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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34462 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Reposted from Theschism

Recently, there was a series of studies demonstrating that ADHD medications are both much less helpful than previously thought (boost lasts for only two years or so) and with much worse side effects, including heightened risks of dementia later in life.

According to privilege theory, this is impossible. ADHD medications are disproportionately given to white boys, the most privileged cohort on the planet. The System was supposed to protect them from harm. Anything given to that population was supposed to be checked rigorously. Medication that helps short term but ruins you later sounds exactly like something that would be given to minorities.

This is personal for me. I have adult ADHD (and possibly bipolar) so earlier in life I was trying to get Adderall. Ironically, my reasoning was the same as described by privilege theory although I didn't know it back then: "this is the same thing that western elite is using, so it must be good. Surely they woudn't poison their own children. That would be monstrous."

Fortunately, as I live in one of those "shithole countries" and not in the west I couldn't afford to see a psychiatrist. Only recently have I realized what a massive bullet I dodged. Today I am pretty well off and could probably afford any treatment but would never, ever see either psychologist or psychiatrist. Who knows which seemingly sound treatment will be revealed as ruinous decade from now? And that's why this male won't go to therapy. Or trust privilege theory.

In chess there is something called "material advantage". A point system you use to roughly determine who is in the lead. So Queen is worth 9 points, Rook 5, Bishop and Knight 3. So someone with queen and a rook is supposedly better than someone with two knights and two bishops. This analysis is pretty helpful on beginner and intermediate level.

But in chess, spatial positioning of the pieces is what really determines the victor. Grandmasters have no problem sacrificing materially valuable pieces if that puts them in favorable position. This is even more true of superhuman chess engines who play crazy alien chess that defies simple analysis.

I think privilege theorists (I think this is nicer term for wokists) have tendency to assign privilege according to point system which grades things like skin color but can't tell you how well positioned someone is. It is just kinda assumed each white person has access to privilege, regardless whether he truly has access to old boy network or not.

Pharma executives -- most of them white males -- are not going to shield white males outside old boy networks. Hence dementia-inducing medication given to white boys, and highly addictive opioids given to white men. Theorized general connection between white elite and all the other whites is just not there. There is only shareholder satisfaction.

I am uncharitable enough to compare privilege theory to evolutionary psychology -especially simplified version of evopsych as espoused by RedPillians and the similar. Both systems give you simplified toolset that is seemingly applicable to every situation, giving you the illusion of understanding everything while actually explaining little.

We hear how women are hypergamous. And they are. Women definitely do like high-status males. But what RedPill doesn't understand is that there are other countering forces. Namely, women don't like to share. High-status male that is already taken is less attractive than low-status one that isn't. And that's why high-status males generally don't have harems. (Although they benefit somewhat from serial monogamy).

Popular version of privilege theory similarly take into account some forces while ignoring some other forces. Sure middle class has privileges. But they are deeply anxious because transferring those privileges to their offspring is harder than ever. It is much less British aristocracy and more walking the tightrope over the abyss. This makes them deeply vulnerable to anyone promising them nostrums such as pills that would make their offspring better behaved.

Also if you have some money, but not enough to afford attorney from petty cash, you are much more vulnerable to any regulation that the powerful dream up. Because unlike the underclass, you are much more legible to the system. You have a job you and all your property is easy to find. I think that's what conservatives think by "anarcho-tyranny".

When you declare such people as privileged, you are declaring that you are simply not interested in helping them with any of those issues. And so, just as the pole is greasier than ever (due to outsourcing), those slipping are being scolded harder than ever.

But you know what? I am probably the last person who should complain about this. Ultimately, all this is to my advantage, as outsourcing that ratchets western middle class anxiety to the point of madness is directly benefiting me. I as a non-westerner am getting those jobs. So please continue belittling your middle class. Please continue ignoring all their problems.

Edit:

Studies:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3063150/

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110220193013.htm

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0161813X06000921

Hypergamy is a vacuous concept. People want to maximize positive attributes in their partners, you don’t say. It’s the male version of the female fear ‘all men want to do is replace their wives with younger models’.

I think the main difference is that male attributes are more legible and women are attuned to the relative status of their males. Men can have the relative attractiveness of their wives blur together and anyways they compete with other males on plenty of other categories that wife attractiveness is only one factor in many. Mean while until women have children to brag about other women can very quickly tell how tall, how apparently wealthy and how well placed a partner is in the legible male status hierarchy. Neither women nor men seem to care all that much about women's careers so despite energy being put there it doesn't really impact status anxiety all that much.

At least by perception the status of women is mostly one level removed from their control, what they can control is which man they attach themselves to. They get a facsimile of having high status by sleeping with the highest status male they can and convincing themselves that this is their true status. At least the single ones who didn't attach to a proto high status male, which is the underside of the iceberg often left undiscussed. These single people that make up the population we discuss have already been selected for something.

I think the main difference is that male attributes are more legible and women are attuned to the relative status of their males.

Interestingly, the same is true for crime. When men attempt to destroy their enemy, the signs are generally very, very visible- hard to hide scratches, bruises, and broken bones- but when women do the same, it's invisible and completely deniable (it's very difficult to prosecute a woman for false rape accusations, and their bullying more generally as the lies are told and the damage done behind closed doors and side channels).

As such, it takes a lot more effort to put an end to female bad actors (and a lot of the judgment will be on circumstantial evidence anyway), and the effect multiplies as the gender balance of an organization (including society at large) skews their way to the point where the (for lack of a better term) "begone thot" school of problem solving stops working.

Corruption is a difficult beast to deal with and no civilization ever survives it (States fall apart when the parasitic load gets too high, but can survive a lot of it to begin with); they all just fracture or are conquered (and we've managed to exterminate all barbarians that could do the latter).

Hypergamy doesn't describe a qualifier, it describes the disqualifier. Obviously, everyone WANTS the best, not the best they can get, but the best there is.

Men don't disqualify from having sex with or partnering up with a woman if she is of lower status than him. Women don't [dm]ate with lower-status men.

It's not what they want, it's what they viscerally don't want.

Disagree pretty hard. Men have a much lower bar for a partner before they say "I'd rather stay single" than women and men would rather sleep with many different partners than having a single super-high status partner. Or the other way around, some women, particularly while they're still young, apparently even prefer being a high-status man's affair over a low-status man's wife.

Just as an example, I personally know multiple women who "have trouble finding a good man" only to find out that they got hit on by a man who was, quite frankly, better than them. My wife confronted a friend of hers who had this problem and concluded herself that she will probably never find someone unless it's literally Brad Pitt, but he is also an accomplished researcher (her words, not mine). Meanwhile looking at my male friends who struggled, most jumped at the very first chance of getting any girlfriend whatsoever.

You should in particular compare what high-status man vs woman say and what they do, since this is the group that has most agency and can optimize for what they actually care about. High-status man will quite frequently have multiple affairs and rarely complain about finding a partner. High-status woman have much less affairs, and if they have one it's usually with a single man that is often even higher status than them, they will frequently complain about finding a good man and generally invest their resources into finding a single high-status man.

These are very simple, real differences between the sexes, and while you may use any word for it you like, hypergamy is a good one.

It’s undeniable that the status of their partner is more important for women than for men. If you want to call that hypergamy, fine, but to me it’s trivial, and doesn’t translate to the vitriol that usually accompanies the term.

That this way of choosing partners is worse than men’s is not clear. I don’t see much evidence that women would rather stay single than men, for example women are often asking men to commit more, ie be less single. But in any case this is also a legitimate preference, condemning an entire sex on that basis doesn’t make sense.

Saying that women are hypergamous is not a “condemnation”. It’s supposed to be a neutral descriptor of their mating strategy. The strategy itself is neither good not evil; it’s simply a brute fact, the natural outcome of biological and evolutionary factors beyond the control of any one individual.

Of course no descriptor is ever entirely neutral, and you do see vitriol accompanying the term, simply due to the fact that TRP/manosphere circles attract a lot of vitriolic young men who can’t get laid and are angry about it. But hypergamy itself isn’t inherently a “bad” thing.

Like Marx's description of capitalism is supposedly morally neutral and a brute fact. It becomes this sprawling, undefeatable monster of negative attributes of the other.

I also disagree that hypergamy as redpillers use it ( meaning , women will leave them at the drop of a hat for a higher-status man, women in general are far more likely than men to think their prospective partners are below them, etc) correctly describes women's behaviour and attitudes.

I think either your understanding of the conversations taking place is flawed or you're just looking at lower quality redpillers. It never turned into this sprawling, undefeatable monster in the circles I travelled in - the term has a very specific meaning, and even the additional connotations it took on were related to and in service of that meaning. Women will absolutely not leave them at the drop of a hat for a higher status man(notice how all marriages on earth didn't break up so that the women could go join President Trump's harem), and among people who are actually having conversations (and not just incels transforming rage and sexual frustration into boring screeds) hypergamy is viewed as one of many factors involved in female mate choice. You don't need to have a 140 IQ to understand why such a drive would come into being, and at the same time it is something that men(who simply do not function the same way) would want to know about.

Where did I condemn women, or implied that their way of choosing partners is worse? If it satisfies you, I will say that men's mate-seeking behaviour ranges from pathetic groveling on one end to callous hedonism on the other end, depending on their status. It is in no way better than women's mate-seeking behaviour.

Is it wrong to say it would depend on the man's age? I think the % preferring each option would be noticeability tilted in opposite directions for say 21 vs 31.

Are you saying you think the 21 year old would prefer the three 6's over the 9 and the 31 year old would prefer the 9 over the 3 6's? Or the other way around?

Correct on the first one, I think the average 21 year old would prefer the greater quantity and the average 31 year old would prefer the greater quality.

As a purely egoistic question? Absolutely the former, no questions asked, and I'm even talking about me personally here. Though I do think it applies to the average man as well, especially given I know how they talk when in all-male company & drunk. If anything in my experience I'm already somewhat unusual in that I actually want kids since I'm a teen instead of purely casual sex. But again, if I'm being honest to myself, I would prefer to have lots have kids with several 6/10 than to have only a few with a single 9/10, assuming I can provide for them.

Of course, in a how-to-structure-society meta way, I prefer for everyone to prefer the latter. So I do not think my egoistic preferences to be good, in fact they're very bad, but I think it is important to be aware of your failures & weaknesses.

As a gay man I would absolutely prefer three 6/10 guys than one 9/10 guy. I have been with guys who are 9/10 and it feels degrading because I know they're hotter than me and it makes me feel bad to be with them. The older I get the less I want to sleep with a super hot guy because it just makes me feel worse about myself. It's basically this meme. In theory I love guys who look super hot because I am attracted to masculinity but it's the cheap thrill subsides when we both know who's hotter. I can imagine myself as richer or smarter or better educated or better on any other metric than any hotter guy but none of these dimensions really matter to me when I'm with a man I perceive as physically hotter than me. I can only imagine that straight men ultimately go through this same process of realization- the classic Gilligan's Island trope comes to mind (younger guys go for Ginger because she's a glam bombshell, older guys go for MaryAnn because she's sweet and loving). The older I get the more I'm looking for a sweet and loving guy I can actually believe likes me, rather than a guy who others will think is hot. Having three men I can believe really like me is a million times more appealing than a guy hotter than me that makes me feel less hot than him.

