting to me" way from the start, but then halfway in it seems to reach the point where words are actually unambiguously rearranged out of their proper places, like in
Gas, and the fact the writing and ideas are underdeveloped.
I wrote until I ran out of time. I pressed send. If I had hated it, then I would have deleted it. If I liked it more I may have dumped it on you today in improved form, or worked on it further for a future a top-level. Is there any part you consider interesting or worth reading besides the stroke?
I sense there is something in that mass of mush, but I've been wrong before.
I don't think Sentence 1 is stroke-y? It's missing a the. Sorry. Sentence 2 is repulsive, I agree. A form of Sentence 2 was written first, then I added more words, words, words in another pass. That's bad. We don't need those sentences at all. Try now.
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We're all just actors in a play. We enter stage, say our lines, and exit stage. The surest way to be disappointed with this is to try to direct from the stage.
I demand a full accounting of the stage!*
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Any chance you could drop a couple lines about him? It's an odd setup.
Sure--let's call him Dylan. Dylan is the son of a colleague, who I met briefly when he was in town visiting his parents. Long, sun-bleached hair, deeply tanned skin, very "beach bum" aesthetic. But not in a "manic homeless" way--he was clean and taciturn. I asked him what he does, and he said he picks pineapples in Hawaii. I asked if that was a year-round thing, he said "kinda." So I asked him what he does when he's not picking pineapples, and he said "play games I guess." Any games in particular? "Older stuff, my laptop is pretty slow." RTS, FPS, RPG? "Some RPGs, yeah. I play Starcraft, too." Well, I game, I played Starcraft (more than a quarter century ago, now...), so the rest of our discussion was about Starcraft. He never gave me the impression that I was getting the brush-off, or that he was especially reluctant to talk--just that he didn't have a lot to say. He seemed nice!
His parents later told me that, after finishing high school, Dylan enlisted with the army. He'd only been in for a couple of months when another soldier assaulted him, put him in the hospital. Dylan says the guy just had some unreasonable beef; whether that was Mom being cagey, or Dylan just never explaining events in detail, I don't know. The assailant faced charges, Dylan got an early discharge. Moved back in with his parents, got a job as a night clerk at a gas station. Soon after got a girlfriend, moved in with her. Split his time between working at the gas station, and getting high with his girlfriend--marijuana at first, harder drugs later. They have a scare and decide to get clean together. Six months later, six months clean, he comes home from work--she's had some old friends over. They brought drugs. She died of an overdose--some time in the early 00s.
Dylan moves back home, largely refuses to leave his room for months. Parents start talking about getting a diagnosis, maybe disability. Then one day, he says he's going to Hawaii. What's he going to do? "Pick pineapples." Where's he going to live? "They've got dorms and stuff." He takes nothing but a duffel stuffed with clothing and some personal tech.
His parents went out to visit him once, and as far as they could determine he was at that time living in a hammock strung between some palm trees. He doesn't date. He doesn't socialize. He doesn't use the Internet. He plays video games on an old laptop, which he charges whenever it's convenient. He doesn't read, or surf. He must hike, at least sometimes, because that is the activity he took his parents out to do. He'll come stateside to visit, occasionally, if his parents buy him a plane ticket. While glad he's independent, they can't help but feel a perpetual simmering concern. As long as he's not starving or doing hard drugs, they don't want to press the issue. "He's been through a lot."
I was fascinated by the story, because on one hand, it kind of sounds to me like drugs and tragedy just fried this guy--that he's a walking husk with no ambition, no particular concern for his own well-being, just barely functioning enough to earn enough money as a laborer to keep himself alive. On the other hand, I can also imagine him a sage of stoicism, someone who has so thoroughly embraced minimalism and detachment that he has transcended the weight of social expectations entirely. No wife, no children, itinerant labor, apparently homeless, but not entirely without places to go. I poked around the Internet a bit and all the references I could find to pineapple picker dormitories are dated to the 20th century; I also learned that pineapple picking in Hawaii is a much smaller industry than it has been in the past. This tempted me toward wild speculations--is this all a ruse? Is Dylan involved in secret government operations, or organized criminal activity? His parents seem confident that his girlfriend's overdose put him off drugs extremely decisively--he only, they claim, ever used with her. But maybe they are kidding themselves?
Then I remind myself--just because I have trouble imagining the life of an itinerant laborer, does not mean they don't exist. Just because a life sounds mind-numbingly dull to me, doesn't mean it's not someone's life. But he's been at it for nearly two decades, and it seems unlikely that he has been saving for retirement. He can't pick pineapples (or whatever) in Hawaii forever. Can he?
Itinérant laborers exist. The roustabout class is declining, but it’s still there. There’s men, trucked up from not Mexico but the countries south of there, who will come do whatever for cash- no particular skills, but they’ll work until it’s time to start drinking. There’s people a bit like your friend. There’s homeless guys who alternate between working some minor, low-skill job(painting or the like) and doing drugs under a bridge.
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The man's expenses are probably near zero. Between savings and social security he may be ahead of the modal silicon valley striver living paycheck to paycheck between mortgage, property taxes, and private school.
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What a payoff, thanks for asking, @butts!
This guy reminds me a lot of a younger version of myself. I suppose stoicism is a skill - I certainly attempted to reach inner peace with a combination of weed and videogames at some points, but was driven to try at life by a desire for women. It sounds like this guy was "scared straight" from engaging with the world.
This guy honestly sounds accomplished to me in his own way. He really learned to tend his own garden! I wouldn't trade my life for his, but if I was a NEET, I can't think of a nicer setup.
I wonder if his parents could have done anything differently, or if this is just the way it goes sometimes.
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This is the kind of guy they make uplifting youtube videos about. "This man has been picking pineapples for 30 YEARS, this is his story.".
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I've met a few examples of this of his age, and a lot more in mid-twenties to early-thirties. Doing just enough to sustain one's gaming in a bottom-tier job and that's essentially it. Not even Hikkimori or obese anti-socials, just... bare-minimum minimum-wage work and gaming or another hobby like Bouldering or Jiujitsu.
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I worked with a guy like that at a locally owned version of doordash in a college town, one of many characters we employed (Our long-term staff from ownership down were ground zero of the male loneliness/failure to launch epidemic, referred to as "the lost boys" by one of the more clever among us or "the expendables" by the owner.). I don't know his specific story, but he's in his early 40s, single, lives with roommates, etc. such that he has insanely low overhead. He doesn't really drink/go to bars, doesn't do drugs other than weed I guess, and is into Marvel and videogames and that's it. If his car craps out there's always another relative with a cheap Toyota, but otherwise he's self-sufficient. Nice guy and perfectly competent, but infuriatingly lazy, truly dedicated to working as little as possible with the bare minimum of hassle necessary to meet his expenses. We jokingly refer to him as something of a monk, in contrast to the suckers who grind and spend insane amounts of money on bar tabs for the illusion that they might gat laid, or at least have a pretty bartender remember their name.
Yeah I just think a decent chunk of men are gravitating towards this existence. My wife's youngest brother is essentially this in his mid-twenties. Games and maintains a hospitality job, but no interest in further education or really building anything. He's 'productive' in the sense that he covers his own expenses but he just doesn't really have any ambitions beyond a gaming laptop, discord etc. I'm surprised your example's in his 40s, but I know quite a large population of late-teens to early-thirties guys who are essentially this. They're not unhappy, just kinda... dudeist. They're not buying into society since they just can't really be incentivized unless they randomly hit it off with a girl one day (which has been the catalyst of the majority of times I've seen somebody right the course in their mid twenties)
I think the messiness of modern dating might be part of it, since IMO a large part of what drives low-motivation men beyond this local minimum is either attempting to get laid or the pressures of a significant other.
In theory this could have been me, once upon a time. I was more inclined to go the "Save as much as possible, invest, move to a low cost of living country" route. I had spreadsheets once upon a time with some rough calculations of how much I'd need to save to live in Romania without any dependents for the rest of my life. I'd more or less given up on women, my girlfriend having left me for another man the day before my father died.
Tangent, that was almost 20 years ago now. Sometimes I actually forget that I was seeing a girl around that time, and she had in fact dumped me the day before my father died. All I remember anymore is the day he died. When I do remember that lady, it's almost like a curiosity. Some weird anecdote that happened to someone else. Not me, happily married with a kid.
Back on point, when I was in my 20's I was an asshole. I mean, I still am an asshole, but in my 20's I was a major asshole. But when I think back, everyone in my 20's was a major asshole. We were high off youth, and whatever minor achievements we'd made. Maybe our brand new degree. Maybe some job that seems like hot shit to us at the time, but was really just another job. A lot of women loved showing off engagement rings for marriages that have long since collapsed. May have had something to do with them also bragging about how short a leash they kept their husbands on, or how "well trained" they'd gotten them. Sometimes I cite 25 as peak cockiness. Something about that feels about right to me as the apex of youthful exuberance. It doesn't fall off immediately after that. But if bad things haven't humbled you yet, they probably start to.
I don't know how you get two assholes to pair off and endure each other until they stop being assholes. I don't know how you get 25 year olds to not be assholes. I don't know how you make the whole experience of having your ego sandblasted off by other assholes so demoralizing you don't tune out of society all together. I have no idea how any of this used to work, or what other generations experienced. I was raised on self esteem and main characters like Zack Morris, Ferris Bueller and Parker Lewis.
Wild speculation but I think accidental incidental pregnancy in the days before birth control plus getting shepherded into the workforce at a younger age probably helped mitigate a fair bit of the natural trend towards assholing. Also prior to women entering the workforce there was more of an impetuous to atleast present a pretense of meekness and agreeability in order to escape the household.
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Lowers helmet
Keep firing, assholes!
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
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I think dating is a big part of it. There is no motivation for me to grind or hustle or finish my PhD fast because I don't see girlfriend/wife opportunities coming very easily.
Yeah or if they are gonna come it's more going to be about solving the dating app metagame than simply hustling on making yourself a productive member of society.
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I started writing a response with my own anecdotes several times, then decided not to, as I don't wish to provide too much identifying information.
Suffice to say I have experienced similar things. I definitely remember a time, pre-Great Awokening, when I had friends who were both right and left. Sometimes we had some pretty vicious arguments, but we usually patched things up afterwards. And my other friends on the left and right could at least conceive of being friendly with folks in the other tribe. Now, not so much.
That said, I saw the online precursors of the Great Awokening well before 2012. I was online way back before 9/11. I remember some leftists absolutely losing their shit over Bush (and telling me that my ability to be friends with Republicans made me a fascist sympathizer). I also remember conservatives on social media circa 2008 and 2012 absolutely losing their shit over Obama's election (and reelection), and angrily demanding that people defriend, shun, and even divorce any friends or family members who voted for him.
This is not to say that both sides do this equally (they definitely do not - I still have some right-wing friends, while I have lost liberal friends for having right-wing friends) but I definitely see accelerationism picking up steam on both sides.
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I know one such quote, but the point there is different, illustrating his dynamic hylomorphism:
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I saw this when my ex fiancée ended things abruptly and without explanation. We had been planning our family and kids and home and such. After the split she gained tons of weight, dyed her hair and got tons of tattoos, is stuck in a dead end job now, and apparently is constantly flooding social media with leftist shit. Her family doesn’t know what happened either because she cut them off at the same time.
I chalked it up to people being weird, but then I met a new friend in town and found out almost the exact same thing happened to him this year. Then I met a third dude whose wife left him and blew up her life and he has been watching her spiral. Then I learned a fourth guy who I have known for a while had a similar story and I had to throw my hands up. These are men I met through a diverse set of circumstances: mountain biking, remote worker meetups, church, etc.
I do think with this topic, there is a gendered problem underlying it all. I read a lot about the male loneliness crisis, or think pieces on why men are dropping out of the dating pool and I can’t help but draw nebulous connections with these experiences. I don’t know if it’s feminism’s fruits, being over medicated on ssris and birth control, or the neutering of men in society, but something is broken.
Women are going to connect with something. And, well, social media influencers are like that.
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I went through a version of that.
Not so much the politics, but she ducked out of the relationship, cut many existing ties, gained a bunch of weight, and now she binges anime (I found her myanimelist account last year) and plays around in Role-playing servers.
And I have three different acquaintances that had this happen too, one of whom I mentioned recently.
One wife was a really nice Mormon girl who now is presenting as full on LGBTQ, blue hair, and does roller derby.
I know of zero relationships that ended because the guy went too far right.
I know of one, the man now has a tiny twitter account retweeting BAP and Fuentes, NYU dropout, beautiful girlfriend, handsome and from a good family, started very loudly talking about how slavery was justified at parties, was literally part of the tiki torch march at Charlottesville, now lives in a small town inland in Florida off what most of his friends think is his grandfather’s inheritance. Went to private school in NYC (I didn’t know him then, but I have friends who did). Gained 50+ lbs.
"Hard Rightie pundit living off of family wealth" seems like a notable archetype.
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I always found this weird, as mathematically for every lonely man there has to be one lonely woman and vice versa. There are some confounders, like that women can have one night stands or situationships. Or that men can pay for prostitutes as a substitute for one night stands. Or that there is more lonely women especially in higher age due to them living longer than men. In any case for each man that lays his head alone in his bedroom, there is a woman somewhere doing the same. It is intrinsically linked phenomenon and it does not make sense to talk about it separately.
Maybe one thing that is different is that in general men who are alone are more aware of it not being ideal situation and they talk more of despair. Even MGTOW community talks about loneliness as preferable to other types of suffering, not as something that is preferable to fulfilling relationship. While on the other side when people are talking about lonely women it is more linked with some sort of empowerment and other positive vibes.
I assume when people are talking about male loneliness they mean a lack of friends, not necessarily a lack of romantic engagement. Nobody thinks of the widowed church lady who spends all day drinking tea with her friends and looking after her grandchildren as lonely.
"Already old and has grandchildren" is quite the goalpost movement. When I think of the modal "lonely male" it's not someone who already has grandchildren, it's someone who never had children yet, or estranged from them in a divorce.
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Having friends - even close ones - is a different experience from having a girlfriend/fiancé/wife you come home to every evening.
