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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   26009 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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Things are happening, and are going to happen in even more spectacular way.

President Trump is weighing a military operation to extract nearly 1,000 pounds of uranium from Iran, a complex and risky mission that would likely put American forces inside the country for days or longer.

Yes, you can do in the real life dungeon crawl from fantasy fiction and gaming, first time since Vietnam tunnel warfare. Yes it would be awesome.(to monitor from far away now, ofc.)

Of course it is disinfo, of course the real boots on the grounds will arrive somewhere else in completely unexpected place. No way would Commander-in-Chief announce his plans to the enemy in the open. This couldn't happen.

I highly doubt that the covert ops community is leaky enough to leak this plan if it were real. There are very obvious and direct consequences to the soldiers involved, I just can't believe that would happen.

That said, there's probably a lot of alpha in finding a way to track the prediction market accounts of actual soldiers, who won't be shy about cashing in. It's likely that in turn global intelligence agencies are keyed into such accounts...which then raises the possibility of using prediction markets to head fake.

It wouldn't be like Vietnam tunnel warfare because you're not chasing enemies through tunnels. The enemies are on the surface; they'd be killed and the US military would set up a defensive perimeter and then send in the engineers to start digging.

But I agree this is unlikely at this point.

I think the US military has enough firepower to keep ground forces away from the engineering zone, but how are they going to stop drones and missiles?

The US can shoot down drones and ballistic missiles too, at least at the rate Iran can currently fire them.

you can see the US's ability to shoot down drones and ballistic missiles by looking at sat photos of their military installations all over the Persian Gulf which have been wrecked and are uninhabitable

someone should tell the American military they could have stopped this because instead of that, they abandoned and have been hiding in hotels for a month

or maybe laundry fires took out all those hangars, buildings, equipment, radars, etc

What, the US military just didn't think it was important to stop Camp Arifjan or Ali Al Salem from getting wrecked? Or CENTCOM's regional headquarters in Qatar?

That is probably true for a carrier group, but I don't think the US can airlift destroyers to the middle of Iran.

My understanding is that so far, they have used high-flying jets to attack Iran with impunity. I would expect that helicopters might be more vulnerable. Also, we don't know yet how many short range missiles and drones Iran can launch in the middle of their country.

it's not true for a carrier group either which is why all carrier groups sit 700+ miles off the coast of Iran

The US can shoot down drones and ballistic missiles relatively effectively at existing installations with reliable supply chains and stockpiles of air defense munitions. A dig site in the middle of Iran is going to require flying in all the air defense equipment, all the necessary ammunition, all supplies for the security force, supplies for the engineers, excavating equipment, replacement equipment when the initial stuff gets damaged... And then at the end you have to fly everything out again (you can ditch the heavy equipment, but not the soldiers or engineers or uranium).

The US military has immense operational competence, but this would be an incredibly delicate operation with numerous vulnerabilities.

Yes, all of that seems difficult but something the US can do.

The US seems to be able to shoot down most of them. Not all of them. This is an important distinction that doesn't seem well reported anywhere.

They don't need to shoot down all of them to carry out an operation. Losses greater than zero are acceptable.

I was speaking more generally regarding the whole war, but in this specific instance "losses greater than zero" very quickly complicate things and expand the operation. Unless the HEU is secretly stored closer to the border than publicly indicated, you're looking at 200+ miles of contested airspace, transporting in and out. Every piece of essential equipment or personnel you lose now needs a backup, which balloons the size of the operation, makes it harder to transport and protect, and increases the number of targets that can be hit. So you need more protection, which increases the footprint to be transported and protected, etc.

The US has air superiority. But yes, it would be a big operation. I believe the US certainly has the capability to do it, though.

And if the recent public speculation that the material was moved to Ishafan is true, the stuff is just in intact tunnels covered with soil and not really deeply buried.

no, the US doesn't have air superiority over Iran and rarely, if ever, flies into Iranian territory due to the risk of their planes being shot down

if it had air superiority, you would see the US regularly flying into Iranian territory to use far cheaper and more destructive bombs, but they rarely if ever do that because they would lose even more planes than their 1 plane loss every day and a half or so

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The US has air superiority.

I think it's really telling that the US has achieved air superiority over Iran instantly, while Russia has as of yet never achieved that level of superiority over Ukraine.

I believe the US certainly has the capability to do it, though.

It's probably not impossible, I'm just saying that when considering scale redundancies and protection need to be included in that calculus.

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As someone who was very against the starting this war and still wishes it never happened. This seems like a good idea to get some benefit. Boots on the ground seizing the Uranium and physically destroying the enrichment facilities would actually provide some benefit to the war and make Iran think twice about re-starting their nuclear program.

I will grant you that the US military has been extremely competent on an operational level so far, but this seems a mission straight from hell.

Iranian enrichment facilities are deep underground. You will not capture them with working elevators. Expect to dig through tens of meters of rubble (if you are lucky) or concrete (if you are not). Of course, the WSJ piece is overly optimistic when it expects that the UF6 will still be in cylinders by the time you get there. At the very least, I would expect it to be blown all over the place. Though I would actually expect the regime to find a a few hundred tons of a cheap substance to mix it in. Obviously not D-UF6, as that would undo the enrichment work, but something which is easily separable within a month or so. I imagine even mixing it with sand would be annoying, perhaps requiring you to heat 100 tons of sand to get it to sublime. Though I am sure that the Iranians have found something nastier. Plus whatever traps you can imagine.

The people on the surface defending the site will not have a better time than your engineers. I mean, obviously you could turn anything within artillery range into Gaza and kill another 50k civilians in the process, but then you might as well nuke their site and call it a day. To interdict infantry from getting into range you would need a continuous bombardment of a sort which would make WW1's Western Front like a skirmish (though admittedly in a much smaller area). For a week or however long your engineers need.

And your excavators can't exactly hide underground, so you need a plan to protect them from every single drone, shell or rocket Iran might try to hit them with.

Nor is it very feasible to just bring your own depleted uranium to undo their enrichment process and leaving it on site. The problem here is that of half the separation work is going from 0.7% to 2% or so. So to undo most of the separation work of 400kg 60% U-235, you would need to ship in 24 tons of depleted uranium in the same chemical form, then mix it really well.

This shows the larger problem: even if it is feasible to airlift HEU out, what are you going to do about the 10% enriched uranium? This already has 85% of the separation work required for 60% HEU in it, but it is also 6 times less portable. Iran could trivially undo the last 15% of separation work and leave you having to scrape up 2.4 tons instead of 400kg.

physically destroying the enrichment facilities would actually provide some benefit to the war and make Iran think twice about re-starting their nuclear program.

Only if you can do so without paying too high a price. If you end up with Iran killing 100 soldiers and capturing another 20 while also spending a couple of dozen billions, Iran might decide that you are welcome back any time.

Trump is a Stalker fan since Putin recommended it to him and he wants the US military to get to experience the Zone by having to extract valuable items from a set of irradiated inland ruins and underground laboratories whilst under fire from various factions of local militaries, paramilitaires and international mercenairies.

What he's not counted upon is another local faction of brainwashed fanatics that worship atom and apocalypse.

Иди ко мне

The most unbearable thing in American culture is that disrespect is seen as high status and respect is seen as low status.

Today, if you are in a situation where you need to be respectful, you are in a very bad place. You are either in court, in a ghetto, or in prison. In court you must pay deference to the judge (who, being very high class indeed, is often very disrespectful- “I just can’t with that history.” I wanted to jump her too.) In the ghetto you must pay deference to the top dogs, the alphas, the crime mob bosses, whoever is in charge. In prison you must be respectful of everyone else or you’re going to suffer the consequences.

Outside of these places, you are free to be as disrespectful as you please. Indeed, the dream is that the richer you are, the more disrespectful you can be toward others around you. You want to get rich so you can go make fun of expensive stuff at Louis Vuitton and Bergdorf (and then buy it, being rude to the salespeople all the while.)

Where does this concept come from? I believe it’s an inherited trait from the English. It is downstream of entitlement. I am a midwestern American but have spent a fair amount of time in France. The French seem irritated by the entitlement of Anglosphere people. It took me a long time to understand why things that work in the Anglosphere are frowned upon in France, and as I’m still an outsider I’m still not sure I fully understand, but I have a theory that seems to explain the difference.

In American and English culture, we often show up to things seeming frazzled and sad and expect those around us to take care of all of our problems. We are owed this by society, after all, we are the sad and frazzled people! In France (and in most places) this is seen as entitled and crazy. If you show up like a weird diva, in England, people will want to know what’s wrong and try to help. If you show up like a weird dive in France, people will think there’s something wrong with you and roll their eyes until you can act like a mature adult who takes care of themselves.

Americans and the English, terrified of appearing slow or dumb, interrupt constantly. In other countries, people are not so afraid of appearing slow and dumb, and let each other speak, and then respond to what has actually been spoken.

The first time I visited Vienna I took a cab from the airport to my accommodations. The cab driver was polite and respectful, and I was nervously practicing my German with him. This being 5 years ago, I was still very much in the anglosphere cultural mode of interaction. So when we approached the accommodation, I said, “Hier ist gut danke,” and he sort of softly chuckled at me, in a way that was just condescending enough for me to be confused as to what I was doing wrong. It took a while to realize that it was I who had condescended to him as if he was someone incompetent at his job, while he was a professional who knew his city and his trade well and I was a tourist who just showed up. The English, and today the Americans, travel the entire world certain that they know the new city they’ve just arrived in better than the 60 year old cab driver.

As an American I can explain why we do this- or at least the rationale that we believe is why we do this. We want to be proactive and helpful, we don’t want to be seen as dumb or lazy, we don’t want to be taken advantage of. Americans go to a coffee shop in any part of the world, order their food, and then stand around waiting for it to be presented to them, staring down the staff the entire time. In most of the world this is seen as overbearing, impatient, rude, and weird. You order your things, then go sit down, because the staff will take care of you. In America we assume the staff to be incompetent or uncaring to the degree that we will never receive the order.

It’s hard to know, but I believe the cultural traits I’ve described have persisted in the American culture for several hundred years. But another trend emerged that has exacerbated the issue. Basically, class was invented for the Americans in the 1980s, or at least class as we understand it today. From the 1940s to the 1960s, there was mass upward mobility among all classes until the stagnation of the 1970s. People were largely of the same middle class in this period, or if not they were certainly living a better life than the generation before them at any rung of the socioeconomic ladder. It is not a popular view but I see the 1970s as the most beautiful time period of the 20th century. The Brady Bunch is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. The grainy quality of the beautiful young blonde and brunet people in their rusty rainbow modernist home is the sort of fever dream you could build an ethnostate off of. The 1970s are the only era of history where the mass market, every day people clothes looked better than the runway fashions. (Compare the rainbow of pristine, printed and textured knits and denim in the Sears catalogue to the drab and underwhelming runway fashions of Halston and Anne Klein.)

The 80s is where everything went wrong. Class signaling emerged and ruined the fabric of American life. Reagan didn’t help things but I’m not pinning it on him alone. Indeed, there is classism in America on both the right and the left. Neither of them are good. Classism from the left looks like the snobbery of NPR and the ivies and east coast intellectualism. Classism from the right looks like midwestern golf and country clubs and HRH in her McMansion. Classism from both sides looks down on poor whites, and when pressed both sides are willing to self-flagellate in honor of the past horrors of the treatment of blacks and other minorities, while never daring to examine the motivations for these historical situations, and never feeling bad about the open and glaring hostility toward poor white people (the occasional Appalachian apologia aside which often feels either forced at gunpoint or the result of some strange 4d chess situation.)

Anyway, I pinpoint the emergence of America’s class system to the 80s because it was truly the decade where equality was thrown out the window. Suddenly you had girls like Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club (who I never thought could really pass for a pretty popular girl- all the redheaded girls I grew up with were goths and poor, but this was the midwest) asserting her class superiority by eating sushi and sticking up her nose at anyone who didn’t get the vibe. 70s Marcia Brady would never resort to ridiculous class signaling like this- she didn’t need to. She was just hot. The 80s were the decade where sex became undignified, and status became the name of the game. Now you didn’t just wear Levi’s from Sears to get laid, you had to wear Yohji Yamamoto- never mind that the silhouettes made you look like a hunched over creep, or that the Kansai Yamamoto jumpsuit you bought made you look like a Goomba from the Mario movie (not even the video game) and that it didn’t get you laid at all.

Please look at the films Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974) directed by John Waters. I first watched these around 2010 while I was in college. I truly was very confused by the conceit of these films. Basically, they are meant to depict very “filthy” people (in the words of the director.) The filthiest people alive, even. But visually, these people look very put together and classy and elegant to me, compared to the people I see today. The Team Rocket-esque main villains in both films (see here) may have unnaturally dyed hair, but she wears crystal jewelry, draped silk blouses, secretary-looking eyeglasses, and thoughtful makeup. He wears button up shirts, well fitted trousers, and sharp blazers. It blows the mind that there was a time in America that women who looked like [this]((https://prod3.agileticketing.net/images/user/fsc_2553/fs_female_trouble_800.jpg) were considered trashy. Ok, the bra is showing through the sweater, but my god. Pleated plaid skirts, pencil skirts, button up blouses- who are these women, CEOs?

Today people dress very disrespectfully. Indeed, the Silicon Valley flex is that the billionaire wears flip flops and hoodies everywhere. Ugggghhhh! Sorry to mention France again, but there is something called noblesse oblige. In earlier societies, the rich gave so much to the poor. They dignified the existence of the poor by giving them something to aspire to, something to look up to, a guide for their lives and their choices. The rich today have abandoned all noblesse oblige in favor of looking worse than the filthiest people alive. They believe they owe those around them nothing.

Now, it may feel glamorous to owe those around you nothing, to disrespect the people around you, to degrade yourself and pull down everyone you see at the same time. But what it really betrays about the person who does this is that they feel so small. HRH, the strange right wing woman internet famous for ranting about eating a potato, once said that she loves to visit luxury boutiques “looking like a pile of trash.” (She meant that she goes in wearing leggings or sweatpants and flip flops, not in proper clothing.) She must feel so small about herself that she needs to grab back some power from her situation and the only way she knows how is to disrespect the people around her through disrespecting herself.

By the way, disrespect is an extremely feminine trait. When I’ve traveled in the Middle East and Greece, men are extremely respectful of each other. They never talk poorly of their local community and those around them. If you try to speak poorly of your culture, even if it is America, they see you as strange and indeed, disrespectful. They expect you to speak highly of it because they feel proud of where they are from for the most part. Of course they don’t have the luxury of being from the most powerful and richest place on earth as I happen to be from, and being in a more turbulent area prone to war and generational blood lust they have more motivation to respect themselves and their communities. Women, who American men allow to set all cultural mores and public opinion, do not have the egos to enact a sense of dignity and respect toward their community or nation.

Speaking of the wealth of America, it was a shock to me that midwestern America seems richer than even Switzerland. My nephew’s high school in the rural midwest just spent $20,000 on costumes for one play this year. An old man in the woods recently told me medicare paid for his $400,000 penis implant to correct ED. The waste and excesses of America are insane. Perhaps if we were more exposed and aware of the richness of the US compared with any other place men and women would both feel more respect toward it. The fact that we can afford absurd luxuries in the middle class but we have no appreciation for it- and even feel entitled to it- is staggering to me.

It must be noted here that respect in the US can vary widely between regions. The Northeast is by far the least respectful region in the USA. This creates a very bizarre dynamic in certain places, such as in NYC where I interned for several months in the fashion industry. The garment district is full of people who come from all over the world, mostly outside of the anglosphere, from places with very strict codes of respect. Being a midwestern transplant and an American through and through, I could tell I was pissing off every single macho Egyptian gay fabric trader and Jewish notions dealer and Korean dragon lady every time I talked to them and had no idea why. In the stress and discomfort of Midtown Manhattan I was a lost cause, I just mostly didn’t make friends there and moved on with my life. But in reflection I can only imagine they felt my bratty midwestern personality clashed with their dignified expectation of respect that I was frankly oblivious to.

Northeastern cultural norms seem to be creeping east into the midwest and the Great Lakes regions. It seems like people were a bit more patient and friendly with each other across these areas when I was growing up 20 years ago than they are today. I would blame this on people seeing the East Coast as classier and more aspirational compared with the Midwest. Appalachian people have their own codes of respect and are a bit cliquish compared with other regions of the US but I would say are somewhere between the Northeast and the Midwest in terms of the baseline expectation of respect. The south is actually very respectful and I am one of the few northerners who prefer southern people over northerners. People in the north want to paint all southerners as racist and bigoted while never examining the bigotedness of this belief. Indeed when I travel in the south I am always struck by how sweet and kind and thoughtful people are in the south compared with the mean, snappy nastiness of the northerners. I’ve spent very little time on the west coast but people seem great out there, it’s hard to be in a bad mood with such great weather and climate and beautiful scenery in California. It seems in the media like people constantly complain about crime and other issues in CA but the vast majority of those problems are so much more unbearable in the east than in the west, so I am confused by the culture and the perception.

