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If you've been on twitter in or around the tpot space the last few days, you may have seen Aella blowing up and deciding to go private. I won't recount the whole story, but it is in screenshots in the link earlier.
Suffice to say, apparently she searched her name and saw a ton of vitriolic attacks and discussions around her online presence. She claims that the worst part is the "overwhelming hate with nobody defending me. People are ashamed publicly to support me, they don't want to be called a simp or cringe."
Long story short she basically said that she is heartbroken, is "so sad the world is shaped this way," and decided to quit twitter and go locked for the foreseeable future.
For some quick background, aella is a prostitute. She is extremely successful, and has built up a huge presence on twitter as well as a cult following in rational spheres. She does data science work as well, and claims to be autistic. She is polyamorous and openly promotes and campaigns for that lifestyle, as well as doing drugs. Some of her stunts include things like tattooing her name on the body of men who have sex with her, having orgies while sharing details of who got to get in, etc.
A few darker claims are that she pushed her two younger sisters into sex work (one of them, by her own admission on twitter, was doing camgirl jobs before she turned 18.) She has also said some... problematic things that are edging around support for pedophilia, although she's canny enough not to come right out and say it.
Now as I'm sure many people here agree with, I don't exactly agree with aella's views or lifestyle. That being said I am still torn, the world is a cruel place. At the same time, aella has probably caused harm to a lot of others with her lifestyle and especially her approach to promoting it online.
This equivocation points to an actual underlying tension/confusion I have around liberal expression. On the one hang I think polyamory, sex work, and some of the.... encouragement aella has around minors watching point &c is quite bad, and should not be allowed to happen in the public square. I think a certain amount of shaming is absolutely good and necessary.
However, perhaps I'm frail hearted or something because it does hurt to see so many attack her so viciously, when they clearly have so much hate in their hearts. Perhaps it's Pollyannaish but I wish that we could do our shaming in a more dignified, and less clearly antagonistic way. It seems that most of the people shaming her, from my read at least, clearly enjoy looking down and judging someone harshly, seeing themselves as better than her. From my perspective, that's not just as bad as what she's doing, but still bad.
I'm wondering, I suppose, whether there's a way we can employ shame in a truly good way as a society? Can we somehow shame people without turning into monsters ourselves, in order to protect our children and especially young girls from (imo) degenerate and overall unhealthy lifestyles?
To be kind to the cruel is to be cruel to the kind. Watching Aella's reputation go down in flames is what prevents young girls from wanting to follow in her footsteps.
Either being a whore is high status, or it is low status. If high status, good and proper to encourage your daughters to embrace that career. And if low status... this. This is what low status looks like.
So before you feel pity for Aella, remember the alternative.
I feel bad about it, too. But it has to be done.
I don't follow Aella. In fact I usually mute anything I see about her. E-girls thrive on attention, and the only correct course of action is to block/ignore.
But what I have seen is that a large part of what set this off was her complaining that she wants to get married and have kids, and no partner she wants to do that with returns the sentiment. She may have also broken up with her long time
partnercuck because he didn't want kids with her? So she was mourning the situation that she would never have these milestones in life she wanted.And then what I saw was people, IMHO rightly, pointing out that if she wanted those things, a life of being a filthy whore in public was mutually exclusive to them. This was a self inflicted wound. And especially zeroing in on her entitlement to a "high quality male" (not her words, but reading between the lines), despite being a literal prostitute that doesn't shower. Like what did she think her value was? The post I saw were blunt about this. Perhaps excessive. But examples must be made lest others fall into the same trap. Consider the sort of man you want, and act accordingly. It's at least known among some men this is what must be done to attract the correct sort of woman. Women just seem to have entitlement.
I don't want to get into doing psychology over the Internet on a person I don't know, but yeah. I think she's in the poly bubble, so she imagines it is possible to find a guy, marry him, have kids, and still maintain the sex worker/poly life. Some poly people do handle marriage and parenting while having multiple partners, so she must think it possible for her.