There's also the other side of this equation, when some friends get married(and have children) and the rest don't. Even worse if they move away. You're still friends, you still talk alot, but circumstances change when you can only see each other face to face once or twice a year.
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Partly I think female friendship is closer, more emotional and less contingent than male friendship. Partly of course grandchildren are family and that makes a big difference compared to tfwngf incelish guys.
Male friendship can be as close, but my impression has always been that male friendship is abandoned for a romantic relationship in a way that female friendship isn’t always.
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Sure, but then this cuts both ways. In that sense MGTOw man who regularly goes to pub with his colleagues or who plays D&D with his friends or who organizes grill party for his nieces and nephews or who volunteers for summer camps for children is not lonely either.
Of course this can explain only part of the problem, loneliness is something deeper no matter how women or men try to rationalize it. And maybe in current culture lionizing single powerful women it may be easier for women to do that. The word "incel" has much more shame and negative connotation in it compared to femcel. A lonely childless widow may have more social status than lonely childless widower. Nevertheless in some fundamental way they are still lonely.
I think the biggest difference is male aggression toward women is usually physical while female aggression towards men is usually social, most notably attempted social ostracization. Women attack men's social bonds in ways that men don't attack women's, thus leading to this asymmetry.
There's also the fact that women are better about maintaining relationships, planning group outings, etc., so that she usually "gets" most of their mutual friends in the break up (Managing the social calendar is traditionally the woman's domain in a relationship). Most of them were probably her friends first anyway, since she was more likely to maintain a large group of friends after leaving school.
Because men tend to have fewer close friends and recieve less emotional support in general than women, break ups also tend to be more traumatic. It makes sense men associate being single with loneliness more than women. If you're a stereotypical man who has oursourced the work of maintaining his social life to his wife for a decade, single life is going to be a lot more lonely for you than for her.
Part of me thinks there should be such a thing as social/emotional alimony. Shared friendships are essentially a valuable and unrecognized marital asset, regardless of who "earned" them.
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Sure, I don’t think this guy is necessarily lonely, unless he does really want a romantic relationship in which case he might be. But there are plenty of widowed older men who have similar large social circles, even if it’s less common than for widowed women.
Yes, that is why I was talking about general attitude. In general men may view loneliness as more problematic, for instance according to Pew research 57% of 18-34 men compared to 45% of women want a family. That is why I previously mentioned that men are more likely to see loneliness as a bad thing and approach it from despair, while women may view loneliness as an empowerment and something they want.
I think this goes hand in hand with general trend where men have more societal expectations put on them when it comes to traditional gender roles - strive for high status, provide for and protect your family and your community especially women and children. While for women the gender roles were targets of more attacks, to the extent where some traditional gender duties like motherhood were dropped completely. To even talk about having children as duty for women is viewed as misogyny.
This also informs how the topic is handled - incels are universally reviled as failures of their own character, while femcels are victims of society in general and men in particular at best. But this may also change in the future and men will be more comfortable also dropping the societal expectations - like 40 year old guys just working part time and playing video games completely reneging on social pressure on their behavior, similarly how it is with women now. However I would not see it as cure for loneliness, just more acceptance of shitty situation.
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After the trans mania dies down, I wonder if this will be the new context in which we're not allowed to use the phrase "social contagion".
The hypocrisy of the "theres no such thing as social contagion" brigade is, once again, amazing. Adolescence showed that problematic white boys are poisoned by Andrew Tate into killing girls with their misogynistic incel culture, which justifies broad castigation of the adolescent white male as the obvious target requiring remedial action. Meanwhile there is no such thing as transtok telling girls that being queer is simply self expression oh and binding makes the icky male gaze go away and if you think girls are prettier then maybe youre actually not a straight girl blablabla.
Social contagion is real, but its only a bad thing if boys can be blamed. There are no such thing as bad philosophies, only bad targets.
They would simply claim that this is a strawman, and that transtokkers exist but if you find their arguments compelling you must have really been trans else it would not have resonated with you and you would have left.
It's similar to the usual old dichotomy of "If you believe my arguments it's because of the power of the truth. If you believe the opponent, you have fallen for propaganda."
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Social media brainrot hits some women very hard and this is the result? People living in an online echo chamber amplifying their vague progressive leanings into extremism and cutting off all the evil conservatives, MAGAs, etc from their lives. People living the rhetoric of the lowest grade of Reddit political discourse.
I mean, far-right brain rot seems very big on self-improvement stuff even if some of their specific prescriptions are a bit dumb. I wonder how much of it is, specifically, that the hit the gym and cut out seed oils and start a business stuff protects men(there is a negligible number of actual women into this stuff) with rightward leanings from spiraling the way progressives do.
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It’s not just a problem of brain rot though. We’ve had a narcissistic culture for decades before brain rot hit the accelerator. Americans prize autonomy, their own needs and wants, and tend to see anyone or anything that requires them to give up their freedom and autonomy to care about others, do things they don’t want to do, or takes the focus off themselves as negative. It’s not that other people don’t want this, but Americans have long taken this to extreme levels. Brain rot simply weaponized this cultural trait and uses it to push political and social ends. Marinate an American raised in the culture of autonomy and narcissistic tendencies in content that tells them they are oppressed and abused by anyone who wants them to do something they don’t want to do. Then celebrate those who “throw off the shackles of oppression” by blowing up all their relationships, quitting their jobs (claims of burnout), dying their hair odd colors (rejection of the norms of society). People who read that stuff end up destroying themselves.
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I have to wonder if social media and smartphonification is making people give up on relationships.
They're simultaneously encouraged by toxic groups and subreddits to dump that gaslighting abuser already!! while also being programned to feel shitty about themselves. You shouldn't have to compromise so much when it comes to love!!, after all.
There's an endless doomscroll of ways to learn how your partner is a narcissist taking advantage of your empath nature while he weaponizes his incompetence to leave cleaning the bath tub to you.
Maybe the Great Awokening is not the cause of relationship collapse so much as another head on the social media-smartphone serpent frying people's brains.
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It's pretty bad. Women are honed to sense out status and sub comms, most can sense out the left winning in the ways reactionaries describe it and choose the winning side. What happens is that the winning side is anti family and anti human in its purest form, which means that if you are an acolyte, you'll be forced to adhere to stupider arguments that others will start calling out after a while. The sunk cost ensures that you stick with it and by the end you have nothing but your ideology which makes you stick even more to your identity.
I feel terrible about these people when I hear these stories. Owning sjws seems fun because the doctrines they swear by are evil and stupid, when you step back, you see a broken person who needs help. I'm not a pro Trans fella, I also recognize that what they feel is painful. Culture wars end up eating people, it's similar to the monastic order in some small cases wherein the people who purity spiral too hard end up being wierdo asetics where all they have left to show for is their ideology.
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Perhaps the attention paid to the male loneliness crisis is due to the fact that it manifests as societal wide problems, whereas female loneliness just results in shut-ins posting on private tumblrs to a circle of cheerleaders waiting their turn at the podium.
To share my own experience, my own compatriots who fell into this insanity actually fell into such due to the harry potter fandom spaces, where they would go insane about how gay pederasty was morally pure compared to disgusting heterosexuality. Their real life end state manifestations is raging at the CCP for censoring their beloved boy love dramas and spamming chatgpt for increasingly explicit kpop slashfic, but the through line still exists. They have eschewed all heterosexual relationships, consigned themselves to a chaste nunnery dedicated to homosexual pedophilia, and find plenty of validation from adjacent groups cheerleading self-indulgence as liberation from the patriarchy.
The great awokening obviously broke many brains, and till my death I will point to elevatorgate as the crystallization of feminism+racism+mental issues in the social justice caucus, but it particularly affected unmoored young women who lacked real life reinforcement. Whether negative or positive reinforcement, the lack of real life consequences for life choices makes online communities easy to fall into and hard to escape once that becomes a 'community'. Men who crawl out of the porn and vidya pits could be threats, women just become the crazy cousin no one talks to anymore.
What is "elevatorgate"?
Elevatorgate was the Gamergate of the Atheist community. That either explains the whole thing perfectly or leaves you totally mystified, so I'll break it down a bit more.
You have a community. A woman in the community claims that the behavior of the men in the community is problematic, and what is needed is for the community to begin enforcing stringent new rules developed by social justice ideology. These rules contradict large portions of the community's existing norms, so people resist their imposition. The community rapidly polarizes into those who are on board with Social Justice ideology and those who are not, and social shunning and retaliation forces people to pick a side or have a side picked for them.
A short time later, the community that once existed is now a shell of its former self, if it exists at all.
I say "woman" above because the primary blast wave happened to coincide with a notable wave of Feminism, but this appears to be more or less an accident of history. It could be any identity group favored by social justice, and later often was, but in 2014-2015 it was mainly feminism driving the process. "Elevatorgate" was when the blastwave hit the Atheists. "Gamergate" was when it hit video game fans. "RequiresHate" was when it came for the fantasy/sci-fi authors community, "The Dickwolves Incident" for the Penny Arcade fandom; I don't know what they called it for the TTRPG designer forums. It came for most online communities sooner or later.
I dunno if there was a single crystalizing incident for TTRPG fandom as a whole, or even for individual forums.
RPGnet has a date that the moderators themselves advertise as turning from "the wild west" to intersectionality uber allies (usually mid-2004/2005ish), but there wasn't some big incident motivating that, just a more formalized ruleset that wasn't even especially biased, outside Darren McLennan, Curt, and a few other moderators having unofficial exceptions.
Same for conventions: things like banning people over pepes and ok symbols are pretty far downstream of everything else at GenCon, just like the White Male Terrorist writeups were downstream of far broader definitions of harassment becoming standardized or the nuTSR thing was very much a reaction to progressive politics becoming cost-of-entry. There's a lot of stuff that was the topic de jour in the early days: D&D's Oriental Adventures controversy in early D&D 4 days (probably 2007-2009ish?), various convention kerfluffles, CthulhuTech controversies...
That said, I'd largely left the fandom except to keep up with Morancy by the worst of it, so I may just have missed some.
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For a real life example, spend time browsing 4chan vs crystal cafe.
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Ah, you know Pausanias?
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Just as we're more concerned with female vulnerability due to men's physical aggression, I'd argue another big contributor to our concern about male loneliness is the fact that female aggression tends to manifest socially, particularly via ostracization of the target.
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Finished reading this and scrolled away before a little voice inside whispered "That all sounded so normal and obvious that it barely even registered."
Lord, have mercy.
Some of us are extremly online though. Try to imagine explaining every sentence to a normie.
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Happened to me.
After ten pretty happy years of marriage, my first wife found tumblr and flipped hard left circa 2015. Delivered our baby, abandoned our family for another state (I have total custody), cut most of her hair off, dyed the rest blue, now works a dead end job with not enough hours. A while later, I realized that I still had access to her private twitter (which I don't really use at all), checked in, and she's posting about how many days she can't even get out of bed due to depression. Did gain weight, but that's from slender to, by American standards, moderately chubby. Based on what I've seen, her life revolves entirely around various fandoms.
Doesn't seem to have money for anything but ugly tattoos.
Latest news via the grapevine is she's marrying a woman who lives as a man.
I've stopped trying to make sense of it. God has been good and now I'm with the woman of my dreams and a lot more children. Deleted my old twitter account so I don't have to worry about the temptation to voyeurism anymore. Sincerely wish her all the best. Far away from my kids.
Do your kids (hers especially) ever see her? Very sad.
Every now and then. A lot of people have urged me to cut off all contact due to the sheer potential radiative damage of her influence but I'm of the mind that on balance it's better for them to know their mom. I'm also making a scary, hopefully-not-prideful bet that they'll be able to look at how her life is going and compare it to our healthy family life and learn the right lesson there.
Don't mind admitting this is one of the most stressful needles I've ever had to thread. The stakes are enormous and there's no clear right answer.
ETA: Since you seem sincerely concerned, I'll note that she never, ever calls to talk to them except sometimes on birthdays. And even after everything that surprises me.
That is sad, I think it’s a great tragedy for a child to grow up without their biological mother but I’m sure your current wife is able to help as best she can. I do think it’s best for the children to know, the alternative is that they seek her out, meet her as impressionable teenagers and young adults and then are possibly ideologically indoctrinated; if they think she’s a loser from the beginning that is much less likely, and any lies she might tell about you are less likely to be believed. All the best.
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What is your new wifes opinion on her? Any female understanding/repudiation?
They've met twice and don't have a relationship.
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I think there might be a Berkson's paradox going on.
Very possibly, but I feel like just saying that employs Berkson's paradox as a thought-terminating cliche, rather than as a careful consideration of the observed clustered phenomena. Which correlation do you suspect might be spurious?
When I suggested that Lana is not just a person, but a personality, I meant it. Her post on the suicide forum made her a particularly extreme example of the type, but I know many women, including members of my family, who very much fit the type, though they haven't imploded their lives to quite the same spectacular degree. Some stay married (but often publicly declare their bisexuality), some get neopronouns, some keep their hair a natural color... but the commitment to wide-band political leftism combined with a willingness to excommunicate dissenters from their lives makes a pretty consistent through-line. Those things seem pretty obviously connected with the clustered phenomena--political leftism incentivizes sex and gender exploration, for example, and willingness to excommunicate others can extend to an unpersuaded spouse. Sociology is hard, but I'm not sure it's so hard that I should be willing to accept "nothing ever happens" as a refutation of the observations in this thread.
Assuming female hypergamy, in higher functioning circles you'd expect there to be more relatively lower functioning women. Lower functioning men can't make it to the circles and if they do are not tolerated for long. Low functioning men are detonating their relationships in the trailer park.
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I don't blame you for this mistake (for lack of a better term), because I didn't notice it until the second time I read your post, but I think our tendency to allow the present to inform out perceptions of the past can lead us toward explanations that don't make sense. At no point in 2015 was any of the smart money convinced that Trump was a viable political candidate. The perception of him before the 2016 primaries was that he was an unserious candidate who tapped into the resentments of a certain kind of person who typically didn't vote. Given the amount of vitriol he received from pretty much everyone in the Republican establishment and his questionable standing among Evangelical Christians, it was assumed that he was good at getting headlines and winning in too-early-to matter polls but as soon as the people who actually mattered started paying attention his standing would drop like a rock.