The respect dynamic also creates problems between American people who have grown up here and more recent immigrants. If you grew up in a place where respect is expected, and are suddenly in a culture where respect is low class, you’re going to feel weird and disrespected by the locals and like you are taking a huge drop in status among the community because you don’t understand the local norms.

The low status of respect is a very strange cultural trait among the Anglosphere but also leads to certain asymmetric advantages. For example, our impatience is a natural positive when it comes to creating efficient computer programs or cutting bureaucratic bloat or refining fast production in food or manufacturing. Having no expectation for respect lets us skip formalities and focus on more important tasks or matters. Mild disrespect could raise the bar for engagement from people who don’t adopt the local norms as readily as an in-group signal.

If you are from an Anglosphere country and want to understand how we come across to other people I would recommend the YouTube channel Mikeokay ( https://youtube.com/@mikeokay ). He is a sweet and friendly guy but he is also very British, talking over people, being oblivious to social cues of respect and so on, though he does try to fit in to the extent that he can. I sometimes feel cringe at things he does that he doesn’t realize are rude but people are usually understanding enough that he is a foreigner and are forgiving even as he retains his fringe British traits.

The most insufferable result of the respect issue in America is the treatment of people who are seen as stupid. Americans believe that we are seen as stupid outside of the US. I doubt this belief. We have been brain draining Europe and a handful of other regions for decades or centuries. People respect American institutions from law and universities to science and the humanities. It seems like a very American invention, and a facile one, that we are seen as stupid outside of the US. Regardless, because of this insecurity of intelligence, we see one of the darkest impulses of the American people, which is to dogpile on people who appear dumb. The other day my mother was looking at her phone, scrolling Facebook, and read a post where someone asked a question about the weather. I forget what it was exactly, but it was seen as a dumb question, and she said that all the comments were dogpiling on this person for asking a dumb question. She was on the side of the mob. I felt so bad for the person who asked the question, and thought less of my mother for siding with the pile on. Sometimes we ask questions that are easily answered and should still be afforded the dignity of having a kind and educated response. That we jump to flaming someone seen as dumb is horrible.

This also is a terrible hypocrisy of the American people. A year or two ago, I went to a somewhat close relative’s wedding. In the ceremony there was a person related somehow to my relative’s new husband. She visibly had some mental disability, perhaps downs syndrome if I had to guess. There was a moment during the ceremony where the relative gave a sort of short speech, and it was a nice moment, but the reaction from the crowd was a massive and extended clapping that felt like a mass group guilt catharsis to forgive themselves and each other of all their other hypocrisies through one moment of kindness toward someone with a disability. These are the same people who will dog pile on a “dumb” question online, or spend decades blaming social ills on the poor, but want to feel good about clapping for a disabled person? I don’t want to be so trite as to say I felt like I was in a room full of nazis clapping for a Jew, but I at least felt like I was in a room full of people who openly dislike dumb people and spend an awful lot of time trying to signal that they are not dumb people who were all clapping for a very “dumb” person. I do believe that they would genuinely be kind to and accepting of this person if they were a close family member, or at least attempt to do so, but I’m not sure if that makes them more or less hypocritical.

Anyway, the same people who flagellate themselves nonstop over the massacre of the Native Americans or the history of slavery and Jim Crow appear to have no capacity to see the problem of being terrible toward less intelligent people or poor whites today. The hypocrisy to me is glaring and incongruent. Ideally we would take a more nuanced and understanding view of history as well as our current bigotries and prejudices, but it’s more likely that we deal with the current bigotries with the same embarrassing self flagellation as we deal with other historical grievances if we deal with them at all. Unfortunately due to the bigotry of the intelligent over the dumb, and the classism of the elite over the poor, anyone advocating on the behalf of either group is too embarrassed to speak out for their interests.

In conclusion, when I was young, my father used to give me a piece of wisdom. He would say, it’s nice to be smart, but it’s smarter to be nice. He is correct. To embrace kindness and respect would help improve public life in America today.

———

I have been meaning to write this essay for like 5 years but never tackled it until today. I will say that I think we’re past peak rudeness as exemplified by the Karen video rage of circa 2020, but there is still a fundamental energy of disrespect inherent in Anglo-American culture that I think is worth examining.

lot of good points here (esp. re: intelligence & respect), but I want to focus on one thing. I think you're highly attuned to social signaling in a way not everyone is by default.

The cab driver incident: you heard him chuckle, read condescension into it, then re-examined your behavior and read condescension into that. Maybe he just had a private joke with himself. Maybe something about your accent amused him. You were a tourist trying to be polite and helpful. Honestly, in your own mind, were you really being condescending?

One time I was mountain biking with my father. Wide logging road, plenty of space. We passed two hikers, waved, smiled, and said hello. They made an exaggerated show of jumping aside, the man shielding his partner from the big scary machines. (really, there was like 4ft of space between us, and no danger). This ate at my dad all day. What had we done wrong? He kept wondering and bringing it up every few hours.

point is, I could come up with a grand theory of respect and owed deference to explain why either of us was in the wrong, but the truth is, I just don't know. I rather enjoy not thinking about it. My dad couldn't put it out of his mind, and it made him miserable all day. If you go through life running every social interaction through an overactive status filter, you'll read malice into things that are probably honest mistakes.

Hard agree. I grew up in a culture where one of the ways the Big Man in the valley showed off how Big he was, was being genteel to the Hoi polloi while wearing clean boots and a luminescent white hat.

This is a really good way to put it. I've bemoaned the culture of dressing down before, but I never thought about it in these terms. We used to aspire to acting with respect, to courtliness; now we aspire to be so important that we can act with disrespect.

Generally agree, but with a bit of a branching split.

The suit.

Suits were originally for men conducting business to meet each other in a way to demonstrate the exact kind of respect that you and OP discuss. I like those kind of suits.

Suits, today, in companies that require them or strongly suggest them, are far more about a corporate conformity and "putting on airs" of Doing Big Business. I spent three years wearing a suit everyday to my job as a .... data scientist. I was rarely in meetings with non-technical staff. I made zero "deals". I was slightly uncomfortable all day long and I paid thousands of dollars in dry cleaning.

The suit, in that context, is functionally pointless and is a kind of weird aspirational gesture to a form of business that 90%+ of non-sales professionals really will never engage in.

What I'm saying here is that blindly aping the forms of respect (dress, appearance, etc.) can, if done without intent, actually create a kind of personal disrespect. The "corporate soulness drone" meme is, in part, a nod to the fact that trying to blend together old world savoir-faire with post-ww2 industrial capitalism fails in a non-linear way; there's no charm of a classic British firm and the efficiency of Space Age MegaCompanies gets slowed down and neutered. You get InnaTech instead of Lloyd's and instead of SpaceX.

It's not that I'm advocating a RETVRN to the business suit. I'm critiquing that we abolished the business suit with nothing to replace it.

I do believe that the American Ivy/Prep tradition is the perfect way for a white American man to dress, and that the suit or something like it is the perfect outfit for most occasions. The suit is aesthetically perfect for the male form. Structured tailoring smooths out your body's imperfections. The lapels broaden the shoulder and slim the waist. The shirt collar frames the face. It's relatively practical and comfortable if you pick fabrics and cuts properly.

But I recognize that wearing a suit and tie is a costume today in most circumstances. It might be a very attractive costume, but it's a costume. For the most part I try to achieve a similar impact with more casual clothing, a chore coat or an unstructured blazer with chinos, a zippered hoodie, etc.

There are lots of other things that can fill that role. There are lots of other ways to create an outfit or dress people well. But we haven't picked one as a society and I think that's a problem that society can choose to solve. We've lost, in most places, the basic "this is how you dress to show respect to those around you" set of rules that make life more navigable.

We've lost, in most places, the basic "this is how you dress to show respect to those around you" set of rules that make life more navigable.

We didn't lose them. We explicitly chose to throw them away at the behest of an ideological movement that asserts "those around you" are not worthy of such respect.

In court you must pay deference to the judge (who, being very high class indeed, is often very disrespectful- “I just can’t with that history.” I wanted to jump her too.)

This is tangential to your main point, but I found a video clip on Reddit with more context, and it seems like the judge was responding to the defendant's lawyer saying "I think the court can trust that he will perform well on probation" (at about 6:30 in the video). So I think she was trying to straightforwardly say "I just can't trust [that he will perform well on probation] given his history", and wasn't, like, invoking Tumblr slang to disparage his criminal record.

I would kind of disagree. The great American sin is hypocrisy, the great American foolishness is arrogance, the great American power is a tolerance and blindness to risk that some people would consider suicidal.

I want to not care about Americans, but I can't. Every conversation inevitably I have to think about them, because they have all the guns and all the money. They have a near stranglehold on capital, culture, and everything in between; every time someone says or does something influential I have to worry about the American who will take it to its logical conclusion and enact something monstrous, or the American who will misinterpret it and enact something just as monstrous. Every time someone invents something brilliant they inevitably wish to sell it to an American, or an American-owned business or the American government, or an American business propped up by the American government. Any time anyone talks about trying to make it on the geopolitical stage, they have to do so in relation to America, whether militarily, economically or otherwise. More foreigners pay attention to American elections than those of their own country's.

Respect is not the issue. Americans don't even realize that they're being disrespectful. They just have little to no conception of anything outside their world being different. This has both positive and negative effects. At its worst, it is "let them eat cake", at its best, it is "this poor wretch is no different than I". If they can't conceive of someone who just wants to murder an entire race, desperate enough to resort to cannibalism, willing to blow themselves up in a holy war with centuries of history, they will never understand it and the thought of it happening will just straight up not register in their worldview. Trying to explain it to them might as well be like trying to explain that extraterrestrials are the reason their Amazon packages aren't arriving. It can read as callous, but it's not really malicious.

I really like this essay. I'm also really liking the response to it so far. I love that most here will happily chat/rant/effortpost on the decline in American society vs the $GOOD_OLD_DAYS but the second someone else does it you get an explosion of "NUH UH, AMERICA IS THE BEST SHUT UP"

I get it too, I will talk shit about how much my family pisses me off all day, but if someone came up to me and said "your mom is really pretentious and has terrible opinions on XYZ" I'd be super pissed off, even though I say that all the time.

Today, if you are in a situation where you need to be respectful, you are in a very bad place. You are either in court, in a ghetto, or in prison. In court you must pay deference to the judge (who, being very high class indeed, is often very disrespectful- “I just can’t with that history.” I wanted to jump her too.) In the ghetto you must pay deference to the top dogs, the alphas, the crime mob bosses, whoever is in charge. In prison you must be respectful of everyone else or you’re going to suffer the consequences.

...

When I’ve traveled in the Middle East and Greece, men are extremely respectful of each other. They never talk poorly of their local community and those around them.

Do you not see the connection there? Yes, places where perceived disrespect results in violence tend to have different norms regarding politeness. That isn't to say that disrespect goes unpunished in the US - it can easily lose you social capital. It's just less likely to get you punched in the face.

What OP is describing as "respectfulness" strikes me as being primarily about having a legible social hierarchy, and an extremely idealized one at that. The reality is that, far from noblesse oblige being the norm, abusing your inferiors was frequently a prerogative of status (patriarchal cultures take this to the extreme). This isn't necessarily going to be obvious if you're viewing these societies as a ground-level tourist (especially a western one), since you're unlikely to be exposed to those social dynamics.

By contrast, the social milieu of the US is often remarkably flat and divided more horizontally than vertically. It's not easy to identify who is on top in any given situation, and even when you do there's a strong measure of performative egalitarianism where people in positions of superiority downplay it. OP is not wrong to note that there is a measure of falsity here - the boss might wear flip flops and a tshirt and insist you call him by his first name, but one of you has the power to fire the other - but the pretense has value in terms of how elites behave.

One of your main bits of evidence that Americans are disrespectful is that we dress like slobs, but that's not what respect means. You can tell a little story about how dressing up conveys respect for the people around you by showing that you put in effort, and respect for yourself by presenting yourself nicely, but you can also tell a story about how dressing down conveys respect for the people around you by releasing them from the obligation to perform a silly social ritual that per everyone's revealed preferences they don't want to perform, and respect for yourself by living authentically. Another one would be that dressing nicely shows off either wealth or a particular kind of cultural competency that encodes class in a way that is inaccessible to some people, therefore putting them down and displaying contempt for anyone who can't manage it. Since you have some background in fashion, this might be an alien perspective to you, but it's definitely not the case that nicer-clothes = more respect. Respect is about how you treat people. How you dress is part of it, and showing up to a wedding in sweats is obviously disrespectful, but it's not at all obvious that going about your daily life in casual clothing is disrespectful.

I'll allow that we may have had a hiatus in class expression between the 40s and 70s (though I'm pretty dubious even of this), but the idea that class was invented in the 80s is absurd. The robber barons, Southern planters, and the Easter financiers around the turn of the 20th century were all way more overt in their class expression than the elite of the 80s. We had a rash of anarchist terrorism motivated on a class basis that resulted in a president getting assassinated. Just walk through the historic part of Detroit and tell me with a straight face that class was invented in America in the 80s.

Finally, the idea that Europeans should be held up as exemplars of respect is crazy to anyone who has worked in a multinational company. Southern Europeans are generally perfectly lovely, but nearly without fail upon having some distant co-worker be rude and unprofessional to me I'll look up where they are based and it's somewhere in Northern Europe (and no they aren't anglophone). I don't actually mind this too much because it means they don't dissemble and you know where you stand with them. I'd much rather work with a Dutchman or German than someone from a high power distance culture who will either not call out a bad idea if they are lower rank or bully people if they are higher rank. Fortunately, there is a culture that manages to both be low power distance and professional: mine. Yes, I understand that this is culturally dependent and everyone has their own perspective. My perspective is that Americans do by far the best job of both remembering that their co-workers are people with egos and getting shit done. (I will say that the French that I've worked with in a professional context seem much closer to the American norms of professionalism than a lot of other Europeans).

On the class issue, it’s probably worth linking Scott’s book review on the subject.

I liked the book review, but there are things in the original book that strike me as almost entirely wrong, like the "when do you eat dinner" part:

Destitutes and bottom-out-of-sights eat dinner at 5:30, for the prole staff which takes care of them wants to clean up and be out roller skating or bowling early in the evening. It eats, thus, at 6:00 or 6:30. The family of Jack and Sophie Portnoy ate at 6:00, an indication of the prole pull on them despite his having a middle-class job, barely, that of an insurance salesman...The middle class eats at 7:00 or even 7:30, the upper-middle at 8:00 or 8:30. Some upper-middles, uppers, and top-out-of-sights dine at 9:00 or even later, after nightly protracted cocktail sessions lasting at least two hours.

Older people eat earlier, just as they get up in the morning earlier and go to bed earlier. The general pattern for most Americans is to eat dinner when the last breadwinner arrives home, which is probably around 6:00.

The discussion about consumerism also strikes me as clearly wrong, and I think Scott would be shocked at how many genuinely upper-middle-class people like Disneyland and conspicuous consumption (and how few proles could afford it nowadays). That said, the book seems to hint at this: "it urges us to watch for "prole drift", the tendency of lower-class signals and behaviors to become higher-class over time." Perhaps this has to do with something called... gasp social mobility?

But, in particular, I think the book he's reviewing is very much a WASP's view of class, which is simply not so relevant to American society and power nowadays -- it does you no good to be old-money upper-class in a society where that caste of people wields less and less concrete political power and fewer and fewer people even know about your standards enough to think they're lesser than you. At some point you're just insisting on things because they've always been done that way, while the new money powerhouses reshape society in their image.

That said, the physiognomy chart was rather funny, particularly in that I was reminded when the news interviewed a Republican from Massachusetts who looked every bit like the guy on the left, who talked about leaving the Republican party because of Trump.

It seems like a very American invention, and a facile one, that we are seen as stupid outside of the US.

I enjoyed much of the essay but disagree here. Outside the US, amongst non-Americans, Americans are indeed looked down upon and considered stupid.

Some clips from Jeremy Clarkson: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JsMVncOU1K4

It's not merely my personal 'America is a greatly flawed country in many respects but also with great strengths' opinion but the strawman version of 'Americans are stupid, fat, uncultured, violent and fascist too'. My well-off Australian friends constantly bemoan America, how they harass you and ask for passwords and social media and fingerprints if you want to enter the US - those are just stories they've heard since they don't want to visit the US with Trump and all.

Even before Trump America was looked down on, the Clarkson clips are old and somewhat representative of ambient anti-American stereotypes. The War on Terror is perceived as a dumb idea executed badly, that the US dragged us into. Same with the war in Iran for that matter. They don't like American lifestyle either, how the food has chemicals in it, the tipping culture, the drug commercials, feeling unsafe in major cities... When I went to the US with some friends we didn't really like it, saw some guy shooting up on the street which was a new experience. Much preferred Europe, though it's also hard to feel safe in Paris with all the troops wandering around.