I think you've misrepresented what I've said a bit, no doubt mostly my fault for weak communication. And I take the important grain of salt that I'm a man trying to model the mind space of women, as I can tell how poorly that tends to go the other way I should be humble in my assumptions. That said I did not mean to imply women are happy to be "pumped and dumped" by higher status males. They definitely want these men as committed partners. My point was that 'settling' seems to be harder for women than men for reasons I can understand.

I'm not perfectly happy with my post, it seems weak to the criticism of:

wait I thought you just said male status is more legible but now you're saying it's multifaceted enough that men don't have as much status anxiety when comparing themselves to other men. Is it legible or not?

To which I think I can respond that the stuff women find attractive in men, from what I can tell on the outside and having spent considerable effort in improving my attractiveness, are fairly legible but other male competition is more nuanced and not as dependent on the evaluation of women. I don't think I'm describing this all that well but do you at least agree that there is some asymmetry at play here?

Related is the idea that fucking an extremely hot or rich man is some great status symbol for women.

I've never seen this idea in RedPill spaces before - not from "official" sources, nor from any random commenters on reddit or blogs.

It's well understood in RedPill circles that men and women relate to sex differently and that women do not derive status from sex in the way that men do. The concept of hypergamy has nothing to do with women trying to make alleged displays of status.

every man who ever worked his way up in society who then married into old or established money, something that has happened throughout the entire history of civilization and still does toda

Precisely! It's well that you're describing economic selection for marriage, and not sexual selection/attraction. That's the whole point! What you described does not disprove the thesis about hypergamy, and is not, in fact, a case of hypergamy.

is that women sleep with a very attractive man and then assume that this is the same kind of person they can marry. Related is the idea that fucking an extremely hot or rich man is some great status symbol for women.

Well, yes, if you word it that way, of course it comes across as stupid. The way I'd word the Red Pill thesis on this is this: for women, it's self-evident and natural to develop an emotional bond to the man they enjoy fucking, and assume that the same is happening to the man; it's so natural to assume that they don't even recognize it. But for men, it isn't. That's the point.

Precisely! It's well that you're describing economic selection for marriage, and not sexual selection/attraction. That's the whole point! What you described does not disprove the thesis about hypergamy, and is not, in fact, a case of hypergamy.

Er, the original use case of hyeprgamy was exactly economic selection for marriage and that is how the term is still used outside of redpill spheres. Women being hypergamous has been accepted in my (non-western) culture since time immemorial. Men being hypergamous too is accepted although them being successfully hypergamous is rarer. Indeed when I get married I'll be paying close attention to the economic status of potential in laws before making my decision (someone who's a 8/10 fit for me by the only child of a very rich family is a much better choice for my future children than someone who's a 9/10 fit for me but comes from penury).

No, I do not think that the average women high-five each other every time they get pumped & dumped by a high status man and I find the insinuation rather insulting.

What I do claim however is that the average woman who struggles to find a long-term partner (note that this is already not the average woman) often has already been asked out by perfectly respectable similar-status men but rejected them for flimsy reasons. If you confront them and ask, well, among the people you know, who would you be willing to date, they'll frequently mention a single, maybe two or three, high-status married men (or, to take an extreme example, the aforementioned non-existent Prof. Brad Pitt). Depending on their taste, they might instead be into a flaky artist they've been having an on-off relationship/affair with for years, their boss, or their most popular co-worker, but the principle stays the same. Their obvious main issue is that among their peers, they simply deem no men worthy of being in a relationship with them, except the ones that clearly have other options. The moment they actually want to settle down and have a family, they'll often find someone in an instant. It's just they're still hoping for a better deal.

On the other hand the average man who struggles to find a long-term partner has already asked out similar or slightly below status women than themselves and been rejected. If you confront them and ask, well, among the people you know, who would you be willing to date, they'll give you a long list of all their female friends, as well as most their female co-workers except the batshit crazy or disfigured, and the same for female acquaintances that may even be significantly below their own status. Their obvious main issue is that among their peers, they simply are not deemed worthy of being in a relationship by almost all women (no, a women telling other women to date him bc he's so "nice" doesn't count). If they wanted to reliably find a girl, they would have to go to great and unusual lengths that may even cause their peers to lose respect for them, like going to Thailand and hitting on every non-prostitute they can find. Otherwise their main options are a) waiting until the women among their peers become sufficiently desperate with age or b) work harder to become higher-status. But unfortunately the latter is a zero-sum approach that will mostly kick down other men even further.

For reference, I'm talking about upper-middle class behaviour here (i.e. the group of people we hear the most complaining from & about). So, well-mannered people with decent hygiene, good work ethic and enough income that any reasonable family can be provided for. I'm a research postdoc at a decent western university, and the number of women with frankly delusional expectations and a surprising amount of sneering disgust towards even slightly below their status men that try to hit on them is downright frightening. Single female professors with bitter attitudes towards the male professors who dared to marry a non-professor are basically a running joke. Plenty of my wife's female acquaintances and friends, who are mostly also researchers, therapists, or I/O psychologists at companies show exactly the behaviour described above, and my wife, who has also become a bit sick of their attitudes, occasionally digs a little deeper into who would actually be good enough for them, and it's reliably exactly who you'd expect.

And to repeat myself, I'm specifically talking about the women who claim to struggle to find a partner, not those that are in stable long-term relationships (I do think women in general are hypergamous, but for most women that preference is weak enough to not lead to this obvious failure mode). And also to be clear, I have plenty of gripes with male mate-finding behaviour as well and do not consider women's behaviour worse overall. But the topic here is the existence of female hypergamy, and the specific issue of a seeming pandemic of unhappy single people is in my opinion mainly caused by female hypergamy, and not by men playing too much video games or similar claims in mainstream journalism.

As an aside, I'm also quite frustrated how reliably every time one complains about how much men suck as a group in some way (they're more violent & criminal, they constantly try sleeping around if given the chance, they flake on family duties, they're less reliable in general, etc. are all things I genuinely think are true on average), it's just everyone nodding along, but if one mentions a single way in which women might not be so great, they get these ridiculous assertions thrown at them.

To contextualize a bit, I’m a MRA-ish antifeminist and rafa, while having some feminist sympathies, can hardly be called a mainstream one. So you shouldn't pattern-match this criticism to the general, frequently feminist, view. The line ‘men want to replace their wives with younger models” is indirectly aimed @2rafa , as they have expressed such sentiments in the past.

I think some redpill concepts obscure more than they reveal. You limit your argument to single women already, but that is not how it is used (awalt).

One can explain the attitude you describe in single college-educated women with general human failings, ego protection and sour graping. Feminism and other forms of female chauvinism, when present, obviously don’t help. But those are not the insurmountable, almost genetically coded obstacles redpill thought makes them out to be, encouraging bitterness and helplessness.

That's the thing, I think you're obscuring more than you're revealing by trying to put everything into generic boxes that can apply to both genders. For example, you can kind of explain "roid rage" through general human concepts like regular rage/anger. But no, the very specific hyper-violent presentation of roid rage is caused explicitly by excessive male hormones. You can also see in general that men express anger and rage much more violently, and that some unlucky men can even get something resembling roid rage more or less naturally. An angry women is just frankly not comparable, and will consistently express that anger very differently. Violence in general is more or less a male-specific problem, with women who are engaging in substantial violence being basically a rounding error (yes, I know the female domestic violence stats; no, I don't think it's very comparable).

The same applies here as well. Being perpetually, unhappily single due to inappropriately high standards is pretty much a female-specific problem. You can kind of find similar-ish behaviour in men if you squint hard enough (some super-high status men seem to have trouble holding a long-term relationship, but they also seem pretty happy dumping their young model gf for an even younger model gf), but again, it really isn't very well comparable. Every single guy I've met that claimed to be single due to his high standards immediately jumped at the opportunity once any woman showed him any attention whatsoever. It was just pure cope.

I agree though that viewing this as as insurmountable is wrong as well. As an individual, there's plenty of things you can do to improve your chances.

Don’t concur with your anecdotes. I don’t think incels or hikkikomoris act like they would jump at the chance to have any girlfriend (not that I condemn that attitude, again, legitimate preference).

I think the situation is symmetrical. For every complaint about men making no effort and being childish, there’s one about women being fat, expecting too much. It’s a market. At the end of the day, some of the inventory sits unsold despite there being some buyers left. Only they want to pay 10 dollars for a bunch of apples, and the sellers want 15. I have no sympathy for their intersex whining ‘the sellers/buyers want to exploit us, they’d rather have nothing than our perfectly good offer.’ Then it degenerates into two separate locker room talks about useless men and bitches.

Adjust your price or live with the fact no transaction will take place, both of you. No side is especially wrong or irrational here.

Good post.

To put it succinctly: eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. Female bodies are inherently valuable, male bodies are not. Everything follows from this principle.

Let's grant that. The difference: most men can't go out and get a younger girl to replace his wife. Only DiCaprio can do this reliably. Women, on the other hand, can get attention from higher-status men to replace her husband, but not as a husband. So, even if hypergamy is vacuous, it's still relevant if only one sex can act on their hypergamous instincts.

I agree they can't find a better husband, but they can find someone who they think will be their husband, and this is the whole issue. Men using prostitutes isn't the same for obvious reasons.

It's far easier for women to cheat, because men are hornier and less discriminating.

Recently, there was a series of studies demonstrating that ADHD medications are both much less helpful than previously thought (boost lasts for only two years or so) and with much worse side effects, including heightened risks of dementia later in life.

Oh wow, that feels oddly vindicating in a way I can't quite explain. I'm in a similar situation to you, but I don't think I was ever at risk. I also come from a Shithole, and when I was growing up ADHD, as well as other disorders, was seen as bizarre Western invention to justify your personal flaws. I also have a big personal bias against psycho-active drugs, so it never even felt tempting.

Maybe it fits right into my anti-elitism. Or maybe I just don't like treating psychology / psychiatry as a science.

But you know what? I am probably the last person who should complain about this. Ultimately, all this is to my advantage, as outsourcing that ratchets western middle class anxiety to the point of madness is directly benefiting me.

I could see it that way if the Westerners could keep their neuroses inside their borders, but they seem pretty intent on spreading them around the world.

if the Westerners could keep their neuroses inside their borders

Honestly this is by far the worst western export, even more so than their bombs, at least you can rebuild after getting bombed, the mind viruses stay permanently...

Can you link the studies?

According to privilege theory, this is impossible. ADHD medications are disproportionately given to white boys, the most privileged cohort on the planet.

Not being a proponent of privilege theory myself this doesn't sound like a steel man. I don't think that people who support privilege theory think that whites being helped is a fundamental force of the universe, it's believe to be sourced from human bias, which is known to be fallible.

Pharma executives -- most of them white males -- are not going to shield white males outside old boy networks. Hence dementia-inducing medication given to white boys, and highly addictive opioids given to white men. Theorized general connection between white elite and all the other whites is just not there. There is only shareholder satisfaction.

This I do think is true and under appreciated by the identitarian based theories. Liberal white men do not have much of an in group bias and where they hold the reins the power is rarely used to help whites or men as a class because whites and men don't really have class consciousness. And I think the people trying to awaken this class consciousness might discover why that particular hatchet was buried to all of our losses.

It might be better for everyone if nobody has the consciousness you're talking about, but surely it's worse to be the only group without it when everyone else does have it.