It seems pretty clear to me that Lana's personal problems have nothing to do with Trump, or the culture war in general. By the time Trump announced his candidacy, her marriage was pretty much over, she was making intimate details of her relationship with her husband semi-public, and she was burning bridges in her social circle—I'm hesitant to conclude that gay marriage disagreements had anything to do with that; if she was oversharing with people such as yourself who barely knew her, you can only imagine what she was telling people from church.
I had a friend in college who grew up relatively poor in a wealthy suburb. He always had this outside fixation on status and success. He majored in business, and read books by Donald Trump and other motivational people that he took literally as business advice. He wanted to go to law school and be a sports agent, and he interned with a sports agency and got to meet Barry Sanders. But his obsession was entirely superficial. For example, he'd read in his popular business books about the importance of budgeting time, so he'd block off time in the evenings to do homework and study. But this consisted of him watching television with a book open, which he'd close at 9pm or whatever and say that he'd already done his studying for the night and was keeping on schedule. When I told him I didn't much like scotch, he told me I should develop a taste for it because that's what the big dogs drank. When his aging Volvo got totaled after a drunk driver rear-ended him at a traffic light, he started test driving cars like the Ford Explorer Eddie Bauer Edition (new, of course) rather than buy whatever the insurance payout would get him.
At some point he got the idea that taking prescription opiates recreationally was a high-status thing to do. When he first mentioned that he liked painkillers, I thought maybe he was just finding a silver lining in dental work or something. When he started talking about it more, I tried to disabuse him of the notion that it was cool by noting its nickname of "hillbilly heroin" and pointing to a bust in West Virginia that had been on the news. He assured me, though, that top businessmen and all the hip young Wall Street traders and attorneys used it to unwind. I never actually saw him take anything, but he came into my dorm room one day junior year asking if I had any painkillers. I pulled a bottle of gin out of my desk and told him that was the only painkiller I needed, and he laughed but said, no, seriously. When I informed him that I didn't (which wasn't entirely true because I had most of a Percocet prescription left over, though I wasn't about to commit a felony for a few bucks), he asked my roommate, who was a bit of a stoner but not a junkie and also someone he barely knew. My roommate seemed taken aback that he would make such a request, and I was inclined to agree.
The problem became more serious later that year, when he started stealing from his roommate. They had been together since Freshman year without incident, and there was enough trust between them that the roommate would leave his wallet out on his desk when in class. This guy would then fill his gas tank and be back before his roommate returned (this was in the days when most credit card purchases required a signature; gas stations didn't if you paid at the pump). After the roommate found out he informed the administration and this guy was banned from the dorms. He still attended the school, though he had huge gaps in his day with nowhere to go, and he was embarrassed for other people to find out what had happened, so he'd hang around the dorm entrance and wait for somebody to go in, and since everyone recognized him as a resident he'd usually be let in, and he'd find a not-too close acquaintance to hang out with until his next class. I let him in once after he supposedly forgot his keys and he decided to hang out in my room for a couple hours, which I thought was odd since that never happened in the preceding two and a half years, but whatever. By this point, my roommate had withdrawn and I had a single room, and a day or so later this guy asked my if I'd mind letting him stay in the extra bed for a couple nights. By this point, I knew what was going on and asked him what was wrong with his own bed down the hall, and he gave me some bullshit answer about not some unspecified problems with his own roommate, and in the spirit of malicious compliance I told him that if it was that bad I'd be happy to have him for the rest of the year so long as he put an official request in, which in my experience would be approved by the end of the day. But if there was something he wasn't telling me then absolutely not or I could get in serious trouble. After I informed the rest of our friends of this exchange it was agreed that the administration had to be informed, and everyone in the dorm had to know that they weren't to let him in under any circumstances. After we reported him, he was expelled.
For a long time, I've had a personal policy of not getting involved in other people's drama, and it's served me well. What I mean by that is that if two people I know are having a dispute and one confides in me I tell them that I can sympathize but since I'm not involved I don't know everything about what's going on and, he (or she) hasn't done anything to me personally, so I'm not going to take sides in a matter that's really none of my business. That being said, if I am involved, and the offense is serious enough, I'm not going to pull any punches, even if it ends up destroying your life. I was friends with this guy, but we weren't exactly close; we hung out a lot, but I primarily was friends with him through other people. As all his other friends dropped off, I tried to remain aloof and neutral. When he asked me to do something that could land me in serious trouble so he could keep up the facade of still living in the dorms, that was the last straw. He seriously thought I didn't know he was a thief and would have no problem letting him live with me; for all I know, he had plans to steal from me had I been sucker enough to let him stay.
I don't know if the drug use was a way for an insecure guy to try to look cool, or if the claims that it was cool were justifications for his using it to cope with insecurity, but I really don't know that it matters. What I did learn from this, as well as from every situation similar to this that I've witnessed, is that people who are intent on destroying their lives aren't going to listen to reason, and are going to continue alienating everyone around them until there's nobody left and they're forced to face God alone. I understand the virtues of loyalty, but it's a two way street, and patience runs out if the other person doesn't show loyalty in return and tries to take advantage of you. To my friend's credit, as far as these things go, he never tried to guilt trip anyone or talk crap about anyone or intentionally create drama. The numerous times we told him that his behavior was unacceptable, that narcotics addiction wasn't cool, and that he'd never achieve his goals by going down this road, he wouldn't get angry but just roll his eyes and tell us we didn't know what we were talking about, or just say "okay" and then keep doing what he was doing.
The good news is that this story at least appears to have a somewhat happy ending. I lost touch with this guy as soon as he was expelled, and haven't talked to him since. A year or two later I heard he had gone to rehab and was back in some kind of school, though this may have been community college. All of this info comes from a friend who was closer to him than I was and who I used to talk to on the phone regularly. When the subject came up, he said he didn't know much but the situation while we were in school was worse than I realized at the time, though he either didn't provide details or I don't remember them. About a decade ago I found out he was selling industrial supplies for some company in the exurbs. More recently, I found out he married a girl who did the kind of low-level bookkeeping someone with an associate's degree in accounting does and they were living in a fairly nice area with a kid or two. The friend didn't know if he worked for the same company or what he was doing now.
It's certainly a decent life, but it's a far cry from what he wanted to be. Sales guys can make more money than I do, but money does not equal status. The best he can hope for on that front, where he is now, is hanging out with local contractors and small-town bank managers at steakhouses housed in strip malls, and a couple times a year taking his wife out to one of the restaurants with dazzling views of the city that attract the kind of people who say "ooh, classy" when they walk inside but that no one with any kind of real status would be caught dead in, not least of which because they serve overpriced "funeral food". Then again, maybe had he been more mature he'd have realized that this was a life worth pursuing, since those of us who ended up working in Downtown offices with floor to ceiling windows and personal secretaries realized that all that gets you is invitations to impossibly boring parties hosted by judges and politicians that everyone attends out of obligation and no one actually enjoys. Then again, maybe the whole status thing was a phase he would have grown out of, or maybe he would have just been to untalented or lazy to ever have a shot at the big leagues to begin with.
Circling back to Lana, I'm guessing that she had a personal crisis that she couldn't handle, and for whatever reason she found herself looking more for validation than practical advice, and when the people in her life started telling her things she didn't want to hear, she lashed out and cut them off. It's not like her family and friends were all Republicans who supported Trump and she couldn't take them anymore; it seems like she alienated people on all sides of the political spectrum. And when you cut yourself off from everyone in your life, what's left? It's not just you and God alone now, because there will always be internet message boards where the friendless will always be able to receive unconditional validation for their poor choices or get endlessly berated, depending on which board it is and who's logged on at the time. Something tells me that neither is what this woman needs. I hope she gets help and can lead a happy, productive life again, but I don't think politics has much to do with it.
You’re a mainstream liberal. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but you tend to either be blind to wokeness because it’s like water to fish for you, or ignore it because it’s politically inconvenient to have such illiberal and unpopular allies.
Shunning used to be something cults did, but wokeness mainstreamed it as part of its attacks on free speech.
Is this the setup for a Mitch-Hedburg-style joke?
"Shunning used to be something only cults did. It still is, but it used to be too."
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What does this mean?
It means they serve mediocre wedding-at-a-country club dishes in a venue that has the ambience of a funeral home.
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God damn it, addicts are addicted and no amount of waspish dressings down can overpower chemical dependence. Nobody wants to ruin their life - that's cope - they are reacting to stimuli. Modern society has twisted that stimuli and now perverse incentives make it easier than ever to self destruct. Did he really think it was cool or was it actually just cope?! Like he was stealing from your friend thinking "I'm Remington Steele!" and not 'I don't want to feel any more, my head is pounding, my arms are shaking, my stomach roils but worst of all is the shame, the knowledge I am doing the wrong thing and I can't stop, I hate myself but I can't stop.'*
Call no man happy until he is dead. You are right that he didn't achieve his dreams and you are right that you have more status than he does. You are right that he will never achieve your level of success, and he won't have to suffer through parties and a corner office. But he also isn't bitching about you on an anonymous forum for contrarian autists.
*I'm not saying 'just be nice to junkies and let them do what they want' I'm saying what I said, nobody wants to self destruct. Enabling is not kindness.
That you know of.
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I think you’re wrong about this. Many people lean into their problems rather than out. Sometimes because - as cope - they convince themselves that they’re self destructing in order to live up to their ideals and then self-destruct harder to prove it. Sometimes because they sabotage themselves rather than risk failure with no excuse.
Mentally healthy people do not want to self destruct, no. Doing so 'as cope' is talking themselves into it via perverse incentives, but they don't want to self destruct, they want the psychological comfort of believing they are in control.
Edit: "They just want to self destruct" is a defense mechanism. It is a person saying they have tried to help in every way they can think of and it doesn't work and so they must want it. But addicts and other mentally ill people can be helped - it's just really unpleasant and hard, harder than anyone should have to go through without a salary. Which is to say nobody should be expected to do it and shouldn't feel ashamed that they didn't. But that doesn't mean that the mentally ill want to self destruct, that doesn't mean they are intent on destroying their lives and bringing everyone else down with them - that is just easier to accept than your own helplessness.
I don't literally mean 'want' as in literally 'will happily tell you that this is their intention'. I mean 'want' as in 'cannot be swayed from their path' i.e. they act as though they want to self destruct. Saying so is a defense mechanism, yes, but it's also that I have known such people and they will reject, subvert and oppose anything that will actually help them so actively that 'want' seems to be the correct word for it.
I do not think that ordinary people can help this subset of addicts and the mentally ill because that would require the power and authority to straight-up enforce 'help' on unwilling recipients, and in some cases it would take active mind-control.
But by saying they want to self destruct all you are doing is absolving yourself of the responsibility to help them by putting your failure on them. I'm saying absolve yourself of responsibility, it's not your responsibility to fix them any more than you feel is required of your morals - but don't put your failure on them. If you write people off, you probably had good reasons, but you still wrote them off. Saying you wrote them off because they made you is passing the buck. Like always, my biggest concern is personal responsibility.
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My maybe hot take is that addicts are optimists. However intolerable they find their lives and/or motivated by warped incentives they are, they choose to kill themselves one day at a time instead of permanently, always telling themselves that they're going to quit.
Speaking as an on-off alcoholic who has generally trended from "pathetic, shut-in drunk who blacks out every night" in my early 20s to "incorrigible barfly" in my late 20s, to "weekend warrior who hits a happy hour or two a week out of boredom" I guess that my tolerance for feeling like shit during the day has declined and my desire to be present instead of hungover during the day has increased as I've gotten older. I'll probably never have great impulse control as far as drinking is concerned, but I have or at least try to have better things to do with my free time. My father has been an 18 pack of coors light a night guy as long as I can recall and I have no clue how he does it in his late 50s. I'm not tough enough and/or don't hate myself enough to do that.
I'm far from a sage or any kind of example to follow but if asked for advice I just tell people that they have to find something better to live for, something better to be for. Maybe professionals can help there, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect a layman, friend, or spouse to be able to find that thing for you.
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I mean, some people commit suicide, and if that's not choosing to self-destruct I don't know what is.
A lot of it, though, occurs to me as an adolescent exploration of boundaries.
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If there's a valid point here it's extraordinarily minor and this was a terrible way to make it. The post doesn't scan to me as even close to bitching.
You seem to be focused on pedantry, based on your determination that the suicidal fit who I was talking about because suicide is self destruction, so I don't think you are interested in my point. Talking, if bitching is too 'harsh'.
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That is why I said "It cannot possibly have been Donald Trump's fault that Lana divorced her husband." I assume Obergefell was also not the actual inciting incident of her divorce--but yes, in retrospect, I definitely see those as coincidences in the most literal sense of the term, unrelated stage-setting events that would become relevant as the story unfolded.
Of course I can't refute this with great certainty. I can report on what I saw myself, filling in some gaps with what was reported to me by others, and if you don't find the correlations compelling, what more can I say? I agree with you, strongly, about the results of cutting people off, for whatever reason; humans do not generally thrive under that condition.
But I know why I was cut off, in this particular story. And I know whose politics correlate more strongly with cutting people off for political reasons. The culture war in general may or may not have been the beating heart of Lana's problems (depending on one's thoughts concerning the possible psychological hazards of generic 90s feminism), but the idea that her problems had nothing to do with the culture war in general strikes me as... unlikely.
Do you know how her ex-husband is doing now?
Not in any detail. I just googled him and he's still got a profile page at the same law firm he was at 20 years ago.
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I’m recently divorced (politics didn’t factor, my wife was more conservative) and have been wrestling with this political absolutism in online dating apps and have gotten into some dustups about the topic in a dating subreddit.
A lot of dating profiles put politics first. As I live in a purple suburb of a radically leftist city, most of this manifests as “No MAGA.” As a “conservative” of the classically-liberal-anti-trump variety, I am not MAGA, but this sentiment extends to anyone who has ever in the last 30 years referred themselves as conservative or Republican. It’s impossible to open a dialogue about what it means to be “conservative” and whether MAGA is actually “conservative.” Nuance is dead. Thought has been replaced by memes.
