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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32761 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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A recent piece by Rod Dreher is the latest example I’ve seen on the Dissident Right of references to “Theater-Kid-run America” and to the dangers of giving power to “Former Theater Kids” and, well, it’s got me feeling called-out in a very uncomfortable way. Certainly this far from the first time I’ve felt conspicuously out-of-place and unwelcome on the Right; my sparring with @HlynkaCG and @FCfromSSC in this space, and with a number of users when I was an active poster in /r/CultureWarRoundup, have reinforced my acute awareness of how my upbringing and personality profile make me somewhat of an uncomfortable fit in the right-wing ecosystem. But the “Theater Kids” discourse hits me particularly hard because it touches on something over which I’ve agonized for a long time.

The question of “why are artistically-inclined people nearly universally left-wing” has occupied my thoughts extensively ever since I began my journey to the Right. As I’ve mentioned here before - probably extremely ill-advisedly, from an OpSec perspective - I have a theatre arts degree and spent over a decade heavily involved in the local theatre scene (both musicals and “straight plays”) in my city. At one point I was incredibly enthusiastic about pursuing a professional career in that field, and made my participation in it a central part of my identity. My political conversion isn’t the only reason I’ve drifted away from theatre (even my use of the British spelling gives me away as a Theater Kid), but it was by far the biggest accelerant of that decision. Another reason, though, is that even aside from their politics, theatre people can be… difficult to be around in certain ways that made me stick out like a sore thumb sometimes even without politics entering the equation.

So, when I see right-wing commentators taking potshots at “Theater Kids”, part of me wants to not only applaud, but to amplify their criticism: “Oh, you don’t even know the half of it!” I’m far more intimately aware of the particular failure modes of artists, because I saw them up-close and personal for a huge part of my life, and can recognize some of those failure modes in myself. Another part of me, though, becomes very defensive and wants to leap to the defense of the creative class; not only because, despite my current politics and estrangement from that scene, I’m still one of those people at heart, but also because I think right-wing people tread on dangerous ground when they too-eagerly dismiss and alienate artistically-/creatively-oriented people.

It is undeniably true that people involved in the arts are overwhelmingly and ostentatiously left-wing. Look at surveys of political orientation among any even remotely creative-adjacent field and you will find support for progressive parties/ideas well above 80-90%. The question of why this is the case is complicated and fascinating. Has it always been that way? It is dangerous to apply modern political categories to pre-modern societies, but if the “theater kid” personality profile existed in ancient/classical societies, would it be possible to say that those types of people would have been more “proto-woke” than the average citizen?

Remember that the great literary classics of Ancient Greece - the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Theogony - were epic poems delivered orally and accompanied by music long before they were written down and codified in literary form. The bards who would have invented, transmitted and augmented these epic poems were real people with real personalities, and I think there’s a significant likelihood that they were not too different from the actors and rockstars of today. Besides implying a degree of narcissism and superciliousness that we associate with artsy people today, does it also suggest that they would have been the “shitlibs” of their day?

There’s an interesting discourse about how the character of Odysseus is a sort of prototype for the theater kid’s idea of a hero - the idealized self-image of an artist imagining how he would be as a hero. Odysseus is a trickster and fabulist; he achieves his heroic deeds largely through craftiness, subterfuge, deception, and pretending to be anybody other than who he actually is. He can conjure whole worlds and identities at a whim through the magic of wordplay and storytelling. He is labile and mercurial, indirect and full of what we might call chutzpah. He prefigures more modern examples of the “trickster/bullshitter with a heart of gold” archetype epitomized by musical theatre characters like Harold Hill in The Music Man, J. Pierrepont Finch in How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, and the funhouse-mirror version of P.T. Barnum presented in the movie musical The Greatest Showman. The guys writing these musicals can’t imagine themselves as Herculean heroes of might and action, but they can imagine themselves saving the world by being so good at spinning a compelling story that they make it come true.

So, what does this imply about the self-image of artists, and what can it teach us about the likely consequences of giving the reins of power (cultural, political, or otherwise) to people who come from this milieu and/or have this personality type? Many on the Right - I’m thinking especially of the blogger The Z-Man - have noted that modern American politics are dominated by a sort of Carny (meaning a carnival performer or huckster) type of personality. There’s a persuasive case to be made that democracy inherently rewards and gives power to that exact type of person. I think we can see all around us many of the failure modes of trusting these people with the governance of our country and the production of our cultural narratives. They are fundamentally unserious people, addicted to attention and applause, attracted to head-in-the-clouds utopian nonsense because they never fully grew out of a sort of perpetual narcissistic adolescence, convinced that the key to solving hard problems is just telling a really good lie and crafting a feel-good narrative so aesthetically-pleasing that it can’t help but manifest into reality. This is a spot-on description of the personalities of many of the theatre people I know, and I wouldn’t trust them to organize a bake sale, let alone run a country.

And yet. By telegraphing its open hostility to artists and creatives - by throwing up a big sign that says, “people with liberal arts degrees, go away!” - I believe that the Right severely cripples itself. Firstly, on a practical level, it deprives the Right of its ability to mobilize individuals who can craft aesthetically-compelling narratives that will inspire and convert normal people. Right now, the only interesting art that most people in first-world countries will ever be exposed to is made by leftists. We can talk about the reasons for this; certainly some of them are structural, and are downstream of the fact that Hollywood and creative industries more generally are dominated by powerful leftists who limit the ability of right-wing content creators to access the kind of resources and backing required to produce and distribute media. But even when right-wingers get a chance to make art, it… generally doesn’t measure up.

Why is that? Is part of the reason why right-wingers (myself included) are so interested in pre-modern art is that they can keep Retvrning to it and are relieved of the burden of having to create something new? Why is it that the only people who go to classical music concerts and operas are PMC shitlibs? If the Right achieves its glorious counter-revolution, will the end product look like the town from Footloose? Distrustful of art and self-expression for fear that it breeds degeneracy? Forever fighting a battle to suppress artsy types who will corrupt the youth and bring the poison of leftism back from the dead? Should creative types who are otherwise on board with the Rightist project be concerned that we are helping to build a future that will have no place for us?

Maybe the fact that I’m asking these questions is proof that Red Tribers are right to be suspicious of people like me. If a conservative and traditional life is ideal for the vast majority of people, who cares what a tiny minority of whiny self-obsessed “artists” want? Aren’t people like me the reason we got to this point in the first place? It’s a tough subject for me to think about. To what extent can I whole-heartedly commit to a political project that will marginalize the people most similar to myself, in order to secure the greater good for the great mass of other people on earth? Am I just overthinking this entirely and letting a flippant shitposty meme trigger me into neurotic despair?

I think we can see all around us many of the failure modes of trusting these people with the governance of our country and the production of our cultural narratives. They are fundamentally unserious people, addicted to attention and applause, attracted to head-in-the-clouds utopian nonsense because they never fully grew out of a sort of perpetual narcissistic adolescence, convinced that the key to solving hard problems is just telling a really good lie and crafting a feel-good narrative so aesthetically-pleasing that it can’t help but manifest into reality. This is a spot-on description of the personalities of many of the theatre people I know, and I wouldn’t trust them to organize a bake sale, let alone run a country.

I've spent a not-insignificant amount of time around "music people", and for the most part they are much the same. I happen to be one myself, but don't feel particularly "attacked" because I don't feel it describes me well - a generalisation doesn't necessarily apply to every individual member of a group.

The first problem is that many of these people don't look at societies as large emergent entities which are governed and shaped by forces that are outside of anything we would consider as "humanistic values" (example: Scott's Moloch), rather they tend to see societies as being almost solely a product of ideology. When that is the primary lens through which you view things, you end up adopting this incredibly airy-fairy idea that you can shape society into anything you want and IF ONLY you could get enough people on board we could live on Heaven On Earth. Most "artsy people" really don't tend to develop very complex thinking about societies and why they operate the way they do, and it doesn't matter how much history or anthropology or evolutionary theory or whatever they learn, most of them in practice tend to remain stuck in this mindset.

The second problem is that their cognition is in large part governed by aesthetics (unsurprisingly so, perhaps). Their political thinking and what they like/dislike are basically determined by what resonates with them on the most aesthetic and superficial of levels, and a huge amount of their political criticisms amount to implying that their opponents' optics are bad and distasteful to them instead of actually engaging with the meat of the arguments being made. Again, knowledge doesn't seem to change this because it's a fundamental, deeper problem with their mindset and personality that's independent of how much one knows.

These two things seem to predispose them to adopting revolutionary, utopian leftist ideologies (e.g. communism) and clinging hard to these beliefs even when they observably break apart on contact with reality.

Their political thinking and what they like/dislike are basically determined by what resonates with them on the most aesthetic and superficial of levels, and a huge amount of their political criticisms amount to implying that their opponents' optics are bad and distasteful to them instead of actually engaging with the meat of the arguments being made. Again, knowledge doesn't seem to change this because it's a fundamental, deeper problem with their mindset and personality that's independent of how much one knows.

Interesting, I wonder how much this connects with something I started noticing ~8 years ago and continues to be en vogue now among many people on the left, which is calling political things they disagree with "gross" or "not a good look." Both of which are obviously subjective aesthetic judgments rather than any sort of meaningful criticism, though they're always stated as if they're supposed to be taken as meaningful criticisms. I've written about the "gross" before, but I recall being absolutely befuddled by seeing other leftists use it to describe right-wing behavior in a negative way, because much of our activism in the prior decade had been about getting society to accept gay marriage and homosexuals in general, and one of the key arguments for the case had been that someone's personal disgust reaction should have absolutely zero bearing on the ethical correctness of that thing - i.e. just because you're viscerally disgusted by the idea of 2 men kissing, it doesn't make a romantic/sexual relationship between 2 men any less beautiful or less worth tolerating, if not celebrating, than one between a man and a woman.

This then connects with one theory that I had, which is that many of the fellow "liberals" fighting for gay marriage weren't fighting for liberalism at all, but rather was using it as a vehicle by which to push forward something that they themselves didn't find disgusting - theater and the arts are well known to have a very high proportion of gay people relative to the broader population, and as such one would expect that people in those groups would tend to have less of a disgust reaction, if any, towards their friends, coworkers, and other direct peers.

When that is the primary lens through which you view things, you end up adopting this incredibly airy-fairy idea that you can shape society into anything you want and IF ONLY you could get enough people on board we could live on Heaven On Earth. Most "artsy people" really don't tend to develop very complex thinking about societies and why they operate the way they do, and it doesn't matter how much history or anthropology or evolutionary theory or whatever they learn, most of them in practice tend to remain stuck in this mindset.

This is a critical part of whatever the full answer is here. Progressive art is unbound by the need to work, hold up to logical scrutiny, or make literally any sense at all. It's pure aesthetics. Dig into the lyrics of the average punk song, or celebratory ghetto anthem, or vaguely progressive pop hit and they are fucking retarded, Gringott's with it's fixed precious metals exchange ratios stamping on the human sense-making organ forever. It's a vibe and a glib line and never ever having to worry if the underlying mechanics will function on any level.

The left’s monopoly over theater kids is possibly because leftist positions are the default for emotional young people who don’t know much about issues and don’t know how to do any deeper calculations. I predict any preteen without exposure to complex thinking would see homeless people and say “give them a home”, see the cost of education and say “make it free”, see a police officer doing something bad and say “no more police”, etc. Whether or not these leftist positions are true, by and large the positions happen to be the intuitive inclination of children. Women paid less on average -> pay them more. Black people were enslaved -> give compensation. Animals in pain when butchered -> vegetarian phase. Gay people can be in love -> marriage. Poor people -> pay them more. Someone has a lot -> he should share.

And so if if turns out that art kids have a highly developed emotional sensitivity (I believe this is true), but have spent fewer points in Information Acquisition and Complex Thought (perhaps this is true), then this explains why the Left would have a monopoly over theater kids. Notably, something like “I want homeless people to have home” is not just intuitive but emotionally potent, so it allows the subscriber to theatrically express their deeply-felt moral intuition about something important.

The populist’s monopoly over theater kids is possibly because populist positions are the default for emotional young people who don’t know much about issues and don’t know how to do any deeper calculations other than "listen to friends".

Yes, it makes intuitive sense that this would be the case (one of the left's primary Newspeak goals is, of course, making sure that "populism" doesn't make sense if paired with "leftist" for this exact reason- this is just as true when the right comes to power, but the word they use is "degeneracy"- to imply traditionalism even when it legitimately doesn't make sense isn't degenerate even though, on its face, it is).

by and large the positions happen to be the intuitive inclination of children

Yes, and the reason functioning societies don't take that seriously is that badly-calibrated intuition tends to be both fickle, wrong, and inherently vulnerable to Sarah McLachlan music concern trolling. Said societies tend to stop being functional ones if you give them the ability to summon guns (example: Karen calls CPS on kids playing outside).

Intuition of this type is also generally limited to reaction and can't really create anything on its own, so the effects of "just pick the popular thing" tend to be amplified in that group because they just haven't developed that ability (to be liberal/have a sober second thought). Interestingly, the reaction to this reaction is traditionalism (which is kind of but not quite like conservatism), and you can see how it forms in the sibling comment to yours.

But the “Theater Kids” discourse hits me particularly hard because it touches on something over which I’ve agonized for a long time.

This is my first encounter of this term in the wild, and I have no clear idea of its boundaries. The obvious features of this specific example seem to be a photo-negative of the ubiquitous "church lady" slur: ignorance, irrationality, and superstition, combined with a supreme self-confidence and self-satisfaction and an aggressively judgmental moralizing attitude toward others. This archetype, it seems to me, deserves criticism; I have no idea how "theater kids" label got attached, but just from Glee alone it seems reasonably appropriate. Is there a better one available?

...I think right-wing people tread on dangerous ground when they too-eagerly dismiss and alienate artistically-/creatively-oriented people.

Is the hostility aimed at artistically/creatively-oriented people as such, or is it aimed at the existing artistic/creative establishment? I would argue the latter. Is there a way to be less hostile, given that this establishment loathes Reds and has dedicated itself to their destruction? I would argue no. Past a certain level of hostility, it's you or them. We're well-past that level with the given establishment. I guess my question is, what do you expect a counter-cultural revolution to look like? Did the Beats and the Hippies and the Dadaists and the Postmodernists and so on politely ask for permission before they burned down what came before?

The question of why this is the case is complicated and fascinating. Has it always been that way?

I don't think so, no. We can readily observe that art overwhelmingly served right-wing goals of values-homogenization, individual edification and social cohesion in previous eras. We can observe that the modern left-wing focus on revolution and hostility to tradition, structure and stability is in fact modern, that it has specific, easily-identifiable beginnings, and like most social transformations of the modern era, matches well to a theory of cause and effect flowing downward from the Enlightenment.

...Your thesis seems to be that creativity, intelligence, and cunning are innate markers of Blue identity, that people blessed with these traits always have been and always will tend toward Blueness. I don't see things this way at all. Blues aren't blue because of their immutable characteristics, but because they're captured by a dominant ideology, in the same way that relatively smart, creative people were overwhelmingly doctrinaire Jaguar-Cultists in 1000s Central America, doctrinaire Catholics in 1400s Spain and doctrinaire Marxist-Leninists in 1930s Russia. Given sufficient enforcement, social conformity is the smart, cunning, creative thing to do, so smart, cunning, creative people conform. The question is simply who is in a position to enforce their standard.

Homer was in no meaningful sense a "shitlib"; the Iliad and the Odyssey are not revolutionary texts aiming to undermine the structure, norms and values of Homer's contemporary society in pursuit of a questionably-achievable utopian ideal. Neither are the great Cathedrals, Dante's Inferno, or Beethoven's 9th, nor the works of Shakespeare or Dahl or Rostand. You're mistaking the results of an obvious, pervasive, overwhelming social enforcement mechanism for the product of bedrock human nature, in the face, it seems to me, of overwhelming contrary evidence of both the past and present. Cunning, creativity and intelligence are not the distinguishing markers of Blueness, but rather a specific form of humanistic utopianism and a fundamentalist faith in "progress" based on a highly specific and idiosyncratic set of values and philosophical axioms.

I am quite confident that Blueness is not an innate, immutable feature of human nature, but rather the product of a very specific set of historical circumstances that have now largely concluded. One way or another, I think Blueness is going to go away, likely relatively soon, and once it is gone it will not be coming back for the foreseeable future. Creative, intelligent, cunning people will go back to using their gifts to the benefit of themselves and/or their society, as they always have, not in service to the peculiar aims and goals of Blue ideology.

There’s an interesting discourse about how the character of Odysseus is a sort of prototype for the theater kid’s idea of a hero - the idealized self-image of an artist imagining how he would be as a hero.