This way leads to the mountains of skulls. It must be resisted until it cannot be.

I'm not endorsing the racial consciousness of any group. I preach color blindness and believe that we can return to it. Wokeness has not been around in the mainstream public consciousness for all that long and what it has wrought has been quite negative. It very much could still crumble. Call it copium if you must but I still see a way out. Your average progressive supporter has not peaked behind the curtain, they do not pay attention to the rhetoric or underlying belief structure. They simply think that progressivism is kindness. The facade cannot hold forever, the wrongness of the theory becomes more apparent every day. You see it with schooling reform, you see it with trans kids, you see it with police funding. Progressives can sell the credulous public on trying some policy but when these policies bear fruits and the fruits turn to ash on the average person's tongue the average person still trusts their senses and spits it out. Liberalism runs deep and can still be saved.

Liberalism runs deep and can still be saved.

Does it run deep? As much as I love it, it seems to largely be the product of English culture and institutions, and the weirdos who were most into it self-selected and yeeted themselves across the ocean to America. Continental Europeans never really seemed to get behind it, given their love of handing over absolute power to the state. And of late England and most of its former colonies other than the US seem more in favor of giving absolute power to the state rather than anything remotely resembling liberal democracy. The US is the last bastion of anyone and everyone who gives the smallest fuck about limiting state power, and even then it's a dwindling number. Covid lockdowns alone should have been enough to convince you of that.

Also a response to @chickenoverlord

I think it does indeed run deep. When talking to progressives their arguments are often rooted in a kind of disjointed liberalism. They talk about unfairness, discrimination, equal treatment under the law as a goal that they believe we're failing. These are fundamentally liberal ideals. They can be induced to mouth and chant unexamined slogans about oppressors and Marx adjacent things but they do not recognize the Marx in it. When it comes down to actually needing to reason instead of regurgitate I have always found they fall back on liberalism immediately and instinctually.

I think you have it backwards. The normies believe in the disjointed liberal stuff. The progressives do not (and often enough claim these ideas are somehow racist or problematic); they believe in the oppressor stuff, but will often use liberal terms to keep the normies happy.

Case in point: "When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression". Which Al Yankovich put better as "they kick you and they beat you and they tell you it's fair".

More comments

I don't think almost anyone talks about equal treatment under the law any more, I much more frequently hear about equitable treatment which is an explicit rejection of equal treatment.

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Not being a proponent of privilege theory myself this doesn't sound like a steel man. I don't think that people who support privilege theory think that whites being helped is a fundamental force of the universe, it's believe to be sourced from human bias, which is known to be fallible.

If you follow the logic of the actually existing privilege theory, rather than allow theorists do damage control after being confronted with an uncomfortable example, then he's right. There was a relatively recent discussion on TheMotte (still back on reddit, I believe), where the fortification of milk was being used as an example of systemic racism. There was no evidence provided for bias being in any way involved, and it never is. The existence of the discrepancy is always evidence for systemic racism in itself. At the very least that would mean our society is systemically racist against white people, and that is explicitly said to be impossible by privilege theorists.

I see now(and that you mentioned this and I missed it) that you're using privilege theory as a moniker for all of the social justice/woke/progressive and not the more narrow subsection of their theory. I still think this is a failing of the ideological Turing test. Even by their theories if we eliminate privilege we're all supposed to be uplifted and thus a 'universe with whites in charge can only do things that help whites' contradicts 'if we don't hold down people of color then we'll all benefit from their unique perspectives'. You can assert that they're only espousing that second axiom as a cynical lie but this is not a steel man and fails the sniff test to me as I live among the progressives and this is not how they think. Right or wrong they truly believe.

I see now(and that you mentioned this and I missed it) that you're using privilege theory as a moniker for all of the social justice/woke/progressive and not the more narrow subsection of their theory.

I disagree. If anything, isn't "systemic dyscrimination" a subsection of privilege theory, rather than the other way around?

You can assert that they're only espousing that second axiom as a cynical lie but this is not a steel man and fails the sniff test to me as I live among the progressives and this is not how they think. Right or wrong they truly believe.

I'm only accusing them of contradicting themselves, whether that's because of cynical lies, or bias of their own, or some other explanation, is not relevant to me. There's a very simple way to prove me wrong. Find me an example from their literature where they consider some example of disparate outcome as a potential example of systemic discrimination, but ultimately argue against it because of lack of evidence of bias. Alternatively you can show me how they call out a case of systemic racism against white people.

Alternatively you can show me how they call out a case of systemic racism against white people.

Ibram Kendi DID note structural barriers for whites and the incentives to "pass" it created.

And his response to people noticing this was just to delete it and pretend otherwise.

And I think the people trying to awaken this class consciousness might discover why that particular hatchet was buried to all of our losses.

That's just called "accelerationism" though. It's revealing that the best idea that labor has to deal with the usurious taxes of capital is "try to speed the inevitable collapse along", but then again that's probably the reason why they're labor in the first place.

But then again... is there really a problem with this?

I always figured it's an evo-psych thing: losing a war in ancient times generally meant being sold into slavery (labor and capital alike), but if that slavery was better than the slavery your own society imposed then it's very difficult to argue that resisting was the right call (and "then we won't fight for you; better to die trying to kill you than the supposed enemy" is a decently effective threat- draftees killing your officers with the guns you necessarily had to give them is not good for military efficiency).

And we see this played out through history. If the population legitimately considers the enemy to be a better choice over their own rulers (or at least, insufficiently bad to bother throwing bodies at the problem with no guarantee of victory), they'll let them walk right on into the city. Ancient cities in the path of invading armies did this time and time again when the invaders weren't actually that much different than them and they'd rather avoid the siege- this is why people pay Dane-geld in the first place. If the price is right, it can work.

The best example of this was, in my opinion, the Taliban reconquest of Afghanistan. No Afghani defended Kabul- the average Afghani male actively chose the Taliban over Western ways because he knew what the enemy wanted, and what they wanted wasn't worth dying to resist. Sure, sucks for the women, but they were perfectly capable of mounting a defense of the city themselves because they were Liberated and Strong per the imported/imposed Western ideology... well, apparently the Islamic view was more correct.

By contrast, the Ukrainian response to invading Russians. Guess the men must feel like they have something worth defending; they could have welcomed the Russians to deal with their "Nazi problem" and their first strike teams were claimed to have been found with riot gear to enforce the peace (that might be propaganda though), but they very clearly did not do that.

The best example of this was, in my opinion, the Taliban reconquest of Afghanistan.

I enjoyed the recent Bennett's Phylactery podcast on this topic. I'm no expert and have done no work to verify details, but the core points make sense in any case.

Can you link the studies?

Linked now in op

As ever, it turns out that it's easier for narrative explanations if everyone just pretends Asian kids don't exist. But once they do:

Results Among 238 011 children in the cohort (116 093 [48.8%] girls; 15 183 [6.7%] Asian, 14 792 [6.2%] Black, 23 358 [9.8%] Hispanic, and 173 082 [72.7%] White children), 11 401 (4.8%) were diagnosed with ADHD. The cumulative incidence at age 12 was 13.12% (95% CI, 12.79%-13.46%). In multivariate Cox regression adjusting for sex, region, and household income, the hazard ratio for Asian children was 0.48 (95% CI, 0.43-0.53); Black children, 0.83 (95% CI, 0.77-0.90); and Hispanic children, 0.77 (95% CI, 0.72, 0.82) compared with White children. In the first year after diagnosis, 516 preschool children (19.4%) received behavioral therapy only, 860 (32.4%) had medications only, 505 (19.0%) had both, and 774 (29.2%) had no claims associated with either option. A higher percentage of school-aged children (2904 [65.6%]) were prescribed medications, and fewer had therapy only (639 [14.4%]) or no treatment at all (884 [20.0%]). Compared with other groups, White children were more likely to receive some kind of treatment. Asian children had the highest odds of receiving no treatment (odds ratio compared with White children, 0.54; 95% CI, 0.42-0.70).

So what does one draw from this, that Black children are more privileged than Asian children and slightly more privileged than Hispanic children? I know what I draw from it, but I'm a psychiatric medicine denialist, so my conclusions surely aren't the same as those of people who think drugging kids up when they don't pay attention is a good thing.

I think privilege theorists (I think this is nicer term for wokists) have tendency to assign privilege according to point system which grades things like skin color but can't tell you how well positioned someone is. It is just kinda assumed each white person has access to privilege, regardless whether he truly has access to old boy network or not.

Nitpick but even if they assume distributions instead of a single value, their conclusions are still expected if they assume the distributions mean being sufficiently different enough.

But I'd agree with Tim Urban that the broad woke ideology is fairly low rung and they might as well be thinking in a point system.

Did you also consider uncertainty?

That you can extensively test the supposed long-term and short-term effects of a drug, do all the expensive studies, yada yada, and still be wrong about it? Not having intended to be wrong about it at all?

According to privilege theory, this is impossible. ADHD medications are disproportionately given to white boys, the most privileged cohort on the planet. The System was supposed to protect them from harm. Anything given to that population was supposed to be checked rigorously. Medication that helps short term but ruins you later sounds exactly like something that would be given to minorities.

As others have noted, this is a misstatement of "privilege theory." That theory does not state that everything done by those in power is purposely done to help those with privilege. Rather, it states that society is structured in a way such that some people, because of their race, gender, or whatever, get certain advantages or are spared certain costs that are experienced by others of different races, genders, or whatever, and that assumptions about what is normal tend to be shaped by the experiences of those with "privilege."

For example, years ago I rented an apartment in what was supposedly a marginally unsafe area. But I never felt unsafe, including walking late at night a couple of blocks from where I had to park to where my apartment was. However, I am a guy, so I did not have to worry about being sexually assaulted, and for all I know the signs of risk of sexual assault might have been present, but I was oblivious. A woman might well have been at risk in that area. That is a form of "male privilege." (And, in fact, my landlord told me that she rented to me over a woman who also applied because she was not comfortable renting to a woman in that area).

Similarly, when I first started teaching, I was told: "Don't assume that every kid has a quiet place to do homework at home." The assumption that every kid has such a place is a form of "class privilege."

None of this is to say that the concept is not often, or even frequently, trotted out and used stupidly, dishonestly, or both. Nor does it mean that privilege, even to the extent it exists, has much actual effect; it could well be quite trivial. But you are attacking a strawman.

For example, years ago I rented an apartment in what was supposedly a marginally unsafe area. But I never felt unsafe, including walking late at night a couple of blocks from where I had to park to where my apartment was.

But note, your supposed privilege here is entirely based on your own feelings and perception, and not reality, which is that males are many times more likely to be the victim of violent crime than females.

Is a person actually privileged if they only feel privileged because they have been psychologically conditioned to feel privileged? This does lead directly to quality of life enhancements so it's not entirely a theoretical question but that does suggest that the solution to many cases of disprivilege would be to psychologically coach a feeling of empowerment rather than changing the reality of the world, and this is exactly the opposite of how privilege theory is received at large.

  1. I specifically referred to sexual assault.

  2. Men are more likely to be the victim of violent crimes because they are more likely to engage in altercations. But I am talking about the risk of being the victim of a crime while minding one's own business walking home at night. I believe that women are more likely than men to be a victim in that context.