Nobody respects 'American institutions from law and universities to science and the humanities'. Nobody really thinks about them at all, except insofar as Trump is perceived as wrecking them. What good are these institutions if Trump emerged and seemingly took over, people think. My legal-inclined friends don't like US jurisprudence, they think it's a mutated and degraded cousin of proper common law. All maluses and no pluses. It's an immature way to think about countries but that's just how the media seems to behave, that's the base expectation. I could point out to them that in terms of authoritarianism, our freedom-of-speech is much more limited than the US, the UK arrests many more people for political crimes but that's not something that people feel comfortable saying or thinking so much.

Maybe it's different in the developing world or China or Japan.

I feel a lot of it, from Europeans and also from the other anglosphere countries (Canada and Australia), is what we refer to as "coping". Mostly coping with feeling less agentful and capable than americans are. Japan and China seem to be more positive because Japan learned a long time ago (and China in the last half-century) that the more productive reaction to being humbled by someone else is not to find excuses but just to learn what gave that person an edge over you and then doing that even better than them. Europeans and (and other anglos) seem to be averse to doing that, they seem to want to double down on what kept them inferior, and wear that inferiority as some kind of weird badge of honor.

I honestly just don't even know how to reply to this. I guess we just have irreconcilable values if you think America is superior.

I'm grateful to all the sacrifices you guys make to hold up the rest of the anglosphere, eg militarily, but I would never want to live there. From my point of view you guys are sacrificing to Moloch as fast as you can, which I very much hope my country will avoid doing until absolutely necessary.

Fun fact: I am not, actually, American. I just recognize that there is still some vitality left in US, unlike Western Europe and the other Anglosphere countries, who have nothing to contribute and make every decision they can seemingly with the goal of smothering their economy, of replacing their culture and demography. Maybe it doesn't always do so in the wisest way, but the american beast still moves and thrash about. Western europe is inert, it hasn't moved in a long time. At this point we should really check for a pulse and just call it.

My apologies for assuming, then. (and I agree Europe is not coming out of this looking good either)

Me normally: "US intervention in Iraq was a mistake, US hegemony has gone too far, we need to pull back, maybe focus on deterring China,"

Me after one (1) drink (of Spite): "...there's still time. We could put the 82nd in London. The people would greet us as liberators! Armored columns could reach Vancouver and Montreal in less than 12 hours. We'd need to arm the moderate Welsh, of course, and the Catalan separatists..."

“Americans are looked down upon as stupid”

How many employees look down on their boss as stupid but don’t see the full picture and only their little bubble and interests. This also feels a bit like being the smart kid in a lower middle class school. The rest will make fun of you etc.

The rest of the American things basically boil down to YES we have black people.

Don't have time for a full response but my point would be that Martial Arts Gyms are one of the few places where MUTUAL respect is both expected, observed, and enforced.

Because the only thing that actually gains you respect is competence, and competence in martial arts can be tested very objectively, and corners can't be cut. Yeah, a McDojo can hand you a belt, but abilities can be tested and frauds identified with a simple sparring session. And generally speaking, people who are capable of actual physical violence, but also understand why you want to avoid it are going to be more respectful of each other, both from recognition of the shared skill AND the avoidance of conflict.

I dunno, I keep coming back to this point. If you're not training some kind of physical skill, even if it isn't a martial one, why would you expect to get respect from those around you. Crossing you has no cost if you are incapable of doing them any harm. And on the flip side, if you are training a physical skill but the others who train it don't offer respect in return, why would you want to train it?

Although the Cobra Kai model does exist in some places, where people prefer to be verbally abused and consider that the mark of quality instruction.

I don't think we need to return to a full on honor culture... but I do think that social etiquette might improve if (nonfatal) dueling were allowed.

Also I think my baseline experience is that most people show certain respect to each other since I've grown up in the South.

I've been thinking a lot about this in a BJJ context, because I've been trying to decide if my habit of self-mocking is obnoxious or not. I'm generally down on myself, I'm a middle aged white belt, and a particularly ungraceful one at that. So I tend to lose more than I win when I go against people who have more experience. But every now and then I catch something, and I nearly always blurt out something self-denigrating, like "oh you let me get away with that one" or "you just got bored of sitting in my half guard so you let me sweep" or "guess you let me work a little too long" or "even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes" after I tap someone.

And this is reflexive on my part, not thought out. I don't hit a kimura trap sweep and think consciously "I should apologize;" I just blurt it out because it's obvious that I only got lucky or I only got it because he let me get it, I want him to know that I don't think I'm better than him and that he doesn't have to make a point of getting me back. And I want him to know that I respect him because I don't want him ripping a sub on me or hitting me with a twister or something.

BJJ functions that way because not only can someone hurt you, there's so much trust involved in them not hurting you. But it's far from perfect, there's always dicks who roll like they have a chip on their shoulder. I've found I can't really roll with the teenage competitive kids at this point, because it's vinegar and baking soda: I don't want to lose to a skinny young whelp, they don't want to lose to a fat old man. We both take things too far and I end up getting hurt.

There's another little guy, about my age, who constantly rips dirty subs, and I don't roll with him much, or when I do I really focus on not giving him any space to breathe and play super conservative. And if he wasn't so aggressive, I'd let a guy like that work, I'd focus on working new things and on good technique and on not using my weight advantage too much, but he's so close to snapping one of my knee ligaments that I just suffocate him and no one has any fun because I'm not gonna give him any chances.

And that's the nature of things that so many people don't consider: mutual respect isn't about who will win the fight, it's about recognizing that in the immortal words of Patrick Swayze "nobody ever won a fight." Even if you know you can win, you can still get hurt in the process (like Tyr losing his hand), or the underdog can get lucky (like Pierre shooting Dolokhov in their duel). The threat of violence is costly for all involved, even the winners.

it's about recognizing that in the immortal words of Patrick Swayze "nobody ever won a fight.

Bingo.

And for many I've noticed that realization doesn't kick in until their first big injury. Hopefully not a permanent one. Young dudes have that innate sense of invulnerability, and they bounce back from minor issues so quickly that the idea that they're one bad fall or headkick away from brain damage or at least an emergency room visit seems to escape them.

I have been insanely blessed to have been doing it as long as I have without being sidelined by a serious injury, but that would be because I've been very cognizant of that possibility, and I train accordingly. I have "let" guys with less experience than me win simply to avoid a situation where one of us would probably get hurt, or to not escalate the intensity to unsafe levels. Most of the time they simply don't have the knowledge to realize how easily they can get hurt. On rarer occasions they lack the self control to rein it in where needed.

Likewise, the worst injuries I've doled out are broken noses. I felt HORRIBLE about that in both cases, but in the grand scheme those are easily recoverable.

On the meta level this means finding a gym that selects for high conscientiousness.

they're one bad fall or headkick away from brain damage or[...]

I have been insanely blessed to have been doing it as long as I have without being sidelined by a serious injury

I love the result of this typo being the trailing off "I've never suffered brain damage or...anyway..."

I have "let" guys with less experience than me win simply to avoid a situation where one of us would probably get hurt, or to not escalate the intensity to unsafe levels. Most of the time they simply don't have the knowledge to realize how easily they can get hurt. On rarer occasions they lack the self control to rein it in where needed.

So much of it comes down to pride, and lack of communication which is mostly downstream from pride. When I get hurt, it's always ego standing in the way of just saying "Yeah I can't do that" or "Yeah I'm just going to tap here, not from a sub but because my leg is in a weird spot." The problem is removing ego from losing, while still drawing motivation from winning.

Likewise, the worst injuries I've doled out are broken noses. I felt HORRIBLE about that in both cases, but in the grand scheme those are easily recoverable.

I know you're far deeper into it than I am, and it's a different ruleset, but for me my BJJ started to get a lot better when I realized that I didn't want to hurt my partner, and just removed all the moves I deem "too dangerous" or "rude" from my repertoire. I don't do heel hooks, I don't do throat posts, I don't do neck cranks, I don't do anything flying or rolling, I don't slam anybody. I stick to slow, even, cautious application of basics. I give my opponents tons of time to tap because I have the sub sunk. This works so much better for me, because when I try something risky, I double clutch trying to make sure not to hurt my opponent, and then I lose the whole thing. I never get a heel hook because I'm trying to do it too slow. Where a straight ankle, I'm confident my opponent is going to tap to discomfort before they break anything important. I never manage to finish wrestling shots live, because I'm worrying about not slamming my opponent and then I lose it, but I can do slide-bys or arm drags all day. I never finish guillotines with a guard pull, but I can use the position to take the back.

I'm hoping to one day reach a level of confidence where I can reintegrate some of that into my game. I still drill it, but letting go of it live and focusing on things I'm confident in really improved my rolls.

and just removed all the moves I deem "too dangerous" or "rude" from my repertoire. I don't do heel hooks, I don't do throat posts, I don't do neck cranks, I don't do anything flying or rolling, I don't slam anybody.

Same. The two big realizations that I try to instill in students regarding intensity:

  1. You learn much faster when its "playful" than if its aggressive as if both parties are fighting for their life. The stress response actually inhibits your recall and interrupts the ideal 'flow state' for learning.

  2. Getting injured means you can't train. The cost isn't just the injury itself, its the weeks or months you aren't able to work on your technique. You have so little to gain from going all out (in practice), why could it possibly be worth it?

I've got a whole bag of tricks that I only pull out if I'm sparring someone of equal experience, or an opportunity to use one safely is just blatantly presented to me.

Otherwise, I spend about 1/4 of my attention defensively watching out for wild, unexpected moves from the partner since I'm the one who'll get injured if I eat an errant spinning backfist or an unintentional elbow.

Its like they say, a white belt is arguably more dangerous than someone with moderate training since their lack of experience means they throw stuff wildly and without regard for either their or your safety, and they won't even know why something is unsafe, much less how to control it.

Likewise with the newbies, if I can get to a position where I COULD do something that would absolutely wreck their day, I'll 'symbolically' perform the motion to initiate it, but usually just give them the opportunity to escape. And they won't realize how bad their position was had I been intending to do them harm. Big one I do try to point out is people who turn away from a roundhouse kick and present their back. I usually give them a little tap with my foot and then explicitly call attention to the fact that taking a hard kick to the spine or tailbone is both painful and dangerous.

I've been trying to decide if my habit of self-mocking is obnoxious or not.

Reflexive modesty is a better habit than bragadoccio, methinks. The guy who rubs it in is more likely to get embarrassingly humbled. Still, be willing to have confidence in your abilities.

I don’t think you’re correct in diagnosing hypocrisy and “mass group guilt catharsis” when looking at the disparate treatment of stupid people vs. visibly retarded people. Most Americans (especially progressives, but also including plenty of non-progressives) are blank slatists who believe that almost anyone can improve his intelligence through education and effort. When those people see someone say something mind-numbingly stupid, they therefore see a moral failing and have no compunction about calling it out and ridiculing the person who publicly sinned in that way. When they see a visibly retarded person, however, they see someone whose lack of intelligence isn’t his fault, and so to do anything other than praise his intellectual efforts, meager though they are, would be completely inappropriate. Not that most blank slatists would be able to articulate that distinction, but I believe that’s what’s going on at an instinctual level.

Of course, to a non-blank-slatist, the underlying premise seems ridiculous, so the poor treatment of regular stupid people seems unconscionable.

Being nice to the help is a status marker for good breeding in America. Presumably other cultures that care more about breeding care more about that status marker.

There are three classes of this: mean to the help (nouveau riche trash), explicitly nice to the help (lesser gentry), and "why would you be mean to the furniture?" (true money).

explicitly nice to the help (lesser gentry)

Yeah, that about sums me up… What an awful thought.

My brother pointed this out to me about myself once, and it was one of the most cutting (unintentional) insults I've ever received.

Glad to meet a like-minded (lesser) gentleman, haha.

FWIW I think 'lesser' is doing a lot of work here, the only people I've come into contact with who seemed to have the 'furniture' attitude in modern times were on the order of a Duke. Most people below that take some interest in the help, although perhaps with varying levels of performativity and enthusiasm.

Yeah I mean the true super-rich, the kind of people who have too many servants to get attached to individuals. Money's a bit like wine, in that it matters if your bottle of wine is below $20 or above $100, but in between it's pretty much the same.

Makes it less cutting, at least. I know I'm not a Duke, all I have to do is look out of the window at the huge lack-of-tracts-o-land...

it matters if your bottle of wine is below $20 or above $100, but in between it's pretty much the same.

Do you think so? I was always under the impression that it was broadly an inverse-log:

  • under 10GBP is going to be awful unless you select very carefully, and even then the result is going to be petrol-ly
  • 10-20 is perfectly acceptable
  • 40-50 is very nice, actually interesting enough to reward shutting up for a bit and paying attention to the wine. I got 50 GBP Chateauneuf du Pape for the family for Christmas.
  • 100 is going to be good and really special and worth paying attention to and remembering
  • greater than 100 and you're really wasting the extra money unless you have a very refined and educated palate, and even then I suspect the enjoyment is going to be broadly intellectual

I've been given the super-duper nice wine before and it was indeed lovely, especially when it was set up as part of a proper tasting and you were told what to look for, but I'd never consider it worth the money for my own table unless I was replacing what I took out of the family cellar (alas, this is true money territory) or deliberately showing off for some unfathomable reason.

I learned this as a rule-of-thumb from the guys whose job at Stanford is to study the wine business, so I trust them. The way I would put it:

  • Under 10GBP/USD, it will be awful. You cannot sell drinkable wine in the first world at that price.
  • 10-20, it's not bad, but there are noticeable quality sacrifices that you can see in that spectrum.
  • 20 was the anchor for the Stanford guys in part because that's what Duckhorn's Decoy was priced at at the time (now it's $25 on the coasts, still $20ish outside of big cities), and Decoy was their example of the perfect $20 bottle you can get anywhere in the States.
  • 20-100 everything is marketing. Price is a signal, sure, but you can find wines in the low 20s that are better than wines in the 80s, and the difference is marketing/distribution. Also country of origin - imo France has the worst price:quality ratio, because everyone knows that French wine is Fancy, and South Africa has the best because ain't nobody thinking South Africa is Fancy.
  • Above 100 you get into special stuff you just can't make for a lower price point. Some wines that are just bullshit marketing, of course, but for the most part there's going to be something special and expensive like long aging or a notable vineyard. Personally, I'm not sure I've been bitten by the wine bug that badly.

Personally, I would envy the super-rich more if they were doing cool shit with that money. I certainly wouldn't settle for some big houses and a lot of servants.

More comments

It would be bizarre to go out of you way to be polite to a dog or a horse, and the act of a despicable varlet to be deliberately cruel to one. Why should a servant be different?

Yes it's true, the richer parts of my family always got along very well with workers and employees and so on compared with the lower middle class parts. My Thai ex boyfriend who grew up very poor was shockingly rude to Thai service workers, it made me so uncomfortable. I think Americans have forgotten that "being nice to the help" as you put it is high class, we've all adopted the strange imagination that the rich are rude and seek to replicate this and feel no shame in doing so.

My nephew’s high school in the rural midwest just spent $20,000 on costumes for one play this year. An old man in the woods recently told me medicare paid for his $400,000 penis implant to correct ED.

Both of these are crazy. Here in the UK the first would be a scandal if somewhere like Eton did this, and Eton et. al. are the only people with enough free cash to be able to do such a thing. The second would be an NHS scandal, it would never pass NICE. American decadence knows no bounds.

Let's discuss democracy, and the decay and potential recovery of two anglo-origin democracies.

South Africa is clearly having a rough time at the moment. Anemic growth, mass joblessness, the spread of slums, ultraviolence on the streets.

The party largely responsible for this the ANC has a declining vote share but still commands the loyalty of a plurality of the electorate. In addition, most of the parties opposing the ANC are not exactly free marketer reformers of the type that might rapidly turn some of these issues around. Since Apartheid ended more than 20 years ago and these trends are deepening, it seems that the decay has not swayed most voters away from the policies that caused the issues.

A friend of mine said that he has full faith in the UK (Great Britain) to recover fully from its current woes, because one day voters will wake up and see that governance is terrible and getting worse, and they will vote for the opposition who will fix things.

Certainly, some of the parties in the Yookay are trying to fix things through structural economic and social reforms (Reform, Restore), but the plurality of voters including young voters favor parties that would either deepen or continue the issues (Greens, Labour, Muslim Indie Bloc)

Note: from the perspective of this poaster the main issues facing the UK are: Low Skill Immigration, Economic Stagnation, Integration of Non-European Migrants, Crime

So I ask the Motte: Do you believe that in anglo origin democracies that enough decay will have voters seek out parties with effective fixes for the issues, or merely cause voters to slowly rebel against the incumbents?

Note: from the perspective of this poaster the main issues facing the UK are: Low Skill Immigration, Economic Stagnation, Integration of Non-European Migrants, Crime

Have you considered that the people voting Green or Labor simply have other issues they consider important?

Take crime, for example. Most crime statistics actually reflect what the police is doing, not what the criminals are doing. Murder rates are often taken as a proxy because most murderers are not competent enough to make it look like a natural death, so we can hope to get a numbers which are roughly independent to police efforts.