Odysseus is certainly a trickster, but what of Achilles and Hector? Where do they fit into this model? The Norse have Loki, but they also have Thor... and with both Loki and Odysseus, it seems to me that their trickery is not portrayed as an unalloyed advantage. Do you find other examples of the pattern you perceive?

Many on the Right - I’m thinking especially of the blogger The Z-Man - have noted that modern American politics are dominated by a sort of Carny (meaning a carnival performer or huckster) type of personality.

Just politics? Take Freud or Jung or BF Skinner, Ford, Dewey, Sanger, Duranty, Mead, heck, Rousseau... The list of luminaries and fields dominated are comprehensive. The Enlightenment was a scam from the very start, and it has remained a scam in every iteration since: a mask of science and rationality worn by the unscientific and irrational to bypass the defenses of the unwary. It was a novel exploit, and a highly successful one, but it works less and less well each year, as the woke themselves demonstrate. Soon it will not work at all, and the structures we've built upon it will inevitably fall.

Point being, this isn't new, and it isn't escapable.

Firstly, on a practical level, it deprives the Right of its ability to mobilize individuals who can craft aesthetically-compelling narratives that will inspire and convert normal people.

Do you think future outcomes can continue to be determined by who can craft the most aesthetically-compelling narrative indefinitely, or will Reality, at some point, intrude? If you believe that, for entirely contingent reasons, Evil currently has a commanding advantage in crafting aesthetically-compelling narratives, should you try to beat that advantage, or invest your hopes in a reality-check? Sure, the former would be cleaner and more elegant, but is it actually possible? ...Is it, and its objections to alternate strategies, Red, or just more Blue Carny bluster?

But even when right-wingers get a chance to make art, it… generally doesn’t measure up.

Leaving aside all the questions of if and why this should be so and taking this statement as a given, why should we care?

You could argue that art is useful because it is persuasive, but it does not seem to me that Blue dominance is derived from the quality or persuasiveness of their art. It seems to me that the dominance of central institutions came first, on the strength of pure ideology, and the bright colors and whiz-bang presentation came later. Elite consensus, force of law, then media propaganda to the masses. And note that such propaganda, while effective in many ways, clearly has limits. Abortion, guns, and racial segregation are three areas where the propaganda has pretty clearly failed on its own terms. Trans issues seems to be following that pattern, and gives me some hope that the Pride movement itself ought to be reversible. All this is to say that while art is useful, it is not infinitely useful, nor infinitely valuable. It would be nice to have Red art. It would be nicer to have Red social dominance of existing institutions, not least because right-wing art would then follow.

If the Right achieves its glorious counter-revolution, will the end product look like the town from Footloose?

To the exact degree that Reds actually resemble the mocking caricatures Blues make of them. That is to say, considerably less than the degree to which even the imperfect victories of Blue culture already resemble this cartoon. We already have the humorless scolds, the censorship, the fanatical puritanism, the callouts, the gossip, the unreflective, narrow-minded bigotry, the fear of anything unusual or out of the ordinary, the purging of image and language, the constant, industrial-scale injection of moralizing sermons into every medium of communication, the purity spirals, the policing of one's neighbors, the constriction of speech and thought within the coils of smothering, irrational dogma. Why worry about the potential arrival of an evil already present?

...All the above amounts to an argument over definitions, unfortunately. What makes a Blue, a Progressive, a Leftist, whatever we want to call the type? Is it an innate expression of human nature? Or is it something more limited than that, an artifact of our present time rather than something core to human nature? What defines its nature, its boundaries? That's the question that underpins a lot of these questions, isn't it?

I guess my question is, what do you expect a counter-cultural revolution to look like? Did the Beats and the Hippies and the Dadaists and the Postmodernists and so on politely ask for permission before they burned down what came before?

I suppose it needn't take that form, but I imagine many revolutions and counter-revolutions can be headed off at the pass by granting lesser concessions until the heat dies down--that is, any movement will first demand changes that the Establishment could possibly implement, before thoughts turn to revolution. Sure, you can't pacify every revolutionary this way, but you'll take enough momentum out of movements to make it no longer a problem.

Just to pick on an issue I care about, I feel like copyright in the First World is slowly becoming a target for burn-it-all-down thinking. If copyright law was rolled back to a 50-70-year maximum, then the idea that it's all bullshit might be inconceivable to begin with.

Your post brings to mind a bit that occasionally comes up in rationalist spaces about "shape-rotators" vs "wordcels". I've mostly just rolled my eyes at it, but now I'm thinkin there might be actually something to it, but not in the way Vice and rationalists typically describe it. I think the better (more accurate) distinction is between "thing-manipulators" and "symbol-manipulators". To me it seems obvious that the creative/theater-kid archetype is very much a "symbol-manipulator". Their world revolves around manipulating, language, allegory, emotion, etc... Conversely a plumber or Electrician is very much a "thing-manipulator" their world revolves around analog processes with clear and immediately observable consequences. The Shit and/or Electrons either flow or they don't.

While I don't think it's accurate to say that all "symbol-in the manipulators are left wing" or that "all thing-manipulators right wing" I do think there are elements of both that actively select for the respective sides. I have a degree in mathematics, but coming into it as I did, IE later in life through the GI Bill after already having had a career in the military, I often found myself butting heads with my fellow math nerds over questions of "practicality". I was that guy who would ask the lecturer "ok that's really clever and all but what's the use case", which always seemed to rub certain sorts of "pure math" guy the wrong way. For those longer-standing users who where wondering on what occasion I had to to interact with Scott Aaronson professionally here is your answer.

In any case I feel like there is a clear tension in math circles between "Pure/Theoretical" Math and the "Applied". Similarly I feel like there is a tension between more symbolic fields of engineering like software and the more physical fields (civil, mechanical, electrical, etc...). And I feel like this tension maps pretty neatly to what both you and Dreher are talking about regarding "theater kids". Back when Scott was first formulating his thrive/survive theory I speculated that the reason that the "working class" seemed to skew right-wing/survive relative to the gentry was that they were generally less insulated from consequences than the gentry were and I feel like a similar line holds here.

Being a "theater-kid" in this context is something of a luxury. The sort of luxury enjoyed by someone who doesn't have to worry about base level analog bullshit.

You were around for the GI Bill? Much respect, sir.

deleted

WRT Trump, pro wrestling (as Trump once cameo'd in WWE, and Linda McMahon was on his Cabinet, IIRC) is often the comparison made, that Trump is a master of "kayfabe" and being able to sell the audience the image they want to see. Pro wrestling is arguably a right-inflected form of theatre in itself, and probably descended from carnival shows (in fact, much of wrestling terminology is descended from carny-speak), so that thread is definitely there and you aren't just seeing Jesus in toaster marks.

Oh, you are dead-on about Trump, and I pegged him from the second he came down that elevator as a toxic grifter to be avoided at all costs. I do think that for all the ways I’m an odd fit for the Right, the fact that at no point was I ever a run-of-the-mill normie conservative gives me a bit of insight into some of the failure modes to which the Red Tribe is vulnerable, and I knew that Trump would be able to expertly exploit those vulnerabilities while actually doing close to nothing to help the people who voted for him. He is the ur-fabulist, someone so labile and bereft of sincerity that he will say and believe literally anything he thinks he needs to in order to secure adulation and power.

The PMC libs are the inheritors of the elite culture which they claim so conspicuously to hate, and the only conservatives left are the proles. If there is hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, is there any taste of tradition left. Proles and animals are free.

I mean, what’s the point of all of it if the proles rise up and overthrow their overlords, only to institute a society where the height of artistic culture is Pawn Stars and a NASCAR race? If the destruction of the PMC means the destruction of what’s left of our high culture, I’ve got to say that siding with the elites starts to look like a more attractive prospect. Say whatever you will about the PMC and their schizophrenic relationship to traditional high culture, but like I said, when I go to a classical concert or a ballet or an opera, it’s very obvious who is keeping these traditions alive, and it sure as hell isn’t Trump voters.

and it sure as hell isn’t Trump voters

Sure as hell isn't Urban Youth either, but this is probably more a function of other common causes, e.g. large urban areas happen to be places that are both highly progressive and support large symphonies, but those two things may not be directly related. I have never encountered any particular disdain for classical music among the red tribe, so much as unfamiliarity and a vague association with NPR preciousness. Symphonic movie scores, though, seem to be broadly popular.

I mean, what’s the point of all of it if the proles rise up and overthrow their overlords, only to institute a society where the height of artistic culture is Pawn Stars and a NASCAR race?

I absolutely abhor this line of thinking. I grew up in a red tribe setting and spent most of my adult life around blue tribe people and whenever they say this sort of thing it makes them look so, so bad in my opinion. People who watch Pawn Stars and NASCAR are poor and even if they're not poor have little to no cultural power in their own country, they have been dying by the thousands in drug overdoses, the rust belt has been on a downward spiral for a century, they have a poor quality of life and then have to be degraded by.... "theater kids" who rub their suffering in their faces. Sorry for the rant but it blows my mind when I see the same tribe of people who spend every waking moment trying not to offend BIPOC people flippantly painting Trump voters as people who have chosen not to keep opera alive rather than painting them as people with the cards stacked against them who are more worried about getting their rent paid than trying to attend a ballet to feel a little superior to the people around them.

Actually, I think I've just hit at the crux of the issue of your original post. Theatre kids are, or have been for the past few decades, leftist because it's where elitism and cultural capital lie. Take away that construction and suddenly the creatives are free to switch sides, which I believe is already starting to happen as I've outlined in this post from a few months ago.

Sorry for the rant but it blows my mind when I see the same tribe of people who spend every waking moment trying not to offend BIPOC people flippantly painting Trump voters as people who have chosen not to keep opera alive rather than painting them as people with the cards stacked against them who are more worried about getting their rent paid than trying to attend a ballet to feel a little superior to the people around them.

Leaving aside the fact that I personally am certainly not worried about offending “BIPOC people” - I direct you to peruse my larger body of work on this site, in which I do precisely the opposite - your larger point stands and is valuable. Progressives will contort themselves into pretzels to make excuses for every self-defeating thing a poor minority does, while not only hearing no excuses for similarly self-defeating behavior from downscale whites but actually reveling in it. The pattern you are outlining is real.

However, hypocrisy can be reconciled in two directions. One would be to see all downtrodden and marginalized communities as equally worthy of sympathy and uplift; a populist “champion of the little guy” who gives every bit as help to every unfortunate and exploited person, regardless of race or tribal loyalty or whatever. That appears to be what you’re advocating, and I understand the appeal. However, I can also resolve the hypocrisy by extending the same disdain and feeling of superiority to the “BIPOC people” as I do to the “trailer trash”; this is the elitist position that some people are better than other people, and that generally speaking power and resources are effectively distributed based on the quality, productivity, and value of individuals. This is certainly an oversimplified worldview and does not accurately describe the whole picture; however, I believe that it is directionally correct.

I have been to the dirt-poor part of Appalachia - I was in eastern Kentucky - and if I were to give one of those people a free ticket to a classical music concert - which, by the way, one can purchase for like $25 at most venues and get decent seats, so this isn’t some massive expense - that individual would probably not appreciate the experience even given the chance. I’m confident that this is the cad because even wealthy or middle-class Red Tribe people - people with no material concerns preventing them from participating in high culture - overwhelmingly do not do so, and prefer lower-brow fare. There’s a cultural/psychological/tribal element here that has nothing to with people just being too poor to afford a ticket to the ballet.

As for your contention that someone would only go to the ballet “to feel a little superior to the people around them”, I can assure you that that’s not the reason I go to the ballet. I go because so genuinely experience it as sublime and beautiful. It makes me feel connected to a larger corpus of important cultural output that represents the absolute pinnacle of what my people have been able to create, during the period when their culture was at its most powerful and dynamic and confident. I have difficulty relating to people who can’t experience the sublimity of something like that. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying lowbrow entertainment - I go to punk rock concerts all the time, which are not intellectually-stimulating or artistically refined - but I think there’s something really limited and unfortunate about someone who hasn’t even been able to cultivate a base-level appreciation for the boundless world of free and instantly-accessible high culture that’s out there at the fingertips of the people for whom you’re making excuses.

Perhaps there is something to ballet that I just don't understand. I have been to at least one, nutcracker, and... it's just people dancing to music. Difficult I'm sure, but sublime? Different people find different things sublime, I love my city, I'm in awe at what our engineers, architects and laborers have built - my culture is more powerful and dynamic today, not in some idealized past where pain stakingly perfecting choreography was the peak of human ambition. Maybe this is what you feel when you see ballet, but it is no universal experience.

For what it's worth, I also like ballet and think it's sublime. I even consider dancing and engineering to be related, because the human body is like a machine. Programming robots to be able to do what humans can do is a cutting edge field of research.

My favorite ballet is the Triadic Ballet, produced out of the Bauhaus school. The costumes worn by the dancers show different aspects of the human body's geometry. The ballet is divided into parts based on various mechanical motions of the body. It's not just a demonstration of painstakingly perfect choreography. It demonstrates ideas and principles that can be generalized to other fields of knowledge.

Say whatever you will about the PMC and their schizophrenic relationship to traditional high culture, but like I said, when I go to a classical concert or a ballet or an opera, it’s very obvious who is keeping these traditions alive, and it sure as hell isn’t Trump voters.

You would switch allegiances over these trifles? You’re always applauding, I don’t see the point. Let’s all dress up and pretend recording devices haven’t been invented, it's pure signaling. Radio killed the Opera star, just let it go man.

I mean, what’s the point of all of it if the proles rise up and overthrow their overlords, only to institute a society where the height of artistic culture is Pawn Stars and a NASCAR race?

Never considered myself aligned much with lowbrow culture, but if I could have a maximally good society where the only drawback is that entertainment is simple...

I mean, what’s the point of all of it if the proles rise up and overthrow their overlords, only to institute a society where the height of artistic culture is Pawn Stars and a NASCAR race?

Growing up, the only ballet I went to was a Christmas Pageant type, one that included this song in it. It was also sublime, and in the top 5 things I miss about moving away from my childhood home.

The Daily Wire has put out at least a couple movies that are on par with anything Hollywood has put out recently. Run, Fight, Hide was more enjoyable than any Marvel Movie since Winter Soldier.

But to make and patronize high-quality art, there needs to be a certain amount of affluence - either on the part of a wealthy art patron or on the part of a polity that can afford it. If the Red Tribe had more of that, I think they'd surprise you.

That said, I think the orchestra and ballet require a bit more of steely-eyed pragmatism, self-discipline, and respect for the past that befits the red tribe better.

when I go to a classical concert or a ballet or an opera, it’s very obvious who is keeping these traditions alive, and it sure as hell isn’t Trump voters

I'm not as convinced- their version of theater is wildly popular. They don't outright call it that (partially for reactionary reasons), but the term "kayfabe" comes from the way its performers act.

Yes, it's a bit more formulaic since it has to fit within its primary conceit of a sports match, but I really don't see much difference between Shakespeare and WWE- it's just that we consider one high art and the other something else, probably because Shakespeare was 400 years ago and nobody fully understands its memes any more.

Seconding @Hoffmeister25.

I really don't see much difference between Shakespeare and WWE- it's just that we consider one high art and the other something else

What this reminds me of, perhaps because of recent exposure to the china-racial-enemy thread, is reading this old Amren article:

In this context, I recall some remarkable discoveries by the late American linguist, William Stewart, who spent many years in Senegal studying local languages. Whereas Western cultures internalize norms—“Don’t do that!” for a child, eventually becomes “I mustn’t do that” for an adult—African cultures do not. They rely entirely on external controls on behavior from tribal elders and other sources of authority. When Africans were detribalized, these external constraints disappeared, and since there never were internal constraints, the results were crime, drugs, promiscuity, etc. Where there have been other forms of control—as in white-ruled South Africa, colonial Africa, or the segregated American South—this behavior was kept within tolerable limits. But when even these controls disappear there is often unbridled violence.

Surprising confirmation of Stewart’s ideas can be found in the May/June 2006 issue of the Boston Review, a typically liberal publication. In “Do the Right Thing: Cognitive Science’s Search for a Common Morality,” Rebecca Saxe distinguishes between “conventional” and “moral” rules. Conventional rules are supported by authorities but can be changed; moral rules, on the other hand, are not based on conventional authority and are not subject to change. “Even three-year-old children … distinguish between moral and conventional transgressions,” she writes. The only exception, according to James Blair of the National Institutes of Health, are psychopaths, who exhibit “persistent aggressive behavior.” For them, all rules are based only on external authority, in whose absence “anything is permissible.” The conclusion drawn from this is that “healthy individuals in all cultures respect the distinction between conventional … and moral [rules].”