But the kinds of guy she is attracted to, given what she's revealed of her childhood, are not going to be the kinds of guy who want to settle down and marry her (this is where the doing psychology over the Internet part comes in). She plainly has very conflicted views about her father, who seems in the small extract she provided to have been a sadistic piece of shit, and I think she has elsewhere indicated she was sexually abused as a child. Since she seems to have escaped into sex work as a reaction to her upbringing, I think she has put all her eggs into the basket of "I'm hot, I'm sexual, I'm promiscuous and that's okay, suck it repressive ultra-Christian upbringing that punished me for everything, I'm doing all the stuff you said would send me to Hell and I'm loving it!"
So having to face "sexual abuse as a child" and "sex work is low status, nobody wants to marry the whore they've been banging on the side" would crack her psyche right open, and she's already too vulnerable. Hence why (I am speculating hard here) if she seems to be endorsing "porn and exposure to sex aren't bad for minors, what is a minor anyway?" it's to do with reconciling how she was abused as a child: unless she can embrace it as "no, it was all fine!", then that brings back the child's guilt of "I must be a bad person, that is why this is happening to me". And to admit "I am a bad person" then brings back "so my parents were right and I'm wrong and what they did was okay" and that is very much not so. The tension of the contradictions is threatening to snap her mental state apart, so she has to balance it all very carefully.
So, yeah. She's pinned her new identity on "you can be sexy, promiscuous, and desired and loved", and found out the hard way that the "loved" part is not in fact part of the package. 'There's women you have fun with, and women you marry, and they're not the same' is an old truth but still relevant. EDIT: I think the data science work and her being involved in rationalist circles is an admission on her part, not recognised as such, that she does want to be admired for more than her waist-hip ratio, that she wants to be seen as intelligent and having worth apart from her sexuality. But she's sort of trapped right now: if she steps back from the sex work, then what is her unique selling point that sets her apart from "all the other kinda smart, kinda nerdy, kinda mathy rationalist-types"? She's shackled by her brand as "Aella, the sexy rationalist girl".
I vehemently disapprove of her lifestyle and views, but I do think she's mentally vulnerable and calling people names isn't polite. Now, that does bring us to "but is calling her a prostitute calling her names or is it naming the truth of her situation?" and I think her supporters would say the former, while "she's doing sex work to make a living, that's prostitution" is the latter.
Yep. Pretty common for sin to feel good in the moment. That's the whole "trick" of it.
Childhood trauma does not entitle you to a lifetime of unlimited compassion from others.
I've been seeing this meme more and more across wide swaths of social media - and from all corners. People are starting to point backwards to "childhood trauma" (ill-defined, subjective, and often shrouded in mystery) as the root of all their problems. This is neo-Freudianism but, somehow, with less rigor and logic.
The entire process of adolescence and early adulthood is the process of recognizing that when bad things happen to you, you have some level of control in how you react to them. Yes, there are some things that are incredibly and objectively traumatic. They will take time to heal, but you have the tools and capability to fuel that healing process if you developed emotional maturity.
When people fail to do this, they not only become unreliable, they become socially dangerous. Most of the men in prison right now had a childhood of neglect and abuse to at least some degree. They are repeating the patterns they were exposed to. Sadly, many of them lack the IQ to even sort their emotions into reasonable buckets, let alone manage them constructively. Should we extend our inexhaustible supply of compassion there way, let them out, and hug them until they've changed? Alarmingly, about half of the voting population would YesChad.jpeg this idea.
This is all part of the rot and incipient counterproductive nature of "therapy culture." It invites negative feedback loop rumination on bad feelings, the opposite of personal agency, all while promising constant absolution from responsibility that one can presume and demand of others. It's a kind of inverted religion; a kind of satanism, if you will. A self-referential cult of the victim ego.
Returning to Aella, and the sexy-rationalist-e-girl archetype, perhaps you had some level of childhood trauma. Let's assume this trauma was real and not cultivated by a very online life that invites all of us to make emotional mountains of molehills. You're (self-proclaimed) like, really, really smart or whatever. Perhaps you ought to take the time to sort through your own emotional baggage and then move beyond it. In her tweets, she is literally calling for internet friends and strangers to defend her honor to other (mostly) internet strangers. This is an obvious sign of emotional immaturity. She is outsourcing emotional regulation to other people through the odd mode of chivalrous honor codes.