The rate of murders in England and Wales (1.148 in 2021 with 684, which has decreased since then) seems roughly comparable to other European nations. Even if a decent fraction of it was committed by immigrants, there is certainly no nationwide epidemic of murder.

Of course, there is also climate change (which the right should care about if for no other reason than that it will lead to more immigration, unless you like living in the kind of state which will shoot unarmed kids trying to get in), the rents being too damn high (effectively limiting upwards mobility for the bottom half of society), the stupid AI race which at best might lead to the median person becoming economically obsolete and at worst to paperclips, and lately an increasingly unhinged US which can no longer be relied upon to lead the free world, and relatedly energy insecurity resulting from their misadventures, to mention but a few.

I'm not sure South Africa is the best comparison point or example for "Anglo democracies", given the unique historical factors that drive its current malaise. South Africa's democratic situation is closer to a nation like Japan, where they are essentially a one-party democracy, never deviating even in the face of catastrophe.

Plenty will argue that South Africa represents the likely future for the UK and Canada as they increasingly fracture upon ethnic lines, but there is another anglo country with massive levels of low skill ethnic minorities that is an even closer comparison - the United States. The US, not long after its inception, imported a permanent underclass that still numbers around 15% of the population, and for the past 50 years, they've had a constant influx of illegal immigration. In comparison to the rest of the anglosphere, they have a much lower % of white Europeans. Nonetheless, the US is much, much richer.

While concerns around immigration, integration, and crime are not going to be solved by money alone, South Africa's issues are clearly heavily economic in nature. The breakdown of their society is heavily influenced by the rampant corruption, the collapse of their infrastructure, and, as you say, the anaemic growth and mass joblessness. For the UK, I'd go so far as to say that the combined vote % for Reform, Restore and the Greens would be <10% if they had even kept close to the US over the past 20 years.

Both the US and Apartheid South Africa demonstrate that the economic conditions of a country are largely detached from immigration/demographics. In right-wing UK circles, I see a lot of "cope" around the plans of Reform/Restore, in which the major factor for productivity collapse is entirely low skilled immigration, and once they are kicked out companies will be forced to pay much higher wages. It's an oddly left-wing viewpoint, one in which greedy companies are keeping all the money for themselves, and you just have to force them in order to get that money to the wider public.

The reality is that the UK's pathetic productivity has been decades in the making. Clamping down on immigration levels might collapse Deliveroo and numerous Turkish barbershops, but it will not suddenly unlock hidden growth.

Most of the replies below are skeptical of saving the UK via democracy, because, I assume, they don't think that [Reform will be elected/they will try to cut immigration/they will successfully cut immigration]. I think this is the wrong viewpoint when it comes to decay or recovery. What will push UK towards South African outcomes is their complete failure to build infrastructure. It's the dead cities and towns and villages outside of London. Its the unending growth of the housing market to the exclusion of all else. It's the most expensive business energy rates in the world. And its the wages and jobs that will soon pay less than even the former communist bloc in Eastern Europe, if they exist at all.

There's not a single party that even thinks about these issues. Sure, you can find MPs and advisors that at least understand the economic woes and can propose ideas - like Danny Kruger for Reform - but even Labour and the Tories have some individuals who get it. None of them are at the centre of power, and there is such structural rot that even if they were, it would take a Herculean effort to turn things around.

So no, I don't think the UK is going to recover.

Will it decay? I'm not sure this is the truth either, more like just stagnation. There are a few bright spots for the UK: the brain drain which smashed SA is restricted for the UK. Europe is just as fucked, and so the only escape route is America. But the US has its own immigration issues, and they make it very difficult for the ~top 20-2 percentile to move there. A US that threw open the borders to white Europeans could instantly decimate most of Europe.

More than anything though, I think timescales are long enough that AI is going to render this entire conversation moot, one way or the other

Both the US and Apartheid South Africa demonstrate that the economic conditions of a country are largely detached from immigration/demographics. In right-wing UK circles, I see a lot of "cope" around the plans of Reform/Restore, in which the major factor for productivity collapse is entirely low skilled immigration, and once they are kicked out companies will be forced to pay much higher wages. It's an oddly left-wing viewpoint, one in which greedy companies are keeping all the money for themselves, and you just have to force them in order to get that money to the wider public.

The argument, as expressed by Mark Carney below*, is that cheap labour functions as a good enough solution that doesn't force companies to become more productive and thus able to raise wages for those they do hire (and doesn't force the government to figure out how to create incentives towards this end). Why bother?

I don't know that this is particularly "leftist". It's about as stereotypically leftist as claiming that companies faced with higher goods prices they can't pass on will either shrink the item or stop selling it. The left wing answer (that we saw post-COVID/stimulus) would be to deny that the business' options are limited this way in the first place, and that the companies are using it as an excuse to be greedy.

It can totally be the rational decision for UK employers until something changes without it being pure greed.

*

Yes, that's absolutely right. There can be short-term, and you're familiar with it.... Mr. Macklem was just in Fort McMurray, and I'm from the area as well, so we're familiar with the kinds of gaps you get there. One doesn't want an over-reliance, certainly, on temporary foreign workers for lower-skilled jobs, which prevent the wage adjustment mechanism from making sure that Canadians are paid higher wages, but also so that firms improve their productivity as necessary. We don't want to mask it, and the intent of the government's review is to ensure that this is used for transition, for those higher-skilled gaps that exist and can hold our economy back.

I think the spirit of the program and the spirit of the government's review is to ensure that this program is concentrated on higher skills, number one, to fill gaps, and to recognize that those are temporary gaps, so that we are ensuring that Canadian businesses are providing Canadian solutions—the training—and that we're working together to ensure that Canadians can meet those gaps. For the lower-wage jobs, it is important over a reasonable time period to ensure that the market adjusts and that those market wages adjust; then there will be productivity and other adjustments that ensure that Canadians are paid more, but also that we're a more productive economy as a whole. Getting that balance right is what is necessary.

To be clear, I don't actually disagree that access to low skilled labour can suppress business investment. It's more the specific idea that this access is the biggest factor in low productivity or wage growth which I find absurd. I would be surprised if was even one of the top 5 most important factors.

The UK is careening toward authoritarianism, but it's hard to predict what flavor it will take, or whether it will quickly disintegrate into a failed state. Looking at the political, demographic, economic, and fiscal cliffs the UK is teetering upon, it's hard to imagine that this wasn't by design. The left won either way; they will have torn down the old order and replaced it with chaos. It's ironically not unlike the Wiemar Republic, though perhaps even worse. Imagine if the Jews were actually as bad as Hitler said they were, except the degenerate elites sided with the Jews and won. Accelerationism might be the least bad path forward, because it's too late for anything else. Whatever remains of the British peoples after this, I'm pretty sure they're going to find their religion again.

The UK is careening toward authoritarianism, but it's hard to predict what flavor it will take, or whether it will quickly disintegrate into a failed state.

I think the flavour is already clear: anarchy-tyranny, where certain demographics (i.e. Muslims) are essentially above the law, while everyone else is subject to ever increasing repression.

The UK is careening toward authoritarianism, but it's hard to predict what flavor it will take

Is it? Looks like authoritarian multiculturalism with none of the redeeming qualities Singapore has.

Looking at the political, demographic, economic, and fiscal cliffs the UK is teetering upon, it's hard to imagine that this wasn't by design.

Really? I suppose you can say this about Blair's changes but they legitimately seem to have sleepwalked into fiscal issues like the triple lock. Which sounds insane but if it was just expected that you could do nothing about the elderly's benefits Labour wouldn't have been forced into humiliating retreats on something much less essential like the winter fuel allowance. They would have just let the train run.

Like many people they just promised more than they could deliver.

Is it? Looks like authoritarian multiculturalism with none of the redeeming qualities Singapore has.

I think it's even worse than that, because authoritarian multiculturalism suggests to me some uniformity of enforcement. I think what we're seeing emerge in the UK is a unique form of caste system, where the favoured groups (Muslims and third-world migrants) aren't subject to the usual laws yet still perform overwhelmingly negatively in most outcomes due to their extreme dysfunction.

Is the concept of an economic underclass having considerably more freedom from the law than their supposed betters really that novel? "Only proles and animals are free".

It's not a question of a separate underclass. At the same socio-economic level, native Brits get the book thrown at them for stuff that's tolerated when done by Muslims. Hence our PM's nickname "Two Tier Keir".

No. Things can always get worse without resistance. Look at Cuba, the situation is much, much worse now than many people - even those hostile to communism - imagine. The country has, since 1991, slowly gone from a moderately poor but functioning socialist country like the former Eastern Bloc or China at the time, to the poorest country in the region after Haiti. The people are starving, there’s no electricity, no medicine, no fuel. The economy has been collapsing for 35 years. There is extensive reporting that even the Chinese have strongly recommended pursuing China or Vietnam style capitalist reforms, but the regime leadership are, moreso than the Chinese or Vietnamese, die hard communists loyal to central planning as an economic theory.

This is true historically, too. There were empires that took centuries to collapse. In my opinion, the institutional inertia around immigration for the Anglo countries is too high to solve. The public don’t have the stomach for what is required. Look at Minneapolis; ICE would probably have to kill hundreds of thousands of American citizens to outweigh even a small part of the damage caused by massive third world immigration. The only thing that could save it would be some kind of sudden, deeply unexpected overthrow of democracy in a Western country, but there’s a 90% chance that only makes it worse. You only get one LKY in a century, if that.

I think it's rather telling that apologists for the Cuban regime always point to the American blockade as the ultimate cause of Cuba's economic woes. It's hardly a ringing endorsement of communism that communist regimes can function perfectly well, provided they can freely trade with their capitalist neighbours. Communism isn't just parasitic at an individual or societal level: it's fractally parasitical, no matter at what resolution you examine it.

I don’t know much about Cuba. Having said that, I think it’s reasonable to argue that whatever shortages there are now are lighter or at least not worse than the ones they had there for many years after 1989. On the other hand, I imagine the situation is generally a lot worse than it was before COVID lockdowns.

Look at Cuba, the situation is much, much worse now

Damn its crazy what happens when the world's super power is constantly fucking with it and preventing it from interacting with the world's economy.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/01/addressing-threats-to-the-united-states-by-the-government-of-cuba/

Also I had a good laugh at the title "ADDRESSING THREATS TO THE UNITED STATES BY THE GOVERNMENT OF CUBA"

Further laughs can be had immediately after, with this gem

"The Government of Cuba has taken extraordinary actions that harm and threaten the United States. The regime aligns itself with — and provides support for — numerous hostile countries, transnational terrorist groups, and malign actors adverse to the United States, including the Government of the Russian Federation (Russia), the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Government of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah."

Ahh yes Cuba, the rich benefactor of Hamas. Their economy is so dynamic they also support the governments of Russia and China simultaneously!

I live in the fucking clown world universe. My government is not comprised of serious people who want to solve the issues my nation faces.

You are easily amused. There is no contradiction between a country being poor and being able to harm the United States. Especially if it has a command economy where the rulers can arbitrarily decide to spend the budget on the latter and not care about the poor people.

Care to share some of Cuba's nefarious plots against the USA? What have they actually done to harm the USA since the Cuban Missile Crisis?

"Nefarious plot" is a very apt way to describe "cooking the heads of US intelligence personnel with a sound cannon."

I'm reminded of Scott's article about rising crime rates, which fails to take into account that if crime rises, and you use costly anti-crime measures, that restores the status quo so that's "no increase in crime", even though the impact of crime has gone up.

Cuba hasn't been able to harm the US much because the US exerts effort to stop it from causing harm, but this effort has a cost, and being forced to pay the cost is itself harm. Where it still does harm the US is mostly on the diplomatic and propaganda front.

but this effort has a cost, and being forced to pay the cost is itself harm

The USA cries out in pain as it strikes you. What cost exactly has the USA paid for the most recent round of "if you trade with Cuba we'll tariff you" or any of the items I listed here

Tariffing countries for trading with Cuba has a huge political and diplomatic cost.

Which the USA has gladly been paying for practically 0 gain for the last 12 months (not even related to Cuba, basically just for love of the game) so clearly it's not that painful lol

I mean, Cuba has had decades to wreck itself before the US decided to embargo anyone trading with them just this year.

You will not find me carrying water for the Cuban government, who I understand to be ideological morons.

But its started earlier than January 2026.

1992 The Cuban Democracy Act barred foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies from trading with Cuba, extending the sanctions beyond direct U.S.-Cuba commerce. It imposed the 180-day vessel rule, penalizing ships that traded with Cuba by barring them from U.S. ports for six months afterward. It also directed the U.S. government to pressure other countries to restrict trade and credit with Cuba.

1996 The Helms-Burton Act directed the U.S. to oppose Cuba’s entry into international financial institutions. It also created Title III lawsuits and Title IV visa penalties aimed at foreign companies and executives dealing in confiscated property in Cuba, explicitly raising the cost and legal risk of non-U.S. investment in Cuba.

2017 The U.S. created the Cuba Restricted List and barred direct financial transactions with listed entities tied to Cuba’s military, intelligence, and security services, deliberately steering outside money away from large parts of the Cuban economy.

2019 The U.S. activated Title III of Helms-Burton, after years of suspension, allowing lawsuits against foreign firms accused of trafficking in confiscated Cuban property. Increased legal risk of foreign investment in Cuba.

2019 The U.S. ended group “people-to-people” travel to Cuba and banned cruise ships, yachts, and many private aircraft from travelling there, directly cutting off tourism revenue.

2019 The U.S. sanctioned vessels and firms involved in Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba, targeting Cuba’s outside energy supply.

Less serious, but general squeezing of remittance flows: 1994, 2019, 2020

With Cuba, it's (unfortunately?) really hard to make a convincing argument that its situation had nothing to do with enemy action. If it really were so intrinsically dysfunctional, the US would perhaps have done better to leave it alone and give it all the rope it needs to hang itself with, making it into a cautionary tale, but as it stands, no peoples trying to decide on what economic or political system to support will be taking away any lesson other than "don't piss off a superpower when you are stuck in its backyard with no allies that are willing and able to help" (a lesson I'm sure Ukraine will come around to eventually, and even Taiwan might learn if it doesn't drown in a sudden deluge of LCLpaperclips first).

While not being able to trade with the US is certainly detrimental to Cuba, it is hardly explanatory as to its utter dysfunction. Access to 1 market, even if it is a huge close market, is simply not capable of producing such negative results. Particularly because Cuba is free to trade with Europe, South America, its island neighbors, etc. Its a small island. Even if it was producing goods and services on a per capita basis rivaling a US state, those markets would be more than adequate to absorb all that output and more.

The only thing that the US opening its markets up to Cuba would really do, or would have done, is piss off a bunch of Floridians, who might storm Havanna in boats. Which would be good for Cuba long term of course, because obviously there are enough Cuban-decent former marines to take out the Castro regime if given a green light, but well there it is.

Particularly because Cuba is free to trade with Europe, South America, its island neighbors, etc.

Nope!

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/01/addressing-threats-to-the-united-states-by-the-government-of-cuba/

"(a) Beginning on the effective date of this order, an additional ad valorem rate of duty may be imposed on goods imported into the United States that are products of any other country that directly or indirectly sells or otherwise provides any oil to Cuba"

They still have plenty of trade partners and this particular subrule is generally not enforced!

n 2024, the top exports of Cuba were Rolled Tobacco ($418M), Zinc Ore ($107M), Nickel Mattes ($88.6M), Hard Liquor ($75.2M), and Precious Metal Ore ($55M). The top destinations were China ($270M), Spain ($109M), Germany ($68.2M), Macau ($57.1M), and Switzerland ($49.9M).

https://oec.world/en/profile/country/cub

Cuba is the 59th largest economy by total size, and the 90th largest by population size (out of roughly 200 on worldometer) but this site has it at 158 & 150 out of 226 on exports/imports.

188 & 180th in per capita trade too (84th GDP/capita).

Crazy it trades so much less than the size of the economy or population would predict.... I wonder why??

Given that anytime a non-Commie tankie goes to the country they consistently report crushing poverty, government corruption, and a bunch of street scams, the obvious answer is the real domestic GDP is quite low and the numbers are cooked by the regime.

Except that America is freakishly good at assimilating people and most of the migrants are from groups that aren't that different and also regard American white identity as aspirational. There's not a lot of Kazakhi yak herders and quite a lot of honduran construction workers- and even in the ethnostates of Europe, the latter assimilate OK, let alone in the US.

Yes, those honduran construction workers will probably not produce very many fields medalists, but modern wealthy societies have a lot of uses for low IQ individuals. Literally every billboard near my house is advertising blue collar jobs- in slaughterhouses, warehouses(and not just Amazon), factories, construction, etc. All no experience needed and all paying a living wage.

Except that America is freakishly good at assimilating people and most of the migrants are from groups that aren't that different and also regard American white identity as aspirational.