However, in the same article, another anthropologist argues that “the special status of moral rules cannot be part of human nature, but is … just … an artifact of Western values.” Anita Jacobson-Widding, writing of her experiences among the Manyika of Zimbabwe, says:

“I tried to find a word that would correspond to the English concept of ‘morality.’ I explained what I meant by asking my informants to describe the norms for good behavior toward other people. The answer was unanimous. The word for this was tsika. But when I asked my bilingual informants to translate tsika into English, they said that it was ‘good manners’ …”

She concluded that because good manners are clearly conventional rather than moral rules, the Manyika simply did not have a concept of morality. But how would one explain this absence? Miss Jacobson-Widding’s explanation is the typical nonsense that could come only from a so-called intellectual: “the concept of morality does not exist.” The far more likely explanation is that the concept of morality, while otherwise universal, is enfeebled in cultures that have a deficiency in abstract thinking.

As always, one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens. Art exists, and WWE ain't it. Commonality of many building blocks is of no relevance. People can be more or less equipped to notice the totality of intellectual effort and purpose directing it which separates art and pure entertainment.

No doubt WWE could be used to stage actual high art, but its incentives lead to the opposite.

“Even three-year-old children … distinguish between moral and conventional transgressions,” she writes. The only exception, according to James Blair of the National Institutes of Health, are psychopaths, who exhibit “persistent aggressive behavior.” For them, all rules are based only on external authority, in whose absence “anything is permissible.”

Aristotle disagreed in that, according to Laetrus, he thought that most people don't act according to some internal sense of right and wrong, but according to what won't get them into trouble:

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

In his view, most people are what Mr. Blair calls "psychopaths".

This is indeed not so clear-cut. Plato also argued that there does not exist a man so virtuous as to abstain from crime that cannot de discovered, in a passage that I believe has inspired Tolkien (Wiki notes the parallel but says there's no proof of borrowing):

The best is to do injustice without paying the penalty; the worst is to suffer it without being able to take revenge. Justice is in the middle between these two extremes. People love it, not because it is a good thing, but because they are too weak to do injustice with impunity. Someone who has the power to do it, however—someone who is a real man—would not make an agreement with anyone, neither to do injustice nor to suffer it. For him, that would be insanity. That is the nature of justice, according to the argument, Socrates, and those are its natural origins.

We can see most clearly that those who practice it do so unwillingly, because they lack the power to do injustice, if we imagine the following thought-experiment. Suppose we grant to the just and the unjust person the freedom to do whatever they like. We can then follow both of them and see where their appetites would lead. And we will catch the just person red- handed, traveling the same road as the unjust one. The reason for this is the desire to do better than others. This is what every natural being naturally pursues as good. But by law and force, it is made to deviate from this path and honor equality.

They would especially have the freedom I am talking about if they had the power that the ancestor of Gyges of Lydia is said to have possessed. The story goes that he was a shepherd in the service of the ruler of Lydia. [...] There were windowlike openings in it and, peeping in, he saw a corpse, which seemed to be of more than human size, wearing nothing but a gold ring on its finger. He took off the ring and came out of the chasm. He wore the ring at the usual monthly meeting of shepherds that reported to the king on the state of the flocks.And as he was sitting among the others, he happened to turn the setting of the ring toward himself, toward the inside of his hand. When he did this, he became invisible to those sitting near him, and they went on talking as if he had gone. [...] As soon as he realized this, he arranged to become one of the messengers sent to report to the king. On arriving there, he seduced the king’s wife, attacked the king with her help, killed him, and in this way took over the kingdom.

Let’s suppose, then, that there were two such rings, one worn by the just person, the other by the unjust. Now no one, it seems, would be so incorruptible that he would stay on the path of justice, or bring himself to keep away from other people’s possessions and not touch them, when he could take whatever he wanted from the marketplace with impunity, go into people’s houses and have sex with anyone he wished, kill or release from prison anyone he wished, and do all the other things that would make him like a god among humans. And in so behaving, he would do no differently than the unjust person, but both would pursue the same course.

I actually agree both with Greeks and with woke anthropologists that morality does not exist and does not differ from conventional etiquette in some substantial objective sense. The belief that it does is obviously downstream from tenets of (Christian) religion, which insists on there being some supernatural authority that informs one's conscience in a way that's qualitatively superior to mere interiorization of customs. Olympians weren't moral role models or authorities. Even Yahweh isn't much of one, even his old prophets weren't. Crucially, Christianity doesn't give much of a shit for the material world that is a disposable platform for testing the character of an immortal soul, so it can get away with abnormally severe deontology, the good of the entire polity being not worth the abuse of a single child. (it's worth noting that Dost's argument in Karamazovs about «tear of a child» is often misconstued as expressing this sentiment, but it was just the old problem of evil in a world created by a good God). This was important for creating a WEIRD psychotype.

But also, clearly racists-objectivists have a point.

To be more specific, we can say that in this framework «morality» is distinct from etiquette in that it is a) premised on instinctive empathy for your fellow being with moral patienthood (this is admittedly somewhat circular), b) practically consists of general game-theoretical heuristics that are intended to maximize long-term happiness/suffering ratio for the group and its members, and c) affects emotions and behavior even in the absence of external reward.

This still allows for diversity of moral systems. When the racist author says that Kenyans wouldn't have freed Dreyfus because they fail at counterfactual reasoning, he misses this.

Whenever I taught ethics I used the example of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army who was convicted of treason in 1894 even though the authorities knew he was innocent. Admitting their mistake, it was said, would have a disastrous effect on military morale and would cause great social unrest. I would in turn argue that certain things are intrinsically wrong and not just because of their consequences. Even if the results of freeing Dreyfus would be much worse than keeping him in prison, he must be freed, because it is unjust to keep an innocent man in prison. To my amazement, an entire class in Kenya said without hesitation that he should not be freed.

The Chinese, or even Japanese, are obviously capable of thinking about complex counterfactuals, but it may be that they too wouldn't have been persuaded by the deontological reasoning here: «social harmony» is for them a moral heuristic that can very well compete with «justice», and is valued for the same object-level reasons the instinct is derived from. Insults to harmony are received with indignation and outrage of the same nature as acts of abuse directed at individuals in the West. Indeed I think that a typical East Asian would appeal to a deeper counterfactual, that of the plausible uncertainty of Dreyfus' innocence, to justify the court doubling down: unrest in the name of redressing a *merely highly likely injustice is not worth it. And heuristics of Kenyans may be not too different, only baked into common metis and inaccessible to abstract reflection. In fact we could say that empathetic morality is more logically primitive than ethics of conventional behavior, because conventions can account for second-order effects which still resolve to moral benefit.

I do not always believe that what I quote or refer to is better than my own thoughts on the matter – those are just neat illustrations for the topic at hand.

I think morality does exist, and as far as I know I don’t derive it from christianity. Imagine everyone has a ring of gyges. To avoid getting stolen from and killed, we refrain from such things even in the absence of retribution. The analogy holds because people really do occasionally have the opportunity to do evil unseen. Magical, acausal thinking perhaps, but I truly believe that if I act that way, they will too. Well, some of them. But it requires them to understand the defect-defect equilibrium we are heading to without such magical thinking, and trust in an unenforceable contract. I’m sorry to say that for me the moral value of a person has an intelligence component, though obviously intelligence is no guarantee.

I really don't see much difference between Shakespeare and WWE- it's just that we consider one high art and the other something else, probably because Shakespeare was 400 years ago and nobody fully understands its memes any more.

I’m going to try and indulge this argument, because I used to believe a version of it. I was a pretty diehard cultural relativist at one point, coinciding with my Marxist days, so I understand the appeal of this argument. It also happens to be the case that I have read each and every one of Shakespeare’s plays in their entirety, and have personally performed his work. During the years in which, while studying for my theatre arts degree, Shakespeare was being shoved down my throat, I actually reacted really strongly against the veneration of his plays as the zenith of the English literary tradition. Part of that is my strong natural contrarianism, but I think I was also correct to identify weaknesses in his work and the ways in which a lot of people do just worship Shakespeare because he’s Shakespeare, independently of the value of his specific works.

But like… even his worst and most lowbrow play is not comparable to a WWE event. I’m sorry, but that requires a level of “there is no difference between good things and bad things, everything is socially constructed and mediated by status signaling, beauty is in the eye of the beholder” that just doesn’t hold up to any honest analysis of the works in question.

My good buddy is a huge WWE fan, and I used to watch Wrestlemania and the occasional pay-per-view event with him, and I agree that it’s a fun time, with moments of genuine excitement, but it’s not Shakespeare.

Now that sounds like a fun remix. "Heels get stunnered many times before their pin; faces taste the folding chair but once." "Uneasy lies the waist that bears the Championship belt."

a classical concert or a ballet or an opera

A miniscule sliver of society enjoys these things. I recall reading that even that sliver is loosing interest and these venues are dying.

Let's not pick political allegiance over this fringe of a past time. In fact, maybe purely entertainment activities such as movies and opera should be viewed as frivolous distractions. Good fun if you like it. But fundamentally unimportant.

There is a reason that conservative intelligentsia is increasingly dominated by people from ultra-conservative subcultures that separate themselves from mainstream American society- like Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro.

are walsh or shapiro even the most popular "intelligentsia" at billionaire-backed dailywire?

do people from "ultra conservative subcultures" even dominate at dailywire?

is the reason because they're willing to burn money paying tech platforms to push their content to the front of every "conservative" feed or were you thinking of something else?

Rebecca Mercer and Matt Walsh both go to the same tradcath church, interestingly(other relevant tradcaths in very prominent positions on the right include pat buchanan, Clarence thomas, Michael Brendan Dougherty, Don Huffines, and a bevy of petty functionaries), and Ben Shapiro is (obviously) an Orthodox Jew which is also strongly over represented in the right wing media-activist complex. So are Mormons.

So yes, there’s clearly a noticeable pattern.

I believe OP intended for that passage to describe Donald Trump. Upon reading it, I immediately thought of Trump, though it applies to politicians of all stripes.

I can empathize with large chunks of what you've written here from my own experiences--among other things, I'm looking at walking away from theater-adjacent hobbies because Republican is the New Gay and the closet fucking sucks when you're in an environment that sincerely hates the real you.

I'm also losing the last shreds of my patience with "my non-binary offspring is a they/them, and I expect you to use the right pronouns." This is not a hypothetical case. I've dodged the issue so far, but another person I know was swifty corrected when he referred to the teenage boy as "he." Apologies for misgendering ensued, and I've discovered this is a red line for me. I will not cater to the whims of a teenager in my word choices, and exerting social pressure on me to do so violates my expectations of friendly behavior.

Am I just overthinking this entirely and letting a flippant shitposty meme trigger me into neurotic despair?

Probably. I think "Theatre Kid" is just a broad stereotype, like, say, tech-bros or rainbow-haired SJWs or the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons.

That said, the intersection of Art and right-wing thought is an interesting one. I'd give a couple of possibilities as to why the right tends to be disinterested in art. (mostly just spitballing here)

  1. Institutional dominance. The creative organs are so overwhelmingly left-wing that it's virtually impossible for anyone on the right to gain traction, and thus most potential creators just don't even try.

  2. Tied in with the first is that left-wing messaging alienates those on the right, so they tend to consume media that has withstood the test of time (the classics) or is from cultures that are disconnected from the Western zeitgeist (Anime)

  3. Signaling. There are some hobbies/activities that get closely associated with a political position even if it doesn't necessarily make sense, and fine art has been tied in with the Left, in much the same way that NASCAR is tied in with the Right.

  4. Survive/thrive mentality. (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/). Art for art's sake is very much a luxury hobby, so it seems somewhat useless to those on the right who just want to work, raise their families, and grill.

  5. Leftward pull. Humans are social animals, and so a right winger creative will naturally be influenced by the environment around him. If that entire professional environment is left-wing, he will naturally be inclined to moderate his views and output in order to fit in with his peers.

https://www.tumblr.com/rightwingart

This guy J Arthur Bloom from American Conservative and Daily Caller etc. started this blog for right-wing art years ago fwiw.

It is undeniably true that people involved in the arts are overwhelmingly and ostentatiously left-wing. Look at surveys of political orientation among any even remotely creative-adjacent field and you will find support for progressive parties/ideas well above 80-90%. The question of why this is the case is complicated and fascinating. Has it always been that way? It is dangerous to apply modern political categories to pre-modern societies, but if the “theater kid” personality profile existed in ancient/classical societies, would it be possible to say that those types of people would have been more “proto-woke” than the average citizen?

A tangent, but just coming out of reading the Odyssey, I was fascinated by the rather self-serving emphasis Homer puts on hospitality, especially towards bards and weirdo strangers. Not only are they to be wined and dined (the gods demand it!), they should also be presented with lavish gifts upon their departure. Sure, Homie...

There is definitely something upstream of politics that makes someone a Theater Kid, but I think the particular political inclinations of the Theater Kid are path dependent. What separates a Theater Kid from Someone Who Likes Theater is that the desire for attention is the number one priority at the expense of everything else, so I think any sort of ideology the theater kids hold is merely what’s useful at the time for gaining attention. I have basically no knowledge of art history but the idea of art being dominated by the left seems like it started no earlier than the late 18th century and possibly much later, and is downstream of the political and intellectual movements in that time. I think the Theater Kid archetypes in medieval Italy would be loudly proclaiming their piety to anyone who would listen, or boasting about how great their local Duke was or whatever would get them approval.

This is also why it seems like different artistic mediums in the modern world have different political splits. I think the artistic types who are drawn to theater specifically are at the right tail of the bell curve for “desire for attention”, followed by movies/tv, music, visual art, and writing. The majority of popular work in all of these mediums is “left coded”, but it seems like there is still at least somewhat of a market for conservative-leaning movies/TV, music, and writing, whereas the idea of a conservative broadway musical is laughable. The tendency for the conservative-ish versions of popular art (network cop shows, Michael bay films, country music, etc.) to be low-brow, while the prestigious versions (classical music, hbo shows, opera, art galleries) are overwhelmingly left wing is probably just a result of the rural-urban divide. I would think ~70 years ago when rich urban PMC types were WASPy republicans, things like classical music performances and art galleries were right-coded.

The “hostility” of the average red tribe person today towards art is also a result of the hostility that modern art has towards them. There’s definitely some sort of practical-mindedness more common to right leaning people as /u/hlynkacg mentioned that makes them appreciate art less, but I think in the past those types of people wouldn’t have been actively hostile towards art, but probably just apathetic or uninterested. The modern hostility of the average right winger towards art is from being told they are uncultured for not appreciating Jackson Pollock and piss Christ, being shown as villains in popular movies and tv, watching satanic themed live musical performances etc. Modern art as a whole is almost like a reactionary movement against the type of “objective beauty” that even more practical-minded people can appreciate. There isn’t an inherent distrust of art in right-wing thought, there’s just an inherent distrust towards art that is anti-right wing for obvious reasons, and as of now effectively all of the “important” art is anti-right wing.

FWIW, I think it's a really interesting topic, and it touches on a number of things.

I don't think the narcissism is the key point -- I think you've got those on both sides.

I think the willingness, and push, to break tradition and authority is certainly a part of it. There's an assumption that convention is bad, and to be subverted, which is pretty inherently anti-conservative.

However, I think the biggest aspect is the ... well, to be a bit politer, let's say a good creative is providing services for the upper layers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs -- entertainment, mental stimulation, belonging. And most can only do so on largesse of people who fulfill the lower layers (safety, food, shelter, wifi). So they don't have to worry about how things will work, they just sort of assume it will be there, and they just need to persuade people to give it to them. Someone else characterized it as childlike empathy, and I think that's a part of it too, but to me it's more this idea of things not having consequences -- if people are poor, give everyone a million dollars.

I think that's also where a lot of the frustration with them comes from; maybe that's an area the not-psycho left should work on -- explaining why the things they propose will make the world a worse place, rather than a better one.

FWIW James O'Keefe is unironically, unabashedly a theater kid. One of the details that came out of his departure from Project Veritas was spending foundation money to fly staff out to see him perform in Oklahoma!. Perhaps his familiarity the culture might explain how he gets some people talking (or is able to hire undercovers with similar abilities).

Is he out for sure then? That's a pity, it seemed like he was most of the energy behind it.

Yes Though it looks like they might be pulling a Top Gear/Grand Tour type scenario with the BBC board "winning" the battle for ownership only to lose the audience, staff, assets, etc... that made the brand valuable in the first place.

There are plenty of artsy-political people even on the edge of the hard right. Moon man for music, ZHPLovecraft for writing, stonetoss for cartoons. Or on the more moderate end of people who reveal their actual names on their publications, there's P. J. O'Rourke's books.

There's a rich history of anti-communist songs. Ain't I right is a banger: https://youtube.com/watch?v=vvzmBhCpWvA

In modern times, there are bands like Rome, Xurious and Triarii (who are German and thus obliged to say they're not ideological or political even though they surely are). There's more stuff that you just don't find unless you look for it, or only find it on niche places. This is because there's significant amounts of suppression going on! Of course you're not going to find something seriously right-wing in Hollywood. How would it get funded? Yet even there you have Mel Gibson.