I would swipe left on any “No MAGA” profile, anyway, because, to me, that mindset – that discussion of political differences is completely off the table – is what I find offensive, even if the person agreed with me on every other issue. As long as the discussion is respectful and aimed at understanding each other’s different views, it should be tolerable. My guess is that the “No MAGA” party would be unable to remain respectful during such a discussion, so in order to assert their moral superiority, they need to shortcut the conversation before it begins. The ability to understand an argument has atrophied, overshadowed by the rush of clicking the “like” or “dislike” buttons.
As I get older, I increasingly find mindkilled flag-waving from my own camp just as distasteful. I don't want to be friends with someone whose Prius sports an "8647" bumper sticker, but nor do I want to be friends with someone with "Liberal Tears are Delicious" on the back of their truck.
I've never dealt with online dating, but I always imagined that the "no MAGA" is a blessing in disguise. It outs people as shallow thinkers or deranged partisans and makes it easier to sift them out of the pool. It would be much worse to go on several dates before finding out the truth.
But after filtering them out, is there much of a pool left? My gut feeling is that the answer might be no, because I'd guess that stable, happy, conservative or grill-pilled single women probably get enough attention IRL that they don't need to use apps. And that any woman who apparently fits that profile might be playing a character (wheat field tradwife) or have some baggage. Is that the case?
I live in a blue suburb of an ultraviolet city, and filtering for women mid-20s to mid-30s, no kids, want/open to kids.
Maybe half include some sort of information indicating progressive politics, and 1 in 10 or 12 have something along the lines of "no MAGA" or "conservatives swipe left." It's really not as bad as you think, especially when you realize the apps specifically prompt you to list your politics and pick from a list of causes that are important to you (that are noticebly lacking in right-of-center options), and half the women affirmatively opt-out of including it. I've never had politics come up while talking on a dating app or on a first date off one. I get way more shit for not having social media to stalk than I do about my politics.
I've also noticed that the women saying "no MAGA" tend to not be particularly attractive anyway.
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Yeah, it's a quick "No" for me, but I live in the Portland area and the women in my age range (40-55) are basically the Pussy Hat brigade from 2016-2017. It does limit the options when an entire geo region is a meme. There are a few conservatives, but I don't fit in well with them, either, unfortunately: I'm not religious or outdoorsy, I'm blue culture with greyish-red politics, and I'm not a masculine ideal. That leaves me mostly with the silent cohort of women who simply don't care about politics, which also sounds dull.
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I haven't been on the dating apps in a few years, but you don't get how hard it shuts down potential matches to put conservative on your profile and also how many of those potential matches are actually open to conservative beliefs they just have this strange conception that anybody identifying as conservative on a dating app is literally a Jan 6 attendee.
Though probably the metagame has contributed to a case where since most rational people stopped ticking that box, the boxtickers left are the MAGAest MAGAs who have no tact.
On your second point I'd generally say it's other way. I know plenty of 'good conservative women' who are absent of red flags, but a combination of a fairly conservative (Massive age skews, lack of fresh blood coming into their churches etc) social circle, workplace flirtation not being what it once was and frequently a lack of meaningful experience in courting means they just kinda get stuck in a loop when waiting for prince righteous to sally into their mortal life.
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Maybe it's the contrarian in me (I was a Paultard in high school/undergrad, so being at political odds with pretty much everyone is nothing new even if I'm more into Nixon than libertarianism these days and less ideologically committed in general.), but I'd take "no MAGA" as a challenge. Then again, I've always found blue tribe dilettantes to be charming, especially if they're smart and argumentative.
On a totally (not) unrelated note, I remain baffled as to why the bar I used to work at (which aspires to cater to grad students/professor types) hasn't followed my suggestion to do anything they can to market to the university law school. FFS law students might be the last group of young people that actually drink!
I wouldn't. I live in an area where a disproportionate number of the pretty young women on dating apps were liberal (at least a decade ago when I was single, probably even more true now) and I have liberal friends so I never thought it was anything worth filtering out. Two things have changed my mind.
One is that my wife is more liberal than me and this causes friction, both from her being annoyed that I am not more anti-Trump (I am not MAGA and do not like Trump but I remain a conservative and push back against TDS type stuff) and us not always being on the same page for child rearing.
The second comes from a young woman I met on OKCupid. We had a first date that went well, and then at the end of the second date after I kissed her she explained that she had seen I was a conservative and she was a liberal and she was looked for a long term relationship and didn't think it would work out. In hindsight I'd say this was very mature and correct of her (though waiting until AFTER I'd wasted my money and time on the date instead of canceling beforehand was pretty shitty), but at the time it was soul crushing. She was not the prettiest girl I'd met on the apps (due to shyness, confidence issues, and not liking to drink I had better luck on the apps than IRL though if I had it to do over again I'd work to change that) but she was up there and she was definitely the one I had the most in common with. And what is very clear to me is that after our first date she liked me a lot and happily accepted the second date and then went to look at my profile again and found the dreaded right wing thought. It is one thing to be filtered out up front by by blue haired harpies with problem glasses, having something with manifest promise cut off at the knees was a gut punch.
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Query: are Leftists or Rightists more likely to report experiencing Demonic Possession? There are about 1,000 exorcisms a year in the United States, though the numbers aren't exactly reported in surveys, and I'd imagine a lot of Pentecostal exorcists don't think the Catholic exorcists are doing shit-all and vice versa. What is reporting Demonic Possession going to correlate with? Well mostly, it's going to correlate with belief in Demonic Possession, essentially no one who doesn't believe in Demons will report it, and essentially no one who isn't religious believes in Demons; so we can guess that more right wingers report demonic possession.
Similarly, self-reports of mental illness, which is what the study measured, correlate mainly that one believes in mental illness and has had contact with the mental health industrial complex. This correlates very strongly with left wing politics. I doubt the effect exists if one balanced for that first.
I should note my own prior here; you're much better off with a priest than a shrink.
I would not be shocked to see a study with a dataset supporting that exorcism is a better mental health intervention than therapy.
The median outcome of beginning the exorcism process is ‘you’re imagining it, go see a mental health specialist. We can provide a list of catholic psychologists and psychiatrists sorted by gender if you’d like’.
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It should be noted that there are way more cases of mental illness than exorcisms. And at least Catholic exorcists won’t even see you unless a shrink checks you out to make sure you’re not just crazy(indeed, Scott has done this). Not exactly an apples to apples comparison.
Sure, and way more people in today's America genuinely, deeply believe in mental illness than believe in demonic possession. We'll see more explanations from the dominant religion of Scientism than we will from other religions. Even pious Catholics acknowledge the dominion of Science and Psychology, even most self-identified Catholics don't really believe in demonic possession as something that might happen to them today.
Though, you're right in that even within their respective paradigms, mental illness is much more common than demonic possession, and a "mental illness" like mild ADHD isn't much compared to possession. So maybe a better analogy would be if we had a survey asking people if they "are a sinner?" Far more right wingers would say they are sinners than left wingers, this would not reflect any underlying reality about sin.
I just don't really accept that "mental illness" is much of an explanation for anything, divorced from generalized statistics about outcomes, which are much more mixed and inconclusive and mostly gets into a series of No-True-Scotsman and Motte-and-Bailey games around what is actually meant by Red Tribe and Blue Tribe. There's something "the enemy is both strong and weak" about saying leftism is the cause and effect of mental illness, while also saying the left controls all the levels of power and all the commanding heights of industry and academia and culture.
There are a couple of phrases which make me discount pretty much anything people are using them to say. This is one of them.
This is just a sneer, isn't it?
Can you put some meat on it?
"Scientism" is itself a sneer, and insofar as it means anything, is usually a false accusation claiming that people worship science or use science when they should be using feelings instead. Of course since its actual meaning is vague, anyone who uses it can deny meaning what they are using it to to mean and there's no way to prove them wrong.
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Do you doubt the dogmatic power of positivism or are you an adherent for whom "it's just the truth"?
Do we do false dichotomies here, or do we do false dichotomies here?
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But their point wasn't that exorcism numbers balance out mental illness numbers. Their point was that the formal part of a formal mental illness diagnosis is already strongly tribally coded, in the same way that a formal possession diagnosis is tribally coded. That is, therapy is integrated into Blue life in a way that it is not for Red life; it may be that Reds suffer mental illness at equivalent rates, but are simply vastly less likely to attempt to get treatment for it. Given the extremely questionable efficacy of therapy as a treatment, it's not obvious why what we see is not what we should expect to see, given an equivalent prevalence of mental illness: Crazy reds ignore it and cope as best they can, Crazy blues get "treatment" that largely does nothing, and then cope as best they can with roughly similar outcomes to the Reds.
This is not the way I would personally bet, as I think Blue Tribe has some legitimately fucked-up memes endemic in its environment that are in fact bad for the brain, but I would certainly not claim to be able to prove this at a population level. The replication crisis looms too large over the datasets, in my opinion.
Sûre, but every dataset available gives the same answer- blues have worse mental health.
Except men commit suicide more often and are more likely to be conservative. All that counting the number of people who say they have or are in treatment for mental health issues, can tell you is the number of known people, people who seek treatment or talk about it.
Men more often keep it in until they snap. Working class men specifically (who went about 63% for Trump) make up the majority of fatal drug overdoses, alcohol related deaths and suicides it appears. Self-medicating, coping and keeping it inside until you can't is the male strategy basically.
Blues have worse visible mental health is perhaps all we have the data to say. But I think there are enough signs that say that a lot of Red men particularly suffer what Blues would call mental health issues, they just don't talk about it and suffer through it in silence, until they drink/drug themselves to death slowly or kill themselves directly.
The truth may well be that Blue women particularly talk about it too much, and Red men particularly, don't talk about it enough. Which is going to confound any easy way to compare rates of mental health issues.
But how much this is confounded by the fact that the economic outlook for working class men in the Rust Belt is currently really bad? In 1975 you would have seen vastly higher amounts of fatal drug overdose rates in America’s ruined cities than out in the countryside. Now the situation is reversed.
Sure, that could be a cause. But the claim was that Blue mental health is worse than Red mental health because you hear about it more. That they might have different causes that vary over time isn't relevant to whether that is true or not. If Red mental health problems currently seem to manifest in different ways and thus are not as visible and thus not being counted as mental health issues at the rates at which they occur, that would be separate from what is causing them.
Why there are mental health issues is irrelevant as to whether we are measuring them accurately and if they appear at the same rates in the same ways in these different populations at any point in time. Conditions of course vary over time in both populations. If we were in 1975 then we'd also want to be seeing if those urban drug overdoses were hiding mental health issues, if we were doing the same comparison back then.
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Do we have a dataset that doesn't consist of a survey question asking some variation on "Do you have bad mental health?"
Rates of completed suicide would work, at least in the senses I'd care about. Link a voter file with death certificates.
Unfortunately, no one has done this yet, afaict. There are state-aggregate studies showing that people in conservative states have higher suicide rates than those in liberal states, but ecological fallacy. I'm also not sure how to correct for demographics--or, rather, whether it makes sense to, since many of the same factors that correlate with suicide also correlate with Republican party affiliation.
I would think that's just measuring effectiveness of method. Firearms lead to more bodies, pills lead to more look at me attempts.
...you just split suicides/suicides attempts into gendered groups, not political. Men tend to be more successful, women tend to attempt it more.
What I had one person point out that's always stuck with me, however, is that an 'attempted suicide' moment for a man is going to be different for a woman. 'Attempted suicide' in that case is going to involve a man taking out a loaded gun, staring at it for an hour, and then quietly putting it away.
The crux of the argument being, 'attempts' in this situation are going to be manifest differently and trying to measure them scientifically is going to be messy and lossy as the result.
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Maybe! There are certainly confounders galore. There have been a variety of attempts to do as you've suggested, or make other, similar adjustments. The most recent one I'm aware of is here. From the abstract:
I just can't help but notice that studies along these lines keep showing up, and keep generating the same kind of response. The 2023 study showing greater depressive affect in leftist teenagers, for example, generated dozens of think-pieces explaining that this was probably just a result of differences in self-reporting, or level of political engagement, or "hey maybe these kids should be depressed, if they're even remotely aware of how terrible things are." But as one of the more thorough essays (archive link to an American Affairs article) I've found on the matter suggests:
Isn't this just a replication of hedonic adaptation? No matter how good you have it, most people feel "average" most of the time.
Mental health isn't really related to how someone's mood. Mental health is a measurement for how well a person can respond appropriately to life's challenges and has a good working model of the world. Even something like a "mood disorder" is one where there is a disconnect between actual life circumstances and the person's state of mind or feeling. If someone was feeling miserable because of actual life circumstances - say they're locked in a basement and getting tortured, no one would consider that a mood disorder. And a mood disorder also covers feelings of elation caused by BPD, feelings of anger, etc.
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When I was a kid, in the 80s, where I lived, Ronald Reagan was the good czar, and all the lingering bad old strife from the 70s was going to be put behind us, because it was all a great misunderstanding, with the government getting way too out of line with the real Americans and needing to be put back in its place. And liberal was a dirty word to tar people with. I didn't understand what had happened, of course, but I could just feel it, overwhelmingly, from all the adults in my life.
As I got older and further from that past, it seemed less and less real, like some sort of giant ridiculous propaganda coup... especially by the Clinton years (New Democrats didn't look anything like what I had been told, right?) And especially by the awfulness of the George W. Bush years. It got really easy to think that all the adults in my life, back in the 80s, had just been misled by propaganda and that era's equivalent of Fox News.
All of which made the 2010s deeply harrowing and shocking for me, especially as I had already steered my adult life in the assumption that much of what I had been told as a kid wasn't true. But early in the 2010s, it dawned on me, watching the mounting personal wreckage of political radicalization from people in my own personal life, especially women of a certain sort, exactly why those adults I had grown up around had loathed the 70s so intensely. "The personal is political" might be an interesting airy political theory, but as a lived practice, it clearly utterly breaks a lot of normal people into quivering, non-functional shards who can't recover from it.