Doesn't the second part of this sentence undermine the first? It's easy to be good at assimilating people when the people are already co-operative. The recent Somali fraud scandal seems to illustrate that when America tries to assimilate the type of immigrants that European countries get, they get European outcomes.

America was freakishly good at assimilating people. I'm not sure that capacity survived wokeness, or the MAGA backlash. And even before that, blacks never assimilated, which shows that there must be a limit to this ability.

Blacks are American as all get out, assuming you mean AADOS. They're essentially stupider poor southerners(their crime rates are not actually higher than rural southern whites). Yeah they vote for democrats but they don't like anti-american socialists. Most of their cultural quirks are more 'America was like this in the fifties' or 'they're poor' than genuinely different from the American mainstream.

their crime rates are not actually higher than rural southern whites

Citation very much needed

their crime rates are not actually higher than rural southern whites

This is not true in any way. They not only have higher objective crime rates via stats like incarceration %, number of homicides per capita, etc, but they also are far less policed and report crime to authorities less often.

If you seriously think that third world immigration is doing the kind of damage you're suggesting then I have some swampland in New Jersey that's for sale. Maybe you should consider moving to Pittsburgh? Only 4% of the metro population is foreign-born, compared to 14% nationwide and over 30% in places like New York City. We're also about 85% white, almost all non-Hispanic. I love my hometown, and the cost of living is low, but the population has been flat for a while, and before that it was actively declining. If you had been here 20 years ago I could have showed you working-class neighborhoods with high crime rates filled with drugged-out white trash. One neighborhood that looked like it was on the brink of collapse only turned around after the area's modest Hispanic population decided to settle there and revitalize the business district. The other one got significantly better once Bhutanese refugees moved to the area, though that area is still bad, and still 70% white.

Of course, none of these areas are that bad, and everywhere is full of people with names that end in vowels. If you want to see some real shittiness we need to go just down the road to West Virginia. And no, I'm not going to take you to hillbilly country, which would be too easy. I'll instead show you actual industrialized areas full of white Anglos that are shittier than anything you'll find in the Pittsburgh region. Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel ran 9 mills in the Ohio Valley—Follansbee, WV; Mingo Junction, OH; Steubenville, OH; Martin's Ferry, OH; Wheeling, WV; Beech Bottom, WV; LaBelle, WV; Yorkville, OH; and Benwood, WV. There was also a huge mill at Weirton, and several smaller facilities. Most of that is gone now, but the area is significantly shittier than Pittsburgh.

But that's the wealthier part of West Virginia. If we keep going south, I can show you Chemical Valley, which is even whiter and more Anglo than the Panhandle, and the chemical plants are still in production, though Kaiser Aluminum at Ravenswood closed a long time ago, and Ormet closed in 2013. Jamie Oliver filmed a show in Huntington after it was dubbed the fattest city in the US, and it also probably has more fentanyl addicts than any city in the US. Just remember that if you buy a house there not to leave anything in the yard, like grills or lawn furniture or even children's toys, because they'll steal anything that isn't under lock and key. I can assure you that this area is free from the negative influence of dirty third-world immigrants, though.

I’m assuming the rust belts of the USA and Britain are substantially different. Deindustrialization took place earlier in Britain, and the presence of Third World immigrants was already much larger. Most of the drug-addicted criminal underclass you’re describing, I guess, descended from low-IQ rural whites with high time preference from Appalachia who migrated to big Midwestern industrial centers back when industrial production was booming and large numbers of workers were needed.

Jamie Oliver filmed a show in Huntington after it was dubbed the fattest city in the US

Legendary show. I watched it on youtube while building a sky-island base in OG minecraft (Alpha? idk) on a ~13 inch macbook. I guess I had both windows side by side on the screen because we dind't have an external monitor. I am typing this on a 38 inch ultra-wide and I almost regret not getting a bigger monitor, as I still want for more screen real estate.

Simpler times...

I'm counting down the days until I can get a second ultrawide. This time a 5k2k one. It's supposed to launch soon.

No. Things can always get worse without resistance. Look at Cuba, the situation is much, much worse now than many people - even those hostile to communism - imagine. The country has, since 1991, slowly gone from a moderately poor but functioning socialist country like the former Eastern Bloc or China at the time, to the poorest country in the region after Haiti. The people are starving, there’s no electricity, no medicine, no fuel. The economy has been collapsing for 35 years. There is extensive reporting that even the Chinese have strongly recommended pursuing China or Vietnam style capitalist reforms, but the regime leadership are, moreso than the Chinese or Vietnamese, die hard communists loyal to central planning as an economic theory.

I've been to Cuba, and it really is shocking just how horrific it is. In Latin America, there are tons of mostly indigenous villages where there essentially is no modernity since anyone with the skills to maintain it, people like doctors and engineers for instance, decamp for the cities which are often first world/close to first world. The Mexico City gdp per capita is Spain tier, for instance. Many of these villages don't even have running water. I've used a bucket with a rat larger than my cat on the wall giving me moral support, for instance. Cuba is essentially one of those villages, just on the scale of a country and with a few exceptions in the hotel zones.

I'm not sure how Communist Cuba's government remains, though. At the low level, cops literally treat you better and reduce any requested bribe if you stay in a casa particular (small house owned by an individual cuban) vs. a state affiliated hotel. They view the first as you supporting the people, and the second as you supporting the state. The party/military essentially functions as a kleptocracy; they make deals with foreign companies to run the hotels, the hotels are incredibly capitalist where poor Cubans serve rich foreigners (and a few locals) where you call each other compañero/comrade as a costume. Even when I was there, most propaganda was more of the anti-imperialist/nationalist/third worldist variety than class based variety.

At this point, I think the party/military understands, even if subconsciously, they are just kleptocrats engaged in capitalism who ideologically justify themselves on anti-Americanism. They literally show MTV in the same hotel Castro used when he first became dictator. Additionally, the revealed preference of the government is to not invest in the rest of the country, which absolutely requires infrastructure improvement, and to solely partner with foreign companies to build up tourism. The hotels are set up so that as much as possible, they import all their necessities, such as food or toiletries, rather than buy it from Cuba itself. The government relaxed the emigration laws so more people can leave. Their actions to me suggest rather than viewing themselves as communists building up a country to a bright future, they view themselves as hotel magnates who unfortunately have an entire island of poor people attached to their properties. It also helps fuel their cope that if Cuba ever liberalized, they would be in penniless exile in Venezuela or Russia at best and languishing in a Cuban jail cell/lynched at worst.

This is true historically, too. There were empires that took centuries to collapse. In my opinion, the institutional inertia around immigration for the Anglo countries is too high to solve. The public don’t have the stomach for what is required. Look at Minneapolis; ICE would probably have to kill hundreds of thousands of American citizens to outweigh even a small part of the damage caused by massive third world immigration. The only thing that could save it would be some kind of sudden, deeply unexpected overthrow of democracy in a Western country, but there’s a 90% chance that only makes it worse. You only get one LKY in a century, if that.

Unless something radically changes, I don't think that the Anglosphere has the stomach for mass deportations, defined as millions deported, any time soon. At the same time, you can have meaningful differences in the rate of immigration: Biden vs. Trump, Trudeau vs Carney for instance. While I don't see any plausible path where, for instance, you get a Britain with absolute minimal immigration/restrictive guest worker programs like in Japan, I still think it's up in the air the degree and type of mass immigration Britain gets. A Britain with a diverse immigrant pool and most problematic groups, like poor Kashmiris, limited is a far different place than one where you get true open borders with, for instance, the entire third world. Britain in first scenario likely is still a pretty decent place to live, while in the second scenario I'm not sure Britain the state survives it.

I feel increasingly disillusioned with our ability to fix issues. Elite circles have successfully ideologically homogenized to such a degree that pretty much no smart & capable person would willingly, publicly go against the main tenets. It just fucks up your prospects too much.

It further has result that our systemic problems are increasingly caused specifically by ideological blindspots, because all problems that aren't can be fixed, while these are the only ones left to fester. Racism, for example, in the lower and middle classes can be a serious problem yet be fixable if the elite is clearly & openly against it. Racism in the elite is coup-complete.

So the opposing politicians are all clearly dysfunctional in one way or another, even when they're right on some core issues. You can find smart people arguing against ideological dead angles, but either only in a small scale that doesn't call into question the entire framework, or pseudonymously online.

Modern multiculturalist neoliberalism isn't the worst ideology, certainly better than, say, communism, but this also means again that as a smart person there is less pressure to change the system: You can make your own life good just fine, so why bother?

I expect it to be supplanted in the longterm, but most likely by an ideology I consider significantly worse.

no smart & capable person would willingly, publicly go against the main tenets

To the extent that this is true I think it because the words "smart & capable" are more often a short-hand for displaying behaviors and beliefs associated with the elite, rather than anything to do with intelligence or the capacity to solve problems.

As men like Donald Trump and Elon Musk aptly demonstrate, you can be hugely successful across multiple domains for decades and still get dismissed by affluent liberals as an idiot/incompetent for having the wrong aesthetics.

What the hell? You're grouping Trump together with Musk?

Trump was never hugely successful at anything. "The Apprentice" was perhaps the only real success.

What did he ever outperform at, given his ambition (which any idiot can be born with) combined with absolutely massive inherited wealth (400m usd or so)?

Trump parleyed his position as the middle child of a minor patrician family into being a top-level player in 3 distinct and notoriously exclusive and cut-throat fields. Urban Real-estate, Television, and Politics. Furthermore he did so without seeming to accrue the roster of enemies, the public baggage, nor the "Kompromat" that one might otherwise expect from a man in his position. (most of the nonsense about him being "a fascist", "an authoritarian", and "the most dangerous man in politics" only appeared after it was clear that he was about to become the 2016 GOP Nominee).

Similarly Musk has founded 3 companies in 3 distinct industries that are notoriously difficult to break into, Banking, Automobile Manufacturing, and Aerospace, and not only have those 3 companies survived in industries where the overwhelming majority of start-ups fail, they've grown to become major players in their own right.

The man leveraged a middling career in reality TV to go 2 for 3 against the entire political establishment of the most powerful nation on earth. I know he hasn't turned that into fulfilled promises, that he's running into hard walls and making bad decisions. But if he is a failure, he has failed to greater heights than most will ever dream of.

He's a success because of the failure of the system. It's not a novelty, it was always the criticism of democracy that it would allow charismatic demagogues to claim political power. The miracle was supposed to be figuring out a way to either keep them at bay or check them

Trump is clearly skilled at moving the public. He's not skilled in some sort of objective domain like someone like Musk who we can say is more impressive at that than the bulk of the elites.

(And I think that Musk also failed at government).

"Trump is a charismatic demagogue" is a very different complaint from "Trump is neither smart nor capable".

In fact, they are in no way equivalent.

Obviously he's achieved atypical things and is talented. The point is that they're not the same sort of achievement as Musk's.

The claim was "hugely successful across multiple domains for decades", implying pre-POTUS times.

“Everyone who inherits 400m is famous” - he’s famous for being rich but 99% of people who are rich are unknown. He had a tv show. He managed to build a lot of buildings.

If I can be 5% as successful as pre-potus Trump I’m taking that deal.

You might be able to legitimate bullets that his IRR on investments had no alpha.

No one smart and capable person would willingly and publicly go against the elites, that I agree with. But multiple smart and capable people could band together in a group and amass enough power over time to take a stand against the elites. The western societies still afford a good amount of agency in the personal life, and enough privacy that dissenting ideas need not be made public too early.

If people are too disillusioned to try that is certainly an issue though. But I do not believe anything is unsolvable yet.

over time

But it is already too late. Brexit was the last chance, and it was not just squandered but completely betrayed.

The party largely responsible for this the ANC has a declining vote share but still commands the loyalty of a plurality of the electorate. In addition, most of the parties opposing the ANC are not exactly free marketer reformers of the type that might rapidly turn some of these issues around. Since Apartheid ended more than 20 years ago and these trends are deepening, it seems that the decay has not swayed most voters away from the policies that caused the issues.

So it seems that democracy is working as intended.

Democracy means that the country belongs to the people, not some chosen elite, and it is up to the people alone what they will do with their country.

If South Africans really like their country the way it is, it is their right and their democratic choice.

No.

The decay of Anglosphere democracies will only be rectified when the still-civilized parts of the population do to them what mohammedans are slowly but surely doing to France, Sweden, etc. There is no hope for this in the UK and in South Africa this will only occur after balkanization.

This is a bit ironic, but Israel does seem to be the first modern state that I know of to actually go through, or be going through, de Maistre's counter revolution. Even with the Holocaust disproportionately targeting Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox, those two groups gradually grew from being essentially charity cases of Secular Jews in Israel to being king makers with huge sway over the government and, assuming Israel is not destroyed in the meantime, on track to demographically dominate the country in the later half of the 21st century.

Israël and red China- thé CCP dynasty is now another Chinese empire, thé latest in a long line.

Funny. I was recently reading the scientist Frank Salter’s new book, and he lays out some interesting analyses in the chapters on profiles about “hostile elites,” and in democracies it essentially happens when the pyramid players at the top are no longer able to institutionally co-opt the broad mass of the population in line with their ideological aims. Basically a failure of the democratic project called “the consent of the governed.” It’s been happening in the Anglo sphere now for decades before I was even born.

In the UK, mainstream-approved protestors allied with the US "No Kings" "movement" are carrying Iranian flags. In the US they're carrying the hammer and sickle. These people are already in charge of the UK (despite the irony of them having a King), and seem set to win the 2026 midterm elections and are likely to gain House, Senate, and Presidency in 2028. I see no return from that.

In the UK, mainstream-approved protestors allied with the US "No Kings" "movement" [...] despite the irony of them having a King

It was my understanding that said demonstrations in countries with constitutional monarchies used the phrasing "No Tyrants". (Note that the plenary powers Mr Trump is claiming go well beyond those of the British Crown.)

This is why my hope is Trump to destroy the current system so hard that recovery to 2020 levels to be impossible.

destroy the current system so hard

Would that get rid of voting in federal elections entirely or have only show elections? Is that even possible as long as elections are managed by the individual states?

I meant the world order as a whole. Total breakdown of globalization and the elites it nurtured.

Ah, I see. So Trump destroying the post-WWII world order. Yeah, that's sounds like something I can get behind in principle. Though I'm worried about unintended consequences. There's no going back to simpler times.

You are right, but if the choice is between complicated times or the current trends that are favored by the Dems and Brussels - I choose complicated times any day.

The problems observably get worse faster than solutions can be coordinated. At some point, people might get desperate enough to get the solutions up to speed, but at some point solution power exceeds the binding force holding society together, and it's rather like trying to lift a one-ton block of jello with a forklift.

A LKY or Bukele type dictator might be able to cut through said coordination problems, of course that runs the risk of rolling a terrible dictator/their successor being trash. I'm not dogmatically anti-democratic, I simply want less democracy (net taxpayers only voting would be nice). Are you arguing that people are running to parties that arguably would make things worse (EFF in SA, Greens in UK) is also part of the coordination problem?

Op is filtered, for what it's worth.

I love that most of FC's participation these day seems likely spurred by his reading a comment and being surprised that there are no responses yet, and so he provides his own, all while not realizing it's a filtered comment.

I don't actually love it, but it's funny.

Do you mean filtered like a mod action, that the perspective in the OP is through a filter, or something else I'm missing? No animus, genuinely don't understand.

Your account is newly registered, which means your posts are filtered until a mod manually approves them. Mods, however, can see your posts and sometimes one of us will respond to a post without noticing that it's still filtered and thus invisible to other posters.

Ah that makes sense. Filters for new accounts seem prudent.

New Aella survey post on child sexual assault just dropped: https://aella.substack.com/p/a-whole-lot-of-csa-data

I think her analysis is generally unobjectionable, but do find it notable that she buries the lead on the "non-cis" sexual assault findings. I didn't dig into the crosstabs, but non-cis people are plausibly getting sexually assaulted even before they become openly non-cis. And while there's plausibly causation in the direction of abnormal pre-egg-breaking/transition behavior being more likely to attract sexually assault, the data re: non-cis people reporting more CSA still very much supports the hypothesis that either:

  • Being sexually assaulted causes people to become non-cis
  • Some root factor makes people both more likely to be non-cis AND more likely to report being sexually assaulted

It might be that these hypothesis are both correct, but for different population subsets. For example, nonbinary people might be disproportionately motivated by a desire to escape a concept they associate with their assault, while transgender people are the ones afflicted by a root factor. (Or vica-versa, either explanation would be possible.)

I would personally bet on the second hypothesis predominating, though. And in particular, the associations re: social class/parental age/trauma are suggestive of some specifically anxiety-related problem. Working hypothesis: If you grow up poor or insecure or to young parents or female you become anxious and depressed, which leads you to be more likely to suffer sexual assault, more likely to interpret past events as sexual assault, more likely to start identifying yourself as non-cis (because of body image issues? Data is obviously underspecified and outside the scope of aella's post), and more likely to be negatively affected long-term by sexual assault when it does happen.