The reason most rightish stuff repurposes other content is because of a lack of funds, not a lack of creativity. I saw a scene from a Disney musical that had been repurposed and revoiced to be an exultation of HBD and IQ tests, it was rather well done IMO. But you can tell that webms dispersed on /wsg/ don't have the production budgets that Rian Johnson can wield.

If there weren't any people on the Right with the 'ability to mobilize individuals who can craft aesthetically-compelling narratives that will inspire and convert normal people' why would there be magazine articles decrying evil right wing memes and pepe the frog infecting vulnerable youths?

It's really the neoliberal, boring Republican end that struggles creating art. How do you glamorize tax cuts and bleating over leftist policies but not doing anything substantive about them? I believe you have to have serious convictions and beliefs to create good art. There were plenty of people making Trump music videos back in 2016 but they really dried up after the election. Take E;R for instance, he was genuinely taken in by the election results and interrupted his stream of long-form movie reviews with some short pro-Trump clips. Later on I got the sense that he was even more depressed and cynical than before.

Even North Korea has their own aesthetic with lasers and jets and neon: https://youtube.com/watch?v=jAHR3nVoIAU

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jAHR3nVoIAU

Thanks, that led me down a 2 hour rabbit hole. https://old.reddit.com/user/zaruka

What's the relation? Zaruka is not Mauzer so far as I can see.

More North Korea stuff. Zaruka has many pics and impressions from visits a decade ago. I finished the rabbit hole after Zaruka and figured someone might be interested, but it's a bit hard to choose any comment and even "top" isn't helpful. But I'll try this: https://old.reddit.com/r/northkorea/comments/n8ysx/i_travel_to_north_korea_annually_ama/

As somebody with basically libertarian views (and therefore is very much out of tune with the current progressive zeitgeist) but who has also been involved in music and theater since early childhood, I am very much interested in this question, and have spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. After reading the other comments in this thread, many of which I think are grasping at different parts of the elephant, there's one potential explanation that I haven't seen and that I would like to suggest:

  1. Parents know that some activities/careers are right-coded and some are left-coded.

  2. Children are likely to absorb some or all of their political opinions from their parents.

  3. Parents are likely to encourage their children to participate in the activities and/or career paths that are more aligned with their politics. For example, conservative parents are more likely to encourage their kids to participate in sports or cheering, and progressive parents are more likely to encourage their kids to participate in things like music, theater and art.

Or it could just be as simple as people naturally sorting themselves into groups of other people who are like them. If all the people you know from your church are on the football team, you're more likely to play football. If you're gay and the other two openly gay kids in your school do theater, you're more likely to do theater. (There was a discussion on here recently about the search for the first openly gay Premier League soccer player and the inability to find anybody like that, and while the idea of a genetic explanation is appealing to me, especially given the high percentage of female professional soccer players who are lesbians, I can't discount the argument put forward by others that if you're gay and everybody in the locker room of your youth soccer team is constantly spewing homophobic slurs, you're probably going to find something else to do for a living.)

Thanks for the interesting perspective. I dont have much to add other than Rod Drehr isn’t what I would call dissident right. From what I know he is firmly in the old guard and on the way out.

Most of the newer voices explicitly talk about leveraging art to win or hold ground.

Agreed, but as I said in this comment, when Dreher uses a DR meme I know it’s really got legs.

I think you might be ahead of the curve. Over the past few years the right has taken the first stumbling steps towards a culture that might actually stand for something, but none of it is in the "respectable world" where people have faces. (I'll ignore the Right Inc. grifters.) My read is that it started in the chans (maybe for the last time), then went to pseudonymous poasters on reddit and twitter, but it's still at the level of books, where a) the author can publish under a pseudonym (pen names being a thing for a long time) and b) the marginal benefit to the author vastly exceeds the marginal benefit to the megaplatform hosting his work. Whereas in theatre, you're putting your identity on the line. I imagine many of the problems you see in theatre are also repeated in Hollywood; either you stick your head down or you go full Daily Wire or whatever. But theatre doesn't yet seem to have a Daily Wire to shelter people and bootstrapping it seems like a hard problem.

Look at podcasts. Red Scare is the one most people are familiar with but The Perfume Nationalist is a really great piece of art and I strongly recommend it to anyone for an interesting right wing/libertarian take on art and culture.

As a person who also studied theatre, I can only guess at the relationship between artists and progressivism:

Art, like any human endeavour, is subject to competitive pressure, and must experience progress. Now, we're familiar with progress in technology, but as a "soft science," art has a very nebulous definition--or even no real definition--of "better." There are technical aspects that saw progress, sure, but practically all of that happened before the 21st century (though our current epoch is home to the drawing tablet, Machinima, Blender, Virtual Reality, and AI art). Thus, competition in art inevitably becomes less about who can out-draw or out-sculpt the others, and more who can out-message or out-fascinate the others.

Now, I don't mean this to say that the post-modern developments in art starting with the aftermath of WWI were some sort of grand dick-measuring contest, but more that, once the lower-hanging(?) fruit of technical skill had been picked, there was a surprising inversion towards techniques and schools of art that traded away technical craft for higher-level ideas.

The new thing is always the most fascinating thing, and those first waves of artists who happened to subscribe to newer, more progressive political ideologies rejected the old ideals in favor of new ones. These political leanings carried into their art, rejecting the old methods in favor of new and experimental things, sometimes with their political message blended in (I mentioned the aftermath of WWI because it gave us the artform of Dada, a surrealist style that rejected all sense of, well, sense in response to the irrational horrors of the Great War).

There are plenty of conservative artists, but I do suspect that something about the conservative mindset does tend to result in more flawed art, even if it's not necessarily made purely for reaction's sake (see: Thomas Kinkade, whose commercial paintings are the ur-example of schmaltzy kitsch, overwrought and out-of-place). But that being said, as an artist, I find the modern-day post-modernist anti-whatever styles and messaging to be franky exhausting. Even when progressive artists try to push a positive message, it never sits quite right with me, though that may only be because I have trouble separating the art from the artist there based solely on their politics.

Thus, I find myself confined to a similar space as many in my generation and the ones preceding it (and even following): cursed with nostalgia for the past, seeking solace in the familiar and understandable, but knowing that this fixed place in time cannot be occupied for an extended duration, let alone forever; everything that was formative to me as a child will be ruined by new sensibilities or undermined by corporate greed, and at best, I will have to let go at some point. I want to move with the art, but the art is often so flawed to me and so, so hard to agree with.

It doesn't have to be this way forever, though. Artists prize a certain freedom of expression, and while not everyone wants the freedom to make art that might hurt some group's feelings, there are going to be those who may well need to tread on some toes to make truly compelling art. I think there must be some limit somewhere, and perhaps the pendulum will swing away from bananas on walls and towards rock n' roll someday.

Tl;dr art is subjective, which incentivizes novelty and subversion. Postmodernism is a feedback loop on those conditions.

To this I would add that information access is the enemy, or at least a contributor. Amateur artists can study at the feet of all humanity’s masters. Give it five years and they can have an AI do that for them. This incentivizes commentary as a route to novelty. New paintings aren’t made in a vacuum, so instead of competing with Rembrandt, it’s more practical to engage with him. Repeat this cycle for 100 years and you get comments on treatises on comments on jokes on technical details.

That said…I’m not sure what about that is hostile to the right.

True, all of that doesn't have to be hostile to right-wingers, but I think conservatism tends to downweight weirdness generally...however, the new Dissident Right, the 4Channers, and so on definitely embrace weirdness, so perhaps that's where the future of the right does indeed lie for aesthetics.

Why artsy people are mostly on the left is probably rooted in psychology- they’re almost by definition people who choose self expression in the face of conventionality, which is left wing nearly tautologically.

Conventionality is currently left wing. You can't express yourself in its face and be left wing, then you are expressing yourself as its face. Caitlyn Jenner bravely being applauded and fawned over.

There is room on the right for all types, but 20 years of left wing propaganda made people think the only people who belong on the right are Mormons, racists and idiots. It's definitely one of their best memes, evidenced by it being believed not only by the left, moderates and normies, but even by many right wingers - even though it does nothing but fuck the right. But it is just a meme.

Conventionality is currently left wing.

Yes, and conversely, libertarianism is currently right wing. Hence the art world's complete identity crisis and breakdown over the past few years which I see as mainly a fracture between the elite old school liberal donor/patron class and the broke creatives who actually make art.

The enemy must be both strong and weak, huh?

Or I guess the modern version is that they’re “so controversial, yet so brave.”

No, they are just strong. They leverage minority groups for their own gain, and then discard them when they are no longer considered weak enough to garner enough sympathy to provide cover for their power grabs. I don't consider left wingers my enemy though, the vast majority of the left are just trying to do the right thing, and we disagree about the methods but not the goal - a happy, stable, free society. I do consider them co-opted by tyrants and sociopaths however, who I do consider my enemy, and I think that the current ideology dominating the left is partly to blame, because it makes it easier for those types to get ahead.

The enemy must be both strong and weak, huh?

This phrase seems to function as a thought-terminating cliché.

All enemies have both strengths and weaknesses, relatively speaking, and it behooves one to have a full appreciation of both if conflict seems likely. There is no assessment of relative strengths and weaknesses, in any context, on any side, that you cannot apply your criticism to. It is fully general, hence either useless or dishonest due to selective application.

Is there not a tension between portraying leftists as conventional and as dangerous radicals? Their hold on the mainstream must be treated as a serious threat—but also “just a meme.”

Is there not a tension between portraying leftists as conventional and as dangerous radicals?

"Convention" as in "Consensus", "Law", "Guideline", "Policy", not "Tradition". You might argue that this is imprecision in language, but language is, unfortunately, imprecise. Note the "Currently", which states that this is a convention of the present. So no, this doesn't seem to me to be a colorable argument.

Their hold on the mainstream must be treated as a serious threat—but also “just a meme.”

Rwandan racial grievances and the Blood Libel are other examples of mere memes that are nevertheless serious threats, and other examples (Marxism, Protestantism, Christianity, "this random guy is actually the legitimate heir to the throne", &etc) abound. Ideas are dangerous, in the strictest and most concrete sense. Memes motivate, and of the means-motive-opportunity trio, motive is the most important.

I'm aware that the cliché in question has a pedigree, but I'm struggling to actually think of a single case where its use is straightforwardly both applicable and productive. I think this is just another of those academic "insights" sustained by a complete lack of rigor in their native environment.

left-wing lawyers, journalists, and activists seem to get more hate than artsy people. It's not uncommon to see posts here and related communities extoling the virtues of The Classics, of old architecture, etc.

Usually, when I've seen people talk about "theater kids", I've got the feeling it's code for flamboyant homosexuality. However, Rod (who wouldn't have a problem with dissing flamboyant homosexuals directly anyway) seems to be using it as code for something else, but I can't quite catch what. Just being very expressive and dramatic?

Just being very expressive and dramatic?

I've seen Anne Hathaway called a theater kid due to her Oscar campaign and that was basically what it boiled down to - being over-dramatic and too earnest

Might have been unfair (see her acceptance speech and judge for yourself) but there you go.

As someone who was a Theatre Kid, albeit not an example of the stereotype nor quite exactly surrounded by examples thereof, the general archetype/stereotype of the Theatre Kid generally is: quirky, high-energy, might act out, enthusiastic, hungry for success, reverently addicted to pop culture, probably has a Tumblr, stuff like that.

I think it's more a reference to certain high school cliques. You had your theater kids, jocks, nerds, stoners, mean girls, goths, preppies, and so on. My vague recollection was that the kids that would go on to become politicians and leaders used to be drawn mostly from the jocks and preppies, and sometimes the nerds, whereas perhaps now the theater clique have become launched more influential people, probably via the power of performative social media, at the expense of the jocks and especially the nerds.

No comment on this enormous topic, for now. I sympathize. Have a galkovsky.

«...The ancient sages prized military valor to an extreme degree. Abilities for painting or versification were valued much less. Even back then it was understood that an artist or writer is, if nothing else, a pampered, weak, and often immoral person. Such people were loved. They were very strongly loved. But they were loved with the love they deserved. The entire Rome was pining for the pantomime actor Mnester, for his silky hips and lanquid eyes. He was the most popular man in the state; Mnester's glory competed with the glory of the emperor [Caligula] himself, who obsequiously sought his love. The modern "decay" of art is, in fact, a natural and explicable development: to each his own. Nowadays, it is already direct pornography. And it is beautiful. This is the way it should be. This resolution is the destruction of an ugly fairy tale of the 19th century, which turned temples into theaters and theaters into temples. The theater is a temple, but a temple that is not Christian nor even pagan. And now, in the second half of the twentieth century, it was deprived of this status. People come to the theater to giggle. Comedians became comedians in earnest, not hierophants or priests. The theater became again what it was in the Roman Empire - a joy house. The theater is also a joy house in its development: "The theater begins with a hanger". The destruction of the myth of "holy art" is, I think, not a crisis of Christian culture, but a crisis of tacit shadow paganism. Although, in the West, "holy art" was just a fragment of the world, a trend; it is our mythology of genius that has become the center of our malnourished secular culture.»

I know 3 guys who studied theater and acted professionally before becoming right wing political consultants.

Are they Kevin Sorbo, Andy Garcia and Scott Baio?

But seriously, someone like David Mamet comes to mind, as someone who has combined theater, to say the least, with right-wing political views. Although he may be more of an "anti-woke liberal" coming around only recently.

Between The Verdict, Oleana, Glengarry Glen Ross, Ronin and Spartan I'd say Mamet's right wing sympathies were pretty well established before the current battle lines were drawn. He may be an "anti-woke liberal" (for a given definition of Liberal) but more in the mold of Kipling or Tolkien than a Libertarian.

Fair shot though.

If the Right achieves its glorious counter-revolution, will the end product look like the town from Footloose?

A bit of a tangent, but three years ago, one side of the political aisle enthusiastically called for nightclubs to be shut down to stop the spread of an allegedly deadly virus, and it wasn't the Right.

I think you need to be more careful about ascribing generality to your experience in your culture in the present day, based only on that which you observe in your immediate environment and glimpses of past and foreign art that are mediated through the interpretation of those inhabiting that same immediate environment. It is not at all clear to me that for instance the medieval European bards that brought us the chansons de geste or the Song of the Nibelungs had a progressive bone in their body, and getting an interpretation of the Odyssey that is not memetically contaminated by a Western Classics department of the last 200 years seems like a lost cause. You can come up with a somewhat compelling-sounding story that efficient acting - literal theatre - necessitates a degree of mental promiscuity and openness that you can't do that and then return to the sort of loyalty to a single narrative framework intended to be shared by everyone in society that conservatism almost definitionally requires, any more than a three-digit bodycount Tinder 1%er (m/f) can happily settle down with a boring unattractive accountant; however, theatre narrowly defined does not seem like a wide enough domain of art that an ideology locked out of it would be forever barren. Narrative-weaving artists considered more generally, though, especially in other societies, seem to have no trouble sustaining right-wing attitudes. Japan had Yukio Mishima, and anime runs the gamut from Miyazaki's surface pacifism that is still bulging with a barely repressed fascination with blood and steel, via every vapid piece of romance (I only realised just how trad the delta from reality to fiction is after interacting with actual Japanese youths), to the unapologetic jingoism of something like GATE. Russia among many others had Solzhenitsyn (and perhaps our very own Ilforte), and I gather that even Limonov was so charismatic and fun in his writing that he won over a significant fraction of the intelligentsia.

I liked your whole post, but I have one tiny quibble:

Miyazaki's surface pacifism that is still bulging with a barely repressed fascination with blood and steel

Is that what you could call it? I know Miyazaki has a love of old-school aviation, I'm not terribly sure there's any real appreciation of the displays of power associated with pre-Cold-War planes. Granted, as someone who saw The Wind Rises in a theater, I will concede that there definitely seems to be a conflicted love of that subject matter there.

Have you read Miyazaki's Tigers In The Mud?

Whole thing(?) Not the best image quality I'm afraid, but enough to give you the idea. He's an absolute model tank and rifle collector who reads Nazi tank ace autobiographies. Really great stuff done in his style.

I've never heard of this before, huh.

I don't know. I'd think that artists were pretty libertine and unconventional at least since the Renaissance. No idea what, say, the Indian or Ancient Greek version of Michelangelo was like...or what artists were like in, say, Tang Dynasty China.

Not really contradicting your comment but I'm a little surprised to see Dreher categorized as dissident right. What are his dissident right bona fides?

He seems to have one foot in the dissident right, if anything by taking off to Hungary. Like he's Matt Forney.

Oh, he’s at best peripherally on the DR, but he sometimes absorbs DR memes by osmosis, and that’s when I know that they have real caché. I’d encountered this meme before and didn’t know how seriously to take it, and once I saw Dreher use it I knew it had become entrenched enough to be worth paying attention to.