I have a half-sister, twelve years younger than me, who went very much through a similar arc to Lana (I have never been especially close to her). She started out quite conservatively religious. And now she's got three kids, lives in a polycule and her various gendered lovers with her despairing, rather unwilling cuckold husband, has gone down the double mastectomy route, is mainlining T and showing off her beard and armpit hair on social media, and writes borderline suicidal posts from time to time about how the only people who will respond to her at this point are online activist LGBTQ friends, as everyone in her normal life is done with her. I'm probably "misgendering" her here, but I blocked her a while ago on Facebook, so I really only get updates second hand through my sister. And my half-sister has a litany of internet disabilities and conditions, can't leave the bed most days, and has made nasty allegations about several members of her family about abuse in the past, none of which are backed up by any of her many siblings. It's horrible to watch, especially given the children involved. I think she would have had a rocky mental health experience in life no matter what, as it runs in the family. But she's clearly been stewing in social influences that make everything far, far worse, and amplify her hardest tendencies... And I've seen milder versions of this play out the last several years in other cases, too!
It's vaguely interesting that there's this "public" conversation about incels and online radicalization of young guys (which, I mean, sure, there's a plausible discussion there), and then meanwhile, there's this giant elephant in the room.
I think we see this sort of backwards. People who make their politics, religion, or sexuality the center of their personality generally are not emotionally healthy. TBH, I think we have an ongoing mental health crisis that’s manifesting itself through politics.
There used to be a normal way to do politics when I was a kid in the 1980s and 1990s. Sure people had an interest in politics, but it was nothing like today. For one thing, the thought of breaking a friendship over politics was something that didn’t occur to people. You disagreed, even argued, but you were still friends and still did things together. And furthermore, politics was just one thing among several that a person might be interested in. There would be other things, TV shows, sports, cars, art, music, and hobbies that took up most of people’s time and attention. It was a much healthier way to do politics, and frankly made for better politics. When people tune out, it’s possible for the leadership to stop posturing and campaigning and start governing.
I think the problem is less centering one's life around politics as it is centering one's life around politics but not going beyond vague, slacktivist methods like calling people out on social media or even attending protests. Actual politicians and people who work for political or community organizations for a living don't seem to have this problem. If she were concerned about the "little people" who Trump was supposedly leaving behind, it might have done her better to do legal work for people who couldn't afford her services, or get involved with a charitable organization, or even picked up litter along the side of the road. It's not like there aren't a lot of people out there looking for volunteers. But I don't think that was ever on the table because I think her political centerdness was downstream of mental health problems, not the other way around.
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If I may reframe this, healthy people do not make politics, religion, or sexuality the center of their personality.
People centering their personality around religion is an old, old phenomenon, and while often seen as annoying, it is very much something that society knows how to deal with.
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I mean I think it’s true of most things. Obsession is a sign of a problem. Most people tend to find a balance between interests, hobbies and life. I think this is part of the impulse behind the JBP advice to “clean your room” before you take on the great issues of the world. If you’re unhealthy, you’ll get obsessed and it takes over everything else, and probably make things worse.
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I'm not positive, but my impression is that this was a conscious turn by really important elite factions in the 80s, though. I don't believe it was "how politics was prior to the 2010s" - it was more like, what politics looked like once the Reagan detente offered up grill-pilling as an option for exhausted voters who were ready to move on from disruption and political struggle. No more fighting over politics - instead, America is great, nationalism is great, Wall Street is great, money and capitalism are great, religion and families are great, no more inflation is great, Hollywood images of peaceful race relations are great, local religious observances instead of national politics is great, Cosby Show instead of All in the Family is great. And especially, Boomers finally leaving their disruptive twenties and settling down to be stable and raise their families is great.
If you go back and read, say, "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 72" by Hunter S. Thompson, or "Days of Rage" by Bryan Burrough, or really anything about the rise of the New Left in the 70s, there is a whole lot of familiar archetypes, topics, and styles of rhetoric.
I guess at this point I'm coming to believe that breaking the brains of a certain amount of people is an overtly desirable feature, not bug, of certain kinds of political agitation. Making people unreasonable can actually be a really effective strategy for forcing certain kinds of change through, because then powerful leaders can't (by definition) reason with those people, and thus have to give in to demands instead or find some other way of dealing with them. I feel like that's what I've been seeing, at any rate - people who would naturally be somewhat unstable having that massively amplified by forces that appear to be attempting to accentuate exactly those tendencies for a variety of reasons.
I absolutely agree with your prescription about what would be better, I'm just not sure if there's a way to get there from here. I think there were a bunch of factors that made Reagan exactly the right affable messenger for that turn in the 80s for a turn away from politics of a certain sort.
On a personal level, or a community level I think creating and maintaining “politics free zones” is a good idea. It can be anything from a gaming group or hobby group or just a group of friends who meet regularly without allowing political talk. Fostering the same kind of thing in family, friend groups, or business settings.
On a personal level, I think it’s unhealthy to spend more than an hour or two a day thinking about politics. As such after you’ve read that much news, it’s probably a good idea to just go do something else. Read a novel, draw, watch a drama or sports, dance, play a sport, hang out, whatever, but don’t marinate in political news. And I think personally reading news, especially from a good reputable source, is better than watching videos or getting it from social media. Reading is much less likely to be sensationalized or emotional.
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C'mon man, she's family. You don't have to name call like that.
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Scott's talked about how bad arguments can act as a kind of vaccine - people reject strong versions of an argument because they've heard, considered, and rejected the bad argument. The woman reminds me of several people I've known personally - quite a piece of work. But the basic issue behind the abortion debate is this: women don't want to be forced to spend nine months pregnant. That's a massive imposition on their lives. It doesn't really matter whether you're doing it out of "hate" or honest conviction, they will see you as their enemy and won't want to associate with you.
I know a guy who's radicalization toward far-right conspiracytardism I can take credit for halting. So reaching out does occasionally work.
What was the nature of the conspiracies? Asking so I can have a rubric for my own views.
The usual crap conservatives started believing around 2021.
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Then it sounds like either they're specifically upset about the extremely rare cases of rape leading to pregnancy, or else they have an accountability problem.
I mean, it is a pretty reasonable expectation that whatever method of birth control used will just work. Unexpected pregnancies certainly exist outside of rape!
If a woman has sex, she might get pregnant. No one's forcing her -- outside of rape. So she either accepts the chance of getting pregnant or doesn't. That's a choice.
And I can promise you that the man in the situation isn't getting told "Golly that wasn't your fault, there's nothing you could have done, don't worry about the resulting human life, that would be asking too much." Because people understand that men, as adults, need to be held accountable.
I completely agree that the general support for abortion stems mostly from both men and women wanting pregnancies to be optional; I think calling this desire an "accountability problem" is a pointlessly obtuse way of framing the issue except that it attempts to build consensus. Fwiw, both of my children were from unexpected pregnancies (birth control ain't got shit on me) that we actively elected to keep, which seems far better than having unexpected pregnancies that we were forced to keep and never got to consider "wanted".
However, I think you dismissing the extremely rare cases too easily. Having your daughter/self forced to carry a child of rape is a completely horrific scenario that you can except essentially no chance of. Having your wife (or worse, mother of your children) die because they were forced to carry a life-threatening pregnancy is another absolute nightmare. These are things that, from my perspective, need to just have a zero probability.
Rape and extreme health risks with regards to abortion are some of the clearest examples of motte-and-bailey arguments I know of. The best way to spot a motte-and-bailey argument is to see if the person is satisfied if you were to grant them the motte. In this case, imagine abortion was 100% completely legal up to any point in the pregnancy for rape cases and for significantly higher health risk than usual pregnancies, and 100% illegal for family planning purposes. If necessary, imagine an omniscient arbiter were able to make sure no rape victim gets dismissed and no one could get away with falsely claiming rape just to get an abortion.
I think a majority of pro-life people would be overjoyed. Even though they might have preferred a full ban, what they want, to save what they percieve as life, is in accordance with the arguments they put forth, so any decrease is good. Pro-choice people would be almost uniformly against, because extreme cases like rape and risky pregnancies are not the reason they are pro-choice, family planning is (but it's a harder sell, especially to family and duty minded conservatives). So in that case, guaranteeing absolutely no rape victim or no risky pregnancy is forced to term is not worth giving up on family planning.
*EDIT: In fact, I suspect that they would be unhappy in ways they could not reasonably explain themselves if full right to abortion were granted to rape and high medical risk cases on top of current compromises. Truthfully because they could not then use these as a shield to expand family planning rights, but I can easily imagine half-assed excuses as to why the medical establishment (or the omniscient arbiter) has no right to judge whether a woman has really been raped, only she can know!
Where I live abortion is allowed as a blanket rule if the mother is under 18, the mother is married but the child is not her husband's, the child is a product of incest or rape, the pregnancy is a threat to the health of the mother, or the child has been identified to have a serious disability.
All other cases of abortion need to get past an ethics panel to be allowed.
I consider this to be a very good state of affairs and a very reasonable solution that everyone should be ok with. I admit not everyone agrees with me, on either side, but blanket statements about no one on the prochoice side being happy with reasonable compromises because they want a family planning card is just you strawmanning your opponents.
Not my opponents actually, I'm not on any side in this. But pro-choice is pretty much tautologically against the compromise I gave, because the "choice" in the name of their movement is the mother's, not a police officer's, a doctor's or an ethics panel's choice.
They might take a compromise on timing, but not on reasons, because those are no one's business than the mother's.
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Why, then, is it that so many abortion bans do not have exceptions for rape? Falsely claiming that one was raped to get an abortion is not something I hear of very often. It seems like nothing but red meat for pro-choice people.
There's a distinction being made here between getting everything we (anti-abortionists) want and whether we'd be in favor of legislation which achieves some but not all of that. But we would take the proposed deal in a heartbeat for the same reason that the anti-gun crowd will be happy for every incremental erosion even if it doesn't result in a full ban.
I do want an exception for (legit) maternal health concerns -- that's just weighing one life against another as is difficult but appropriate -- but not for rape. The reason is simple: The rape resulted in a human life. If someone was conceived in rape and is now two years old, you can see why killing the child doesn't make sense. The fault is that of the rapist; ending an innocent third-party human life doesn't improve the situation.
The thought of a woman (or girl) having to go through that pregnancy is indeed horrific. This is what makes rape so terrible! In a sense, the rape is not an event at that point so much as an ongoing process. But I think ending an innocent human life is much worse than nine months of pregnancy.
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I think the pro-life people, particularly the religious who form a majority of them, don't tend to view the question tactically. If a position was imposed that reduced abortion rates without bringing it to zero, they'd still be happy, but they cannot themselves argue for a mere reduction because if they did they imagine themselves being tormented in the afterlife by the ghosts of the unborn fruits of rapes asking them "Wasn't I also a precious human being worth fighting for?". So for them, it has to be a total ban. This might change in the future if the pro-life position gets taken up en-masse by people who have another basis than religion for it; after all, natalism is not inherently religious.
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Only if you see pregnancy as a punishment for the crime of having sex they're "unfairly" trying to avoid.
No, I see it as an obvious direct consequence of their decisions. You're the one loading this completely-unobjectionable fact with emotional valence.
Crying that the natural consequence of one's decision is 'punishment' is childlike. And womanlike, I guess. As I said, they seem to have a problem with accountability.
ETA: Also, watch your quotation marks. I don't appreciate you putting words in my mouth.
"But actually there's a simple technological solution or medical treatment that negates the negative consequences."
And then people are mad as though this person is dodging the correct cosmic punishment for their sins rather than suffering as they deserve. As thought a universal justice with built in punishments for the wicked is being subverted by technological and medication advances.
Your very best and most charitable framing of your opponents is that they are crying in a womanlike manner?
Within this context, no one is attempting to 'punish' people for sexual activities that do not result in the creation of human lives. However, when people choose to engage in the specific versions of those activities which may result in the creation of human lives, our perspective is that they have certain obligations to the resulting human lives and should be held accountable.
Frankly your post belies an unhinged, pathological antipathy toward people who believe in human purpose and absolute morality, but I'm not getting much else from it.
I think dodging accountability is a childlike and feminine trait, yes.
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No, I see it as an obvious direct consequence of their decisions. You're the one loading this completely-unobjectionable fact with emotional valence.
It's not a fact - abortion can avoid it, just as technology has allowed us to avoid many "obvious direct consequences" in the past 300 years. Yet only this one you take issue with. I wonder why.
You're not arguing in good faith here, having repeatedly attributed stances to me which I did not take and do not hold.
Say what you mean, coward. Maybe then we can have a real conversation.
I’m not thrilled about how AT is putting words in your mouth, but this sort of callout helps approximately never.
Be polite or refrain from responding at all. No one will think less of you for it.
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If I hit a hobo while driving drunk I can avoid the consequences of my actions by finishing him off with a brick to the head and hiding his body in the woods. Murder lets you get away from the consequences of all sorts of things, provided you can hide the evidence well enough. Fortunately for women, we've decided to make avoiding accountability for their decisions via murder legal in the case of pregnancy, and some segments of society even actively celebrate their right to murder to avoid accountability!
It's still begging the question.
The question here, really, is whether anti-abortionists are coming from a place of A) wishing punishment upon women for enjoying sex or B) concern for the resulting human lives.
Within this context the question of whether nascent humans should count as humans isn't being begged. It's established that this is the background belief of (almost all) anti-abortionists, which is what matters here.
Claiming that anti-abortionists just want to punish women is a weird sort of disbelief in the foreigner, I think. Indeed it seems to beg the question of whether we really care about the nascent lives involved, and it comes down on the side of 'no'.
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I think they have a problem with narcissism.
Most women go through their lives being the center of attention. Women Are Wonderful, and most relationships revolve around them and whatever it takes to keep them happy. After all, it's easy for them to replace the men in their lives who fail to live up to their standards.
To a point.