...So if you have kids, and want to maximize their chances of identifying as cisgender into adulthood, your top priority should be reducing their opportunities for anxiety. Openly worrying about drag queen story hour and queer books would be ironically counterproductive.

Ideological disclaimer: as a catholic I believe there are only two genders, fixed at birth, but as a transhumanist also I'm in favor of letting anyone, including children, do whatever they want to their own bodies. (I accept some nuance re: having to get psychologists/a judge to sign off that someone is truly acting in their own uncoerced self-interest, with increasing scrutiny in proportion to the danger posed by the modification and the mental irresponsibility of the requestor.)

For what it’s worth I think one of your two options is the most likely explanation, but this is a false dilemma. There is a third option: non-cis people might be more likely to lie (both to themselves and others) to make themselves seem more interesting.

Isn't that covered under the second due to the wording (emphasis mine) "more likely to report being sexually assaulted"?

I would imagine Aella's survey is very heavily tilted towards "community of people who are disproportionately likely to be outliers" so that a lot of non-cis/other flavours of queer people as respondents is more likely to show up. Ditto for "I was sexually assaulted" in the answers.

I think I tend to agree that it's hard to know if early sexual abuse leads to knock-on effects on mental health, including 'more likely to decide I'm some flavour of queer sexually/gender-wise' or if it's the case that 'kids who show signs of being somewhat isolated/outsiders are more likely to be picked as victims by abusers'. That is, if the kids are already inclined to mental problems/struggles with gender identity and/or sexuality and this signals to possible abusers that they are safer choices as victims, since they will be more likely to keep things secret and less likely to be believed if they tell anyone ('oh you're just lying again'/'that is just Uncle Phil being friendly'/'that can't possibly have happened, you must be mistaken or exaggerating').

Yes. Girls that are raped because of their small vulnerable female bodies often try to opt out of being female. (the other common occurence is lesbians who think that they won't be bad and gay and god hating them if they are a man). This shouldn't surprise anyone. It also doesn't work. If put into male prisons or psych wards they get... raped. Generally immediately.

In mammal and bird species, juvenile masculinization is a very common phenomenon in species where 'mating too early' is a serious issue on the population level, reaching its apogee in spider monkeys and hyenas(where it's looped back around to... causing serious issues on the population level for other reasons). Humans notably don't do this by default, but it should be unsurprising as a result of male sexuality fear.

That humans are incapable of doing this should also be unsurprising.

Openly worrying about drag queen story hour and queer books would be ironically counterproductive.

Sort of. You should be covertly worrying. These events normalize degenerate behaviors and increase opportunities for grooming if you're unable to portray them as the negative examples they represent.

Assuming that being non-cis is an inborn trait, it could also be that being non-cis makes you more likely to be sexually assaulted at some point.

A transhumanist Catholic?

...

I suppose that is not technically impossible, and I've heard of queerer ideologies, like Posadism. Welcome to the club, at least for the transhumanist bit, and if you want to call the Singleton At The End of Time God, feel free.

It's well established that people with BPD or elevated borderline features show much higher rates of reported childhood adversity, including childhood sexual abuse, and borderline features are also linked to higher risk of later victimization or revictimization, especially in dating and intimate relationships. They're both more likely to be abused, to abuse, and to be later victims of abuse.

It might be a slight stretch, but I strongly suspect something similar is at play with trans people.

To engage in calisthenics further: autism is a factor. Autistic people are 3x more likely to become trans. That's associated with general dysphoria and being uncomfortable in one's skin. The most vocal parts of the trans community is more than happy to attribute such factors to being an "egg", and encourage transition.

Being trans, or being gay, or autism or very many other human traits, is impossible to pin down to a single gene. They appear to be extremely polygenic and also strongly influenced by environment. There's no neat and tidy answer to give, almost certainly because it doesn't exist.

Maximal charity, transhumanist Catholic is probably anticipating the glorified body after the Resurrection a bit too early and too mechanically 😁

But, uh, regarding transgenderism (or indeed other bodily alterations of a drastic kind) "letting anyone, including children, do whatever they want to their own bodies" would not be in line with current teaching, no.

A transhumanist Catholic?

That's not something you see everyday. Most transhumanists are atheists, and, if Christian, tend to be Mormon. Catholics usually share Pax Tube's opinion on transhumanism.

Some root factor makes people both more likely to be non-cis AND more likely to be non-cis sexually assaulted

Am I really the only one who sees an obvious link?

It's autism. Being on the autism spectrum is massively more common among people who are trans (particularly MTF in modern world). Likewise not understanding social cues and being generally weird exposes one to all sorts of issues (and then there's the combination of autism spectrum running in families and how that may affect the previous generation or two's behavior towards future victims...).

Also this being Aella's survey, it almost certainly has a massive self selection bias for people on the spectrum so that's a huge confounding factor.

The thing I don't understand about the autism/trans link is that in my mind autism is partly characterised by the kind of rigid psychological orthodoxy that gets agitated by things like having different kinds food on their plate touching, or a familiar TV show getting a new theme tune. But, somehow, they can overlook the incredibly simple, intuitive and natural definition of man vs woman. If anything I'd expect autists to be stubbornly sceptical of transgenderism's manipulation of the categories.

If anything I'd expect autists to be stubbornly sceptical of transgenderism's manipulation of the categories.

Never formally diagnosed so can't speak for proper autists, but sufficiently weird and isolated that I can throw my tuppence worth in here.

Back at puberty, I was very ignorant (these were the days before easily accessible information was everywhere and society was nowhere near as openly sex-soaked as now) and so it took me by surprise when my body started changing in ways I did not want! did not like! had not agreed to! So straight away that hits the "rigid psychological orthodoxy that gets agitated by change and unexpected, unexplained divergence from a familiar and accustomed situation/routine" buttons.

Second, suddenly all these limitations started popping up via my mother, mostly but not solely: "you can't do this thing you used to do before anymore now/you have to do that thing" and the only explanation, so far as I got one, was "well now you're a girl". But.... wasn't I a girl before? Why did these changes of "becoming a young woman" mean now all these new things I could not/had to do?

Third, I was never a 'girly girl' so never fit very well (physically or mentally, in what I was interested in) into the categories of "girls are like this". Take all those things on board and I was very much at times feeling "Gosh, it would be so much easier if I were a boy".

I grew out of that, eventually, but I can see how if nowadays there is the push for "kids can be trans! transgender is a thing that exists! make sure kids know all about all the options and don't restrict them to two sexes and one sexuality!" information and treatment, somebody who feels the way I did might conclude (because again, being on the spectrum, you go by your intelligence as your main strength and that is how you make decisions and once you convince yourself this is the right solution it's nearly impossible to budge) that they were indeed 'not the right gender'. Particularly for MtF getting the messaging that "wow, women have it so much easier in today's society, we are all forced to agree Women Are Wonderful, everything is set up for them".

If your body already feels alien to you, not really 'you' (that's your brain and your mind and your intelligence), and Science Has The Answer, then why not change to an easier model with clear(er) definitions that you can fit, simply by dressing this way, growing out your hair, wearing makeup, and taking medication to change the vehicle you have been saddled with? If you're already acting/masking to fit 'normie' perceptions, what's a bit more acting along with that?

the days before easily accessible information was everywhere

"Girls become women" isn't hidden knowledge that autistic people are expected to infer from inexplicable social cues. It's not something arbitrary like code-switching how one should greet their betters vs their equals and how to discern which is which. Every child can see a world of little girls and little boys, and adult men and adult women, and the distinguishing factor between those groups is their age. QED.

Maybe it happens sooner than you were expecting, or would have preferred, and maybe it's attended by seemingly arbitrary and unfamiliar social expectations being placed on you, but a notion that you could escape the discomfort by becoming the opposite sex ought to be less plausible and less preferable than an alternative notion that you could somehow remain a child indefinitely.

a notion that you could escape the discomfort by becoming the opposite sex

When you are told "you can't do this because you are a girl", it is not unreasonable to think "so if I were a boy, I could do this? maybe things would be easier if I were a boy!"

See all the comments on here about how easy women have it in modern society which is set up to cater to their every whim. Someone any bit malleable might well think "so I can live my entire life on easy mode just by being a girl, and I'll get everything I want handed to me on a plate?"

It's normal to the point of triteness to think "if only things were different". It's the malleable aspect that rings false. It would make sense if they rejected gender as one more in the list of unintuitive things that society says you should conform to "just, like, because, okay?!". It seems highly uncharacteristic to whole heartedly accept an idea that a simple biological binary can be overruled if what to them is normally unintuitive society says that same binary is, you know, like, contingent on subjectivity.

The thing I don't understand about the autism/trans link is that in my mind autism is partly characterised by the kind of rigid psychological orthodoxy that gets agitated by things like having different kinds food on their plate touching, or a familiar TV show getting a new theme tune.

Just because you've developed rituals doesn't mean that they're correct or useful rituals, or even comprehensible to anyone else. Doesn't even have to be a full autism thing, the Smile Like You Mean It problem's well-enough known there to be diagnostically useful.

Sure, but autistic people being sympathetic to transgenderism is like if autistic people were the ones supporting fake smiles, or for replacing fake smiles with faker snarls. In comparison a non-binary or gender eliminationist stance would make sense.

Transition is a natural extension of a rigid view of gender. "Men are strong and tough and physical and confident, I'm not any of those things, I must not be a man."

Autists are uncomfortable with grey areas that everyone understands intuitively, like that it is feminine to like makeup but that not liking makeup doesn't make one not a woman.

Except trans people act far more like their birth gender than their adopted gender. Autogynephilic trans women in particular usually led a ridiculously masculine life before transitioning (e.g. Bruce Jenner), and even trans women who are not good at sports and confidence still display typical male interests (programming, anime, porn, etc.).

Autogynephilic trans women in particular usually led a ridiculously masculine life before transitioning (e.g. Bruce Jenner),

Autogynephilic trans women are different from autistic trans women, and they present differently.

and even trans women who are not good at sports and confidence still display typical male interests .

Yes, because they are fundamentally/originally autistic men. The autism both causes them to have autistic interests (programming, anime, porn, etc.), while also inducing or precipitating feeling of gender dysphoria, due to the aforementioned rigid thinking.

There's also the issue that in the interests of diversity, male interests with any status to them get portrayed as female interests. Programming is probably the biggest example of that (see Tron: Ares with a female programmer/CEO). So someone who programs and who can't sus out that the media is lying won't think "I have a male interest".

Am I really the only one who sees an obvious link?

I think there are plausibly several links: I've heard a fair number of anecdotes that FTM is associated with or similar to eating disorders in girls, which are also linked with sexual abuse. Not always, I'm sure, but the mechanic of "I don't want to be womanly and attractive (to abusers)" and body dysmorphia makes sense in a horrible way, and modern times offer new ways to limit your secondary sexual characteristics.

typo correction is actually

Some root factor makes people both more likely to be non-cis AND more likely to [report being] sexually assaulted

btw.

...

I do think autism is very plausible as a root cause for the legit-trans people (as opposed to they/them attention seekers). I've had enough personal experience with autists and trans people to see the pattern. However, I'm not convinced it's the only root cause, or even the most root-y of the root causes. Given base rates, I suspect most of those non-cis respondents are nonbinary and non-autistic, rather than trans, and yet they still show the same patter re: reporting. I think "anxiety and depression" still functions better as the base-level causes, because I think it's when autism causes those things that it puts autists at risk, and that people with anxiety and depression but no autism have a similar risk profile to anxious depressed autists (while happy autists have a similar risk profile to happy regular people.)

I'm quite convinced that a lot (discalaimer: not all) of those spectrum-y people, especially the FtMs, female asexuals, and non-attention-whore they/thems, are just kinda trusting and gullible and were groomed into the identity by the LGBTQXY recruitment drive, independent of any molestation.

Even the from-an-early age trans stuff makes me slightly doubtful, just because I once knew someone dumb who thought her 18-month-old might be trans because he didn't like wearing pants.

The problem is the way any expression of gender non-conformity gets lovebombed, when it should be neither encouraged nor discouraged.

Even the from-an-early age trans stuff makes me slightly doubtful, just because I once knew someone dumb who thought her 18-month-old might be trans because he didn't like wearing pants.

'Scuse you, that is a Scientifically Validated method of identifying trans infants! An Expert Agrees!

It seems impossible to imagine being groomed into any identity other than the default. Despite the feelings of the anti's out there the level of social pressure to be normal is fucking wild.

I'm not LGBT, I'm probably not even Q other than by the thinnest margin (I don't really care about my gender particularly and I don't seem to be as pathologically obsessed with getting my dick wet as the average guy) and even that is too much.

Let the level of push back/path dependent pressure to course correct the 0.5 rads I've deviated be designated as X: X < beating my woman with a closed fist BUT X > gently correcting with an open hand (This is a humorous exaggeration, please get off my back).

Shit is crazy, you have to experience it to believe it and you can only experience it by being authentically weird in some way; eg by being autistic. I'm just glad I wasn't born with a fragile ego or a limp spine, that shit could fuck you up easy if you let it/were susceptible.

I wonder how much of the pressure to conform one way or another really depends on your bubble. In a trad Cath or almost any red tribe group I've been exposed to or a part of, you're going to get pretty open social hostility. On the flip side, LGBT subcultures by definition involve make being LGBT, or whatever subset of it that particular group is of, the normal. Progressive groups IME tend to give a lot of social support verbally and signaling wise to LGBT people, but I'm unsure what the total experience of an LGBT person would be in there. I have a wife and kid now, but in college I had an addiction to gay porn that due to drunk hijinks was known by many, and some progressive friend groups tried to recruit me into their groups when previously they were uninterested. I imagine which bubbles you are exposed to, and we are all exposed to more than one, decides how much pressure you have to conform to cisheteronormativity (to use the academic phrase).

I'm less referring to personal pressure which is brownian, and more society in general.

Eg, even the most flagrant of the homos are out here fighting for ... the right to participate in the institution of marriage? Who could have predicted?

Anyone paying attention. The culture says that you are not a complete human without the picket fence and the kids, etc etc.

I think that's why the rejectionist tendency among all people is getting stronger over time; it's coming from the same place. The flaming LGBTQ types and the Incels and the Transhumanists and the fuentisimos and the revanchist communists are all reacting to social pressure to conform to a certain image or life path that for various reasons only has enough room for x = population % 10001 and everyone else can eat shit and die.

I'm less referring to personal pressure which is brownian, and more society in general.

Eg, even the most flagrant of the homos are out here fighting for ... the right to participate in the institution of marriage? Who could have predicted?

Anyone paying attention. The culture says that you are not a complete human without the picket fence and the kids, etc etc.

The first question I would have is: which society? This isn't a gotcha: it's fair to say that, essentially by the mid 20th century, the US did have a mainstream mono-culture which almost everyone interacted with consisting of big business, the government, mainstream media (not just news but things like Hollywood as well), and probably a few other things too. At the same time, you also had subcultures that had values opposing and/or orthogonal to that dominant culture. The Amish and gayborhoods being some examples. How much the values of the dominant culture dictate your life and community does very much depend on where you elect to wind up.

I think that's why the rejectionist tendency among all people is getting stronger over time; it's coming from the same place. The flaming LGBTQ types and the Incels and the Transhumanists and the fuentisimos and the revanchist communists are all reacting to social pressure to conform to a certain image or life path that for various reasons only has enough room for x = population % 10001 and everyone else can eat shit and die.

This is true to a large extent. While the modern mainstream has a more ambivalent relationship to those above groups then pure hostility, it's clear that tons of people were given expectations of what is the good life that, for varying reasons depending on the person, is out of reach for them. What makes this more dire on a personal level is really how much power the monoculture has over your life; if you're Amish, the monoculture has a limit affect on your lived experience but if you're an atomized modern, you're going to swimming against the river every time you wake up without a supportive community. When you have a bunch of people with mutually irreconcilable desires to change the monoculture, and the stakes are high for them since there is no subculture they can retreat to to compensate for any failures in the monoculture, conflict becomes nasty quickly.

Weird kids can get really emotionally dependent on teachers and other school staff; one guidance councilor obsessed with egg-cracking can do a lot of damage. And I've seen the cloying lovey-doveyness that gets lavished on adult trans people secondhand; the extreme protective emotional reactions when a wokie thinks they spotted a transphobe. I've seen straight girls dating men in dresses because they were told not dating a trans person is transphobic. I know a few weird girls who dabbled in lesbianism or FtM, then left it later and suddenly lost all their friends for being a betrayer.

The FtM’s are not, by and large, particularly interested in being male. They are interested in being not-female, so I wonder how much of the sexual assault link is driven by them specifically and how much is driven by stable two parent families producing both few assault victims and few gender weirdos.

stable two parent families producing both few assault victims and few gender weirdos.

A further question is how much of that is driven by genetics, ie. the same genes that increase the chance of FtM also decreasing the chance of starting a stable two parent family.

I mean, autism seems to reduce the odds of forming a stable nuclear family.