Do you have a citation on that second point? I haven't seen any hard data on that, but I think it may be confounded by frequency with which men are forced into more dangerous situations for criminal violence via occupation (night shift, security guards, etc) and their statistical propensity for perhaps-careless-but-not-illegal risk taking.

Well, this says that the rate of violent crime victimization for women was about the same in 2018 and 2019, so since, as you note, men are more likely to be in dangerous situations and have a propensity for risk-taking, that implies that women who are just minding their own business are indeed at greater risk than are men. And that is purely quantitative; it ignores the qualitative aspect of being a victim of rape or sexual assault.

their statistical propensity for perhaps-careless-but-not-illegal risk taking

Note that the fact that men are careless might well be evidence of "privilege" -- men can "carelessly" walk home late at night because they are at very low risk of sexual assault. They can better afford to be careless than can women.

"Defection game" implies that it's zero-sum, but from what you're saying, it seems like the world would be greatly improved if all low-conscientiousness people used amphetamine. Unless there are some serious side effects that would outweigh the improvements in conscientiousness, of course.

"Defection game" implies that it's zero-sum

When it's in an academic context, it absolutely is- grades tend to be on a curve rather than objective (though that depends on the institution), and if you're taking performance-enhancing drugs to get As, that means someone else is closer to getting an F. Sure, one could argue that it's valid to cheat to get a credential that doesn't matter, but that outlook doesn't help anyone else in the class.

Otherwise, I would tend to agree that widespread amphetamine usage, if the accelerated productivity is rewarded by employers rather than simply becoming a new baseline, would yield massive improvements. Because I'm absolutely certain that won't happen and have seen examples (though some fictional) of a population's chemical dependence being abused for some other goal, I don't actually think this is a good idea.

EA would do well to fund a second-generation amphetamine, though.

I might be sounding a little too idealistic here, but grades are definitely not the main point when you're "in an academic context". Hopefully you're actually trying to learn something and having stronger, more focused peers to talk to makes this significantly easier.

and if you're taking performance-enhancing drugs to get As, that means someone else is closer to getting an F

This is very much not true! Grading is almost always against the difficulty of the material, not against your peers. I have never heard of a single colleague who ever made their class this insanely zero-sum. Any sort of curve is just a sanity check to make sure that estimates of difficulty are correct and always take into account impressions of how strong a given class is compared to past ones. If someone is closer to getting an A, they ask better questions in class, are a better resource to talk to outside of class, and in general make the class better.

I've seen the effects of withdrawal and addiction to it and I think I'll pass. Adderall sounds like a great idea to PMC 20-somethings who don't think they have anything to lose, but heroin is also fucking awesome and i still wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

Frying your brain is not worth any high powered job.

Broke: I don't take adderall, people who do are losers who can't work hard.

Woke: I take adderall, people who don't are losers who can't work hard.

Bespoke: I don't take adderall, people who do are losers who work hard.

So why do you not take amphetamines?

God, this sounds like it would change my life, but I've already been through Risperdal in my teen years and I don't think getting back on that BS would be a good idea nowadays. I share your reluctance towards medication.

Recently, there was a series of studies demonstrating that ADHD medications are both much less helpful than previously thought (boost lasts for only two years or so) and with much worse side effects, including heightened risks of dementia later in life.

Where are these studies? Googling "ADHD medication dementia" just gives me articles about ADHD medication being used to treat dementia.

Linked now

Recently, there was a series of studies demonstrating that ADHD medications are both much less helpful than previously thought (boost lasts for only two years or so) and with much worse side effects, including heightened risks of dementia later in life.

The studies you linked are from 2006-2011. How is that "recently"?

Recently, there was a series of studies demonstrating that ADHD medications are both much less helpful than previously thought (boost lasts for only two years or so) and with much worse side effects, including heightened risks of dementia later in life.

The first study linked, which concludes that ADHD treatment isn't very effective (after skimming the article, "boost lasts for only two years or so" seems to be an oversimplification), is from 2009. The second and third, which find a correlation between amphetamine use and Parkinson's disease, are from 2011 and 2006, respectively.

I understand that some fields move more slowly than others, and that a clinical trial by its nature must take several years (plus the time to prepare the trial before it starts, to collect enough participants, etc., and the time needed to analyse the data after the trial is done and to write up the results, and the delays related to publishing). Nevertheless, I think describing a study published 17 years ago as "recent" is a bit of a stretch.

(It could be that you just didn't see when they were published, and assumed they were recent, for some reasonable definition of "recent". This is known to happen. I've read on Snopes that stories sometimes reappear randomly: someone stumbles upon an article from years ago, assumes it's recent and shares it, other people see it and share it, and suddenly thousands of people believe something new and important has happened, when in fact it happened years ago and was unimportant and quickly forgotten. It's why The Guardian added a big bright yellow warning above older articles saying "this article is x years old".)

When I first read the quoted sentence, before any links to the actual studies were present, my interpretation was that a series of related studies (I think it's not unusual for one clinical trial to result in multiple publications) examining in detail all the long-term effects of ADHD medication had been published within, say, the past few months. In fact, the first study reports the findings from a clinical trial on the effectiveness of a certain kind of treatment for a certain subtype of ADHD, and makes no mention of dementia; the other two investigate a hypothesized correlation between amphetamine use for any reason, apparently including recreational use (the third even counts methamphetamine as a relevant type of amphetamine), and make no mention of ADHD treatment.

Meth is a known neurotoxin, not much to say there. Recreational use of amphetamine, at doses significantly higher than those used to treat ADHD, is likewise already known to cause neuropsychiatric problems, including psychosis. Your post, however, implies that treatment of ADHD with amphetamine was recently found to be dangerous, a claim not supported by the studies linked. If it had been discovered in 2006, or even in 2011, that treating ADHD with amphetamine increased the risk of dementia, this would have become widespread knowledge by now. As I noted in another comment, however, looking up "ADHD medication dementia" only returns results of ADHD medication being used to treat dementia.

In conclusion, the central premise upon which your entire post is based is false. This does not mean that "privilege theory" is correct, just that this particular argument against it is invalid.

P.S. Anyone who was treated for ADHD and became concerned after reading the original post should now relax. (Maybe with some benzos?)

Perhaps I'm missing something, but it's my impression that medicating children for ADHD in America (in contrast to students/professionals using the medications for performance enhancement as adults) is something of a lower/working-class thing in contrast to sending them to therapists or whatever. Indeed, it is the South (along with a few northeastern states) that diagnoses children with ADHD and medicates them for it the most frequently.

I think privilege theorists (I think this is nicer term for wokists) have tendency to assign privilege according to point system which grades things like skin color but can't tell you how well positioned someone is. It is just kinda assumed each white person has access to privilege, regardless whether he truly has access to old boy network or not.

This has been an age-old accusation (well, if you count "since right before Gamergate" to be "age-old") against social justice proponents, that their politics make them engage in "oppression olympics" and box-ticking--even when it's not literally quantified (there's a much older image of a possibly-faked score card from Tumblr that I can't find now), the "privilege theory" will indeed lead to failures to recognize legit oppression or disadvantage because it happened to the "wrong" group or it "didn't count."

This "accusation" has been vindicated a million times by countless word games about how men or whites can never be oppressed, how female privilege cannot exist, and about how anything bad that ever happens to them must be qua one of their other characteristics, never qua them being men. Intersectionality in practice is a network of one-way streets.

With SpaceX's Starship having finished it's static fire tests they will soon be gearing up for the first orbital launch. So far, space travel and industry have avoided getting polarized (although Musk has gotten some frankly ridiculous hit pieces for the whole Ukraine Starlink fiasco), but I don't expect this to continue as it gets cheaper and easier to sent things to and from space.

If you look at the cost per metric ton for space travel right now, it's around $11.3 million/ton. That means that if you want to get a ton of material into space, you're shelling out quite a bit. This limits space endeavours to major governments or multinational corporations for the most part.

According to Musk, Starship will be able to lower the cost to only $20,000 per metric ton to get into space. This is multiple orders of magnitude in terms of cost reduction. Now I'm not super optimistic this number will be hit anytime soon, but if it is, it will enter us into a new era when it comes to space and technology.

My question is - how does this play into the Culture War? Musk has been increasingly right-coded, but it also seems like space and 'moonshots' have long been a darling of the left. On top of this, there's a strong nationalist angle if we can get and maintain an edge on Russia/China in space industry.

I'm curious if anyone else has more fleshed out ideas on this topic, in terms of how space industry will affect the Culture War. Or do most of y'all think this is a non-starter and nobody will care about space in 5-10 years?

...it also seems like space and 'moonshots' have long been a darling of the left.

Have they? I think there's an I Fucking Love Science branch of the broadly construed American left, but I tend to think of the left-wing view of space projects being encapsulated by the absolutely amazing Billions for Space Pennies for the Hungry photograph. Of course, there's more than a little bit of racial politics to play into that as well and my perception is that this has only grown stronger with time. In more modern media, I see people blaming Jeff Bezos for going to space rather than just personally ending world hunger.

I guess this was just a perception, on a quick google it looks like space isnt' very politicized yet.

Money (as in "a countable medium of economic exchange") is great and pretty foundational to human civilization, but it does tend to distort people's thinking once the scale of the numbers, and thus the corresponding impact on the real world allocation and distribution of scarce resources, gets several orders of magnitude beyond what they're used to thinking about in their daily lives.

Like, it's clear that if a man is spending $1000 a month on booze and gambling while his kids are starving, he is being evil. He could very easily spend $1000/mo on food for his kids instead of on his own enjoyment. $1000 of food per month is a tiny fraction of your local food economy.

It's less clear to me that Bezos could end world hunger overnight by putting his billions of dollars towards that goal instead of building rockets. What real-world resources are the two different projects competing over? Food production is mostly about arable land and physical labor; rockets use very little of the former and relatively modest amounts of the latter. The main resource that space project money goes towards is smart and skilled people's time and creativity. Whether you think world hunger could be solved by Bezos would seem to hinge on whether or not you think that if all those smart rocket scientists were put to work figuring out how to grow more food (or, realistically, how to distribute it better - I've never heard anybody gainsay the conventional wisdom that the world grows enough food to feed everybody, it just doesn't get it into everybody's hands efficiently enough before it spoils) it would make a sustainable impact.

There's also a separate issue of the difference between a one-time investment in developing a technology that you expect to eventually turn a profit (as far as I know, SpaceX, Blue Origin and all the other private space companies definitely expect to get their money back down the line once their rockets are developed) versus sustaining a charitable non-profit (if "solving world hunger" simply means "give money to everybody who can't afford to feed themselves, from now until eternity if necessary") which has no financial upside (except perhaps in a macro sense, i.e. people who aren't starving will be more productive and the economy as a whole benefits, but that's the government's job, not Bezos's). Leftists would still claim it's the right thing to do with that money, but approximately none of them have built billion-dollar businesses by spending their money on things that will eventually make more money, etc., so they really have no clue what it takes to get those resources in the first place.

And let's not forget just how effective poor people are at ruining the best-laid plans to help them.

World hunger as an issue isn't dominated by the literal cost of paying to send people food. Live Aid found that out. Famine in the modern world is rarely caused by too little food and often caused by someone using deprivation of food to serve a political motive. The best way to estimate the cost to end world hunger is to start with the cost of invading and occupying North Korea as the minimum estimate.

