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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34588 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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I find poly evangelicals just as annoying as the next guy and don't think it's a good lifestyle for most but what movement exactly do these people think they're joining? Yes, it's mostly weirdos, quite a bit of whom are on the spectrum who are interested in weird ideas. Where are these advertisements where it's pretending to be something else? All of the rest of society follows your moral beliefs. Yes, EA has control over some funding and useful roles, but they created them and it's theirs you have no right to it without putting up with the weird community that made it possible.

Yes, it's mostly weirdos, quite a bit of whom are on the spectrum who are interested in weird ideas.

I don't think, "I should be able to have sex with multiple women that seek status by association with me" is actually that weird of an idea, even if "polyamorous" people have concocted a bunch of window-dressing to make it sound different than that straightforward arrangement.

I'm widely not a fan of the polyamorous ideas around these things but this is not a very good description of the silicon valley weirdo version of polyamory, which seems much more likely to be male heavy than female heavy. I do think they're actually sincere, which may be the weirdest thing about them.

Yes, EA has control over some funding and useful roles, but they created them and it's theirs you have no right to it without putting up with the weird community that made it possible.

But when you're giving preferential treatment to people who join your "polycule," you're basically in pure Harvey Weinstein territory. He could argue that he created those jobs too, but there's no principle that job creators get to exchange those jobs for sex.

I still don't know what the coherent principle is that would say that job creators don't get to exchange those jobs for sex if one buys into the whole "sex work is work" paradigm.

I don't think it was said preferential treatment was given to polycule members, the complaint us have to occasionally hear about them at informal events.

My take is that everyone involved here, including the "victims" is a shitty human being. The predators obviously but also the so called "victims" who willingly exchanged (note: willingly isn't the same as wanting to, I willingly go to work multiple times a week, but I much rather want to stay in bed and have a lie in) sex for favours. The real victims here are the people who refused the advances and thus lost out on career progression, as well as men who were locked out of the roles on the basis of their sex (I'd like to see a discrimination trial some day against abusers with this as its argument, it would be enlightening to see how the progressives react).

Amen brother. Amen.

Many of the women on the spectrum are deeply mentally ill and will find a way to make anything fit into a sexual harassment accusation. Trying to seduce these few women in the "rationalist" autist community is a guaranteed shitshow.

Your view of women is very enlightening, in that it reveals more about you than about actual female behaviour.

Sometimes even ignoring the hard "no's" causes the women to submit and often she doesn't tell society / her mate and that starts an affair.

Where a 'soft no' is "No", I don't even want to imagine what a 'hard no' is. How do you think this does not come across as an apologia for sexual assault/coercion and indeed all the way up to rape? "Sure, she's screaming and struggling, but ignore that hard no, she really wants you!"

And then of course this gem:

Many of the women on the spectrum are deeply mentally ill and will find a way to make anything fit into a sexual harassment accusation.

I suggest to any women out there not to get into an elevator alone with you at any time of the day or night, given your views on "hard no" and "if she makes an accusation it's only because she's a mentally ill autist".

Where the "hard no" part is coming from? It's quoted but I don't see it in the commend above. Was it edited?

As someone who has been raped, twice, and sexually harassed by men and women many times, I personally would rather live in a world where I get raped or harassed sometimes than a world where, like in America, I am not able to have a social life because everyone just sees me a dangerous creep.

Elaborate on how you're not able to have a social life because everyone sees you as a dangerous creep? Knowing america, I can't really imagine what you mean. Most people manage to have social lives despite the small, but existing risk of false rape accusations.

This is basically my attitude, with more aggressive schadenfreude. EA is a community built by autistic nerds with more money than sense; this is just whining that some other group of sociopaths was running cons on the quokkas first. You don't want to deal with the weird nerds? Go build your own mountain of grant money.

what movement exactly do these people think they're joining? Yes, it's mostly weirdos

Which we know because at least by second- and third-hand accounts of the Bay Area bubble and the general community around EA and rationalism (I know a lot more than I wanted or needed to know about accusations of sexual abuse and harassment in the rationalist circles due to the trickling out of information via various blogs and references to the scandals on other blogs, all because of being on here and via SSC/ACX). But if you only learn about EA by things like this, when you go off to college, and you think "This sounds great, I want to make a positive contribution to changing the world", then you don't know about the poly and the non-conventional attitudes and all the rest of it.

So yeah, normie goes to conference and is shocked to be propositioned to join polycules and when refusing gets the lecture on compersion and the rather holier-than-thou attitude the poly evangelists within rationalism adopt about "we don't get jealous, we're so much better than you monogamous types" which I am, sorry to say, glad to see coming back to bite them in the backside even if it is in the context of a TIME article which isn't going to be the greatest in the world.

This reminds me. About ten years ago I asked a girlfriend who was an advertising exec if there was a cool edgy counterculture left that hasn't been co-opted by the mainstream and completely hollowed out yet. Without missing a beat she replied "polyamory". Adding "it's just too weird".

With that in mind, the obvious enlightenment of polyamory aside, I do wonder if it's kind of poison pill that's meant to keep out normies.

Everyone's on-board with being part of a smart do-gooder club until they're introduced to some metamours.

I do wonder if it's kind of poison pill that's meant to keep out normies.