Being involved in theater doesn’t make you a theater kid, and you can be a theater kid even if you are not involved at all in theater. I wouldn’t take it too personally.

Do you see yourself as better than others? And wish to impose your beliefs on others? Do you imagine over dramatized revolutions yet oppose gun ownership, and associate fitness with something negative?

It’s the kids who were in high school asking for more homework, tattling on other kids, and sneering at anybody who liked sports. If that was you, then yeah you’re a theater kid.

There are however many right wing and even far right wing artists. Anybody who doubts this should spend some time at burning man interacting with the people building the art there. They’re the most libertarian of libertarians.

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It’s the kids who were in high school asking for more homework, tattling on other kids, and sneering at anybody who liked sports. If that was you, then yeah you’re a theater kid

Uhh, I think theater kids are defined by their participation in theater. I don’t have any of these other associations. In fact generally theater kids were not the best students

As for the assertion that libertarian is far right, that kind of proves his point. Libertarians aren’t exactly known for close adherence to tradition, but rather drug experimentation and breaking social norms.

At least at my high school, which granted was small and rural, theater kids were kids who didn't do sports but weren't usually stereotypical nerds either. Most weren't that popular with the opposite sex but they did ok.

We were a small enough school that aside from maybe basketball anyone could join any team, club, or activity at least to participate, but the theater kids might also be in band or choir and that was usually about it.

Hm. I always had the impression that “the odds were good, but the goods were odd.” Theater kids had plenty of relationships and relationship drama.

Sounds like No True Theater Kid to me. Sure is convenient that Dreher was only complaining about the people you don’t like.

There are however many right wing and even far right wing artists. Anybody who doubts this should spend some time at burning man interacting with the people building the art there. They’re the most libertarian of libertarians.

I will first point out that the question of whether or not libertarians are “right-wing” is a very hotly-contested topic, and that I would answer the question with a definitive “no”. Also, when was the last time that any of the art produced at Burning Man made any sort of cultural impact on the general public? I’m certainly not aware of a single example, although I admit that it’s not an area about which I’m very knowledgeable.

I will first point out that the question of whether or not libertarians are “right-wing” is a very hotly-contested topic, and that I would answer the question with a definitive “no”.

Let's start with: what do you consider 'right wing'?

Also, when was the last time that any of the art produced at Burning Man made any sort of cultural impact on the general public? I’m certainly not aware of a single example, although I admit that it’s not an area about which I’m very knowledgeable.

I don't think there is really a way to address this question. In my world, burning man is a massive cultural juggernaut. It defines building/architectural styles, sculpture styles, music styles, clothing styles. It's practically inescapable.

Burning man had its own exhibit in The Smithsonian: https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/burning-man

Hmm, man I'm really at a loss as to how to address your question of what cultural impact burning man has had.

FWIW, I think that says more about your world than the larger cultural one. I'm kind of involved in that sector and burning man is barely on the radar.

We're not in the US, which perhaps plays something of a role, but BM seems more known for drugs, garage creative, and rich folk cosplaying as creative.

I agree there's a lot of creativity there, but I don't think it's made it out much into the larger world.

Really depends on how we judge what "burning man art" is. A lot of incredibly famous musicians have gone out there and play sets, as attendees. I don't know if they even pay artists to show up, i know they didn't when i was more aware of that scene but i wouldn't hazard a guess anymore. Tons of people that work on movies and videogames and esoteric AI powered VR DMT simulators go. I havent been keeping current, but i watched video of Skrillex playing at a sound camp there from before he won a grammy.

Point being, the cumulative attendees of burningman might be the most wide reaching and impactful group of artists in the world. Like, if you don't think that scene has had a notable impact on culture over the last 20 years i wonder what you would point to as being influential.

In your defense however, i will say that most notable burningman attendees don't really advertise their time there, so not being aware of how many influential people have attended is pretty easy to excuse.

(i don't know why i'm even defending burningman, its a hollowed out husk of a super cool party)

Are you trying to redefine "theatre kid" to be purely pejorative? Please don't.

I have never heard this term used as anything other than a pejorative. I've only really understood this term to basically be the teenage version of the "karen" archetype.

I feel like actual kids involved in theaters have used it in a more playful way, the same way band kids will joke about being "band kids."

To me, it primarily means "a young person really into theatre". For example, I think the OP meant this sense of the word above when they were describing themselves.

There's definitely parts of the Glee fandom that are either trying to reclaim the concept or just started under the assumption is what in-group.

And I've never heard it used to mean anything other than "a kid who is into theatre". I think your understanding is way off base, but I'll concede that it's anecdote vs anecdote here unless someone has something more substantial.

I second your definition of theater kid, it didn’t just mean anyone who was in the school play but the clique of people who were extremely into it, and it carries the negative connotations you mentioned. The same way you probably wouldn’t call someone on the cross country team a jock even though they play a sport. It’s also definitely what people mean when they say things like “theater kid occupied government” even if you think theater kid just means someone who did theater.

It's not worth much thought. Every worthwhile 'Right-wing' artist is either: A. Formerly left-wing; B. A revolutionary progressive at heart. That's it. People who kowtow to the status quo never have anything interesting to say. Here I shall invoke the views of Parmenides, being too lazy to try to quote him: the sole constant in the pantheon of artists' beliefs is that they always go against whatever has been most prominently arrayed against them. I.E., what's the sole thread which connects them all? The fact that they're all different is what shows that they're the same, not actual engaged in impartial or transcendental truth-seeking but just taking the dogmas as they're given and accepting/rejecting them.

Change or innovation of the beliefs-that-be is the preside of thinkers; advocacy or spurning of them that of artists, however much they might like to think otherwise.

People who kowtow to the status quo never have anything interesting to say.

So, would you say that people who support the progressive-woke status quo in western countries are the “real” rightists, and people who oppose it are the “real” leftists?

I don't think this is accurate at all, "right wing" art is still being made and "right wing" artists are still out there, successful ones even, they're just not "fashionable". Passion of the Christ remains the most successful film of the 21st century in terms of budget to box-office, but it will be a cold day in Hell before anyone in the Hollywood establishment acknowledges it.

I don't think this is accurate at all, "right wing" art is still being made and "right wing" artists are still out there, successful ones even, they're just not "fashionable".

It depends on definition of "right wing".

Is this an art that will shield your kids from socialism?

Flippantly, I'm skeptical about whether that's even art.

More to my point, how many time have you heard someone say something like "I listen to all genres of music except pop and/or country". Fact is that the press and "the Academy" can shower all the attention and awards on non-binary Satanists with questionable fashion sense they want but at the end of they day they aren't the ones filling stadiums. Taylor Swift is.

Jesse Singal gets gaslit

Also, a more neutral take: https://elizamondegreen.substack.com/p/about-that-twitter-shitstorm-affirmationnot

Brief recap:

  1. NYT shifts its coverage of medical concerns for trans issues from 100% supporting transition in all cases to a more questioning stance, particularly with minors

  2. An open letter is sent to NYT laying out "serious concerns with editorial bias" in response to this shift

  3. Jonathan Chait posts a critical response to the open letter at New York Magazine (no relation to NYT)

  4. Chait gets dragged on twitter for being anti-trans, with a highlighted passage

  5. Jesse Singal posts in support of Chait, showing the highlighted passage is directly in accordance with WPATH guidelines and explains what it means

  6. E. Kale Edmiston, a trans man, posts in response that he, Edmiston, wrote the WPATH guidelines posted by Singal, and that Singal is misinterpreting them

  7. Liberal media pundits and reporters pile on, when Singal defends the straightforward interpretation, demanding that Signal accept Edmiston's (frankly bizarre) interpretation of the quoted passage

  8. Singal has done his homework and contacts several other WPATH authors, who all confirm Singal's interpretation of the passage and reject Edmiston's

  9. Eventually this reaches Scott Leibowitz, overall head of the WPATH guidelines document, who says that Edmiston definitely did not write the highlighted passage, and later severely admonishes this lying and false attribution from within academia

  10. Singal performs several victory laps on Twitter, demanding from the media pundits and reporters the apologies and corrections they had demanded from him

Good guys: Jesse Singal, Jonathan Chait, Scott Leibowitz

Bad guys: E. Kale Edmiston, Madeline Leung Coleman (NYMag editor), Michael Hobbes, Jeet Heer, Marisa Kasabas (MSNBC Columnist), David Perry, Eric Vilas-Boas (Vulture staffer), Miles Klee, Siva Vaidhyanathan

The most interesting, dire, and relevant info is from Eliza Mondegreen, linked near the top. Apparently there is a wink/nod system with the WPATH Standards of Care document, where the words are written a certain way because they must be, but they are interpreted much differently.

She concludes:

Theory and practice—the Standards of Care and what actually happens in the exam room—have nothing to do with one another. Everything in the Standards of Care that sounds cautious and responsible comes with an understanding that’s supposed to go unspoken: We don’t really mean it. We just need to say this. If a patient shows up with serious comorbidities, of course we have to say that they must undergo a “comprehensive” “assessment” and that the clinician must remain open to the possibility that the patient might not really have gender dysphoria and maybe shouldn’t really transition. But you know how important the work we all do is.

In other words, the Standards of Care are a lie that everyone involved in gender medicine pretends to believe. When reporters like Singal and Chait try to hold gender clinicians to WPATH standards (something I think is worth doing, by the way!), savvy clinicians will respond: Yes, of course we “assess” patients very carefully, what do you think this is, the Wild West?

Among other, more obvious mistakes, Edmiston’s most grievous error was not pretending to believe the lie.

EDITS: Signal, Single, Liebowitz. added Cast of Characters, Eliza Mondegreen quote

Among other, more obvious mistakes, Edmiston’s most grievous error was not pretending to believe the lie.

This is something that has seemed obviously true to me for a while, but of course you can't prove it unless you are deeply inside the system. You express concerns about children being casually, almost instantly, referred for "gender affirming care" up to and including surgery, and clinicians and trans activists say "Don't be ridiculous, of course we don't think doctors should just write blank prescriptions everyone's needs are carefully assessed they get a comprehensive evaluation it's all very cautious and evidence-based blah blah blah..."

Every bit of anecdotal evidence I have ever read - but it's still anecdotal! - is that in practice a trans-identifying kid will be "confirmed" as trans basically on their say-so. I've never actually heard of a doctor at one of these clinics saying, "Well, actually, have you considered you might not be trans? Let's work on some of your other mental health issues and then revisit this."

I'd love to find out I am wrong, that the typical clinician is in fact cautious about going along with every child who presents as "trans" and pursues other avenues of care first. But I have yet to see any evidence that this happens... anywhere. Rather, it seems increasingly like anything other than immediate and unreserved validation of any child who presents as trans is treated as transphobic and life-threatening.

Jesse Singal does the lord's work, and he has two problems.

The first is that his work is very wonky. Like, he does deep dives into statistics, he actually reads the charts in the papers cited (and mis-cited) by activists, and points out all the errors, but it's not something easily summarizable if you really want to have an understanding of what he's saying. All his opponents see is "There goes Jesse Singal, known transphobe, obsessively bullying a marginalized community again." Who actually reads and parses his work in detail?

I'll admit while this whole thing was happening on Twitter, I didn't quite get the back and forth the first few times until I finally sighed, dug in, and reread the entire comment chain to figure out who said who said who said what about what when. And I'm fairly current on the issues, reasonably intelligent, and sympathetic to Singal. Meanwhile, everyone else is just posting dunks and high fives and "yikes!" And even after this fairly comprehensive vindication of Singal, I doubt a single person on the other side actually had their mind changed or their priors shifted an iota. What I have seen in response has been a lot of tepid "Well, obviously it's a very complex topic mumble mumble but jeez why does Jesse Singal care so much anyway?"

Which brings me to my second point: Jesse Singal does himself no favors fighting these things out on Twitter. I get it - I understand his mindset. "People are lying about me on the Internet! People are saying I said things I clearly did not say! They're also wrong about the facts! They're saying things that aren't true, just read this damn paper right here that proves it!"

He cannot shake the conviction that if he yells this often and loudly enough, he will make them see. And he won't. Ever. So he ends up looking like deranged Reply Guy who is obsessed with this topic and wants to fight everybody. Meanwhile, his enemies, who don't actually care whether he's right or not, only that he's on the wrong side, see that they can keep winding him up by saying "Look at Jesse Singal being transphobic again."

The reason he keeps doing it is because he thinks these people are on his side and just mistaken. He has an unshakable prior that there must actually be some genuine truth to the trans question and there are just a few bad apples and bad bits of science that need to be cleaned up. He truly believes the emperor is wearing clothes and he just needs to find the right light spectrum that everyone else must be looking through to see it and can't tell that all the other people telling him his methods are a ridiculous insult to the emperor because he's obviously wearing clothes are lying to him.

Every bit of anecdotal evidence I have ever read - but it's still anecdotal! - is that in practice a trans-identifying kid will be "confirmed" as trans basically on their say-so. I've never actually heard of a doctor at one of these clinics saying, "Well, actually, have you considered you might not be trans? Let's work on some of your other mental health issues and then revisit this."

I mean, a clinic in Canada was shut down over doing exactly this. To the activist, that's "conversion therapy", and they will end your career over it. To add insult to injury, the accusation which finally did get the Canadian clinic shut down turned out to be about a different doctor entirely. But the activist worked with what they had.

Coincidentally, Jesse Singal did the breakthrough reporting on that case too, including showing the person allegedly victimized by a doctor a photo of the doctor activist were attacking, to which the alleged victim responded that it wasn't the man who victimized him.

He cannot shake the conviction that if he yells this often and loudly enough, he will make them see. And he won't. Ever. So he ends up looking like deranged Reply Guy who is obsessed with this topic and wants to fight everybody. Meanwhile, his enemies, who don't actually care whether he's right or not, only that he's on the wrong side, see that they can keep winding him up by saying "Look at Jesse Singal being transphobic again."

I wonder at this. Jesse has been working this beat too long, and seen too much of the inmates running the asylum for that. The problem is that he can't escape the cultural framework of D's good, R's bad. It is literally unthinkable to him that D's might be the baddies on this one. That as a party and a cultural force they are responsible for the mutilation and sterilization of countless children. It's too large an atrocity for him to even consider on his side's hands. And even if all the evidence, all the personal experience, says so, there must still be some way that R's are actually still the baddies.

It's unclear what his end game is. Maybe he doesn't have one. Maybe he doesn't hope for any change, and is just a reporter working his beat.

It is literally unthinkable to him that D's might be the baddies on this one

From my perspective, one that I imagine is quite similar to Singal's, the D's aren't the 'baddies' for three central reasons.

Firstly, for the average Democrat this is simply not an important issue. I could name literally hundreds of issues that are of greater significance than the trans debate, even for the average Democratic legislator I strongly suspect that the issue does not really occupy their thoughts very often. When was the last time Congress debated the issue? In state Houses and Senates it comes up more but even then only on occasion. The point is that this is an issue whose prominence on the internet and in vaguely left-wing popular culture is completely out of proportion to its prominence in partisan politics, and in fact its actual importance.

Secondly, where it does crop up in partisan politics its generally in the form of anti-discrimination bills, or culture war fluff like sports, rather than the specifics of transgender medical care; indeed, in general medical practices are not something directly intervened upon by politicians, so the issue is fairly left to the non-partisan regulatory state and independent medical bodies, and it's surely best that way. Even if you think the current state of affairs is unacceptable, I doubt that we'd be much better off with state or Congressional Republicans managing medical practices.

Finally, the Republicans are hardly any better. Singal is good because unlike most commentators on transgender issues (on the sceptical side) he doesn't come across as a deranged culture warrior with an axe to grind, which unfortunately seems to be the case for most Republicans.

Firstly, for the average Democrat this is simply not an important issue. I

What's the average Democrat's response to Republicans' attempt to stop it? "Oh, that's not an important issue, go ahead, no I won't cancel you"? Maybe, but I suspect not.

I don't think the average Democrat engages in much cancelling, or tries to While certainly they (and I) would oppose some (most?) of the measures Republicans introduce here and there, it still wouldn't, I think, stand as a great priority.

Average Democrats are not relevant to the conversation. It's activists and the leadership that decide on which course is taken, and they definitely do coordinate cancelation campaigns. They're also pushing through the trans ideology throughout the education system, legislature, etc.

There are things I'd also put in the category of "I'm against it, but it's not important". I prefer lower taxes to hiflgher taxes, less bureaucracy to more, etc. Normally these sort of issues would be ripe for a compromise, if you give me control over "unimportant" cultural issues, I'll give you pretty much anything you want. Does that sound like a good deal to you? Is there any evidence average Democrats would go for it? If not, it is simply not true that the issue is not important for them.

leadership

I meant leadership as well.

legislature

Where?