Has space and moon shots always been left coded? Maybe I'm not old enough for that.

I see no reason the derangement that has devoured every other unalloyed good in our society won't devour cheaper space launches. And I don't even think it takes novel rhetorical arguments to derange it. There are plenty of rhetorical weapons already created to alienate the left from space industry, and turn low information voters in blue dominated areas into an activated political enemy to SpaceX.

  • Why invest billions into space when minority patron group still suffered inequity?

  • Space industry is just a reflection of toxic masculinity and it's need to conquer and master

  • "Ecological" arguments about how it's immortal to "pollute space"

  • SpaceX has a "toxic" work culture, and/or discriminatory "merit based" recruitment.

  • Just regular old sneering and "Elon Man Bad".

And I'm sure you'll be able to follow the money right back to ULA, same as you could follow the unfounded attacks on mandate and lockdown skeptics right back to Pfizer.

Why invest billions into space when minority patron group still suffered inequity?

Whitey on the Moon, a 1970 (!) spoken word poem which featured in the 2018 movie "First Man", shows that such ideas were already present and don't need to be extrapolated from first principles.

At least according to this article, there was at least some opposition to the original moon program from the civil rights movement. The most famous congressional NASA/space program opponent, William Proxmire, seems to have been a somewhat libertarian-ish Democrat, from his Wikipedia description. OTOH Murray Rothbard also bashed the space program, such as in here.

I don't think that pro-space-program/anti-space-program is something that is immediately returnable to left-right scale. It appeals to a certain variety of nationalism-tinged technophiliac small-p progressive thinking that has adherents both on the left and the right, though with different areas of emphasis.

It's impossible to know for sure, but I think if President Kennedy hadn't been assassinated, the US would not have put men on the moon in the 1960s. Or 1970s. Perhaps not ever (so far).

Kennedy's martyrdom made the Apollo program a political third rail, so pretty much anybody with the potential power to cut its funding kept their mouth shut until the first successful landing. But nobody spends hundreds of billions of federal tax dollars without a lot of people wanting that money to be spent on something else that they think is more important.

US would probably have still felt it necessary to not let the Soviets get all the space-related achievements for only themselves tbh.

If it's successful I think the left is most likely to just ignore it. Excellence in American industry doesn't serve their purposes. What the right will do is hard to say, populism and suspicion of elites make interesting bedfellows with the likes of Musk but the right does contain factions that will be absolutely enthralled to see him succeed and because of his more recent mask off plays at the expense of the left he will probably find a home on the right.

How it all shakes out will probably depend on which industries actually have most immediate use for cheap(er) launches. Besides the obvious satalite uses and space tourism the immediate impact is harder for me to grasp. This isn't to say it won't be huge and disruptive, I just won't even hazard a guess at how it will be.

Mining seems to be one obvious game changer if there are very valuable materials we don’t have a lot of but could use a lot of.

Yes, that's the ultimate jackpot. However that still seems decades off, even with my fairly bullish stance on space.

As with so many things in space, I think the timeline is driven by one binary variable: does SpaceX's vision of a rapidly reusable Starship come to fruition?

If it does, asteroid mining goes from a pipe dream to a reality in the blink of an eye. So many things that work in principle work in reality once you can toss a hundred tons to orbit every day of the week.

doing complicated construction in space and getting autonomous miners where they need to be, then maneuvering the mined material back to earth and getting it back down is the kind of thing that has hundreds of steps just as hard as being able to reuse the rockets. Hell, if you asked someone smart who didn't already know how hard of a problem it was having reusable launch crafts probably wouldn't even come up on their list of hard problems.

Oh, certainly, I'm not saying the only thing holding us back from von Neumann probes and a Dyson sphere is mass to orbit! But if you skip autonomy, on orbit mining, and on-orbit manufacturing, you can still make a business case for the simplest asteroid mining possible:

  1. Identify asteroid with 100 tons of platinum

  2. Launch intercept/dock mission a la Hayabusa

  3. Slow burn for intercept course with Earth using ion propulsion a la Dawn (not to mention Starlink and a million Soviet spacecraft)

  4. Crash it in the desert and recover contents

100 tons of platinum is only a couple billion dollars, so this only works once launch prices for the monstrous probe necessary for something like this are reasonable and you can cut costs on the probe by removing the anal mass optimization currently necessary.

This is obviously far less revolutionary than true asteroid mining with on-orbit processing and manufacturing, which is what will kickstart the off-Earth economy, if we ever get there. Still, it's a start.

it also seems like space and 'moonshots' have long been a darling of the left.

I'm not sure this is the case anymore. They've been pulling the "There are starving trans people of color being hunted by Republicans while the ocean is rising, and you want to spend money on SPACE that could have gone to my non-profit for hunted trans POCs?" card for a while, and demonizing space travel as a way for rich (white) people to escape earth. I don't hear much futurism from them anymore.

Buuuut, I was surrounded by particularly-inconsistent leftists for way too long.

I don't see how you CAN be a progressive leftist under the current popular definition of the term and openly support rapid industrialization of outer space.

On the practical side, advancement of space industries is a tacit admission that we're not on the verge or running out of space, resources, or energy for the planet, requiring everyone to cut back drastically on consumption or risk ultimate ruin.

That is, even if "Capitalism depends on unsustainable growth!" is technically true, we have a shitton of room to grow if we can get space colonies operational.

O'Neill cylinders could (theoretically) grow all the food we would need on the planet in a sustainable way (i.e. almost zero net impact on earth's biosphere). Orbital solar collectors solve climate/energy woes almost by themselves. If we get asteroid mining, all bets are off. Hell, if we put factories in space we could run them off the dirtiest energy sources imaginable without harming anyone.

Can't have "late stage capitalism" if Capitalism is even now staging for off-planet industry.

Private companies are driving space exploration forward WAY faster than government, with an overall better track record too I'd allege. Hard to make the claim that space travel is the purview of Government when government can't even launch rockets, currently. People are going to become billionaires or maybe even trillionaires if this industry matures, this promises massively increased inequality.

Money spent on development of this tech directs it away from special interest groups or captured institutions.

And perhaps the bigger downstream effect, it gets us on the path towards new frontiers which can be used to escape their social games and restrictions.

There's nothing to excite a progressive about space travel if their worldview requires believing that the world is in such terrible shape and beyond technological salvation that only socialism can solve it.

They've been pulling the "There are starving trans people of color being hunted by Republicans while the ocean is rising, and you want to spend money on SPACE that could have gone to my non-profit for hunted trans POCs?"

It was happening back then as well, space exploration has always been coded right-wing and nationalist. I'm not sure why OP thinks it was ever coded as left wing.

It has forever been coded as right-wing in a large body of scifi literature and filmmaking, and it was also right-wing and nationalist in the most literal sense- Nazi scientists were hugely important to the US space program. That is one of those historical anecdotes that progressives cite as a low-key own goal. "Look how bad our government was- it recruited Nazis to the space program!" Yeah, it did, because they were the best and they greatly contributed to those accomplishments.

The dialectic between civil rights and NASA is going to endure in similar form in the modern culture war vis-a-vis progressivism/Effective Altruism versus space adventurism.

The right wing of today should take the side of space adventurism as well, as a competing vision to EA. The two are not really reconcilable.

I’ve seen enough leftists ranting about how the ISS is literally settler colonialism or whatever to doubt space being coded progressive. I mean obviously they’re not expressing the majority opinion, because their opinion is ridiculous, but it does point to a tendency towards discomfort with space travel.

I mean obviously they’re not expressing the majority opinion, because their opinion is ridiculous

Sorry, walk me through the logic here?

Wait, did they really get so mixed up that they think what's bad about colonialism is the "going somewhere else and building a home there" part, and not the "muscle out and exploit whoever's currently living there" part?

Yes, I see this all the time in commentary around certain boardgames, for example. A lot of the time it's acknowledged that it's worse with the second part, but a lot of people seem to object to the first as well, at least if the word "colony" is explicitly used. This is far from universal even among the hard-core progs I encounter, but it's definitely noticeable.

Cheap space access creates unavoidable security implications.

Looking forward to rods from God becoming a reality. I believe it is merely a matter of launch cost holding back this obvious weapons system.

In some ways Brilliant Pebbles is even more exciting. In principle, space-based BMD is actually viable even for mass launches of ICBMs. In fact, because (i) MIRVs are only deployed on re-entry, (ii) objects moving in a vacuum are relatively predictable, and (iii) any kind of collision in space is likely to be terminal due to the insane velocities involved, the economics and physics might even favour the defender: 10,000 or so baseball-sized micro-missiles could take out huge numbers of ICBMs reliably (again, in principle - so much of this stuff is untested).

It's not as simple as you think.

Consider that looking out of the plasma of re-entry isn't easy, neither is beaming radio signals in. Maybe some sort of powerful laser or microwave link could work. If not.. precisely computing where an object falling through differentially dense layers of atmosphere is going to end up isn't easy at all.

And I doubt any major government would let someone test this extensively.

Most of the plasma interference is to the front and sides of a reentry vehicle, isn't it? Signals relayed through whichever part of a LEO constellation is currently behind the vehicle might be an option. They wouldn't have to be continuous, just frequent enough to cap inertial navigation drift.

I think finding a good use case is an even harder question. These would be perfect aircraft carrier killers, but the country with Starship is also the one with all the aircraft carriers. For easier targets there are already cheaper options at much higher TRL.

Wow, love the quotes here. It definitely captures something I've always felt about those opposed to space travel, but haven't been able to quite articulate.

It is definitely easier to peddle a simplistic doom and gloom view of unstoppable apocalypse. I like to think the heroic vision is still popular enough to capture interest and catapult us to the stars. (Hence my tag)

I think, as others have pointed out, the case for manufacturing and research in space is still quite impressive. Creating exotic materials, and new medical formulae are only the tip of the iceberg.

Otherwise we're relying almost-solely on Elon Musk and that's too much hinging on one guy.

I do sometimes fear that if he dies all hope for space will disappear...

It is definitely discouraging that Tomorrowland, which was designed to remind us of the optimism and hope of our grandparents' time, died such an ignominious death at the box office.

Given how closely space tech has historically been tied to defense, I don't exactly see it as a progressive darling.

The current crop of utopian technologists derives more from reading Iain Banks than Marx. And the Gay part of his work, let alone the Communism, has always taken a backseat to the Fully Automated and especially Luxury elements.

We're probably overrepresented in tech-hub cities, and we're definitely overrepresented on the Internet. I suspect that alignment with progressive causes is downstream of those two associations.

Space missions were always opposed by part of the left and supported by part of the right, see Ayn Rand on Apollo 11:

In The New York Times of July 21, 1969, there appeared two whole pages devoted to an assortment of reactions to the lunar landing, from all kinds of prominent and semi-prominent people who represent a cross-section of our culture.

It was astonishing to see how many ways people could find to utter variants of the same bromides. Under an overwhelming air of staleness, of pettiness, of musty meanness, the collection revealed the naked essence (and spiritual consequences) of the basic premises ruling today’s culture: irrationalism — altruism — collectivism.

The extent of the hatred for reason was somewhat startling. (And, psychologically, it gave the show away: one does not hate that which one honestly regards as ineffectual.) It was, however, expressed indirectly, in the form of denunciations of technology. (And since technology is the means of bringing the benefits of science to man’s life, judge for yourself the motive and the sincerity of the protestations of concern with human suffering.)