Having a kid takes all the attention they were getting, all the effort people were putting into keeping them happy, and steals it away from them. Now the kid is getting it. There is no comparison to being a man and becoming a father, because nobody gives a fuck about men in the first place. Supposedly becoming a dad is (used to be?) good for your career because people are (or were?) more generous with raises for a family man.
It is broadly true, even controlling for age, etc.
I once saw a way of framing this that there is not a men vs women wage gap; there is instead a married men vs everyone else wage gap. That may be overstating it a bit.
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This sounds to me like something that happened in the 50s and 60s back when ~lifetime employment and "being a company man" were still possible. But I still think there's a weak form that survives. There's a sort of brotherhood of fathers that I've noticed in interviews, both as an interviewer and interviewee. Being a father shows that you've got a definite course plotted out in your life, that you know what you want, that you've got obligations to meet, and that you've got a certain level of resilience. You can append asterisks to all of those qualities because there are of course massive exceptions, but the odds are good. I definitely give fathers a few bonus points during interviews, and I'm closer to my colleagues who have kids.
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Relevant tweet https://x.com/constantutional/status/1930247522401890634
This intuitively makes sense to me. Women see pregnancy as inherited devaluing, so maintaining control over it is of utmost importance.
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I'd push back because yes, the kids start drawing attention, but mom, as the arbiter of who gets to interact with the baby, also gets a lot of attention and, if the child appears to be doing well, accolades for raising them.
So to the non-narcissists who don't mind sharing the spotlight, this is a boon.
Indeed, this is probably the only way a woman can keep herself centered in attention in her thirties and forties, short of being a literal celebrity.
I mean, yes. But also, that requires a lower time preference than most narcissist are capable of. They don't want to give up attention now for more attention later. They want all the attention, right now, all the time. And especially their exact favorite type of attention, not a different type that's better in some ways and worse in others.
Unreasonably high time preference making life harder for everyone.
Many such cases.
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Family man is generally motivated to make sure he keeps a job and is less likely to jump ship so all things equal probably more valuable.
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Men and women famously had similar views on abortion until 2020. Framing this as men imposing on women doesn't reflect reality.
Never said it was men imposing it on women, pro-life activists are disproportionately middle-aged and elderly women.
I've been toying with the idea that anti-abortion is intrasexual competition - menopausal women want to see younger ones saddled with babies, preferably out of wedlock, so they'll be less attractive to 40-something men.
That makes no sense, because prolife activists are notably opposed for fornication.
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I'd assume in the ancestral environment the young women would be mostly daughters and nieces or otherwise related to the older women. So it wouldn't be competition, it would be trying to spread one's genes more.
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One of my first thoughts after reading about Lana was "Did she start seeing a therapist before or after divorcing her husband?" Then I realized that you didn't say she was seeing a therapist.
Yeah, I have no idea either way, though I certainly have my suspicions.
I have seen therapy work for people, including genuinely saving the marriage of a close family member, but... mostly not.
Main problem with therapy is that unless it is mandated by someone else, a therapist is chosen by his patient. So it's likely that the patient will seek out a therapist that tells them what they want to hear rather than what they should hear.
This is fair, but I would also add that this shifts the incentives for therapists as well, towards mechanisms of therapy that are "easier," or more "humanistic" for patients. The humanistic school announces just what you've outlined as a point of pride:
The academics whose studies are always presented as evidence for the effectiveness of therapy almost universally practice strict cognitive-behavioral therapy, which explicitly involves persisting in important activites despite negative feelings, acting on carefully-reasoned directions rather than following emotions, and trying to clearly understand how your actions affect other people. In other words -- exactly what someone whose negative emotions harm themselves or others needs (emphasis mine):
It does strike me as funny that a lot of criticisms of therapy culture you see on the motte and elsewhere are essentially that therapy should be just that -- short, goal-oriented, placing a great deal of responsibility on patients, focused on behaviors rather than emotions, emphasizing change instead of validation. If all therapy were like that, it would be a much better profession!
Yeah, in practice they just go in and talk and talk about themselves without pushback, creating a 'history of me', the end result being that they 'learn' that the original source of all their problems is that their parents/siblings have screwed them over in childhood and there’s nothing they can do. It’s incredible, what garden-variety therapy accomplishes. They blow up their small, real problems to gigantic proportions, convince themselves they cannot be resolved, and also destroy their relationships with their closest family members.
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Problem is therapy works, but 80-90% of therapists are very bad at their jobs
Therapy might well work for people who really need it, but for those who don't, it may end up either being a massive waste of time or actively making their lives worse (or the lives of their loved ones).
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80-90% of therapists seem to be strongly left-leaning women and a whole lot of those are single. I must imagine that women coming to them for marital help tend to get pushed hard in certain directions.
If I need marriage counseling I'll be going to a priest, and I'm not even sure that's a less-politically-neutral act.
Yeah priests have been far, far more helpful to me in my personal life.
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This post was beautiful and uncomfortable and made me need to forcibly reboot my brain in order to go about my day in the way that the best Old-Scott posts did.
Well done and also screw you for dredging up those feelings from that time in such a rich way.
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I've seen variations of this path happen to people who are in the second layer of my orbit (i.e. usually not my CLOSE friends). At first it appears like the the varnish of a happy, complete life is simply peeled off to reveal the dysfunction beneath, but after seeing it often enough, it really turns out that they just wanted out of what could have been a complete, happy life, and they're basically bailing out of a situation that was otherwise quite tolerable.
Call it Trump Derangement syndrome or whatever, but I'd say its just Trump or the Conservative/Right Wing boogeyman acting as a nexus point for their internal turmoil and persistent sense of pending doom, it feels better to externalize all that negative emotion to an outgroup.
What is more unique now is how ubiquitous and all-consuming the fear-driving stimuli is. THAT part, being fully inundated in an information environment that exacerbates and amplifies thought processes that would otherwise possibly remain mere undercurrents is what leads so many to have these aggressive and apparently 'sudden' breaks from whatever friends and groups they had previously maintained.
I've watched the pattern unfold enough times now that I am confident I can recognize the earlier stages of it and predict with some accuracy where things will end up after a brief observation period.
If the woman is already at the point where she feels comfortable disrespecting the man in public view, and/or is falling in with some of the lefty activist causes, its likely terminal.
It goes towards a point I made a while back, though.
Scared, anxious people are easier to control. You create a population of neurotic, particularly fearful citizens and scream in their ear, nearly 24/7, through every media outlet possible, about how much danger they're in, and then you offer them the outlet for all that pent up anxiety: vote for [Candidate!] or [Policy!] and you can finally be safe!
Except it won't help, they cannot be mollified. But if the policy fails or is never implemented, they can continue to blame it all on the same boogeyman.
Thus, the incentive to fix or moderate this issue simply isn't there. Scared people are politically useful. All the more so if you isolate them from their sane, well-meaning friends and family.
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One statement I've found that cuts across the bipartisan spectrum is 'the internet made us all crazy'. Conservatives will imagine liberal craziness, liberals will imagine conservative craziness, but everyone I've said it to agrees. Something broke in the 2010s. It was probably the smartphones, the internet was safer when it was anchored to a desktop that you had to walk away from to do anything else. Now we spend most of our waking hours plugged into the outrage machine.
It may be one of the factors, but not necessarily the primary one. People in the past refused to date or engage with people of other religions or classes. What I think really happened in the past decade, is that for many secular people the politics basically became the new religion - especially for those more radicalized ones. Internet may spread the radicalization more effectively, but the underlying phenomenon is still the same.
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Smartphones.
Then Social Media...
Then algorithmically curated feeds.
I think the last one is where the breaking actually happened. But I say this as someone who remembers original Facebook where you just got a feed of stuff your friends posted, in chronological order, without the site itself trying to guess what you would find most engaging/catering to your worst impulses directly.
You generally used the smartphone to send messages directly to friends, not have things mediated through an app that aggressively wanted to steal your attention.
Yeah you'd get in political arguments, but it'd be with actual friends and generally the temperature was kept below a boiling point. The algo introduced you to ever more distant strangers, who held ever more extremist opinions, and did its best to keep you in a happy little echo chamber where you had your ego stroked THEN were randomly introduced to an unknown wrong-opinion-haver to unload on.
Its not a new insight that ragebait and outgroup bashing are the most effective way to hijack human attention.
But now, that's how literally every single media platform works. There is no countervailing force whatsoever. Even sites that became popular for featuring cute and 'funny' content have bought in.
To say that I am appalled with where this once-promising tech has taken us would be an understatement.
I remember this era as well (Facebook recently "shared a memory" old enough to vote). My dark-ish take is that very public efforts for "trust and safety" failed miserably because the median user looked at the drama that was strongly associated with "trust and safety" and decided that the site felt neither trusted nor safe for sharing going forward. Maybe it was inevitable, but it felt like a decent chunk of it was an own goal on the part of the social media companies.
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Some day, this 2016 election is going to end.
It's comforting to believe that this is an unnatural state of affairs, but what the internet did is not make people crazy, but show them how much of a fraud the world they lived in is. Much of the things we now bemoan about the neoliberal consensus were already there in the 90s and the 00s, you just couldn't possibly know about them or get to care about them.
Kojima is often rightfully credited for shining a light of what ultimately was predicted by contemporary philosophers in MGS2: the interconnection and sheer quantity of information makes shared context impossible, which means that hard power reasserts itself as the only means of enforcement. And thus we go along the road of violence and conflict, because there is no possible way to negotiate between peoples that operate by mutually incomprehensible memes.
However, this is not unnatural, people have had many irreconcilable differences and assorted conflict in the past, it is simply History telling Fukuyama "We're done when I say we're done."
What broke isn't the psyche of people, but the unity of the unipolar American Empire, as its myths could no longer be sustained in the face of its contradictions. And insofar as much (though not all) of those myths are deathly lies, that's a good thing.
Fight! Fight! Fight!
This is the most chillingly beautiful phrase I've read this week.
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It strikes me that I've also seen a lot of marriages turn to divorces in the 2015-2020 time frame. I've always just assumed I was in that "season of life" where my friends get divorced because we're all in our 30s and that's just what people in their 30s do these days.
You seem to suggest a radicalization -> divorce pipeline, but I wonder if the reverse is more true? People ruin their relationships and this leads them to a political radicalization as a way to find their true family / identity. I can think of at least a couple of cases in my own life where I've always assumed the later direction was more true.
In any event, this is an excellent example of a certain type of post on the motte that I really enjoy: I can't say I learned any useful facts reading your requiem, but I do certainly view the world in a slightly different way now, and that's quite useful.
There are lots of women with very similar original views to Lana, who are moderately religious and married to Trump supporting men, and who do not personally like Trump. Few of them get divorced- probably fewer than average.
Rather than radicalization leading to divorce, I’d think divorce leads to radicalization. Their marriage doesn’t seem to have been going to well to begin with.
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This strikes me as related to @urquan's question about religious identity. I saw events happen in a particular sequence, but it's entirely possible that the consequences of personal change manifested in a different order than the actual causes of that personal change. This researcher has done a fair bit of work on how people's perception of their own race can change in response to their politics (most research on race and politics assumes the reverse, treating race as an immutable characteristic). So yeah, I'm certainly open to the possibility that we're talking about, essentially, a two-way (multi-way!) street.
And this is a great example of the other type of motte post I enjoy: Fancy new facts that make me reevaluate my worldview! It never occurred to me before that people might change how they perceive their race based on politics.
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Why not both? Look, I haven't taken a chemistry class in 20+ years. But by way of a possibly flawed analogy, you can have incredibly stable molecules that get pried apart in the correct solution. Maybe all it takes is water.
No relationship is perfect or without strife. Culture can encourage people to kill their ego and sacrifice to work things out, or it can encourage them to be purely ego driven and destroy their relationships in pursuit of limitless self actualization.
If you want to take the chemistry metaphor further, and you don't mind a little bit of absolute horror, I'll point to the concept of disappearing polymorphs:
Isn't this a similar mechanism to how prions work?
I think there are some technical differences, but pretty similar.
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For a moment I read that as "prisons" and my mind ran off with a metaphor for how kinds of criminality may be overwritten and replaced, often with something worse, by exposure to other inmates-
-But then I read it correctly.
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You were not kidding about the absolute horror.
This Kurzgesagt video evokes a similar feeling to me: losing something that can never be regained, the crushing weight of the rules of material reality.
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Thanks, I hate it.
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I certainly do think it's both! And part of my changed-world view is that I'd never considered the other direction before. It's a bit like OP's link to "Leftism is both a cause and effect of acute mental illness".
I suspect basically all statistically correlated human behavior also has a 2-way causative relationship.
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There’s so much there, and it’s so rich and dense with detail, but I find myself noting one thing in particular — every relationship dispute you describe there concentrates around sex.
Given that Lana has had fallings-out with both a man and a woman over sex, is it possible that she just has a very low sex drive, and believed this to be indicative of lesbianism even though it might actually mean she’s just not very sexual towards anyone? “Well that jerk only wanted one thing, and it’s disgusting.” “Well that hoe only wanted one thing, and it’s disgusting.”
Maybe she doesn’t really want to have sex with anyone, but attributed it to male perversion, or something, which the lesbian falling-out gives the lie to?
The suicidewatch subreddit has always struck me as weird, in that it expects incredibly specific behaviors from posters that are in line with the way suicide hotline call center workers are trained, but from anonymous redditors. I argue that this makes it strictly worse for the people who go there feeling hopeless — the median post gets almost no responses because the rules are so strict no one wants to reply, and the responses someone does get are very vague, non-specific, non-judgmental and therefore useless. There’s no authenticity in it. You might as well talk to ChatGPT.
When you say she’s (or was?) a “religious Protestant” — what do you mean by that? Because it strikes me as very odd that she would hold the views she did and be a member of an evangelical church. I know of feminist evangelicals in that mould, but I always think of them as people who are simply in the process of leaving, as Lana eventually did. I find it shocking that she wouldn’t be able to find a home in the mainline Protestant world, where her views are extremely common! And I wonder if perhaps the extremity of her behaviors reflects the zeal of an evangelical-to-agnostic convert, a type with which I am very familiar. But perhaps she was mainline, which would make this moot and frankly make her behavior and the opposition of the church (the mainlines couldn’t enforce sliced bread remaining sliced even if they tried) even more concerning.