Does that sound like a good deal to you?

Well it would have to be within reason, but in very broad terms yes I would make social policy concessions for economic policy returns.

Where?

Throughout the western world. In Europe there's a bunch of self-ID laws being pushed, often covertly without public debate. Same for blue states in the US, though over there they are balanced by red state legislatures.

Well it would have to be within reason

Yes, obviously it would have to be within reason on both sides. So if Democrats are so open to such a compromise, doesn't it seem strange to you they haven't offered one in all those years? Could it be an indication that the issue is more important to th then you claim?

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Hear that whistling? It’s the sound of goalposts receding into the distance.

That as a party and a cultural force they are responsible for the mutilation and sterilization of countless children.

What's the average Democrat's response to Republicans' attempt to stop it?

They were definitely talking about normies rather than (just) activists.

The second part was added as a bonus to show his argument would fail on his own terms.

Your post is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. You agree that this trans pandemic is out of control and damaging people. You agree that Dems are asleep at the wheel, or facilitating it.

And yet when Republicans do what they can to try to stop it, suddenly they become the baddies. Because it's "culture war fluff" to keep rapist out of women's spaces. Or it's discrimination to ban the dangerous and unregulated mutilation and sterilization of children.

So you create this situation where you acknowledge the problem, your "side" broadly sits on it's hands or encourages it, and you claim the only people trying to stop it are the bad guys. Because, for whatever reason, even when Republicans are addressing the problems you admit are problems, and are trying to stop the things you admit should probably be stopped, it's just unthinkable to you.

Also, it's a preposterous framing that "in general medical practices are not something directly intervened upon by politicians". The FDA regulates what drugs we are allowed to take. Dangerous or inhumane medical procedures do get banned by governments, like lobotomies. This learned helplessness towards the medical community going off the rails with respect to trans treatments is bonkers. As is the vitriol even people who acknowledge it's a problem direct at anyone who attempts to fix it.

The FDA regulates what drugs we are allowed to take.

Yes, but that's not a partisan affair. The FDA should take whatever action they deem appropriate on transgender care and they don't need politicians to weigh in on the specifics of the decision. Politicians determine the broad remit of the FDA, they don't interfere with its functioning on specific issues.

You agree that this trans pandemic is out of control

I wouldn't go that far, certainly. As for 'asleep at the wheel', it's a question of prioritisation. Political capital and legislative time are finite, and I'd much rather politicians focused on any number of other issues than making ad hoc adjustments to the state of transgender medical care.

the FDA is partisan, acts in partisan ways, and is filled with people who consider themselves Democrats and with political donations to Democrat or more "leftward" orgs signifying their allegiances

"the admin state is a nonpartisan affair" is not a defensible position in 2023

additionally, claiming a political entity created through politics which acts on the politic on behalf of the politic isn't "political" is absurd

"political" is absurd

I didn't say it wasn't political, I said that it wasn't partisan.

In any case, simply because most people at the FDA will be Democrats that doesn't mean one can automatically conclude every decision they make on specific approval of specific treatments will be part of some partisan agenda.

"the admin state is a nonpartisan affair"

I think this is actually broadly true. Undeniably, Democrats are overrepresented significantly in civil service work, but the administrative state opposition that it was frequently claimed Trump would encounter never materialised.

why would "every action taken" have to be "necessarily" part of "some partisan agenda" in order for the FDA to be not "nonpartisan"?

nor did I say that was the only reason to conclude the FDA was partisan

we went from you broadly labeling the FDA as "a nonpartisan affair" to now moving the discussion to defending that every decision taken is part of a partisan agenda

this is silly

Firstly, for the average Democrat this is simply not an important issue.

Literally every single democrat on my street has one or more pride flags flying way out into the road so nobody can miss it. Some of them replaced the old version with the "progress pride" thing last year, while others just fly both. Half of them have "in this house we believe trans women are women" signs up.

I am not going to believe you that they do not care about this when it seems to have eclipsed race as the number one thing to signal party loyalty and make ominous threats to dissenters over.

Wait what, aren't you German? Where do you live? Kreuzberg? shudder

Haha this was a terrible name to pick, wasn't it.

Not sure if you know this, but Bernd is a stereotypical German boomer name. It is also what anons are called on the German chans.

Yeah, it was a reference to an old krautchan thing. Talk about dating yourself: may as well put up a "get off my lawn!" sign at this point.

"Well, actually, have you considered you might not be trans? Let's work on some of your other mental health issues and then revisit this."

One of the most sensible things that Jordan Peterson said recently was pointing out that body dysmorphia is normal among women with mental health issues. So, if society links body dysmorphia closely to transgenderism and doctors put zero inquiry into whether the dysmorphia is symptomatic of the woman's other mental health problems, then overdiagnosis of transgenderism among women will result.

Anecdotally, detransitioning does seem to be more common among ex-transmen than ex-transwomen, but I don't have stats. The common pattern seems to be "Autistic or otherwise unusual woman develops depression/social anxiety/socialising issues as an adolescent, starts transitioning, maybe develops dysmorphia AGAIN (now wanting to be a woman) and detransitions, often with permanent or long-lasting damage to her body." Both before and after she started transitioning, the real problem was her socialisation and mental health challenges, not that she was in the wrong body. You can't solve such issues with surgery, but that is the impression that many such women are getting.

Anecdotally, detransitioning does seem to be more common among ex-transmen than ex-transwomen

Completely spurious reasoning but I feel like a lot of this would be down to transmen having more to lose by opting to be a male and thereby losing out on 'the sisterhood'/social connections versus low-status men essentially going from nobody giving a fuck to a built-in social network when they opt to transition. I also feel like men are more likely to actually achieve something approaching what they want out of the transition, whilst in my own experience of Transmen there's a lot of very garbled logic about essentially wanting to be a top 1% guy to experience those perceived advantages without realizing they're renouncing female privilege and moving onto... petite feminine male non-privilege.

The rather brutally honest evaluation of this I've seen is that they don't realise before transitioning that being a short guy with wide hips and no muscles is not going to do them much good.

It's like the geographic cure for dealing with problems - "if I just start afresh someplace nobody knows me, it will all work out better". For some people, be it FTM or MTF, transitioning will fix their problems. For others, swapping genders is not going to fix their depression or loneliness or other problems.

petite feminine male non-privilege.

Especially not good if they are interested in men, especially long-term relationships. AFAIK, it's hard enough for gay men to find committed partners, and even worse if you're playing in a crowded field (feminine gay men).

detransitioning does seem to be more common among ex-transmen than ex-transwomen, but I don't have stats

According to this article, the number of subscribers to /r/detrans has risen from a few hundred to 44,000 in the space of five years. Allowing that not every subscriber is a detransitioner themselves, it's still a striking increase.

Absolute numbers aren’t exactly the best here, given that pro-trans awareness has also skyrocketed in that time. It’s also compatible with boring subreddit life cycles. Or even dramatic ones, like a flood of activists looking for rage bait.

It also…doesn’t address the gender ratio question at all.

given that pro-trans awareness has also skyrocketed in that time.

Are trans people really substantially more visible now than they were in February 2018? Back then we already had Caitlyn Jenner, Jazz Jennings, Laverne Cox, Sophie, the Wachowskis. The Danish Girl came out in 2014.

It also…doesn’t address the gender ratio question at all.

Yeah I know, I just happened to have encountered a statistic pertaining to detransitioning this week so I thought I'd mention it.

I've never actually heard of a doctor at one of these clinics saying, "Well, actually, have you considered you might not be trans? Let's work on some of your other mental health issues and then revisit this."

I'd love to find out I am wrong...

While it's nowhere near as common as the early 00s (where "spend six months figuring yourself out" was the WPATH recommendation), and most of the more cautious stories are from more Red Tribe areas, there are still some times where this does happen, both for legitimate reasons and for sometimes overcautious ones. The current keyword is "mental readiness", but it seems to change every couple years and I'd expect that to continue.

((The flip side is that the last twenty years of political everything about this means that people build tools to work around it, so the people who most worry about are going to gravitate to the shrinks who advertise about questioning the least. Which isn't the same as the people who most need to be questioned, but thanks to BPD and psychosis has at least a little overlap.))

I think the pendulum overcorrected, but there's reasons you'll still see gatekeeping mentioned in trans-heavy spaces, and it's not just exaggeration or memory.

Completely agreed. But I, for one, find him vindicated and gloriously so. So there's that.

And even after this fairly comprehensive vindication of Singal, I doubt a single person on the other side actually had their mind changed or their priors shifted an iota.

This is something that's never going to happen, largely because of Kayfabe politics. I don't think we're going to see activists on this give up a single inch. And I mean...I do think objectively there's room to give given up, right? I think it's OK to say that it's bad if there's no assessment done and that shouldn't happen. I think that's giving up an inch. And that's in line with what Singal's argument is for what should happen, is high-quality individualized care.

It's possible maybe this could become a new windmill for me to tilt at, and maybe I'm wrong, but I feel it strongly. I don't think they can give up a single inch. Because an inch isn't an inch. It's actually a mile.

I do think there's an underlying question that's being ignored here. Can exposure to Progressive/Academic models of sex, gender and power or at least, the popularized crude forms, result in Gender Dysphoria or something approaching such? Not universally, of course. But are there people susceptible to this in a way, where exposure to these things might result in significant mental and emotional trauma?

Because I'll be blunt. If we're talking about a recommendation for support or therapy, largely speaking I do think this is the road it's going down more often than not. And if that's the case, if this is something that we should be aware of....then maybe the good guys are not always the good guys. Maybe there needs to be some level of care, or safeguards or whatever put in place. Maybe the world is more complicated than babyfaces and heels, of good guys and bad guys, of white and black.

I do think there's an underlying question that's being ignored here. Can exposure to Progressive/Academic models of sex, gender and power or at least, the popularized crude forms, result in Gender Dysphoria or something approaching such? Not universally, of course. But are there people susceptible to this in a way, where exposure to these things might result in significant mental and emotional trauma?

My contention is that this is where a majority of contemporary homosexuality comes from, never mind gender dysphoria.

It's not that leftist memes swept away bigotry and now everyone's out of the closet and able to be their authentic selves without fear of ostracism / lynching; no, buddy, you just got memed, tricked, into reneging against your genetic imperatives by a slick "mere exposure" advertising campaign.

My understanding is that estimates of the rate of full blown homosexuality have remained roughly stable since as far back as the Kinsey report. It's true that bisexual identification has gone up in younger generations, but I suspect this is largely a matter of signaling and doesn't necessarily translate to a proportionally increased rate of homosexual intimacy.

I wholeheartedly disagree - in fact, I think that the existence of the closet and a reason for gay people to stay in it actually increases the prevalence of gay people in society. Homosexuality is partially heritable, and when gay people have to perform heterosexuality they will often end up having more children, thus reducing or negating the penalty to reproductive fitness imposed by homosexuality. It's another one of those paradoxical outcomes where increasing suppression of homosexuality actually creates more homosexuality in the population.

Do you have any actual evidence for that belief?

I honestly just decided I’ll be a bigot and have worked out that trans people don’t exists. Realistically I think there’s an incredibly small percent of the population that some hormone thing went wrong and really have gender confusion.

It feels a lot like anorexia. Where Scott just wrote a piece about how it wasn’t common in society until one case got publicized and now you have an epidemic of anorexia and the same process has occurred in multiple societies. Or like one mass shooting leads to multiple Maas shooting.

So it’s part of the culture war I get no interest in reading the nuances of. It’s like trying to debate caring about a cult of Scientology.

Rather than saying they don't exist, it would be more accurate and productive to say that they have a mental illness. Like with people with anorexia. It exists, it can cause suffering, it's complicated and hard to solve rather than just "made up" in a way that a five year old pretending to be a cowboy is. But it exists within the realm of psychology, and therefore effective treatments will also be within the realm of psychology: therapy and medications. And it is socially irresponsible to enable the behavior and reinforce the illness, even though sympathy may be appropriate as it is for most mental illnesses.

But it exists within the realm of psychology, and therefore effective treatments will also be within the realm of psychology: therapy and medications.

I don't think the conclusion follows.

I, like many men, have a similar problem to transgender folks: I'm Dwayne Johnson in the body of a 40+ computer programmer. The solution is squats, deadlifts, bench press, road work and clean eating, not therapy and medication. Body transformation >> body acceptance, at least in this particular case where body transformation has so many other benefits. And it's pretty easy to reverse the transformation and go back to dad bod if desired.

The principle that "what starts in psychology stays in psychology" seems to be false.

Now in the transgender case it's trickier because body transformation doesn't work very well and it seems like the desire for body transformation is often far less permanent than the transformation itself. But that is fundamentally a question of cost/benefit analysis (and I think the modern world is getting it wrong).

Abstract principles like what you describe don't help. If we had a 100% perfect and reversible gender transition, there would be no reason not to let people try on an opposite gender body just for fun.

I, like many men, have a similar problem to transgender folks: I'm Dwayne Johnson in the body of a 40+ computer programmer.

If those things are actually similar, that blows up the entirety of trans discourse into atoms.

If "I'm a woman stuck in a man's body" is just a more dramatic way of saying "I wish I was a woman", there's no good reason to concede any of the demands of the trans community. Not the bathrooms, not avoiding "misgendering", not women's sports, or women's prisons. You can wish all you want, why should anyone care?

You can wish all you want, why should anyone care?

People should care because it's good for us to care about one another.

Rather, you can wish all you want, but why should anyone bear the costs of your wishes?

This is, for me, a recurrent political challenge as an American, because I end up stuck between the bifurcated "standard positions" constantly. I object to abortion but I value doctor-patient confidentiality, so as long as I don't know it's happening, I don't think I have much to say about abortion--but if you want to spend tax dollars making it affordable, accessible, etc. then I have a problem. If a man wants to dress in lipstick and ballgowns, enjoy! But if he wants to police my language and my thinking by making implausible demands concerning his pronouns, he can fuck right off.

The law is at its most ethically plausible when it is mediating conflicts between important interests. Modern welfare states, however, are substantially modern manipulation states, deploying government coercion not to mediate legitimate conflicts but to thumb the scales in furtherance of questionable aims. People think it's not good enough for the state to merely abolish segregation laws; they think states must proactively "integrate" communities, even over the objections of historically oppressed minorities. People think it's not good enough for the state to decriminalize activities; they want the state to subsidize those activities. This, I think, actively erodes the care that we should quite naturally feel toward the other humans in our lives. I should care if my friend wishes to have a different body; if the technology existed to actually change them into what they want to be, I'd be all for it!

But I wouldn't pick up the tab for it, and should not be required to pick up the tab through insurance pooling or taxation--any more than I should be required to pick up the tab for their wished-for sports car.

object to abortion but I value doctor-patient confidentiality, so as long as I don't know it's happening, I don't think I have much to say about abortion...

I've never found the confidentiality argument from Roe persuasive, and I don't think the legal system ever did either. Any coherent principle that treatments are exclusively between doctors and patients has to skip over that Roe was never found to legalize medical marijuana or euthanasia, both of which we've punished patients and doctors for in the past.

I think there are reasonable arguments in either direction, but a hard libertarian view of the doctor-patient relationship seems only to be referenced as a rhetorical cudgel rather than a principled argument.

I think there are reasonable arguments in either direction, but a hard libertarian view of the doctor-patient relationship seems only to be referenced as a rhetorical cudgel rather than a principled argument.

Well, it was used as a throwaway example in this case, but since it is apparently all anyone wants to talk about...

My substantive position on abortion is that it should not be legal except in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. But because I am not against abortion in all cases, I have created an enforcement problem for myself. How should doctors confirm rape/incest/etc.? This creates a potentially perverse incentive for women to lie to their medical providers about what happened, and about things that may require doctors to report to law enforcement. Sending a man to prison for a rape he did not commit strictly because you do not want to have his baby is morally repugnant, of course, but people have, and will, lie for far less.

Consequently, my resort to doctor-patient privilege is less of a "hard libertarian" view than it is an attempt to balance all competing interests and think of a policy that raises the fewest serious problems. If I were the tyrant in charge of such things, then, I would forbid the advertising of abortion services and spend no public resources enabling abortions. But I would also not criminalize the provision or acceptance of abortion services. There are obviously other details I'd have to iron out re: deliberate murder of the unborn, and really I'd like to see abortions that do happen limited to very early in any given pregnancy. But the real point of saying all this is just to further illustrate how wildly outside the realm of remote possibility my views are. Absolutely no one cares what I think on the matter; my views give too much to their outgroup, pretty much no matter who their outgroup is.

How should doctors confirm rape/incest/etc.?

The difficult to diagnose ones are crimes so perhaps use conviction of the perpetrator if we were organized enough to have trials within 9 months.

An alternate method is to have an abortion court where the woman makes her case and an interested party for the rights if the baby make their case and an impartial jury decides. Burn the records afterward, sealing stopped being trustworthy too long ago.