It wasn't meant to keep out normies; the poly stuff was there long before EA had to worry about the general public becoming aware of them. I wish it worked better at keeping the mainstream away, though. There are a lot of "effective altruists" these days who don't seem to care about effectiveness, just evaluate charities based on vibes, and don't even know what "on the margin" means. (REEE!)

if there was a cool edgy counterculture left that hasn't been co-opted by the mainstream and completely hollowed out yet

There have been several trial balloons over the recent years with pieces in the 'respectable' news media, but yeah: we normies are just too stuck-in-the-mud to realise that this is poly which is a cool new original novel thing, not adultery and cheating and all the other old ways of having your cake and eating it too.

Poly helps keep love alive!

Here are the facts!

Poly is the future!

But we still obstinately stick to this view of it 😁

Or, as W.H. Auden put it:

To the man-in-the-street,

Who, I'm sorry to say

Is a keen observer of life,

The word ''Intellectual''

Suggests straight away

A man who's untrue to his wife.

refusing gets the lecture on compersion

I remember once talking to a woman at a (non-EA) conference whose big fetish was basically her partners having sex with other people. She was a bright, attractive, and charming young woman, but her self-esteem was painfully low.

That's the cuckold fetish, isn't it? Women can have it too. I think there's a lot of old stuff that gets dressed up with new names. For those who can make it work, good luck, but my impression is that it's a young person's notion and eventually they'll either partner up and marry/pick one person as their main partner, or it'll be well-off/high status older guys with a set of younger female partners (but that's totally not the same thing as mistresses or a harem or whatever that people did before the new enlightened days).

Thank you for linking that page on compersion, I got a great laugh out of that.

Oh man, I had to look up the Kerista Group who coined the term "compersion" as mentioned in that article, and dear oh dear. I think "cult" is the kindest word I can find. It started up in 1956 and lasted until 1991, which is pretty impressive, but it wasn't all free love and frolicking through the daisies by any means:

Kerista was founded by John Presmont after an auditory hallucination telling him that he was the founder of the next great religion of the world. After time spent in New York in the 1950s, and several island experiments in Dominica, Honduras, and Belize in the 1960s, Jud settled in San Francisco at the end of the 1960s

(Always Honduras! Same with Prospéra and for probably the same reasons: loose government regulations/amenable to bribery so you can set up and do what you damn well like so long as you grease the right palms).

From 1971 until 1991, the community was centered at the Kerista Commune (not a single physical building), founded in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco, California. The Keristans maintained a very high profile that included publication of a popular free newspaper and several national media appearances.

Entrance to the commune was extremely selective. Potential members were expected to attend the Growth Coop for several months, interact with other Keristans at potluck volleyball and during newspaper distribution, and socialize with various BFIC families. This intense mutual-selection process included months of transitional celibacy. Starting in Fall 1986, it included screening for AIDS/HIV before joining a sleeping schedule. By 1987 there was no celibacy period, but three months of transitional safer sex and quarterly HIV testing for the duration. A more controversial policy was men being required to undergo a vasectomy in order to join. That policy was overturned a year before the New Tribe ended.

Being 'unresolved-on-the-lifestyle', even momentarily or temporarily, warranted immediate gestalt and possible expulsion from the family or commune. Practically, a member could be "called out" on any standards violation or non-utopian thought or action by anyone at any time.

And the techie element was strong with this one, and naturally they went for Apple:

The Keristans shared income and could choose whether to have outside paying jobs or work within the community (which operated several businesses, a legally incorporated church, and an educational non-profit organization).

The most successful of the businesses was Abacus, Inc., an early Macintosh computer vendor in San Francisco, which eventually offered a variety of computer hardware, training, and services. At its height, Abacus had over 250 employees, offices in five cities, and revenues in excess of $25 million a year. It was voted the 33rd and 42nd fastest-growing privately held company in America by Inc. Magazine in 1990 and 1991 respectively, and was the top reseller of Macintosh computers in the Bay Area in 1991.

Is this sounding like a cult yet? Because it's sounding sort of like a cult to me.

In 1979 and 1980, two children were born in the community. Beginning in 1983, the adult male Keristans underwent vasectomies to deal with birth control and address global population issues. All male members subsequently had the requirement of having a vasectomy within a set period of time after joining the community.

The family structure of Kerista was composed of fidelitous groups called B-FICs (Best-Friend Identity Clusters). Keristans practiced non-preferential polyfidelity, which required consensus to accept a new person into the group.

Non-preferentiality was an important concept of Keristan polyfidelity, and had lofty goals but was more intended to keep people from coupling up. Keristans had a transitional celibacy period after joining a group of three months, sometimes waived.

A single B-FIC was composed of men and women who rotated sleeping with all of the opposite-sex members on a balanced rotational sleeping schedule. The sleeping schedule assigned each family member to sleep with a different opposite-sex partner each night. Since the BFICs were rarely balanced between men and women (typically more women than men), on any given night several family-members would have no partner to sleep with and were assigned a 'Zero-Night' when they slept alone. In addition to the programmed sleeping schedule, it was permitted to sleep with any opposite-sex family member at any time, which was termed a 'freebie'.

Oh yeah, way better than boring old monogamy and all its jealousy and conditions and restrictions on sexual and emotional freedom! 😁

I wonder how many other trendy terms or ideas have histories like this, if you actually go digging into their backstories. Somehow the sex/gender split in modern English has been laundered from its origins with John Money and his uh... unorthodox practices, and nobody remembers that the trans pride flag was invented by a man who stole his female colleagues' underwear and wrote stories about an adult man marrying a teen girl who doesn't age.

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