A sad story. But I wonder if the object lesson is not so much about intolerance of dissent as it is about the characteristic Christian calling of humility: humility before morality, before duty, before other people, and ultimately before God. If tolerance comes from anywhere, it comes from understanding in humility that you may be wrong; and that others, in their humility, may also be. And that neither of you may — I say “may” here advisedly — be wicked and perverse for your error, but simply human.
It is not difficult to find evangelical or conservative Catholic women who identify as feminists in kind of a 90’s pop feminism way. They’re usually very sex negative, extremely concerned about domestic violence, big believers in women getting lots of education but also value stay at home moms(as long as she has at least a bachelor’s degree, of course), kinda uncomfortable with pro-choice ideas, thinks it’s important to go to church but not because God takes attendance, don’t like Trump but democrats at the very least make them uncomfortable, middle aged or older. Most of them even vote R.
That describes most of the teachers I had in catholic school. It’s not shocking that one in a failing marriage with a church community taking her husband’s side might spiral to the left.
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I honestly don't think it's weird at all. Except maybe in a sort of Tumblr-ish "weirdos online intuit where the culture will go" way.
A lot of the stuff around microaggressions, trigger warnings and pronouns essentially insist on turning first any employee in proximity and then the average person into a caregiver for those who are or claim to be fragile.
Atheists of a certain sort simply do not see humility in religion but the opposite so this point never lands with them. But it should raise an interesting question: Christians are tyrannical, know-it-all busybodies, how bad do the consequences of a lack of humility have to be that even their book warns against it?
Often, Christian emphasis on humility registers simply as a way to self-license to be as unhumble as one can be, as long as the arrogance can be rationalised as being in the service of Christianity (or more bluntly divorced from the meaning of words, something that amounts to "I am clearly more humble and therefore superior"). This pattern is by no means exclusive to it - consider the tropes associated with countries that have "Democratic" in their name, or the reactions of "tolerant" left-wingers when asked to tolerate something outside of the standard bag of things to be tolerated.
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Did she block naraburns over sex? Marriages falling apart is one thing, falling out with every friend you ever had is another. And when people in online support group are telling you you're the asshole... Ho boy...
I meant “relationship dispute” in terms of “dispute in a romantic relationship.”
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I only mean that she attended a "non-denominational" Christian (is that an oxymoron?) church in the area, but I couldn't tell you anything more specific about it than that. I probably knew the name of the congregation at some point, but I certainly don't remember it now. It's quite possible she was, as you say, "simply in the process of leaving," albeit very slowly (then all at once). From my limited perspective, the congregational falling-out seemed to be part and parcel with the divorce, but again--by then, most of my information on her circumstances was being filtered through the lens of social media posts.
Ah, that does mean evangelical. Almost universally, “non-denominational” means “Baptist in denial.” Sometimes with more charismatic influence than is typical of Baptists. It would be absolutely no surprise to me for a pro-choice feminist to have a falling out with such a congregation over gay marriage, as those congregations are typically conservative doctrinally even if they’re experimental liturgically and ecclesiologically. (And congregational autonomy isn’t even a strange idea for evangelicals.)
That also draws into relief why she felt her religion was either/or — one characteristic of many non-denominationals is a general ignorance of forms of Christianity outside the evangelical orbit, so the concept of an institutional Christianity that is somewhat, well, woke would be unfamiliar. That also makes her pathway more clear to me; she brought the non-denominational emphasis on spiritual autonomy, raw authenticity, and emotional intensity to her politics, with disastrous results.
Nondenominationals are theologically Baptist, but in practice strongly tend to be a bit more liberal than baptists are, not necessarily politically. Nondenominational churches near me run ministries for trial marriages, which baptists at the least would frown upon.
You’re right that virtually none of them are going to be OK with gay marriages. But this is probably more ‘how she chose to frame her disagreement with the church’ than the disagreement itself.
That's... weird. I've been out of the evangelical orbit for, woah, like 15 years at this point? So it wouldn't be surprising if the moral sands have shifted in ways like that in all that time.
I can testify, though, to the bare fact that moral drift in evangelicalism seems to have accelerated over that time, at least -- both my Baptist friends and my Pentecostal cousin are drinking (alcohol) now, and women in pastoral roles is becoming a commonplace belief and practice, even if the Southern Baptists are holding out for now. I also have a friend who was? is? an SBC deacon and had pre-marital sex with multiple women before his marriage, even after his entrance into ministry, because, to quote, "I don't feel convicted of it." (Is there a term for "perfect uncontrition?") He was always kind of a heartbreaker, though. Accusations of infidelity and sexual misconduct have followed him for a long time. So I don't exactly know he was going to let something as petty as "the moral commandments of the almighty God" get in the way of getting his dick wet.
This is indeed much more common than it used to be, and I think it’s a spiritually healthier place for the church to be. I have little knowledge of how it’s gone inside the holiness movement, though.
This is sort of true but in a weird way. There used to be more of a middle ground for evangelicals to combine a mostly theologically conservative outlook with gender egalitarianism. But that middle ground has eroded heavily, as the gender egalitarian types usually went liberal in other ways over time, to the point that this has become a kind of unconscious expectation. The delay for public figures to go from supporting women in ministry to deconstructing is now shockingly brief. I know some folks who still try to occupy that middle ground, but few of them are younger than Gen X.
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Baptists have always drank alcohol, even if they said they don’t. Remember the jokes- ‘Baptists? So rude, they won’t even say hi to you in the liquor store’ and ‘How do you keep a Baptist from drinking all your beer? Bring a second Baptist.’ Or even ‘Baptist church? Check the deacon’s office for beer.’
Sexual misconduct allegations of that sort aren't terribly unusual among baptists(or low church Protestantism generally), so it doesn’t surprise me, but even fairly liberal ones near me at least theoretically ban cohabitation. On the other hand it does seem like preacher’s wives have gone from Mrs pastor to copastor. Definitely have the impression that, liberalizing(slowly) though they might be, baptists are holding out dramatically better than nondenominationals.
I'm not familiar with those jokes. But my ultimate familial background is also in the holiness movement where not just the teaching but the strict expectation of avoiding alcohol was a point of repeated emphasis and "serious" sin results in loss of salvation -- often with the expectation of a public confession of sin as part of an altar call (the preferred term is "backsliding"). I reckon this background made me especially predisposed to the concepts of infused righteousness and sacramental confession, even if Wesleyan holiness tradition has a very different model of what "synergistic justification" looks like (and therefore finds no place for the veneration of saints as heroic). A famous quote from the Holiness movement is this, "The minimum of salvation is salvation from sinning. The maximum is salvation from pollution—the inclination to sin"; which is eerily Tridentine. So I suppose there's a little projection of my own that I'm doing, where I assume the historically strict behavior of my holiness family members is true of abstentionist Protestant movements more generally.
The sexual misconduct allegations had nothing to do with abuse of power or his work in the Baptist church, but were more informal, and are probably what I'd put in the bucket of "overreaction to a misunderstanding." If the exact terms of the accusations were discussed on the motte, they'd probably be laughed at. My larger point is simply to illustrate that this friend is... kind of a player, someone who seems very sociosexual, to the point where excessive sexuality seems to surround him. And to be fair, he does have bedroom eyes.
Maybe they’re Catholic jokes.
We also tell the joke ‘baptists only fornicate lying down so peeping toms don’t mistake them for dancing’. Applied holiness standards have been selective for a while.
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I'm not sure it's ignorance so much as disinterest. If she's in the process of abandoning Christian conviction anyway, why seek out a woke church instead of the woke secular friends she already has? In my experience exvangelical men and women usually end up atheist, with a minority of women falling into witchcraft instead.
A drift toward wokeness that maintains the form of Christianity is much more likely when it happens at the congregational level and up.
That's a fair point. But as someone who is, I suppose, a literal exvangelical according to the definition (if not the spirit) of the term, I agree that most conversions away from evangelicalism lead away from faith entirely (or toward performative paganism). But that actually goes to my point -- evangelicalism is so totalizing in its cultural orbit, so utterly identified with Christianity to many Americans, that rejecting it or its culture means rejecting Christianity. I speak from experience here: I knew profoundly little about non-evangelical churches when I left evangelicalism as a teen, except that Catholicism and mainline Protestantism theoretically existed, even if they seemed more like historical trivia than real religious bodies. Even Catholicism has long struck many white evangelicals from the Midwest and Southeast as something for elderly latinas, someone else's ethnic religion, a church for the still-pagan descendents of pagan Aztecs, a place for hyphenated-Americans. That tone has severely softened in recent years, as white Catholics have become the standard-bearers of the religious right in many ways, but there's a serious way in which the often harsh, but nevertheless informed critiques of more traditional forms of Christianity within historic Protestantism have been flanderized in evangelical circles to an absolute rejection of the Christianity of non-evangelical forms of faith -- indeed out of ignorance.
That said, evangelicalism has also been characterized by a firmer affirmation of conservative social doctrine than spiritual doctrine (I'm not saying spirituality isn't important to them -- I'm saying their emphasis, especially to people who grow distant, is often perceived to be culture war instead of spiritual development), and so leaving evangelicalism is often associated with leaving social conservatism. So most who proudly wear the title of "ex-evangelical" do so because they believe social liberalism is the One True Faith, and become evangelical atheists instead of evangelical Christians. Seen it many times; been there myself.
I also very much see cases of increasing non-denominational, doctrinally-loose and progressive churches that explicitly attract people like this; some Baptist friends of mine have a lesbian friend who attends such a church, which is growing. So there's clearly an appeal for a form of Christianity that basically reflects the worldview that Lana had before the breakup of her marriage, and I'm simply reflecting on the market failure where the mainline Protestant churches that have already been there for a long time now aren't even considered as an option, and are themselves being out-competed by "woke evangelical" churches the same way the megachurch is out-competing the Bible church on the street corner!
I had a somewhat different experience of the evangelical church growing up than you did, though I can see where you are coming from. I remain in the congregation where I grew up, a Baptist-adjacent Bible church in a blue state.
I’d say that our attitude toward Rome growing up was guarded, sometimes harsh, but not particularly uninformed; of course I have a deeper understanding of the critique as a middle-aged man than I did as a teenager, but that’s true of many things. We didn’t talk about the Eastern Orthodox much, but there weren’t a lot of them around. Our attitude toward middle- and even high-church Protestants was reasonably positive so long as they were strong on Scripture and held to sola fide.
I agree that the general evangelical attitude toward Rome is much less guarded today than it was. Opinions on Eastern Orthodoxy are pretty mixed, but the most common attitude is to regard them as eccentric Roman Catholics. (I will give you that this one is pretty uninformed.)
I can’t speak to your experience, but in mine people who leave evangelical Christianity tend to move toward social liberalism first, then when this clashes with evangelical Christianity they abandon evangelicalism. It’s a commonplace that when a young man comes to his pastor and says, “I just can’t accept the truth of Christianity any longer,” the correct response is, “Who is she?” Also common today are people who want to accommodate their friends on LGBT issues and leave their evangelical churches when those hold fast to the biblical teaching.
To those leaving it may look like the church is prioritizing social issues over spiritual things. But striving after obedience to God’s will revealed in Scripture is fundamentally tied up in spiritual things. (“If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” and, “Faith without works is dead.”) You can be socially conservative without being an evangelical Christian, or a Christian at all, but it’s no coincidence that socially liberal churches also have a low view of the Bible.
(There is a smaller cohort that leaves evangelicalism directly for more liturgical churches. This is a different phenomenon, and most of them don’t think that evangelicals’ positions on social issues are too conservative.)
I agree that this demand exists, but in my world it’s less than one might suppose. I expect that most “woke evangelical” churches will fade away in a generation or so as the children of their members abandon any connection to Christianity.
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And much like HBD, an obvious truth gets dismissed because to believe it leads to only a single brutal conclusion. A group of people that you want to enjoy full human rights and political autonomy because that's what we've decided is the bedrock of being a good person, must be marginalized and contained at worst, eliminated at best. Or vice versa? Because it's impossible to share a Republic or a Democracy with a power faction that are literal raving lunatics and/or pants on head retarded.
I have so much whiplash from the 90's. The promises implicitly made to me by the culture (in the absence of parental guidance), the beliefs I took on by osmosis, and the horrifying hellscape of a nation I now live in 30 years later which seems the ultimate fruit of those promises.
Like, as a trivial example. There was a humor site called Pointless Waste of Time, that eventually got rolled into Cracked.com and had all it's best articles memory holed, even from archive.org. There was an article where this guy was trying to catch up with his highschool friends maybe 10 years later. I viewed this author as my peer, just a few years ahead of me. He liked video games, shock humor, and was a sneering atheist who never wanted kids. Over the course of catching up with a bunch of his friends, they'd all changed. He alone remained basically as he had been in highschool. I don't recall the precise score, but something like 2 of his friends overdosed and 5 had gotten married, had kids and found Jesus. He joked that he "lost" more friends to God than to drugs. I laughed. What fucking losers deciding to go to church with your family if you'd made it through your childhood not doing so.
So anyways, I got married, had kids, and now we go to church as a family. I can scarcely imagine how miserable I'd be had I bitterly clung to some version of myself I thought was "cool" in 1998. What sort of neuroses I'd develop to cope with the objectively lack of meaning, stability or community I'd be adrift in. The idea that "being a father cost me my identity" sounds literally insane to me, any more than not being a sneering 90's teenage atheist anymore "cost me my identity". Maybe 90's teenage me wouldn't understand the life 2020's middle age me lives. I don't care.
I also grew up on Pointless Waste of Time. FYI, the guy who ran PWOT, Jason Pargin (nom de poast David Wong) still has an internet presence. His twitter feed is pretty damn funny. He now has a substack that I think is pretty good and in particular does a very solid job of threading the needle between "don't piss off the blue normies" while still being actually insightful, same basic thread as he did back in the day. He's also been very successful on tiktok (not really my thing, can't comment on quality or anything), I think that's actually mainly how he mainly makes his living.