“But the chief reason for assessing the significance of the moon landing negatively, even while the paeans of triumph are sung, is that this tremendous technical achievement represents a defective sense of human values, and of a sense of priorities of our technical culture.” “We are betraying our moral weakness in our very triumphs in technology and economics.” “How can this nation swell and stagger with technological pride when it is so weak, so wicked, so blinded and misdirected in its priorities? While we can send men to the moon or deadly missiles to Moscow or toward Mao, we can’t get foodstuffs across town to starving folks in the teeming ghettos.” “Are things more important than people? I simply do not believe that a program comparable to the moon landing cannot be projected around poverty, the war, crime, and so on.” “If we show the same determination and willingness to commit our resources, we can master the problems of our cities just as we have mastered the challenge of space.” “In this regard, the contemporary triumphs of man’s mind — his ability to translate his dreams of grandeur into awesome accomplishments — are not to be equated with progress, as defined in terms of man’s primary concern with the welfare of the masses of fellow human beings . . . the power of human intelligence which was mobilized to accomplish this feat can also be mobilized to address itself to the ultimate acts of human compassion.” “But, the most wondrous event would be if man could relinquish all the stains and defilements of the untamed mind . . .”

I believe manufacturing is a far more relevant market than mining. There are a bunch of things that can be made better with zero/low gravity manufacturing.

https://varda.com/

Mining seems to become more interesting as a way to get materials that are already in space rather than for earth uses.

Finally, Gundanium/Endo-Steel will be real.

My question is - how does this play into the Culture War? Musk has been increasingly right-coded, but it also seems like space and 'moonshots' have long been a darling of the left. On top of this, there's a strong nationalist angle if we can get and maintain an edge on Russia/China in space industry.

I don't see how it will affect the culture wars much, for the main reason that progress is so gradual compared to other issues. If anything, things have been regressing: no more manned missions, but more probes. Musk providing coverage for Ukraine via Starlink scored him some points on the left .

Musk providing coverage for Ukraine via Starlink scored him some points on the left .

Did it? How many and for how long? Somewhere in between "but we can't subsidize it ourselves indefinitely" and "but we're trying to not let it be weaponized on drones", the backlash against them for not doing more seems to have greatly exceeded the original points, predictably.

At 20k it's still not very consumer facing, so it has low signalling potential and therefore low culture war potential. Maybe some rich people will do some tourism and we'll get a 'White Lotus' season on the moon so the educated class can sneer at the upper class while envying them. The blue tribe is anti-carbon emissions but they'll still fly to see family on the holidays. If there is a ubiquitous consumer use case like that people will use it, but I don't think there will be.

Whatever industrial and communications use case exists will be the most important one and that won't have big culture war implications.

IDK, that's like ten bucks a pound -- I can't get much shipped overseas for that rate.

(obviously there'd have to be somebody aggregating 'space stuff' into more transport friendly packages, who would probably take a big cut -- but if people want their ashes or science experiments sent into orbit, it could happen)

Yeah I guess the price is less why it's not consumer facing and just that most people won't have much reason to send things into space. Science experiments will be mostly institutional. Scattering grandpas ashes in space doesn't seem that different from say, flying to some natural spot to scatter ashes which doesn't have much culture war valence.

I mean, I weigh like 200 pounds, and routinely pay ~$2000 to go places less interesting than space?

This would not be so fun if I were stacked like cordwood in a container with a thousand other people, so I'm sure the price will be more -- but it's indicative that space tourism is moving away from "eccentric hundred-millionaire" towards "early career tech worker", which I think will have CW implications?

I have a feeling the cost to launch and the cost due to demand is going to come into play and push price up quite a bit. I don't think these things are going to be produced at anywhere near the scale that would allow for a $2000 trip up any time soon.

That's why I said "I'm sure the price will be more" -- but if it's 10x more, that is well within the reach of a whole bunch of people. Even if it's 100x, some dude working for Facebook probably has worse things he could blow his bonus on.

I don't agree. A considerable amount of effort was and very explicitly is being into designing the machine that builds the machines. The engines are being produced at a rate of nearly one a day and the general design and choice of construction methods and materials point to ease of fabrication being a primary design constraint. It is very plausible at this point that these will be constructed in quantities at least equal to that of widebody aircraft, and since they are ordinarily not expended, as with aircraft, that fleet does not rapidly deplete itself.

One problem is that all the current (human-rated) vehicles aren’t designed for affordable trips to space— they’re designed around constraints that will make them prohibitively expensive.

Dragon is for NASA (nuff said), New Shephard is boring (probably the closest to scaling into the vicinity of affordable though), and from my armchair virgin galactic seems like an expensive deathtrap (no in-flight abort? Manual controls?). Realistically, Starship won’t carry humans to orbit for many years (if ever) because of launch abort feasibility issues.

Maybe the next iteration of tourism vehicles will be more promising (for the less-wealthy among us). Something like a V2 of Dragon but built for tourism and cost from the beginning maybe. Flying humans reliably is wicked hard.

Hundreds of millions of Americans routinely incur bills higher than that. $20k is cheaper per ton that many normal cars cost per ton.

I went to find some polling evidence, and it seems that support for space exploration, at least in principle, is pretty strong across the board, and remarkably similar numbers of Dems, Reps and Independents in US support space spending.

If you look at the cost per metric ton for space travel right now, it's around $11.3

$11.3 million.

Also, the culture war will probably be kept out of space development due to how important it is. Space is the ultimate high ground and it is easy to command. You can't really block off thousands of kilometres of shoreline very easily, even with aircraft carriers. There's the horizon to worry about, land-based missiles, aircraft, ships can stay in protected harbors. (you really need satellites to watch for blockade-runners)

But with space, you can watch everything that happens. There is no stealth in space and almost no stealth from space. I suppose you could hide mobile missile launchers in warehouses or armored trains, play shell games like we do with ICBMs.

But you're certainly not going to be able to hide or defend your grounded spaceships. These things are huge, obvious and vulnerable. Even if you put in a lot of effort, someone will spot them hours before they launch, while they're all vulnerable on the launchpad or getting ready to launch. Then down comes a laser or kinetic shell and you've lost a billion dollar spaceship to $30 worth of electricity or a $50,000 chunk of processed moon-rock. Imagine if the Royal Navy could just charge into French ports during the Napoleonic War, or if both sides knew precisely where eachother's ships were? It would be a massive stomp for the British, for the stronger navy.

Control of space means control of nuclear weapons. Powerful lasers in space counter nuclear missiles flying on a high arc. Even if they fly low, they are still fairly visible from space and could be targeting by patrolling aircraft with less-powerful lasers, or ground based missiles. Controlling space means you could deny the enemy reconnaissance satellites, so they wouldn't have time to see your first-strike until it came across the horizon, weakening their ability to launch a second strike. Or you could launch rods from god style attacks, which are even faster than ICBMs.

It's much easier to build spaceships in low-gravity than in high-gravity conditions like Earth. Flying from Earth imposes immense design costs, you need a very sturdy ship with very high thrust-weight ratios capable of leaving our atmosphere. It's much more efficient to have low thrust engines that burn for a long time. Controlling space means controlling the best places to build spaceships, in the asteroid belt. There is a ludicrous amount of construction materials there.

Controlling space means total world domination.

There is no stealth in space.

Just FYI, and also this. Obviously the programmes are super classified so we don't know how stealthy the satellites are, but hiding stuff in space isn't impossible.

but the satellite was seen and tracked later that year and in the mid-1990s by amateur observers.

Yeah, not sure how well that's working out for them.

The classic "no stealth in space" does refer to propelled craft, starting from torchships and working its way down. You can avoid most of the objections by a fully passive orbit without a crew demanding life support. But you're still left with an object that's warmer than the 2.7 Kelvin background, at least when it's on the sunny side of the planet. Or microburning to adjust orbit. Or maybe even powering up to communicate.

Good point, I was referencing the old hard sci-fi idiom that there is no stealth in space. This really applies most towards things that move (especially if there are crew), satellites are a partial exception I suppose. Gigantic plumes of fire are pretty obvious.

But how do you launch something covertly? If there are rockets involved, there's huge plumes of fire. I suppose once it's up a satellite could be made out of radar-absorbent material - but our sensors are very very good. You can't really have your satellite be optimally radar-absorbent from all angles, some shapes have to be there to accomplish the purpose of the satellite, solar panels or whatever.

Heat or light signatures don't just disappear into the atmosphere like with aircraft. And spy satellites have to transmit information, which means they're sending a signal out. I suppose they could use some kind of point-to-point communication to hide. But there's going to be some heat created when you send a signal, heat that needs to radiate away. The background temperature of space is very low! They could also pretend to be civilian satellites I guess. But that would make it harder to put weapons on them.

I suspect that for the near future some combination of masquerading as or hiding on civilian launch vehicles, blinding enemy sensors via on-the-ground or on-the-web sabotage, or massed launches of decoys will enable some weak form of stealth or at least maskirovka when it comes to space warfare. There are also some crazier ideas out there involving active cooling with liquid hydrogen that I don't put too much stock in but would make for a good Tom Clancy novel.

Since Tom Clancy is dead, I already planned to add that as a plot point to my own hard scifi novel. Funny that I see the hydrogen steamer referenced here of all places!

I thought this place could do with a little good old fashioned space talk. ;)

This is a good post, but if I'm not mistaken, are there not treaties/bans against space weapons for reasons like these? Or was that just for things like "storing nukes in orbit"?

Treaties banning weapons only work when people either can't or don't want to build those weapons. We have treaties banning chemical weapons because no one wants to either use them or have them used on them. On the other hand, we had some treaties limiting the Russian and US nuclear arsenals because neither of us wanted to keep burning capital on the race.

Neither is the case here - the US is poised to gain a quantity advantage in space that no one outside of China will be able to match. (And China only if they can keep fast-following, since they're behind right now.) You can be sure the brass in the Space Force would love nothing more than to scale up Delta 9.

No, treaties agreed to by spacefaring nations only ban WMD in space.

Yes there are treaties against nuclear weapons in space generally and against conventional weapons on planetary bodies like the Moon.

But all this will change once it becomes more practical. The treaty doesn't even mention mining in space, there's no concept of property in the Outer Space Treaty aside from launched objects. You can't claim the Moon for instance.

I have no strong opinions on the role of space in future warfare, but I would raise a note of caution that reading your post really reminds me of the early 20th century air power advocates and the apocalyptic visions they conjured of entire nations reduced to rubble and madness by bombardment from the air.

Control of space may prove to be decisive in future conflicts, or it may prove to be just another theatre in war. It's far too early to call it either way.

the apocalyptic visions they conjured of entire nations reduced to rubble and madness by bombardment from the air.

Well, yes? The "bomber will always get through" speech turned out to be grossly overstated once the bomber was put up against radar and better fighters and flak cannons, but the risk of being reduced to rubble and madness is one reason why nations with strategic bombing capabilities (much less nuclear bombing capabilities) have avoided anything more than proxy wars with each other ever since.