Could be just because we've had at least a century or more of dysgenic population policy. We treat genetic capital like an infinite resource. Dysfuctional people dysfunction in many ways all at once. Infant mortality was load bearing, sadly.

I honestly think there should be some kind of differentiation between trans people and autistic trans people.

Very much so, as I just wrote in another comment.

A cishet couple I know have a fancy multimonitor remote work setup and a large My Little Pony collection in their respective studies which I find funny for fitting stereotypes about men vs women so well. No points for guessing which room is closer to every MtF person I've ever known IRL or online (hint: it's not the one with the MLP collection).

Do you think the pony jar was a female creation? I would be surprised if among adults female MLP fans outnumber men.

Having been a teenager during the bronie era, I thought you were trying to say that the man had both a multi-monitor setup and a my little pony collection. Also, IMO, multi monitor setups are highly popular in the workplace among both men and women, and it wouldn’t be surprising to me for a woman who works a computer-based job at home to have a multi-monitor setup for productivity.

That said, on the trans question, I’ve met trans women who struck me as masculine in their hobbies, some who struck me as more autistic than anything else, and some who struck me very feminine in a stereotypical sense, like being a reader of romance novels or having strong opinions about makeup in the way only women and guys like James Charles do. If some fraction of gay men are feminine, like gay hairdressers, it doesn’t beggar belief that some trans women would be, too.

Having grown up in a very red part of the US, I’d say that trans women from rural or conservative environments often seem much more invested in femininity than trans women from the coasts, which may speak to the level of dysphoria or femininity a person needs to reach in that kind of environment before taking the social risk of transitioning.

As magicalkittycat says, this type of person is rare, very rare, and my very loose outsider’s impression is that they’re happy to ally with the more flamboyant elements of the trans coalition or the broader the LGBT coalition because of strength in numbers, while privately being more reserved and actually rather conventional, if you get to know them.

Having been a teenager during the bronie era

Ah. I keep forgetting you people are all still a bunch of kids... (shakes fist at cloud mumbling about lawn)

No, I'm talking about the original 80s MLP. The one with absolutely zero male fanbase at the time, at least around here, but loved by five year old girls who also loved being princesses and dressing in pink.

Also, IMO, multi monitor setups are highly popular in the workplace among both men and women

Yeah, but how many (non-autist) women build a man cave around them and approach them with the same piety and tech enthusiasm as hardcore gamers approach building the ultimate gaming rig?

That said, on the trans question, I’ve met trans women who struck me as masculine in their hobbies, some who struck me as more autistic than anything else, and some who struck me very feminine in a stereotypical sense, like being a reader of romance novels or having strong opinions about makeup in the way only women and guys like James Charles do. If some fraction of gay men are feminine, like gay hairdressers, it doesn’t beggar belief that some trans women would be, too.

I'm not disputing the existence of feminine trans women at all. I'm saying that the autistic / hardcore-nerd-male-until-ackshually-I'm-a-women MtF are a different population that should not be grouped with "normal" trans women for any analysis because their behavior and "origin stories" will differ so significantly and result in any data being a complete mess. If anything, the gay men I know have more balanced feminine interests and are pretty much what you'd expect from non-autistic men who don't have to care about fitting masculine stereotypes and couldn't give a damn about whether women find them attractive or not.

No, I'm talking about the original 80s MLP.

Ohh, that era…

Do you have an elevator pitch for Catholic transhumanism? I thought that they were diametrically opposed.

I can't find the original meme, but I remember seeing an image macro that went something like this:

[Protestant LGBT:] "Jesus loves everyone! Love is love! I go to a church with a pride flag!" (Secretly wracked with guilt.)

[Catholic LGBT:] "Man is a fallen creature. I accept that I am a pervert. I go to the BDSM club on fridays, confession on saturdays, and church on Sundays." (Openly wracked with guilt.)

...

I thought that they were diametrically opposed.

So yeah, that's basically it.

@Tretiak I do appreciate the charity though.

Okay, good job, that made me laugh out loud.

That is indeed what Protestants and Catholics are like.

Do you have an elevator pitch for Catholic transhumanism?

Best I can do is this.

As a Catholic myself, I don’t see any explicit contradiction between the two, just things that would strike someone as ‘extremely’ odd and strange. Justin Martyr was the first real post-New Testament theologian who tried being both a Christian and a Platonist because he saw such a natural harmony between the two. Being a Catholic and Transhumanist is definitely unorthodox for sure, but maybe that’ll change in the future. I don’t think if we ever get to the point of instantiating consciousness in computers it’ll provide neo-Aristotelian’s evidence that’ll resurrect hylomorphism and prove computers have souls, in the same way that when computers malfunction we don’t accuse them of being possessed by demons. Even though I believe in the reality of demons, I ‘don’t’ believe that’s how that works.

Some root factor makes people both more likely to be non-cis AND more likely to be non-cis

I would imagine that there is a correlation with r=1 between the two. SCNR.

I know you meant "victim of CSA and non-cis", which would be weird. But then again, quite a few things could are both weird and true. Generally, everything is correlated with everything else, mostly through boring confounders (perhaps the size of the town one grew up, or absent parents could be a risk factor for either).

I mean, it is also possible that child abusers in aggregate have some preference for victims which are less gendered than their peers, and that being less gendered as a kid also makes one less likely to be cis. But I don't think that is a big effect either.

...So if you have kids, and want to maximize their chances of identifying as cisgender into adulthood, your top priority should be reducing their opportunities for anxiety. Personally, I don't think it is worth worrying about very much. There is a sure-fire way not to have trans kids, and that is not to have kids. I see being trans as a minor medical annoyance for the patient, less severe than diabetes and a bit more severe than Hashimoto. I mean, if we had total control through magical genetics, deliberately making someone trans would be a bit of an asshole move -- like using CRISPR to give someone color blindness so that they can continue to carry on the legacy of color-blind people or some bullshit.

But of all the medical conditions a kid could have (and which might be avoided through embryo selection to some degree), being trans does not feel like a very big deal. (Of course, I say that as one who is happily cis-by-default. OTOH, I have been on antidepressants for more than a decade and would probably trade them for hormones if some fairy offered me the deal.)

Openly worrying about drag queen story hour and queer books would be ironically counterproductive.

Yes, but it is also not meant to be productive, it is performative, signaling. You might as well try to raise non-alcoholic kids by pretending that booze does not exist. Or try to raise abstinent kids by not teaching them about sex, which commonly results in teen pregnancies.

Unless you ban kids who are openly non-cis from schools (which would be problematic), kids are going to get exposed to other kids who decide that they are trans. Of course, talking about how brave they are will lead to more kids deciding that they are trans. A better approach might be to offer them your condolences for them not having the chromosome set they would like to have, use their preferred name and continue with the lesson plan.

I know you meant "victim of CSA and non-cis",

Fixed typo:

Some root factor makes people both more likely to be non-cis AND more likely to report being sexually assaulted

("report" is also important here.)

I see being trans as a minor medical annoyance for the patient, less severe than diabetes and a bit more severe than Hashimoto.

I've had (non-trans-related) body image issues since puberty and it's been fucking horrible. If I didn't think therapy would be largely useless for me I'm pretty sure I could get a body dysmorphia diagnosis. (Useless compared to the replacement option of looksmaxxing, not in general-- I'd probably go if it was free, quick, and convenient, but as-is I have better ways to spent my time.) I completely understand, on an emotional level, why trans people are trans-- I just don't believe that wanting to be something is the same thing as being something. To my eternal furry chagrin, I am not a wolf on any level, including physical.

Given that experience, I very much hope that if (and hopefully when) I have children, I will be able to protect them from feeling similarly-- and by applying the pharmaceutical, behavioral, and social interventions that would have helped me, hope to dramatically reduce the internal factors that would contribute to the same thing. The final piece would be just, "not talking about it." The body-image issues in my family are generational, so I think combining the other interventions with "stop yelling meme" would cut them off at the knees. Applying that logic to transgenderism, I think that helping kids feel pride in their gender roles without being neurotic about conformity is half the puzzle, and easy, so figuring out how to counter whatever confounding factor exists between CSA and becoming non-cis is what I should be focusing to spare my kids from a frankly hellish fate. (Meaning: the dysphoria, not the non-cis-ness specifically... though as opposed to something like bigorexia I do think gender-related ailments are particularly pernicuous, and that post-treatment surveys significantly underestimate the amount of trans people telling themselves ego-preserving lies, A.K.A "coping.")

Or try to raise abstinent kids by not teaching them about sex, which commonly results in teen pregnancies.

Not to derail things. But how true is this? I know people say that. But i find it hard to believe someone would commission, publish and report on a study that says Catholic abstinance sexed in fact reduces pregnant, harm, whatever.

I know you said “not teaching about sex” which is a straw man version of the argument.

I have no idea. But I could easily imagine how a religious abstinence approach is superior to the modern public school insanity that is sex and gender.

But how true is this?

Wildly not true. If you'd like to know more, you can consult the considerable literature on the subject:

Underhill, Operario, Montgomery Cochrane systematic review (2007). This is one of the strongest reviews: 13 randomized or quasi-randomized trials, 15,940 U.S. youth. It found no consistent effect of abstinence-only programs on unprotected vaginal sex, frequency of sex, number of partners, sexual initiation, or condom use, and concluded the trials suggested these programs were ineffective in high-income settings.

Denford et al. review of systematic reviews (2017). This “review of reviews” covered 37 systematic reviews summarizing 224 randomized controlled trials. Its conclusion was explicit: abstinence-only interventions were ineffective at producing positive changes in sexual behavior, while comprehensive interventions were effective.

Chin et al. / Community Preventive Services Task Force (2012). Their systematic review/meta-analytic work found insufficient/inconsistent evidence to conclude that group-based abstinence education works, whereas comprehensive risk-reduction interventions were found effective.

Trenholm et al. / Mathematica federal evaluation (2007). This congressionally mandated evaluation of four Title V abstinence programs found the programs had no effect on youths’ sexual abstinence and that participants were no more likely to have unprotected sex.

Kirby, review of 56 studies (2008). Kirby found that most abstinence programs did not delay initiation of sex and only 3 of 9 abstinence programs showed any significant positive effect on any sexual behavior. By contrast, about two thirds of comprehensive programs showed strong evidence of benefit.

Kohler, Manhart, Lafferty (2008). In a population-level analysis, abstinence-only education showed no significant effect on teen pregnancy or vaginal intercourse, while comprehensive sex education was associated with lower teen pregnancy risk. It also found that teaching contraception was not associated with more adolescent sexual activity or STDs

Actually I’ve heard the relevant group to study on this is the Mormons and statistics on citizens in Utah. They also have one of the highest adoption rates in the country. It’s less about preventing it from happening and controlling for the context in how it happens such that it’s intentional.

Wow, those graphs are physically difficult to parse- in fact I'd actually say they're actively harmful to a proper understanding of the data. A "plain reading" (at least to me) of that data suggests 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 12 boys have been sexually penetrated in an unwanted manner before the age of 12, which isn't passing the sniff test given, if I remember correctly, prevalence of sexual contact by 12 is about 5%, or 1 in 20. So I doubt I'm reading the graph correctly, but there's no way to derive the total context or get a scale of the proportions involved relative to all respondents.

Being sexually assaulted causes people to become non-cis

I think this is ignoring the obvious-to-me confounder that becoming non-cis can cause them to become a victim of sexual assault [or reinterpret themselves as such] where they hadn't necessarily considered themselves as such before. This can also happen to cisgendered people, and women more than men for reasons that have to do with an asymmetric biological incentive to claim abuse for social or financial stability or gain (it's very popular to do this and makes headlines when it happens re: #MeToo, also, internal narratives matter to people re: 2rafa's comment below).

If you grow up poor or insecure or to young parents or female you become anxious and depressed, which leads you to be more likely to suffer sexual assault

Well, no, if you grew up poor, 2 things are likely true for kid-you:

  • Your peers, especially the adult ones, are more likely than average to have poorer than average impulse control (or "high time preference", for short)
  • Less stability means less trust in institutions, and less of a chance you try and 'rock the boat' (and give in to something you perhaps don't want to, or let it go further than you'd like)

Which means you're more likely to be "propositioned", and less likely to feel you have the power to pull back before it happens, and apparently this decreases monotonically by wealth level (outside of the 'elite' answers, whose error bars are very large- though I can believe this becomes truer for elite children simply because the chance for catastrophe in that scenario becomes large/taking 'no' for an answer and being driven enough to take risk kind of selects you out of the 'elite' group, obviously).

Also, and perhaps most importantly, we don't actually hear the first question: what's abuse? The analysis buries "indicates that they might be the most enthusiastic participants" in there, which suggests the question of "abuse" wasn't worded properly (i.e. in the legal sense, not the objective 'it was unwanted' sense- and I'd expect a survey designer who claims to value childhood autonomy to know better), which is a massive deal, especially when it comes to drawing conclusions on the last question.

Perhaps the second set of data will be more illuminating, though I'm not holding my breath on this one. If the base question/premise is bad, the analysis won't get better.

prevalence of sexual contact by 12 is about 5%

Can the "was sexually assaulted in the sense of the Aella survey but didn't classify it as 'sexual contact' for the purpose of the other one" set be discounted? I can imagine that the latter survey was framed in a way that suggested consensual or at least peer encounters.

Wow, those graphs are physically difficult to parse- in fact I'd actually say they're actively harmful to a proper understanding of the data. A "plain reading" (at least to me) of that data suggests 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 12 boys have been sexually penetrated in an unwanted manner before the age of 12, which isn't passing the sniff test given, if I remember correctly, prevalence of sexual contact by 12 is about 5%, or 1 in 20. So I doubt I'm reading the graph correctly, but there's no way to derive the total context or get a scale of the proportions involved relative to all respondents.

I think this is just reporting bias-- CSA victims are probably more likely to share and respond to this survey. I don't think that's an issue with respect to Aella's analysis because she's specifically interested in cross-response correlations rather than the headline numbers.

I think this is ignoring the obvious-to-me confounder that becoming non-cis can cause them to become a victim of sexual assault

The confounder definitely exists-- we have plenty of other surveys showing non-cis people are more vulnerable to sexual assault-- but the data for this survey contradicts any notion that this is primary. If this was the primary confounder, then we should expect to see a much larger difference between response rates of cis vs non-cis people comparing between the 0-12 vs 13-18 age groups, since the coming-out rate is WAY higher in later adolescence than childhood and pre-teen-hood. Instead, the difference in response rates remain very similar. Plausibly there's still some "wierd kid" confounding factor because the kids who become non-cis are never normal even before transitioning... (the one kid I know that transitioned had previously shown me furry porn in the cafeteria because we were both bronies... and had some pretty solid taste, honestly, ngl.) That gets right back into the question of what exactly makes these kids weird, however.

Well, no, if you grew up poor, 2 things are likely true for kid-you:

You say this like you're going to provide a counterargument and then propose two factors that seem extremely likely to increase anxiety and depression.

we don't actually hear the first question: what's abuse?

I made a typo in my OP. Fixed it, so my second bullet point reads:

Some root factor makes people both more likely to be non-cis AND more likely to report being sexually assaulted

I do think it's likely that the difference in sexual assault rates between cis and non-cis people is partially (though probably not totally) due to differences in specifically reporting rates. I don't actually think we need an explicit definition for what constitutes as 'abuse' though-- it would be sufficiently interesting to find that non-cis people adopt inclusive definitions of abuse at a higher rate, or are more likely to re-interpret invents in a negative way.

One big issue is the difference between the, for lack of better labels, the meaningfully transsexual transgender person, and the the "trender" transgender person.

The meaningfully transexual trans person, who has typically had their feelings since they were young despite lack of input, maintain their desires to transition over long spans of time and put effort into presenting themselves in the world as their identified gender are rare. Like really really rare.

The recent Kansas decision to pull changed drivers licenses actually gave us some workable numbers on it. Apparently 1700 people are impacted by the decision, and chatgpt pulls up "Active driver’s licenses (most recent full year reported): 2,099,927 licenses."

That makes for less than one tenth of a percent of trans people who had the gender marker changed (assuming there wasn't even any data input false positives which at such rarity I wouldn't be surprised if errors was a significant number of them). Of course not every meaningfully trans person will have had a changed license, and perhaps many of them would have left Kansas before this anyway so there could be a selection effect but even if we doubled or tripled, it's an incredibly small number of people who actually meaningfully transition in that way.

The people who "find their identity" on Tiktok or Instagram or whatever and dye their hair weird colors and also tend to fake being DID/Autistic/tourettes/etc and are just generally "omg I'm so quirky" types seem to be in much greater abundance. Those types definitely seem to be more disproportionately the former explanation, that wanting to disconnect from negative associations with their sex can be a primary motivator for them. It's not the only one, after all they're "teehee I'm so quirky" types trying to stand out and be special in other ways, but it sure does seem to be true of many.

Ideological disclaimer: as a catholic I believe there are only two genders, fixed at birth, but as a transhumanist also I'm in favor of letting anyone, including children, do whatever they want to their own bodies.