People should care because it's good for us to care about one another.

Rather, you can wish all you want, but why should anyone bear the costs of your wishes?

Nope. I'm sorry, I'm just one man, and there's millions of human tragedies unfolding every day. I don't have that many fucks to give away, if I actually cared for everyone I'd be a nervous wreck. I'm actually happier to pick up the tab for someone's fanciful wish, than to be forced to care for it. You're Dwayne Johnson stuck in a dadbod? Here, have a gym subsidy, or something. You want a sports league for guys who wish they were women? Why the hell not, knock yourself out. You want me to care? Why? Who are you anyway, and why did you follow my daughter into the locker room?

I object to abortion but I value doctor-patient confidentiality

It's off topic, but I don't get that argument. Doctor-patient confidentiality is not absolute. We let doctors handle pretty hard drugs, but my understanding is that if a doctor starts prescribing hard drugs for the explicit purpose of getting their patients to trip balls, they're getting locked up. Doctor-patient confidentiality would get even more disregarded when the lives of third parties were involved. I don't think a doctor is allowed to say "I have just the thing for your condition! Here's a prescription for carrying out an assassination!"

Nope. I'm sorry, I'm just one man, and there's millions of human tragedies unfolding every day.

That's fine, but it's probably worth noticing that this is not what you said. What you said was:

...why should anyone care?

This is meaningfully distinct. "Why should anyone care about that" is very different from "I have no reason to care about that." I quite agree that you have no reason to care what some rando wishes, or even what a great many randos wish. Some dude in a dress follows your daughter into the locker room, well, you have great reason to care about your daughter's comfort, and no reason at all to make that a lower priority than his comfort. But noticing that you don't have any reason to care, while important, is not the same as saying that no one should care.

Doctor-patient confidentiality is not absolute.

I didn't say that it was, but as you note, it was just a side point to illustrate my frustration with the polarization of certain arguments.

You are being excessively literal in a way which is the scourge of rationalists.

"Why should anyone care" means "why should people other than the ones central to the situation care", not literally "why should any human being care".

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This is meaningfully distinct. "Why should anyone care about that" is very different from "I have no reason to care about that." I quite agree that you have no reason to care what some rando wishes, or even what a great many randos wish. Some dude in a dress follows your daughter into the locker room, well, you have great reason to care about your daughter's comfort, and no reason at all to make that a lower priority than his comfort. But noticing that you don't have any reason to care, while important, is not the same as saying that no one should care.

I'm having issues explaining what I'm driving at. No, they're not distinct, it's not just about me. The "traditional" way to talk about a gender dysphoria, it's that it's an extremely rare psychological condition causing people a lot of distress over the sex they're born with. If this is what we're going with, fine, I do see a reason why society should care, the same way we should care about schizophrenics, phobics, bipolars, etc. tikimixologist said it's somehow similar to wanting to be more fit, if they're qualitatively similar, then yeah, I'm sorry I don't see why anyone should care. You can want all you want, please give me a good reason for anyone to care. If "people should care because it's good for us to care about one another", that sets the bar for caring so low, we'd all be curled in a fetal position, and sobbing all the time from all the caring we're doing for everyone else.

body transformation doesn't work very well

Do you mean the transformation itself is poor or that transformation is a poor treatment for the illness?

In your fantasy future where

100% perfect and reversible gender transition

Is possible and available, would you expect this to cure the dysphoric cohort?

My suspicion is that other symptoms would emerge. Are anorexics cured / happy once they reach their weight loss goals?

Do you mean the transformation itself is poor or that transformation is a poor treatment for the illness?

I'm not the person you're responding to but I think the answer to both questions is yes. There's no way to enable trans women to get pregnant, neovaginas are a laughably poor substitute for the real thing (functionally and visually), facial feminization surgery only goes so far (especially if the recipient has already completed puberty). On the trans men side of things, no amount of testosterone will enable any trans man from achieving the muscle mass and bone density of the average cis man, and you can't ejaculate with a neopenis.

In answer to the second question, there was a study conducted in Sweden which found that undergoing gender reassignment surgery did not significantly improve the recipient's likelihood of committing suicide. Obviously beware the man of one study (one obvious potential confounder: a trans person even considering undergoing said procedure is probably in far greater distress and hence proneness to suicide than a trans person who isn't considering it), but anyone presenting medical transition as a silver bullet is either ignorant or deceitful.

I, like many men, have a similar problem to transgender folks: I'm Dwayne Johnson in the body of a 40+ computer programmer. The solution is squats, deadlifts, bench press, road work and clean eating, not therapy and medication. Body transformation >> body acceptance, at least in this particular case where body transformation has so many other benefits. And it's pretty easy to reverse the transformation and go back to dad bod if desired.

That sounds like therapy.

Like, talk therapy involves lifestyle changes all the time. It can be an important component of treatment. This is still, 'what starts in psychology stays in psychology'.

I'm Dwayne Johnson in the body of a 40+ computer programmer. The solution is squats, deadlifts, bench press, road work and clean eating, not therapy and medication.

You forgot steroids.

EDIT:

(I'd like to add that without the steroids, he'd probably look half as muscular, which would still be rather impressive in the context of our sedentary society )

I dunno why the rock is always the go-to example of steroids overuse. He's 6'4 and 260 pounds. This is really tall. Using the cube law of scaling, this is the same as a 5'7 man who weighs 178, which is not so unreasonable. Even Joe Rogan is 15 pounds heavier at about the same height.

He did three different professions (football, wrestling, acting) all notorious for steroid use. He's noticeably more muscular than he was at 30.

People who use steroids think he's almost certainly using based on the way he looks. Discussions on nattyornot is almost unanimous.

Going by FFMI he is is borderline, but I think it's safe to assume he's on something.

This is more correct than cubic scaling when comparing individual people rather than across animals. This is why both FFMI and BMI use a square in the denominator despite the fact that the third power has been proposed for more than a century now. Tall people are not just linearly scaled up short people. A square simply describes the observed variation better. Using a square law The rock is the equivalent of a 202 pound, 5'7" guy, very lean, at 50 years old.

It's not clear to me what the reference to Joe Rogan is here. He is not nearly as lean, and I think is open about using exogenous anabolics in the form of "TRT" and HGH.

I don't know where the line is between use and overuse. But the Rock is visibly, obviously cycling a stack of anabolic steroids.

don't think the conclusion follows.

Okay yeah, you're right, and my statement was worded too strongly. It does not follow with logical certaintly that psychological issues must be solved solely within psychology, and there are plenty of counterexamples. But it should be the first thing to try. Plenty of "trans" people have other psychological issues and comorbidities that cause distress, and the trans thing is a red herring, a panacea they've been sold to solve all of their problems. And if they transition those issues still exist but now their one panacea has been tried and they think their problems will never go away. and they have a mutilated body.

And even for someone with actual gender dysphoria as their primary problem. Maaaybe it's an objective desire, analogous to your body building issue, where they inherently wish they had a certain body type, and getting that body type solves their issue. But maybe it's relative: grass is greener. Maybe part of their brain perpetually and irrationally insists that they are ugly and disgusting despite being perfectly health and attractive (a lot of teenage girls have body image issues like this). They just don't want their current body, whatever it happens to be. And no matter what it changes to, that part of their brain doesn't stop telling them that they're disgusting, because it's broken in some psychological way, not actually grounded in their physical body. Transitioning will not help with this latter case, and will in fact make it worse (and does, when this happens in real life).

Yes, if we had a 100% perfect and reversible gender transition, then there would be a lower cost to just trying it and seeing if it works, so I would have much fewer objections to moving it earlier on the list of things to try. (There are still potential social issues, like letting creeps and rapists into women's safe spaces, or having people lie about their original sex to sexual partners who care about their partner's origins not just their current body, but those are a separate issue, and don't apply to good-faith actors who are genuinely seeking help.) But given the irreversible and mutilating brutality of current transition technology, I think it should be an absolute last resort after all interventions and even non-intervention have been attempted and the only alternative is suicide. Maybe in a few decades if technology has advanced we can reconsider transitioning as a viable treatment mechanism. Not today.

This is just debating the meaning of the word exist. Sherlock Holmes does not exist, because he is made up fictional character. On the other hand Sherlock Holmes does exist as a made up fictional character with his own books, movies and TV shows and centuries long impact on culture.

So in the end I think you and OP want to convey the same thing. Trans people exist as a social construct, as a manifestation of certain cultural process. Of course you can debate impact trans people have on culture and so forth, but OP does not think it merits deeper discussion about the nature of trans as a real category. Another analogy would be debating existence of God - it is one thing to accept it as a social construct and studying impact of this cultural meme on real history. And it is another thing to seriously debate true nature of god as if he is real in the same sense as you are real and if he is one person or three persons in reality etc. This could be considered a category error given that many people have premise that god does not exist in that way.

I feel it's perfectly valid to say that Gender Dysphoria exists as a medical diagnosis and yet trans people exist as a social construct aimed at addressing/ameliorating said social construct.

I feel it's perfectly valid to say that Gender Dysphoria exists as a medical diagnosis and yet trans people exist as a social construct aimed at addressing/ameliorating said social construct.

I agree. To use another analogy: "Bob thinks he is Jesus Christ" can be grounds for valid medical diagnosis of "personality dysphoria" or whatnot. However debating the nature of Jesus Christ in this context is useless.

Are Jesus Bob and his disciples going to insist we call him Lord and accept his divinity?

It is exactly like anorexia, and it's also exactly like Dennis Avner aka Stalking Cat.

Dysphoria is a disorder, treating the disorder should be mutually exclusive with affirmation. Yes, anorexics are too skinny, no they don't need to lose more weight. No, Dennis is not a tiger. No, men cannot become women, nor should they try, and neither can women become men. I've always been partial to the homosexual/AGP split to explain transsexual men, mostly because it pattern matches to the personal encounters I've had with them, but I have no idea what causes women to become transsexual. At this point I don't care why they are the way they are.

I have no patience for acceptance or affirmation, and my patience for simple tolerance shrinks every time I hear of stuff like this. It's a social contagion, an infohazard, and just like you shouldn't publicize and glamorize suicides, you shouldn't publicize or glamorize transsexuals.

you shouldn't publicize and glamorize suicides, you shouldn't publicize or glamorize transsexuals

Suicides and transsexuals are a good start, but if we were to rank order a list behaviors that shouldn't be glamorized or publicized those wouldn't be 1 or 2 on my list, though they'd probably make the top ten.

I think — love to the good ones like Scott — almost all of psychiatry is basically a pseudoscience dressed up as medical science. There’s just not the same level of skepticism and rigor behind the diagnosis and it’s not even something that most of them seem worried about.

The DSM defines various illnesses abut there are problems here. First, everything is based on self reported symptoms. This is not how a science-based medical diagnosis should work, especially now that anyone can simply Google and find out what to report. How does a doctor know you have the symptoms? You tell him, and he believes you. If you report losing your keys “often” and that you can’t pay attention in lectures, you have ADHD— with no checks to see if you actually have more trouble than anyone else of the same age. Second, most of the disorders are simply defined as symptom clusters, none of which are something objectively testable even if you wanted to. It’s a mess.

Add in that doctors caring for mental health quite often aren’t skeptical about anything their patients tell them, and it’s simply a patient wring their own diagnosis through the auspices of a doctor who will believe anything and use that to give you what you want.

Last time this came up, I gave a variety of DSM listings which were objective. They had symptoms with specific lab tests, or obvious external evidence. If one ends up eating sand regularly, that’s pica; no self-reporting is needed.

There are steelmen for subjective diagnoses like depression, too! My cousin tried to kill himself after his father’s death. He got committed for it, because that’s pretty good evidence that something is going on in his head.

Psychiatry is not limited to gender affirmation and Ritalin. You’re building a case that doctors “will believe anything” based on how many “seem worried” about meta-level concerns for their field. This is compatible with credulous doctors. It also fits with doctors as drug shills for Big Pharma, or as political fifth columnists. Or maybe you just don’t talk about the Scientific Method with lots of psychiatrists, I dunno.

How much of psychiatry do you think is real?

I think getting a full, accurate picture of someone's mind would have to basically involve spying on them without their knowledge to observe how they act. As someone who did see a psychiatrist for ASD (and got medicated), I think it helped overall, though I've been off medication for years and I have a hard time remembering what we did other than chat weekly. But thinking back on it, I think there were patterns of my behavior and other things I never really told him, and I wonder how that would have affected the diagnosis and his approach--but then, I also feel like he told me that I didn't have to talk about everything, or at least, he never pressured me to.

There are steelmen for subjective diagnoses like depression, too! My cousin tried to kill himself after his father’s death. He got committed for it, because that’s pretty good evidence that something is going on in his head.

Is it? I mean, the judgment that suicide is bad or an inappropriate response is itself, a moral and cultural one. The Indian women who threw themselves on their husband's pyres were not crazy - they were doing exactly as their morality and culture prescribed. Suicide right now is considered immoral, so we act to prevent people from doing it... sometimes. I understand it's back in fashion in Canada, and doctors will not only do nothing to stop you from asking for euthanasia, they'll give you a button to do it with.

Items eaten include earth, paper, chalk, feces, glass, paper and other nonfood items.

Huh, but what about paper?

The DSM defines various illnesses abut there are problems here. First, everything is based on self reported symptoms. This is not how a science-based medical diagnosis should work, especially now that anyone can simply Google and find out what to report.

I'm not sure this is a tenable position.

If you actually dig deep into the philosophy of disease and disorder in medicine, it's actually very hard to robustly define what an "illness" is, and there are actually lots of cases where the collection of symptoms is more valuable to doctors than the specific cause of what is going wrong in a person.

Consider over-the-counter medicine, which often just treats symptoms like fever, runny nose, or pain. Sure, it might be helpful to know the exact variety of flu or cold virus I'm dealing with, but researching and treating each of them individually would be costly for society, and it far more resource efficient to say, "Use what you can get at the supermarket to deal with the worst symptoms, and if you sickness gets bad enough, then go to the doctor for more specific medicine."

The process of constructing a definition of a "healthy human body" is a partially social one, and has points that are debatable. What's our cut-off for "unhealthy"? Is every measurable trait of the human body that correlates to shorter lifespan, or greater physical or mental distress automatically "unhealthy"? I'm sure I don't need to explain why that would be unworkable - but one example is that would have us saying that being tall is "unhealthy" since men tend to be taller than women, and tend to live shorter lives than women. But these kinds of questions pop up over and over in medicine, and the current medical consensus of what counts as a "disease" and what is merely a normal variation of human traits is going to be highly dependent on what treatments exist, what kind of measurements we can take, and past precedence.

The DSM is very clear in its introduction about the model it uses when thinking about mental disorders. It more or less acknowledges that the diagnostic categories are more practical than ontologically rigorous. They're telling the doctor, "In the past, when we've had patients that report issues x, y and z, we've generally found medicines a, b and c seem to help those patients in controlled studies." They're not telling doctors, "A patient reporting issues x, y and z, has a definitely 'real' disease A, which is mechanistically and reliably caused by b, c and d."

Though Scott stresses repeatedly, that anorexia or anything else is not "less real" even if the underlying cause is 100% social and 0% biological. Do you think mass shootings don't exist? Of course not. An anorexic girl will still be anorexic and is in danger to hunger herself to death.

This is a bit weird to truly wrap ones head around. Lets take demonic possession. Deciding that there are no demons (or maybe very few) is a valid position. But there is a difference between A) this isn't real, possessed people are faking it, and B) the brains predictive engine is very good in simulating, and the individual experience/qualia is suffering under demonic influence.

Deciding that there are no demons (or maybe very few) is a valid position.

Not only that, but convincing others that there aren't actually very many demons and the are probably not currently in the thrall of one seems likely to decrease the number of apparent demonic possessions. In contrast, saying that demonic possession is common, shouldn't be judged, and needs a flag to support brave people of possession seems likely to increase apparent demonic possession above ambient levels.

Well, I think that still could mean that the best way to help reduce the number of people suffering such conditions is to not publicize and normalize it so much.

I think the answer is ‘so what if it’s real that some people feel like women trapped in men’s bodies. Society doesn’t owe comfort to weirdos.’

I think your phrasing may come across as unduly harsh, but I'd agree with an amplified version. Society doesn't owe comfort to anyone. Comfort is something to seek and give on an individual basis, and generally isn't owed, with some exceptions, as within a family context.

It…kind of does, though. See the ADA, special ed, prison reform. Any number of other times society accepts some cost to mitigate harm for a disadvantaged group.

The question is how much.

All of those are errors. The ADA is the second reason we can't build anything (NEPA being the first). Special ed ends up consuming a large percentage, sometimes a majority, of education resources trying to educate the uneducable -- and in worse forms it sometimes ends up ruining education for the rest.