Well they were right, were they not? Nuclear weapons can raze large countries within an afternoon. The missile (with decoys) will always get through! There are wars fought without nuclear weapons but the whole global security system is founded on the basis of nuclear weapons, it's like the sea in which we fish swim. It's not the Russian army that deters NATO support for Ukraine and direct intervention, it's their nuclear arsenal.

The early 20th century air power advocates were directionally correct but were just one or two orders of magnitude off in their predictions. North Korea was reduced to rubble by conventional strategic bombing, for instance. Basically all urban centers were razed. If they were alone, they would've capitulated.

Interesting points from a strategic perspective. How do you feel about the possibility of an international space treaty /non aggression clause going forward?

It lasts until someone sees use in putting a weapon in space, which won't be till we are beyond the moon

I’d imagine a weapon in LEO would be extremely devastating, why beyond the moon? Also what does beyond the moon mean in this context?

Maybe "beyond the moon" as in Side 3?

Yes, but any weapon in LEO can be based on the ground like an ICBM or modern ASAT weapons.

There already technically is the Outer Space Treaty (ratified by countries that matter) and Moon Treaty (which hasn't), which probably tells you the strong limits on what can be done from a political sense. As does the various questions and problems related to anti-satellite weaponry development.

Why would the strongest states adhere to a treaty that limits their strength?

There's SALT, START and the test ban treaty as a tentative example. But most of that has broken down by now, along with the anti-ballistic missile treaty.

Another example would be the Washington Naval Treaty which set everyone's capital ship strength at a certain ratio to the British. The Japanese and Germans cheated and then WW2 happened, whereupon everyone left. It was a major failure. Similarly, the treaty on conventional forces in Europe has broken down.

My belief is that space is more like conventional military strength in that there's rough parity between attack and defence. The more warships you have, the better you are proportionately.

With nuclear weapons, it's easy to defend and hard to attack in strategic terms. Destroying the enemy's nuclear weapons in a first-strike is very difficult, they can hide them in various places. And the defending side's missiles can probably get through missile defense, that's still very cost-inefficient. So it's much harder to gain a decisive advantage such that you can really exploit your nuclear forces. Mutually Assured Destruction.

Arms control treaties make most sense for nuclear weapons, less sense for symmetrical weapons like capital ships or conventional forces that can attack and defend. Space is more like the latter. Nuclear treaties are already breaking down, so what chance is there for space?

More songs about buildings and food discussion of trans matters, this time courtesy of Freddie deBoer. First of, let me say I appreciate Freddie's writing. I think he often has sensible things to say, particularly in his own field of education, and offers necessary criticism as a leftist who is on the left.

That being said, he is just as prone to the shibboleths of his side as we on the right are to the shibboleths of our side. Having seen how the progressive agenda around education is a steaming pile of what makes the roses grow, because he's been there and he's seen how the theory does not correspond with reality, I don't understand how he then falls into line with the rest of the progressive activism around other matters. But then, we all have our blind spots.

He wants to compare transgenderism with transracialism, and how one is real and valid and the other is a fake, but then he comes out with lines like this:

The basic progressive argument about gender is precisely that gender identity isn’t tied to either genetics or physiology.

Well then eff me, Freddie, if it's not genetics and it's not physiology and biology not real, what is gender identity tied to?

Maybe... feelings? I feel like a woman?

Then why isn't it possible to feel like a black woman? To have that same yearning about identity and conviction that what you are "assigned at birth" is not the truth of what you really are?

But the evidence against this is right in front of your face: the very word “trans” announces the distinction. It’s the trans movement! If the point were to insist that there are no physiological or genetic differences between trans and cisgender men or trans and cisgender women, then it would be awfully odd that trans people identify as trans, wouldn’t it?

He does not seem to have seen the arguments in some quarters that the term "trans woman" should not be used, that it should simply be "woman". After all, trans women are women. Maybe he hasn't encountered the nuttier fringes of the "trans movement" as yet.

But on LGBTQ issues, I’ve never really had an unusual angle, just like I’ve always been conventionally progressive on abortion or environmentalism.

Yeah, I absolutely don't disagree there. He sings along to the chorus like a good right-thinking person on the right side of history. But maybe those who don't hold the conventional progressive position aren't all dishonest or activated by unthinking bigotry and prejudice? Something to think about.

Anyway, this is mostly to present a reasonable leftist and what they think the trans movement is all about, and how their experience may or may not line up with what other people have experienced. In the middle of the screeching harpies, it's hard to remember that on both sides of this question are people who are genuinely trying to do their best.

It's weird. Gender seems obviously more tied to biology than race, which is, in large part (oc not fully) mediated by cultural association.

A black man is more like a white man than a black women. Yet the progressive thinks he is more capable to become the latter than the former because reasons.

A middle class African American is more like his middle class American white neighbor than he is like a rural African farmer. Not just culturally, possibly genetically too through racial mixing. Yet we are to believe that their dominant skin tone represent an impenetrable, immutable, objective racial feature of more import and gravity, than the separation between males and females.

Oh well, freddy has always seemed like a joke to me. I even think his 'education' takes are quite lacking. It's just that the right leaners here are already don't apply any critical eye to those takes because they're too busy clapping.

Is a cock closer to a bull than to a hen? Because cocks and bulls are similar in the same way that black men and white men are similar: they share a sex.

  • -29

cocks and bulls are separate species. Black men and White men are not separate species. Racial variation is not speciation in any meaningful sense. This comment is terrible.

no, they share sex and they are the same species. what are you talking about? the distance between races is comparable to the distance between mammals and birds? damn u racist.

Species are a social construct.

Either you are deliberately exaggerating for rhetorical effect, which is not the sort of low-effort sneering we want here, or you are literally claiming that white men and black men are not only difference species, but completely different classes of being, which is an extraordinary claim requiring proportional evidence.

Do not post like this. You have a number of warnings for just plain bad posts now. Your last one was almost a month ago, or I'd probably give you a ban as I usually do for a string of crappy comments in a short time. But next time will very likely be a ban.

I don't accept your false dichotomy just any more than I accept the (unsupported, extraordinary, consensus-building) claim I took exception to. There is no either/or, and I'm not sneering, unlike the responses I've gotten thus far. I noticed neither of them warranted a mod-hat brandishing a banhammer, despite being better examples of rule breaking.

Either you are deliberately exaggerating for rhetorical effect

My post is a reductio ad absurdum, which I know you are familiar with. I didn't appreciate @motteburner123 or @FCfromSSC deliberately ignoring that, but they're not threatening me with a ban for using simple logic. Both of them swallowed the absurd at face value in order to call me racist, and my post terrible, which each breaks more rules than the post they replied to (Antagonism, Charity, Consensus, Clarity, specifically "we ask that responders address what was literally said, on the assumption that this was at least part of the intention."). Motteburner didn't even use capitalization, having spent even less effort than my admittedly brief reply.

My post was short, but it was perfectly clear. The argument

A black man is more like a white man than a black women.

is absurd. I demonstrated how absurd it was by taking it to the extreme. This is not sneering, it's rhetoric. I didn't think I needed three paragraphs of text when a simple and straightforward reductio ad absurdum would do the job. My use of a common form of argument was deliberately misconstrued, by you included, in a way that breaks the very rules you're threatening me with. In your own post you clearly understand how absurd it is. You link to classes, but if you followed the logic one step forward, you'd have realized that classes are determined by distance from a common ancestor. Why can't you apply that same logic to the comment I replied to, or even to my own comment which was obviously absurd?

The organisms most like you are not those that share your sex. That is absurd, like saying a cock is more like a bull than a hen. Instead, the organisms most like you are those that share the greatest share of ancestry. The organisms most like you are your parents and your siblings and your offspring. A black man is more like his black mother and black sisters than he is like a white man. He is more like his black grandmother and black cousins than he is a white man. The very same thing that determines classes, shared ancestors of common origin, is what makes the original claim obviously wrong and in need of the proactive evidence in favor. My rebuttal needs no such proactive evidence, as you tacitly admitted by using the very same logic when you ignored my argument.

There was exactly one thing in my post that was genuinely obscure and unstated. I used cock and bull, not stag and ram, for effect. I apologize for not speaking clearly in that regard.

I noticed neither of them warranted a mod-hat brandishing a banhammer, despite being better examples of rule breaking.

Neither of them broke the rules. You did.

My post is a reductio ad absurdum, which I know you are familiar with.

That's not how reductio ad absurdums work.

This is not sneering, it's rhetoric.

The two are not mutually exclusive. You do not get to throw sneers and then claim "I was using rhetoric."

I find your disclaimers unconvincing. The warning stands; do not do this again.

They both assumed the worst of me, despite rules for charity. They both called me names, despite rules for kindness. One didn't use capitalization, and referred to me as "u," despite rules for effort. How is that not breaking the rules?

That's not how reductio ad absurdums work.

Yes, it is. You are wrong.

You replied far too quickly to have read my post, so I don't know why I expect you to read this, but here's the definition:

A mode of argumentation or a form of argument in which a proposition is disproven by following its implications logically to an absurd conclusion.

This is exactly what I did. I followed the implication that black men and white men are more like each other than to any woman to its logical conclusion, thus disproving the proposition.

You seem to have it out for me, but that doesn't mean you can simply lie about what I'm doing, or flatly deny my arguments out of hand.

Seriously, you want me to mod someone for a lack of capitalization?

You replied far too quickly to have read my post

I read your post. It doesn't take that long to write a few lines in response.

You seem to have it out for me, but that doesn't mean you can simply lie about what I'm doing, or flatly deny my arguments out of hand.

I don't even notice you except when you pop up in the mod queue.

I don't care how you feel about being modded; I am telling you why you were modded, and what the consequences will be if you post like this again.

I want you to mod someone for low-effort swipes. The lack of capitalization is evidence for how low effort it was.

I want you to mod someone for saying this:

damn u racist.

about me, which breaks the rules. I ignored it because I don't care, but if you're going to mod-hat me, you ought to be doing the same to him.

You should just ban him -- I don't see how any good can come of this.

I think if you’re making an “ad absurdium” argument the onus is on you the poster to clearly communicate that with at least one phrase.

Single phrase responses that read like rhetorical smack downs is precisely the kind of thing this site tries to avoid… like literally the whole point of the rules in my perception is to avoid one-liners submerging real content and thought out arguments.

The fact that most people consider your comment racist is an orthogonal issue and not, IMO, ban-related, though the mods can speak for themselves.

Isn't the idea that gender is more biological than race an argument in favor of transgender being acceptable and transracial not being acceptable? Biology can be altered by taking hormones that have a variety of physiological and psychological effects. Get a dark spray tan and dreadlocks doesn't have the same sort of effect on the transitioning person's physiology and psychology.

That's something of a 'trans-medicalist' perspective, most trans activists wouldn't endorse the idea that you have to take HRT to be legitimately trans. I think that's mostly for 'big tent' solidarity reasons, most trans people won't shut up about how much hormone therapy changed them.

Isn't the idea that gender is more biological than race an argument in favor of transgender being acceptable and transracial not being acceptable?

So if he thinks race is more biological he should be defending transracialism and dismissing transgenderism, no?

Yeah we're making different arguments. He seems to be focused on the issue of deception, with the idea that trans racial people are trying to deceive others about their biology while trans gender people acknowledge their biology is different by affixing trans as an adjective. It's a weird argument that's pretty orthogonal to what's actually contested.