I don't really think the debate about gender is even that useful. As Ymeskhout wrote about the transgender sticker fallacy and Scott Alexander has wrote about before in categories were made for man, while the world might come from a divine power, words and labels don't. I have no issue acknowledging trans people as their identified gender so long as they are living generally within that space. Words and labels also can shift depending on context. In the context of giving birth, trans women are not women, but in the context of what section of the store they buy their clothes or what gender roles they try to match in society, they are. This applies to cis women as well, a woman born without a uterus is not a woman in the context of giving birth either, as it does not apply to them. Another way to look at it would be like a sticker of a door on a plastic car. In the context of opening and closing it as an entrance into the toy vehicle, it's not a door. In the context of appearances it is a door. Vice versa, a secret passage in a bookshelf is a door for the context of being an opening and closing entrance, but not a door in the context of appearance.

We see this right now with the Olympics banning people with the SRY gene. While it's definitely been touted in the media and online as a ban on trans people, the real world effect will almost entirely fall on the intersex competitors given the rarity of trans athletes at the Olympics (one in ~twenty years). Someone like Imane Khelif who for basically her whole life has lived in the context of being a woman, in a country that is very hostile and violent towards trans people too, is now considered not woman in the context of the Olympics and among many activists pushing for the ban. So Imane Khelif is in a state of flux, she's a woman according to one of the most trans hostile countries on the planet and has been that her whole life, and yet considered a man for the Olympics.

And chromosome arguments fall flat trying to reconcile this, because the idea of man and woman in society existed far before genetics and chromosomes were ever known about. A case like Khelif is not just considered a woman by Algeria, she would have been considered a woman by basically everyone in history before (at the very earliest) the 1900s when sex chromosomes were discovered. It can be argued that Khelif should count as a man in the context of the Olympics, but expanding that much further is actually against the traditional usage of these terms.

Regardless I agree with the end point, I think people (including children) should be allowed essentially maximal freedom to themselves (as long as it is of course, to themselves and not others) and if someone makes a mistake or fuckup then that is the price of freedom. Allowing the notion that big government has any moral claim to speak over me and my decisions and my autonomy is something I will not ever do. If someone gets addicted to drugs and dies, that is their fault. If someone overeats, that is their fault. If someone takes hormones or puberty blockers and then regrets it later, that is their fault. And when I do things I regret, that is my fault. If someone is too intellectually retarded to be held responsible for their own decisions, then they should be held in a mental hospital or the like. If paying privately, the most a doctor should really have to do is a consent form so it's known that the patient made their own choice and assurances against fraud (not providing the agreed upon treatments) and negligence. If paid by insurance then they meet the insurance standards too.

what gender roles they try to match in society, they are.

No. They try to match their idea of the sexual gender roles. Being a woman is, shockingly, not largely based on sex. This is why its offensive blackface. Imane Khalif does not at all live like a woman, no woman in a muslim country would be hoisted up on the shoulders of their coach. Imane Khalif is a cheating man. Trans athletes aren't rare. Khalif was only one of two male gold medalists in the womens boxing last time, and the entire 800 meter podium at rio was also men.

Assuming you are arguing in good faith here are hundreds of examples of this thing you think doesn't happen: https://hecheated.org/

Imane Khelif isn't trans, they are at worst intersex. Someone like her, raised as a girl since birth in a trans hostile country, would have also been seen as such throughout basically all of history. It is in fact a modern idea to privilege genes and chromosomes (only discovered in the last century) over outer genitalia among intersex individuals in determining if they're men or women. There are plenty examples of intersex individuals being regarded as female at birth like this, and it is only until recently, because genetics itself is a recent field, where a case like Semenya or Khelif would have been contested as not being truly female.

Trans athletes aren't rare.

In the Olympics there has only been one. There have been various intersex athletes, but only one who is traditionally trans, and also who came in last place too funnily enough.

I don't really think the debate about gender is even that useful.

I think it's useful, but that's because I specifically believe that gender roles are specifically duties, created by God, and that individuals and societies should encourage those duties like they should encourage everything else God wants humans to do. Identifying which duties are relevant to yourself and others is therefore necessary and good.

One big issue is the difference between the, for lack of better labels, the meaningfully transsexual transgender person, and the the "trender" transgender person.

IMO an even more problematic issue that confounds all discussions about transgenderism is that trans people are treated as one group instead of being separated into people on autism spectrum and the rest. Every "non-famous" MTF person (ie. I've run into them in real life / specific FB groups / other forums in person instead of reading about them from some source) I know of are obviously on the spectrum, many of them are deeply weird in other ways and they have stereotypical hardcore male intellectual interests (to the extent that some tech groups have multiple orders of magnitude more MTF people than actual women). Not surprisingly none seem to have shown any indication of feeling "woman trapped in a man's body" as kids / teenagers / young adults. I have a hard time believing their experience or behavior matches particularly closely to the "modal" MTF group who felt they were born into the wrong gender from young age.

Of course not every meaningfully trans person will have had a changed license, and perhaps many of them would have left Kansas before this anyway so there could be a selection effect but even if we doubled or tripled, it's an incredibly small number of people who actually meaningfully transition in that way.

I will caution that there's some selection effects going on: in addition to a lot of trans people going to the coasts, many Red Tribe states require or required significantly more documentation of interventions than one might expect. Kansas wasn't the most extreme, there - some other states mandated certain types of surgical intervention - but even before trans stuff became a culture war lightning rod, it was well-known to be enough of a hassle that even some eligible people dodged it.

The numbers in California are probably closer to 1-in-400.

Someone like Imane Khelif who for basically her whole life has lived in the context of being a woman...

Probably not a great example: there's been leaked information claiming Khelif to have 5a-reductase deficiency, which would have been detected as an (ironically, false) doping incident at least as of 1984.

I would have thought that an obvious "common factor" in both identifying as a CSA survivor and identifying as non-cis would be "being left-wing".

Becoming left or right wing is downstream of other life experiences. It's more plausible that whatever common factor causes the other two things also causes the left-wing-ness.

it's worth reiterating that the heritability of political views is extremely high. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4038932/

More than half a century of research in genetics, neuroscience and psychology has demonstrated that human behaviors, including social and political attitudes, are influenced by genetic and neurobiological factors.........[Authors] pioneered this radical departure, finding that genetic variance accounted for a substantial portion of individual differences in conservatism, sub-dimensions of social, economic and defense ideologies, as well as individual social and political attitudes. Additional twin and extended kinship studies which included parents, non-twin siblings, spouses, and twins reared apart confirmed these earlier results and found that most individual political attitudes were influenced by a combination of genetic effects (which explain between 30 and 60% of variance) and environmental influence. In this way, children resemble their parents because of their genetic relatedness as much as parental upbringing and social environments.

block quote edited for readability

not disagreeing with you. just adding for emphasis because it's easy to forget just how large a factor it is on people's outlooks.

the heritability of political views is extremely high

Correction: heritability of personality traits is extremely high, and how these traits manifest in support of political views is culturally and historically contingent.

2020's veteran MAGA Red American in, for example, 1920's USSR would be also Red, hard core Bolshevik Red. Probably Workers' Opposition bitching about party bureaucracy betrayal of the revolution and working class. If only comrade Vladimir Ilych knew about it!

I remember someone once describing the birth of an ideology as something that begins as a “pre-analytic cognitive act.” What that means in the political realm is that the former acts as the mental architecture and framework of understanding that emotionally colors and interprets particular experiences, which is independent of how experiences act back on us to form our views. Experiences no doubt shape other opinions and attitudes we have, but whether we’re left or right is rooted in something more fundamental, or perhaps the earliest life experiences we have as children. That’s certainly been true in my case.

My emotional disposition towards things and my political beliefs were formed far before I ever had a political awakening or became more learned as an adult. Everything since has been just backing into it after the fact with evidence and logical arguments to support my conclusions. There’s things I’ve ’learned’ over the years. Not things I’ve ‘changed’ though. Even when I really think I am earnest trying to understand others and am willing to be persuaded by their opinions, I’m mostly just not. That’s how I interpret the findings in cognitive psychology.

I don't think you're disagreeing with me, but just in case you are I wanted to clarify that this "pre-analytic congnitive framework" that comes prior to politics, being a way to experience life, is one of those things I'd lump under "other-life-experiences." I'll moot discussing whether it's the specific life experience that determines reporting rates and non-cisgender-ness though. The phrase is general enough that I think we would get into a dictionary definition argument. A broad enough definition of the term would compel me to agree that it's the prior factor I'm talking about, but likely result in me complaining that it's so broad a definition as to be practically useless-- and a narrow enough definition to be useful would probably have me dithering about a lack of hard data to conclude if it's central.

I can personally attest that my values/principles have been largely unchanged. What has changed has been my understanding of situations and how applying (or misapplying, given leftist theory!) those principles work. It's no secret the reason that leftist ideology sells/fails to be snuffed out so well is that the basic ideas seem so basically right. Looking at the way they were applied, however, completely changed my positions on many things. Some small examples of principle:

  1. People should be allowed to live how they want (gay marriage good or at least acceptable!)
  2. Keeping people down is bad (let's implement programs to raise people who have the potential to be good candidates a chance!)
  3. People dying to violent crime is bad (let's keep guns out of the hands of the violently criminal!)

And how they were implemented:

  1. People should be allowed to live how they want (you will not question or criticize me living in a poly relationship while taking life altering hormones, and not even question me advocating it to others)
  2. Keeping people down is bad (let's explicitly fudge hiring numbers to fill quotas despite the qualification of the candidate)
  3. People dying to violent crime is bad (let's not punish violent criminals in any way, and punish lawful gun owners, violating the constitution the whole time)

These are simple examples, but they're good examples of how the world has changed around my principles.

I can personally attest that my values/principles have been largely unchanged. What has changed has been my understanding of situations and how applying (or misapplying, given leftist theory!) those principles work.

Which is entirely the above thesis. It’s what we all do.

People should be allowed to live how they want…

The root of the disagreement people have when statements like this are made depends entirely on what you think human beings are. When you hear things like “people should be free to do what they want,” an average person may here things like:

  1. Same-sex marriage

  2. Live wherever I want to

  3. Drink alcohol

  4. Smoke weed

Etc. When ‘I’ hear something like that, here’s what I think of:

  1. Commit theft

  2. Murder people

  3. Sexually assault others

  4. Vandalize property

Etc. Civilization isn’t a spontaneous creation that emerges naturally out of simple and uncoerced economic exchanges. Socioeconomic libertarianism isn’t enough to get you there. Constrained liberty is the best you can hope it. Small governments that only enforces contracts have a very short half life. In Basketball the ref’s have to be more powerful than the players otherwise what incentive is there for them to listen to them? Same applies with market participants and governments. Civil society requires enormous amounts of collective investment to build and uphold it. Leftism in theory nor in practice (which I’ll give them considerable ground in certain ways, I’m not a priori opposed to it) just has never worked to me, no matter how I examine it.

Which is entirely the above thesis. It’s what we all do.

That's why I posted; I agree with you!

I'll clarify "in their personal lives with the consent of others". I'll stand by that as far as support for gay marriage.

I agree with your agreement!

Excellent. Drinks on me

Becoming left or right wing is downstream of other life experiences

I think being a CSA survivor is itself a pretty major reason someone might grow up as strongly leftist, though (and, separately but compoundingly, that someone identifying as "a CSA survivor" in a survey is more likely to be left-wing than right-wing even assuming equal rates of actual experience of CSA between blue and red respondents). The therapists are woke, the books about coping with trauma are woke - if dealing with trauma is a huge part of your life then you'll grow up marinating in a generally left-wing worldview. And if you don't absorb that worldview you're less likely to continue identifying as "a CSA survivor" in adulthood - as opposed to compartmentalizing it away as just some shit in the past you don't need to think about, unlike all those fragile left-wing snowflakes who bootstrap themselves into chronic anxiety by fixating on their bad experiences.

So that gets us "CSA survivors are more likely to be left-wing"; and surely I don't need to justify the "left-wingers are more likely to question their gender" part of the chain of reasoning?

I don't think this explanation works.

  1. The ratios between cis vs. non-cis people reporting sexual abuse in the 0-12 range remains similar for household vs non-household penetrative assaults.
  2. (My prior is that) people who are abused by non-family-members are more likely to receive therapy (because they're less likely to be abused by the people who would otherwise be responsible for getting them that therapy)
  3. However, your explanation predicts that likelyhood that a child recieved therapy should increase CSA reporting rates relative to baseline.

2 and 3 contradict.

I admit that there probably is some relationship with therapy->liberalism->non-cisgenderism, but I don't think it's central.

Personality type clearly has an impact on the likelihood of these unpleasant things occurring, which feels like an extraordinary taboo but which should be obvious.

I have a semi-friend, let’s say acquaintance, who has a personal narrative of being raped or trafficked by a much older man in her early teens, kind of like an Epstein situation although this man while rich was just a moderately successful man in his early 40s.

At the time (and I was there and the same age) she saw herself as an empowered, tumblr-driven “sugar baby”. I see her as a casualty of the sexual revolution more than anything else. She bragged about this relationship to all the girls. She sought it out, lying repeatedly about her age on the dating platforms of the late 00s and very early 2010s, and to the multiple older adult men she had sex with (and would again brag about this). She had no trauma at home (yes, one never knows for sure) and came from a wealthy and loving family with several siblings whom I know well.

At the time, her own close friends advised her against what she did, called her weird and various other less nice things. But while she was pretty and popular, she was not the prettiest or the most popular and I think in a way the attention from older men helped make up for that in her own head. As I said, I think a better world would have found ways of preventing her from doing what she did, and of preventing the men who did what they did to her from doing it.

But it also doesn’t sit right with me to absolve her of any responsibility, and it frustrates me when she (on the one occasion I have seen her in the last few years) narrates this chapter of her life as if she had zero agency, when everyone who was there knows that she had plenty of it.

As I said, I think a better world would have found ways of preventing her from doing what she did, and of preventing the men who did what they did to her from doing it.

They’re called ‘parents’, and you don’t have to live in a better world for that. No really, since you went to school with this person- where were her parents? 14 and 40 is a very different thing from 17 and 20(which many parents would let slide even if they don’t like it).

Kids can be surprisingly good at hiding things, and if the parents were liberal they probably didn't want to have a parenting style that would be seen as controlling (the old 'I want to be friends with my kids' style) and most of all not controlling of her sexuality. Very likely to have had no idea that precious daughter was setting up as sugar baby and would have been shocked to discover this.

Does sound like some of the Epstein girls, who earned money as highschoolers and recruited other girls into it with 'hey want to make some easy money, all you have to do is give a massage to this rich guy' and then years later present themselves as helpless victims.

The account sounds so familiar: girls that age thinking they are so adult and grown-up and can make their own decisions and nobody has the right to tell them what to do, getting attention and validation from older men, and not recognising how they are being exploited and exploiting others (even if she did lie about being 18 or 19, I do think if you're 30 or 40 and on such sites hunting for young women there is some responsibility on yourself there, but we've had this argument on here before about "men are attracted to younger females, every guy who is honest thinks 16-17 year olds are hot and bangable, science proves it" and more arguing over it will go nowhere).

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for middle aged men whose mistresses turned out to be jailbait(especially not 14 year old jailbait), but going out with one involves going far enough out of a 14 year old’s way- bearing in mind that she couldn’t drive and sharply limited independence was pretty normal at that age- that it’s difficult to believe her parents didn’t know.

Do you know what she told her parents? Did she lie about going to a friend's house, or that she was meeting Teacher Jones for extra tuition, or just going to the library/other activity where she could plausibly be out of the house for a few hours?

People can also be very trusting of motives, and if they had no idea in their heads that "my 14 year old daughter is being sexually active", then her meeting up with respectable older men where she's explaining it as "that's Janey's dad, Janey is a girl in my class, he's just driving me over to Janey's house" can work. Or they could have known and have been trying to control her but not able to, that happens as well. Locking a teenager in their room might not be illegal but it could be presented (especially if she was manipulative) as a pattern of abusive behaviour by the parents.

Sure, I'm not doubting that there might be an explanation where her parents were merely bad at their job rather than insane. But there would be an explanation, it's not a default.

To the extent that there is a distaff counterpart to "toxic masculinity" I feel like the sort of off-shoring of agency you describe here is a big part of it. I feel like as society has become more "feminized" I've see more of these situations where a failure clearly occurred but we can't just tell someone that they "failed" because really the failure was the fault of "systemic issues" and everyone following their individual incentives.

It’s because that attitude tends to make a moral argument out of everything, even when there’s nothing of the sort involved in the matter in any way whatsoever. I don’t even bother reasoning with people like that. I just let them sulk in their misery. They can’t grapple with any reality that makes them “uncomfortable.” The psychological resources just aren’t there that empower them to deal with the difficulties of life. You’re having to drag these people everywhere, kicking and screaming, no matter where they’re going.

To the extent that there is a distaff counterpart to "toxic masculinity"

Top-tier Freudian slip.

Edit: apparently this was intentional


What is this place?

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


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