(Side note: I bet Scott does it)
It....kinda should though?
We have good evidence to believe that free will is mostly BS at this point but even if you aren't about that line of thinking it is still true that childhood abuse ruins your life outcomes. We have some knowledge of things like the impact on your brain chemistry and psychological development, we can point to incredibly poor outcomes and paucity of truly effective treatment.
People just don't get better without a lot of good genetics, supportive nursing and lucky life events the majority of the time.
Doesn't mean you have to accept or interpersonally tolerate them, but you should have empathy and compassion.
It is in all likelihood not her fault and her brain is fundamentally broken and society does not have the tools to force her to do what is required to get better.
Citation needed.
Citation needed. Also, there's literally a cottage industry in within hollywood that does nothing besides making films about people who overcame their childhood to do amazing things.
Citation needed.
Citatio--nevermind.
Let's say you come back with bulletproof evidence for all of your claims. Think through the implications. How do we as a society ever hold anyone accountable for anything? What "counts" as trauma? Who decides? How do you account for individual variation in the ability to cope with negative emotions?
The whole point of our legal system is that it is based on the premise that there is the law and only the law. Your personal circumstances have little to do with how you are judged against the law*. "Your honor, I had a really hard childhood. I think you should take that into account during this armed robbery trial." That would be pants-on-head insane because it would mean every single law and every single interaction with it would be an inherently subjective exercise. There would, in effect, be no laws. No laws, no society ... you get the picture.
Compassion and empathy do not outrank truth.
By implication, you're also preemptively condemning literal children to a life of low expectations and patronization. "Damn kid, your mom was a crackhead and dad beat you? Well, don't feel bad about being semi-homeless for a while, it isn't your fault." Or, in this specific Aella case, "Sure, sure, honey, you're a multi-millionaire with a massive online following, but you go right ahead and have a public meltdown." Why not encourage them to rise to their potential? Why not deliver the much, much better message of "despite what has happened in your past, you can create a good life and be a valued, pro-social member of whatever community you choose**"
Pairing all of this with your initial dubious claims we have yet another example of the satanic nature of current therapy. It's the embodiment and fulfillment of the Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations. It takes otherwise healthy people who may need some encouragement and turns them into fragile, dependent slaves to the cult of "self-care", "triggers", "boundaries", etc. Many are literally permanently drugged and then reminded that such drugging is "necessary" to keep them ..... stable? I'll take volatile but responsible and competent over "stable", flaccid and burdensome.
Admittedly handling this well requires some flexibility of thinking that is going to be challenging for the general population, but just like how HBD claims doesn't mean we have to treat *ethnic group * like ass, just because free will is limited doesn't mean that we can't punish people for misbehavior, arrange society in various desirable ways, and so on.
Let's start with the free will statement. The strongest form of the argument is something like this: we have good data on things like efficacy of treatments, causes of various things, outcomes given various adverse childhood experiences and so on.*
We can cobble together some genetic data and presentations, certain kinds of childhood experiences like gross sexual exploitation, family history of other mental illness, family history of substance abuse, etc and say "this kind of person is enormously unlikely to ever overcome their circumstance." Can we do this for most people? Well not right now anyway, but for certain kinds absolutely yes.
Should we allow them the chance to make their own mistakes instead of doing something first? Different question. Should we let them run roughshod over things? No, but different question.
This definitely applies to certain patterns of child abuse.
A better example is probably opioid abuse. Medication assisted treatment (this is not safe injection sites) originally started as highly stigmatized and disliked but has grown to be approved by most in medicine because what we've found is that once addicted (rarer then you might think) most people just don't recover.
Free will need not apply. The thing is too dangerous.
Look for other options.
We know that external locus of control and efforts at getting people to help themselves work for those who can, so we should try, but thought leaders should be aware that some populations and situations just aren't going to get fixed without outside intervention.
*Simplest place to start if you want to examine the research base is ACE studies.
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