Like @The_Nybbler said, I think that the ADA was a huge mistake. Well intentioned, yes, but a mistake nonetheless. We can't reasonably try to build all of society to conform to the needs of a small minority of people.

I’ll defend it on veil-of-ignorance grounds, I guess. I don’t have strong feelings now, but I would want to have those accommodations if I were wheelchair bound or whatever. And unlike gender we have the expectation that it could happen to us. That makes it a hedge against breaking your leg or getting paralyzed.

I’m not sure that’s literally how the ADA got traction. There was a good dose of political pressure from the beneficiaries, as with women’s suffrage or race relations. But it was enough to get some outsiders saying “these people are right; it doesn’t matter that they can’t beat me in a fight.”

Point is, sometimes society does extend charity. Maybe pronoun usage, or making insurance cover hormone therapy, is too far. But it’s not unthinkable.

I’ll defend it on veil-of-ignorance grounds, I guess

I'll attack them on veil-of-ignorance grounds: Even if I ended up in a disadvantaged position myself, I'd rather be born into a society with functional institutions for the average person, than into a society that gives me more handouts, but results in massive barriers for getting anything done.

100% Most conservatives also agree, but, stereotypically, see it as the church helping widows and orphans.

We are a rich society, and I think that behooves us to help the less fortunate. The trick is how much, and doing it in a way that doesn't encourage too much becoming an 'unfortunate'. I think that's a really complex topic, and one, unfortunately that seems hard to talk about.

E.g. I think having decent unemployment insurance and welfare is a net social good, reduces stress, making people more willing to change jobs, and even reducing crime (as you have more to lose). OTOH, it of course incentivizes people who could work, but just don't, which parasitizes society. I don't think you can have the one side without some of the other, and the key to good policy is finding the balance, and ways decrease the bad effects in ways that don't decrease the good effects more.

So it’s part of the culture war I get no interest in reading the nuances of. It’s like trying to debate caring about a cult of Scientology.

Too bad it cannot stay a niche like scientology,. It's not like scientologists are demanding we use their lingo in everyday parlance.

There was a time up until probably the early 2000s when Scientology was a large part of the culture war, in particular regarding several legal battles between the church and it's detractors. They really were attacking anyone discussing Xenu, and both openly and covertly threatening their detractors. There are some pretty serious allegations against them.

I don't think Scientology is the best example here.

Maas

Mass-shootings As A Service. If you believe these are partially a social contagion caused by hysterical media coverage, then this is sort of true.

deleted

You can always shoot yourself! Be the change you want to see!

Paging Scott to include this in the next Bay Area House Party article.

Realistically I think there’s an incredibly small percent of the population that some hormone thing went wrong and really have gender confusion.

I mean the base idea here is that Gender Dysphoria is definitely a real thing that exists.

Meanwhile the whole trans movement is more about 'how does society decide that these people should be treated and what is appropriate in regards to them' then it's far more a matter of conjecture and debate.

The trans movement is also about "what does it mean to be trans," and "what traits make you trans," "is it morally and/or socially good/high-status to be trans," and "is it beneficial for a person to be trans" and other questions that are not just about how other people interact with/treat trans people.

It’s basically a subtype of body dysmorphia. How do we treat that? Surgery is contra indicated, that should give you some idea

Doesn't this imply that surgery would not help those with body dysmorphia (perhaps they might still feel the dysmorphia even after alteration), ergo, it wouldn't help trans people? But you could probably find trans people for whom surgery really did wonders for their mental well-being, i.e., it "cured" the dysphoria.

IIRC suicide rates remain static for trans people who undergo surgery - in other words no change in mood. Dysphoria would just move to some other aspect of themselves, like whack a mole.

Hard to disentangle the second order effects arising from trans surgery not being actually that great though -- is the gender-swap in and of itself making the people feel better, or is it the power arising from providing a locus of control over society and its denizens, or the feeling of putting one over on everyone?

Ironically a magical trans-sex pill wouldn't really provide these ancilliary benefits, and therefore might work less well at alleviating the discomfort -- it would be interesting to compare satisfaction between the "Bruce Jenner middle aged AGP dude" and the new crop who blocked their puberty and are directionally closer in appearance to their ideal, once they hit their 30s or so.

I'm honestly shocked Leibowitz had the bravery and integrity to do that. He must have been under tremendous pressure to join the pile-on and hand his authority to the gaslighters. Good on him, but I hope he won't be purged for it.

But I went to WPATH. There were whole sessions devoted to transitioning people with every imaginable comorbidity—like patients presenting with ‘multiple personalities’ who disagree about what irreversible interventions ‘they’ want to pursue

Holy shit, I didn't realize it was quite that bad. Only a decade ago the "multiple personality" thing was recognized as larping social contagion, and now it's back to being treated seriously?

I guess this shouldn't be surprising after the castration fetish forum member writing the wpath guidelines, but the gell-mann amnesia is hard to shake off.

There's this recurring phenomenon in psychology of fad illnesses that have gigantic spikes in diagnoses for diseases that are real but normally extremely rare. And typically specifically spikes of teenage girls.

Trans has clearly been going through the motions but it's bigger culturally than MPD or anorexia ever were and at this point I think it might be self sustaining.

Appeal to historical patterns is a lot more compelling when it’s not immediately followed by “and this time will be different.”

I was there when trans was this obscure thing nobody gave a shit about, I can tell how different things are now from first hand experience.

I don't fucking know what's gonna happen. The other fads I know of didn't have a political movement attached.

But if there's no level of social contagion involved here I'd like to know how you explain the 1000% growths. Because so far it's the only compelling explanation I've found and the only answer people claiming otherwise have given me is insults and dismissals of official statistics as lies.

It’s not that there can’t be a social contagion involved. I have no doubt that the movement has picked up trend chasers, disaffected youth, hypochondriacs, whatever. How many? I don’t know, I haven’t looked at detransition stats lately, but that’d be a good lower bound. I definitely wouldn’t pick number of Reddit subscribers, especially due to the attached political movement.

I’m objecting to the anorexia comparison for a different reason. You’ve observed that both trans and anorexia have the trappings of a fad. But trans doesn’t seem to be hitting the expected lifecycle. This suggests two options.

If trans is a fad, then like anorexia, it should be expected to wane. If trans isn’t going to fade away, then it perhaps it isn’t like anorexia in other ways.

Instead, you’ve picked from both options. It’s like anorexia (contagious, not “real”, should be stigmatized) except when it isn’t (politicized, expected to self-sustain).

I'm honestly shocked Leibowitz had the bravery and integrity to do that. He must have been under tremendous pressure to join the pile-on and hand his authority to the gaslighters. Good on him, but I hope he won't be purged for it.

My model of Leibowitz, pending specific updates, is the same as for NYT editors I've explained here. Actual top managers do not want any «Cathedral» to grow underneath their feet. He doesn't necessarily care about the object level conflict. He may even be more sympathetic to the radical side. But he runs this thing. He's the boss, the alpha of the pack. You use the correct word – hand his authority. It was a direct challenge to him: hey boss, we wanna eat this dude, give us the greenlight OK? Just keep silent about this pesky lil detail we made up that compromises the reputation of your organization, we'll take care of everything. Just sit this one out... Had he agreed, he'd have recognized them as decision makers. And then it would have been as bad as any cancellation, for all his power and status would have become nominal, a shell at the mob's beck and call.

Before long they'd have started to casually refer to more unhinged opinions he did not endorse – what's the harm, the old man's a bit out of the loop (heh) but his heart's in the right place, he's gonna see our point when he gets to it, why bother him. His own assistants would have begun signing documents without his authorisation (realistically they already do, but only when believing he does intend them to do so) – assuming he'd find it too stressful to retract, and would instead escape to routine work, to conferences, to personal affairs... And then a younger alpha, an informal leader, having built a coalition of energetic strivers, would have gratefully received the reins.

Power balance in institutions is surprisingly dependent on such archaic chimp instincts. Do not give your boss the impression you want to make him your bitch unless you're ready to strike.

Only a decade ago the "multiple personality" thing was recognized as larping social contagion, and now it's back to being treated seriously?

Scott Alexander has written about this, I feel pretty certain. Tulpas (intentional creation of additional personality) and victims (unintentional multiple personalities) seem to be real phenomena, if rarer than claimed.

Scott Alexander has written about this, I feel pretty certain.

Yes he has

Wow, Freddie was going off in the comments.

We've had some recent discussion here, too. I think Singal's motioning around the modern "plural/multiplicity" thing, which is still weird, but it's a different sort of problem than the more classical DID/MPD "is this a giant trauma reaction, or are shrinks training people into it" (and, perhaps more importantly, doesn't have the 'large memory gap' symptom that a lot of DID fakers abused).

I'm pretty sure that 200 years from now we will regard contemporary psychology and pyschiatry the same way we regard galenic medicine today.

Jesus Christ.

I wish Twitter wasn’t taken seriously as The Public Square. This is depressingly stupid. Why would someone make easily falsifiable claims about an organization’s stance and about his role in it?

  1. because he expects no one with standing to call him out

  2. because he expects anyone who does to be absolutely dogpiled by this cesspool of a website

Wrong on 1), right on 2), I guess.

I despise that this objective question—“does the WPATH say such-and-such?” Or perhaps “is the WPATH guideline reasonable?”—is getting settled by shitslinging and victory laps. Perhaps I was foolish to think it could be anything else.

I look forward to seeing what our resident BAR contributor has to say on the issue.

Why would someone make easily falsifiable claims about an organization’s stance and about his role in it?

Because he wants to run for Congress?

No, but seriously, because a non-zero number of people will not bother to either check the claim themselves, or believe the people who did because they are already affectively aligned with the position the falsehood is supporting. Also, it's much, much easier to sling bullshit than it is to fight back against it, and so in the long-run the bullshitting side is going to get something to slip past the filters, or just convince people through the "if there's smoke, there's fire" method of shifting the Overton window.

Really, that's the part that I tentatively describe as "gaslighting" (hate the term). One questionable "dude" makes an absurd claim, and the rest of Twitter NPC falls in line. When any neutral reader would accept Jesse's straightforward interpretation.

This twitter dude sounds like a compulsive liar / fantasist. I don't think they can help themselves and they say the most absurd unbelievable shit and I think most of the time the people around them either enjoy the stories or tolerate it so they don't usually get meaningful pushback.

I wish Twitter wasn’t taken seriously as The Public Square. This is depressingly stupid. Why would someone make easily falsifiable claims about an organization’s stance and about his role in it?

because ultimately there a little consequences. twitter is probably the most free speech site on the planet (Musk had nothing to do with this, it's just part of the platform) if your bar for "free speech on the internet" isn't "lets me spam slurs all day long" and so when people can spread something false information, it'll be harder for people to shout correct information louder.

The popcorn tastes unusually good this week.

So...guilty until proven innocent? This has never happened before.

Low-stakes crisis like this is the outcome of having a huge creative and intellectual-elite class, abundance, and economic prosperity and geopolitical stability. Twitter is the prefect medium for this. It will get much worse. Who's funding all of this. It's being funded by an endless supply of substack $, subscriber $. It's coming from somewhere. Like with Google we know they make money from advertisers buying ads, but who is is funding all this culture war?

I suspect that for the causes the right favors it's more grassroots (apparently a good chunk of the funding for the last North American right-wing protest came from the US even though it didn't occur there- admitting that doesn't help anyone involved, of course) and for the causes the left favors it's a lot more organized.

[Assume left and right are just sides of the aisle for the following].

The right-wing party doesn't listen to its voters as much as the left-wing party does partially because the people the State wants to target disproportionately exist on the right (and right-wing parties aren't immune to this when they form government), so they can't be as centralized for legibility reasons WRT the State. Substack's model of "Stripe doesn't serve Substack directly" helps them significantly in this regard- Patreon isn't as useful for the more interesting parts but not all parts need to be interesting.

For the causes the left favors? The grassroots movement for them haven't been nearly as strong- mainly because they have less middle (a double helping of "they're the State so they're necessarily against it" and "their civil religion currently happens to align with its elimination"), so it's organized backing by the strongest foreign corporation that owns the American means of production along with domestic corporations through both official State and deep State (in the "adopt the [anti-middle-class/right] religion, or we stop inviting you to the WEF dinner parties and start working against you" sense) pressure.

Twitter is the prefect medium for this. It will get much worse.

And now you know why left-wingers are apoplectic about the fact they no longer directly control Twitter; I think they believe (correctly?) that they've lost Twitter as command and control for their human botnet like they made heavy use of in 2020 WRT coordinating riots and general disease hysteria unless they manage to neutralize him and state power is all they have to do that (left-wing people aren't Starlink or Tesla customers). Remember, the only people who stopped using Twitter when he bought it were the religious, and religion alone is clearly not enough (which the relative failure of Gab and Truth Social should have made clear before the Left tried and failed with Mastodon).

(left-wing people aren't Starlink or Tesla customers)

Lots of left-wing people are Tesla customers. But they're not going to stop buying Teslas. Left wing consumer "boycotts" almost never actually work, they're a sort of theater where a left-wing organization declares they'll boycott and left-wingers either at the principal or at some middleman pretend to be scared of the boycott and cave in. For instance, Twitter lost advertising because the ad agencies (middlemen) are controlled by leftists, not because consumers were actually going to punish companies for advertising on Twitter.

left-wing people are Tesla customers

Sure, but that suggests that they're not quite true believers in the Left's civil religion and are more likely (though of course that isn't guaranteed) to switch sides/be skeptics when the chips are down; at some point they had to encounter the cognitive dissonance between its two luxury beliefs: being "save the environment" and "Elon man bad" and they chose the answer that was closer to reality (rejecting moralism while still working towards a goal they share happens to currently be right of center).

Or they picked the inherently right-wing answer of "the value proposition is actually really good with my usecases" and considered that it aligns with a left-wing luxury belief either as a bonus or something they priced in as having value unto itself.

(Alternately: there are no true Scotsmen, but some Scots are more Scottish than others.)

And now you know why left-wingers are apoplectic about the fact they no longer directly control Twitter; I think they believe (correctly?) that they've lost Twitter as command and control for their human botnet like they did in 2020 WRT coordinating riots and general disease hysteria unless they manage to neutralize him and state power is all they have

This is why I'm still slumped that elites let Elon buy twitter. Top billionaire elites could have easily pooled their money together to buy it. Disney alone is worth $190 billion but just $40 billion for a major organ of propaganda is almost a good deal. Maybe they are hoping he runs it to the ground and then buy it back cheap, but why take that risk?

Top billionaire elites could have easily pooled their money together to buy it.

No. Only Musk could do it.

Most billionaires aren't actually that rich. They wouldn't be able to come up with enough money.

And of the ones that are, most of them aren't American (and the US would absolutely not let a foreign buyer get their hands on the Voice of America Twitter- Musk is US citizen enough for the government to offload its space program onto his company).

And of the ones that are, most of them work for technology companies that directly compete with Twitter (anti-trust law in the US is a dead letter these days, but if anything could get them to wake up it would be that- Musk isn't that kind of tech billionaire).

The thing that bothers me is that Musk is the only citizen in the US to whom its Constitution meaningfully applies, and has it in ways people meme about. There is a reason it was supposed to be for all citizens and this is it.

He purchased the First Amendment (he owns Twitter).

He purchased the Second Amendment (he owns a private fleet of ICBMs).

He purchased the Fourth Amendment (he owns a functionally-unjammable communications network).

If the country melts down sufficiently to allow a Caesar there's a very good argument to be made that these powers are sufficient to give him a crown.

If that happens, the furries (that also happen to be a good chunk of his staff, though not necessarily intentionally) will have been responsible for putting the Musk dynasty in charge of the entire world and the flag of the future will be a pawprint softly caressing a human face forever.

he owns a private fleet of ICBMs

Last I heard, it's a lot harder to get a working warhead on a rocket these days than it is to get the rocket.

Anything is a "warhead" at sufficient velocity.

Surely there's some non-nuclear explosives that are "good enough" to stick on a rocket...

Wait, furries? I'd ask where do they come in, but it sounds like the setup to a really gross punchline.

I'd ask where do they come in

The guy employs a lot of smart technical people.

That group just happens to disproportionately be furries.

That's it. History tends to have a sense of humor, so clearly this is the way it's going to go. Musky husky uwu

Any larger corporation could have done a much richer stock for stock swap, it didn't have to be cash only.

I think you give elites too much credit.

Or perhaps too much class interest. If you wouldn’t expect a small town of proles to coordinate for something, you shouldn’t expect a few billionaires to agree on it.

Look at how tenuous the chain of events has to be—all the risk of buying a business, and less obvious, legible upside. Adding more conspirators just makes the C/B worse as more potential competing interests get skin in the game.

I think it pours some water on some of these 'grand theories' that suggest collusion between powerful entities


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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.


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