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I find it ironic that you would pick HBD as your example because to me it HBD reads as this precise dynamic only in reverse.
That is to say i think that a lot of people who are culturally progressive but who otherwise find themselves on the wrong end of the intersectional stack, end up fixating on racial differences and other structural "-isms" to avoid the more uncomfortable implications of thier beliefs regarding individual responcibilty/agency. Or acknowledging that the old John Wayne, Bill Buckley, Ronald Reagan-type "Stern Fathers" may have been Right all along.
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It's funny that you say HBD, because, uh, what exactly do you figure is the group of people that should have been marginalized and contained to prevent these outcomes?
I continue being a big fan of the theory that almost all the stereotypical "SJW" behaviours we are seeing are the result of (at least partially heritable) conservative temperaments grown on a liberal cultural substrate that was made by and for people who are disposed quite differently. "Lana" coming from a committed evangelical background clicks with this theory just as well as Puritan Harvard of all places being considered the main cathedral of the capital-c Cathedral, and I can't help but notice the overrepresentation of various priestly castes and theocratic cultures (Brahmins, Ethiopians, ...) in SJ activism. Leftism seems to simply have choked on its own success - much like England would probably have been spared Rotherham if their ancestors had been a little worse at subjugating Pakistan, the Left probably could have avoided getting taken over by people building a sacred hierarchy full of arcane behavioural rules around their ideology of toppling sacred hierarchies and arcane behavioural rules if they (we?) had resisted the urge to assume suzerainty of places full of people thus inclined.
(Are people like naraburns the rarer opposite example of temperamental liberals running on conservative memes?)
I think this is the vast majority of people on this website. Hlynka was definitely right about that. Yarvin called them (us) "dark elves" in that one substack post (which did have some good insights, but dear lord is he terrible at optics), and the same people are the "tech right" that has been so recently ascendant until like 8 hours ago. The extremes always pull the moderates to the edges (h/t martyrmade's "Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem", the best podcast about Israel and Palestine that's ever been made), and the culture war has pulled scott's "grey tribe" towards the blue and red, and in more even proportions than you'd think.
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Let me put it like this.
I would not be against much maligned literacy test to register to vote. I wouldn't be against banning people on SSRIs from voting. I don't understand why felons ever started getting their rights to vote back, when the last thing we need is a felon voting block, somehow convincing politicians to make their crimes legal or at least unpunishable. I think it might be a worthy experiment to whittle away at universal suffrage "disparate outcomes" be damned.
Sometimes I think of the origin story of sorts for the Slavs. Mostly because Dan Carlin did a podcast on vikings in the east, and then immediately after I heard that Putin summarized largely the same history in his interview with Tucker Carlson. And that origin story, as written by the victors, is that the Slavs were so incapable of ruling themselves, they invited some viking nobles who were much better at ruling down to rule over them. The relentless and short sighted tribal strife largely calmed down, some measure of relative peace and prosperity returned to the region.
Now on the face of it, that sounds like a preposterous story obviously written by the victors. Are we honestly supposed to believe that a people requested from foreign stock a new ruling class? That it's even possible for them to have the self awareness required to realize, as a people, they are temperamentally incapable of governing themselves? It's probably just a story, a myth even. But sometimes I think about it wondering, what if?
Kinda sorta happening a bit. Some prominent West coast prosecutors selectively decline to prosecute some classes of crimes. Not prosecuting property crimes of course. But also more serious issues of selectively not prosecuting gun crime depending on the demographics of the perpetrator.
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98% of people with a record believe that the law as written is fair, but they and their friends are being railroaded by the man. Prisoners would not vote to legalize theft/shorten sentences. They would vote like normal poor people, except they might support more of an anti-cop platform.
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Not exactly what you're talking about, but Zimbabwe does come to mind, what with their begging whites to come back and do basic things like organize agriculture and start businesses. In that case they're not asking for a foreign ruling class, but a foreign middle class. Interesting stuff.
I wonder if they're getting any takers.
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There are recorded instances of something like this happening: the Glorious Revolution, Texas seeking US annexation, or Napoleon III in Mexico.
Frequently it seems to be "please invade us to replace our rulers with better ones."
Texas seeking annexation was done on the basis of being a state, not being ruled over, and the selling points were military defense and paying down the ridiculous debt.
Likewise Napoleon III invaded Mexico because it defaulted on its debt. There were individual Mexican politicians supporting him, but that’s because they wanted to be the puppet rulers. Santa Ana might be an example from Mexican history though; he just kept talking the Mexican government into making him president and having to be removed from power involuntarily.
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Even if you limit the process to the same supposed mechanism as the Slavs, "please rule us to provide an impartial judge for our feuds", Slavs wouldn't be the only example of that Stranger King theory - Wiki lists cases in the Pacific, Iceland, and Sri Lanka (although the latter swiftly regretted it).
Wiki doesn't list the Slavs, though. IIRC when I looked into it the historians' consensus was that in their case it was a false narrative invented by writers centuries later.
Well, as little as we know about the Rus, we know of several Byzantine treaties with them, with the earliest ones featuring very Norse-sounding signatories and the latter ones featuring more and more Slavs.
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Church attendance is highest at middle-income levels. It's why people in low-income areas associate Christianity with success and people in high-income areas associate it with failure.
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Must we marginalize and contain these people? I reject this premise. What we can do is work with them, educate them on how to live a better life, and love them.
Then ideally create a culture that doesn’t lead people down these paths.
I'm certain you don't: you just draw the line a little bit further down the hierarchy. Imprisoning people is marginalizing them. Putting people into custodial care (mentally-deficient adults, etc.) is marginalizing them. Keeping disruptive, aggressive children out of normal classrooms is marginalizing them. This is obviously necessary. Again, the question is where the line ought to be drawn.
It's not hard to imagine an argument that segregation was the humane, minimally-marginalizing functional solution here. Main issue with it being that it was indeed deeply unfair to outliers, genetic hybrids, and so on.
Disagree. That's possible for those who wish to improve themselves; who are willing and able to receive such education. Many do not fall into this category.
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As with HBD the question is what happens if you can't do that (at least at scale) and it's easier to do other things?
In this case "destigmatize" whatever their condition is, which seems to have somehow flowed directly into "publicize" and even "encourage".
You can see why. It's simply much more convenient, and less mean, if society has the problem and it can be made to disappear in a puff by encouraging the "marginalized".
If you take punitive/mean options off the table it's an excruciating problem to find some way of containing bad memes without containing carriers. And, frankly, it cedes power to a certain sort of person I'm not sure it's wise to trust.
You can absolutely love people into more virtue. Christians did it with entire societies and came to basically rule the world.
These are excuses that I don’t accept.
I don't know that the conquest of large sections of the world were really expressions of Christian love, even if Christianity was often invoked as legitimating force and Christian voices often called for temperance in colonial activities in the name of the Gospel (i.e. Bartolomé de las Casas).
It's not quite that simple. In my view the Christian faith led to a massive amount of pro-social coordination to happen, which allowed Europe to evolve in unique ways. Then the wealth of that was misused I must admit.
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This has been the political project of the last 50 years, and it's only resulted in the inmates running the asylum.
I don’t believe it has been done correctly. Love is not endless, empty compassion. Love is pushing people to become better, even if sometimes against their will at the moment.
(Always excellent when I can resort to life lesson from The Wire)
How do you deal with those who are too seasoned?
Because, eventually, you're going to have a non-trivial amount of people who actually have exchanges like this:
- What if you had a life sentence?
- Then I'd fucking escape.
Fat tails are real. Whenever I see someone make your argument of "we have to love them more, and educate them!" I know, and even sympathize, with what you're thinking. You're thinking of my cousin who's just kind of goofy bro who drinks too much, smokes pot, lives in his girlfriend's parents' basement, and has been to jail a couple times. His shit isn't in order, but it could be. Is it his fault? Eh, his dad wasn't there and his mom didn't try. Love him more, educate him.
And that feels good because it feels manageable if we all just pitch in! And for a good number of guys-like-my-cousin, it would probably work! This is why I am a believer in charity in principle.
But what do you do with people like our friend Sean (from the clip) who, when faced with a hypothetical life sentence, immediately defaults to "I will escape from prison so that I can murder a man" -- and means it (inasmuch as he can "mean" anything, driven by immediate emotion and instant gratification as he is).
The fat tails of society are both what lift it to new heights (real entrepreneurs, real political leaders, et al.) and what pose a constant existential threat. The social consensus since 1964 has been to look at that constant existential threat and say ... just got to love 'em more!
I agree that there are people who must be contained for the benefit of others, that's not what I'm saying. It seemed as if @WhiningCoil was making the argument that all progressives are insane and need to be imprisoned or killed. Perhaps I read it wrong.
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The political project of the last fifty years has skipped the "educate them on how to build a better life" part in favor of simple affirmation, partly out of a woeful misconstrual of what love is and partly because our societies have adopted increasingly hollow ideas of a better life.
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I personally noticed this trend starting in 2013, and it reached its apex in the aftermath of the 2016 election.
On some level, I think there's a personality that craves power and control, but is also loathe to admit it through crass displays of naked force.
That internal conflict seems to result in escalating and increasingly nonsensical demands for "common decency" from everyone around them. It's a win for the person making the demands because they can bend weak people to their will, and also because they aren't the ones making the demands; they're just being the better person. They didn't do it, and the target deserved it.
The most interesting thing to me is that there are very similar behaviors in domestic abusers. Seeing DARVO fully generalized as a cultural norm is peculiar, to say the least.
"If you x then unfriend me" style posts, I believe, are one of the best pieces of evidence for the argument that social media broke our brains.
This is because people can react to that post. And the only people (well, not only, but the majority) of people who would post a reaction to that post are going to highly validate it. "You tell 'em, girl!" that kind of thing.
The original poster is getting a source of approval and affirmation that is orthogonal to the original subject-object construction. By blasting "people who x", the poster gets thumbs up and smiley faces from group y who was never in the original "conversation".
The physical world equivalent of this would be something like saying "I told off my (ex)friend Tom because he likes Trump" and immediately having several people applaud you. This doesn't happen because, in the physical world, people are far less like to constantly re-count negative interactions publicly. Yes, of course, you do it with close friends or your drinking buddies or whatever, but, generally speaking, you're not walking around shouting about how you got into a fight with your drunk uncle at thanksgiving.
Social-media opened up this entire new vector of indirect praise related to fundamentally negative emotions and interactions. Which creates this really fucked up feedback loop of "the more negative emotions that I have in public the more I can count on public affirmation." How else can you explain people posting crying/screaming video selfies after Trump wins (or after x thing happens).
Negative emotions are a part of life. Prior to social media, I actually think the default pop-culture responses to them (talk to a friend, go for a run, journal about it, etc.) were good enough. They created a process of negative emotion --> sublimation of some sort --> return to normal emotional equlibrium. Now, with social media, the cycle reminds me of someone saying "Time to get good and drunk so that I can do some coke to get back on top of things."
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FYI, it's "loath". "Loathe" is the verb, not the adjective.
I once read a JM Coetzee book (Disgrace) that spelled the adjective "Loth" and I still haven't gotten over it.
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Auto correct is a hell of a drug
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Great post. I know this isn't really the point of it, but do you know what happened with Lana's child(ren)? Do she and her ex-husband share custody?
I know they shared custody initially, but the job she eventually landed was in another state, and I don't have any information on how their custody arrangement evolved from there.
It seems hard to imagine that the kids didn’t eventually choose to stay with dad. She was, after all, literally crazy.
Maybe.
Alternately, Transhausen by Proxy.
All things under the sun are possible, even horrible things that make you weep at the tragedy of it.
Thé kids would’ve been too old for that, wouldn’t they? Trans kids weren’t a thing until very recently, and it sounds like the kids weren’t exactly babies at their divorce.
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I love the series of branch-swinging-assumptions we're making here.
Mentally ill parents are incredibly unpleasant. Teenagers will choose ‘rules’ over ‘just fucking awful’. The addition of constant fighting between lesbian parents wouldn’t have helped, either. Young adults usually want their parents to be stable and functional, too, which a train wreck like the mom turned out to be won’t do that(this having been 10 years ago means those kids are almost certainly old enough to make their own decisions).
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Unless she worked something out with the father, it's doubtful she'd get primary custody after moving to another state. About ten years ago a friend of mine decided to dump his wife after she caught him running around on her. At the time of the divorce, they were both teachers in the same school system who made similar money and lived a couple miles away from each other in the same district in North Carolina, so it was a pretty simple case of shared custody with minimal child support. Around the time the divorce was finalized, he quit his job in North Carolina and accepted a position as an assistant principal at a school in West Virginia. That is, until his attorney found out and informed him that if he moved out of state the custody agreement would disappear.
That much he expected; what he didn't expect his attorney to tell him is that if she ended up with primary custody after him moving out of state, there would be no downside to her moving out of state. His ex was originally from northern Minnesota, and he knew she'd move the kids back home with her if there were no repercussions. He got incredibly lucky and was able to take a different teaching position at the school he had just left, despite his old position having been replaced, and was eventually able to find a principal job down there. That being said, he's still an asshole who got what was coming to him after running around on a perfectly fine wife who desperately tried to keep the marriage together. I can't believe I went to his second wedding.
You can't believe a second woman was willing to marry him or that you were willing to attend? How/why are you friends with him?
The second. I used to work for the Boy Scouts and he would come up during summers and run the business end of things at camp. He was originally from Pittsburgh and came up regularly to visit his parents so we'd all hang out. There's a whole extended friend group of people who worked there at one point or another, and a lot of us still see each other regularly. I haven't seen him in years, because the Principal job keeps him in NC year round and his parents hate his new wife and her parents hate him. But anyway, as I said in my above novel of a post, I don't get involved in other people's drama. I was friends with him and not his ex-wife, and though I agree he's the one who fucked up and she deserved better, I'm not taking sides. He's never done anything to me personally that pissed me off enough to cut him off completely, and if he called me right now to go out for beers I'd go. That being said, I was in North Carolina a few years back with an extra ticket to the ACC Championship game and I didn't call him to see if he wanted it, so there's that.
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