And even if it were that simple, claiming to be experiencing gender dysphoria when you aren't (i.e. malingering) so that you can be transferred to a women's prison is another kind of deceit which seems highly relevant to the conversation.

I think if "I'm pregnant, using the ova produced by my own ovaries and carrying the foetus to term in my own uterus when I will then deliver it via my own vagina, but I am 100% a man and it's not legal for you to say otherwise" applies, then it damn well ought to apply in the case of "So what if my melanin levels don't match that person's levels?"

Some people who have a uterus and ovaries, are not on testosterone, and identify as men or as not as women may wish to become pregnant. Unless you’ve taken testosterone, the process of pregnancy is similar to that of a cisgender woman. Here, we’ll focus on the process of carrying a child and giving birth for AFAB folks who have a uterus and ovaries, and are,or have been, on testosterone.

Why should testosterone be considered any different to taking antioxidants and vitamins to naturally increase production of melanin?

People of any skin type can try increasing melanin to reduce skin cancer risk. Studies suggest that upping your intake of certain nutrients could increase melanin levels. It might even increase the amount of melanin in people with fair skin types.

Or even tanning? If Chris (new name) needs an artificial source of testosterone to be a real man and this is acceptable, why should it be unacceptable for Shaniqua (new name) to use tanning booths and fake tan to be a real biracial woman? Depending on her ethnic background, it might be possible for Shaniqua to naturally achieve darker skin, while Chris will never be able to naturally generate testosterone. So which is more truly affecting physiology?

If you put a transgender person alone on a space station and give them HRT they're still going to have experiences aligned with their gender identity. How they experience emotions, sexual arousal, and some of their personality characteristics are going to become more closely aligned with the gender they identify with. On the obvious stereotypical stuff, trans women will find it much easier to cry, trans men experience more arousal in response to visual stimulus.

If you put a white person on a space station and let them increase their melanin levels are they going to have any experiences that constitute 'the black experience' or are part of black culture in the U.S? I would think not, because those experiences are inherently social. Perhaps they might have to change their skin care routine, but that doesn't seem a comparably large change in internal subjective experience.

That is to say that melanin is constitutive of race almost entirely because it's a flag that indicates how others should treat you socially. Gender is both a social cultural experience and an internal psychological one.

It makes sense to me for someone to say "my internal psychological experience is closer to the gender I identify with than my birth sex, so I would like to occupy the social position of my gender identity and take hormones so my internal experiences and body align more fully with that gender". It doesn't make sense to me for someone to say "my internal psychological experience is closer to a different race" because I don't think races have unique internal psychological experiences outside of social treatment.

As you point out with the case of pregnancy there are going to be all sorts of things where trans people have experiences that are wildly atypical for someone of the gender they identify with. Obviously criminalization of speech is bad and I oppose that. But if someone says to me: "I think my internal psychological experience is closest to a man's and I would like to occupy the male social position and take testosterone, but the only way for me to have biological children is to become pregnant and so I have chosen to do that please refer to me as a man" I would do so.

If people have to take hormones, or mutilate themselves to achieve their “gender identity” then those are biological changes that prove that the whole thing is biological.

But do keep up. The ideology of gender identity supports self identification and demands no medical intervention, which means that -for instance - any male rapist can be get into the female prison estate by merely calling himself a woman. No GRC even needed.

This is the inevitable result of gender identity - you have to believe anybody and everybody.

You don't though. It's possible to admit the existence of a mental health condition without believing everyone who self diagnoses with that condition actually has it. That's how gender dysphoria has been treated for most of history and the shift to mere identification being adequate is recent. Imo it isn't a logical conclusion of ideology, but an obviously incoherent position invented to deny any grounds for gatekeeping by the medical establishment.

One man's modus tollens or however that's phrased.

The trans activists would have us believe that a trans woman's inner experiences are similar to those of the modal female, but that it's ridiculous to suggest that a white person could have inner experiences similar to those of a black person.

A trans woman can approximate the social experience of being a female adult by dressing as one, and doing so could give her a meaningful insight into how being a woman "feels" socially. The thing is, there are real differences in bodily functions such that there are experiences a trans person will never be able to have: a trans woman will never experience menstruation or pregnancy, a trans man will never experience ejaculation. As you correctly note, the meaningful differences between a black person's subjective inner experiences and a white person's are almost entirely social: people treat you differently because of how you look. As in the case of transgender people, transracial people can approximate this social experience using tanning beds, makeup and the like.

So a trans person claims to be able to bridge the experiential gap and understand what it feels like to be someone of the opposite sex, overcoming the social differences (people treat you differently because you are female/male) AND the actual biological differences, which cannot even be approximated and which are hence entirely inscrutable. Transracial people have a much easier job: they only need to contend with the social differences. The imaginative empathetic gap is far narrower for transracial people than for transgender people.

The trans activists would have us believe that a trans woman's inner experiences are similar to those of the modal female, but that it's ridiculous to suggest that a white person could have inner experiences similar to those of a black person.

I don't think you're getting it. The idea isn't that black and white people have no inner experiences in common, the idea is that they have no difference in inner experience except for in response to social treatment. To say "I desire to change my melanin to match my inner experience of blackness" is incoherent because there is no inner experience of blackness distinct from social treatment. To say "I desire to increase my testosterone to match my inner experience of masculinity" is coherent because femininity and masculinity are aspects of inner experiences.

I think a big part of our disagreement is that I think living with a testosterone or estrogen dominated body is a much bigger part of gendered experience than having the appropriate genitals. I ejaculate every few days, a cis woman menstruates a few days a month. We're both constantly having our emotional processing, cognition, personality and preferences shaped by our hormones. A trans man might never have 100% of the experiences of a cis man but getting on testosterone can give them a lot of them pretty quickly.

A white person who tans their skin isn't going to immediately start having racialized experiences, and because race is so linked to class and culture they may never. Progressives don't like to talk about this but black people police blackness all the time and discuss people not really being black enough. I don't think a well educated middle class woman who tans her skin so she's plausibly biracial is really going to experience much racial discrimination and may or may not participate in black culture.

It also seems a little telling that trans-racial people as re usually not white people from 'the ghetto' who live in the black community and want their skin to better reflect their internal experiences. It seems to be a bunch of white women who want favoritism for non-profit positions.

I don't know if every transgender person claims to have inner experiences similar to those of the opposite sex, but "I feel happier and more fulfilled when I'm presenting as a woman because I like the way people treat me" strikes me as the kind of sentiment many trans women would say accurately describes their inner lives. If a big motivation for transitioning (or even just "passing") is the social component, why is this desire legitimate in the case of transgender people but illegitimate in the case of transracial people? Why is "I like the way people treat me when I present as a woman, even though I'm male" a perfectly legitimate desire to hold, but "I like the way people treat me when I present as black, even though I'm white" offensive and wrongheaded?

All of this is further complicated by the fact that, while taking hormones and undergoing surgery will change a trans person's inner experiences to be more similar to those of a member of the opposite sex, many trans people never take hormones or undergo surgery, and the suggestion that trans people who don't medically transition aren't really trans is widely seen as an offensive form of gatekeeping in trans activist circles ("truscum" is the preferred term). For many trans people, the extent of their transition is social: they have no interest in changing their bodies in order to change their inner qualia, changing the way people treat them is good though for them. Once again, I ask why this preference is legitimate in the case of gender, but illegitimate in the case of race.

It also seems a little telling that trans-racial people as re usually not white people from 'the ghetto' who live in the black community and want their skin to better reflect their internal experiences. It seems to be a bunch of white women who want favoritism for non-profit positions.

You could say the exact same thing about male sex offenders who suddenly "discover" an internally felt female gender identity upon conviction. If the existence of a few transracial grifters cynically claiming to be a different race for personal gain invalidates transracial as an identity, precisely the same argument applies to transgender. For what it's worth, Freddie himself doesn't go this far, acknowledging that he thinks there's something "tragic and wounded" about Rachel Dolezal.

It makes sense to me for someone to say "my internal psychological experience is closer to the gender I identify with than my birth sex, so I would like to occupy the social position of my gender identity and take hormones so my internal experiences and body align more fully with that gender".

But this ultimately does not make sense. It's a claim to knowledge that the person cannot possibly posses. There is not way to differentiate between in the internal experience of "I am a male who correctly identifies that I internal psychological experience closer to what women have" and "I am a male who incorrectly believes I have internal psychological experience closer to what women have and actually the experience itself is inherently a male experience". We all only have one first person experience.

You could say the same for all internal mental states because language is an imperfect medium for communicating lived experience. How can I ever know if I'm really "angry", or if I am incorrectly describing some other emotion as anger? I can never directly access everyone else's experiences to know what anger truly is, I just have to construct an idea of anger based on other people's descriptions.

Very little usually hangs on the accuracy of such comparison. Yes - you can't actually know if the anger you feel is the same as the anger I feel although you do at least have a lot more evidence it does(especially if we're the same sex), because anger serves a common biological purpose. Your gender's body has very little reason to be able to accurately model such a thing and probably a few reasons to not perfectly do so.

And hell, I'm open minded, I'm not bothered by Men who want to dress as women, act like women, even get cosmetic surgery/take hormones to look like women for whatever reason. They just enjoy looking cute, they feel sexy, whatever. But don't expect me to agree that there is some cosmic way that they're actually fundamentally women. I gave up religion a long while ago and this is precisely the thing I will no longer accept on faith.

We're social animals so there's lots of evolutionary utility from being able to predict other people's actions and accurately modeling other people's internal states would be helpful for that.

Sure I'm not big on metaphysics. I think labels are about communicating useful information not cosmic essences. But I think in most cases the useful information to communicate is the social role a person is presently occupying not their birth sex. I think trans inclusive language in medical contexts is pretty dumb because the anatomical details are relevant there, but in most social contexts expected presentation and mannerism are the relevant content of the gendered label.

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Isn't the idea that gender is more biological than race an argument in favor of transgender being acceptable and transracial not being acceptable?

it may be an argument, but it doesn't appear to be freddy's.

most trans activists wouldn't endorse the idea that you have to take HRT to be legitimately trans

This stance is generally labelled "truscum" by the trans activist community. No prizes for guessing how positively it was received.

I'm aware. I think there's a coherent idea of transness right there for the taking, but the actual trans community has strong strategic reasons not to take it. If they admit that transness is 'gatekeepable' in any way they won't be the ones who get to decide who is legitimately trans and who isn't. Hence, they have adopted a 'no gatekeeping' stance which is obviously incoherent but that doesn't mean that there is no coherent account of transness.

It'd be like if the Ukrainians declared anyone who fought on their side in the war a Ukrainian. Obviously it's logically incoherent to put some American guy who died in his first month in Ukraine in the same category as someone who lived there all their life, but you understand the strategic rhetoric and it doesn't mean there's no coherent account of Ukranian identity.

I don't think the people who don't really want to change anything about their bodies or lives except wear dresses and have female pronouns belong in the same category as people who have crippling genital dysphoria, but I understand the strategic logic of them all coming together under the same label.

I don't think the people who don't really want to change anything about their bodies or lives except wear dresses and have female pronouns belong in the same category as people who have crippling genital dysphoria

Fair enough, that's a consistent position.

Well then eff me, Freddie, if it's not genetics and it's not physiology and biology not real, what is gender identity tied to?

Your soul.

I've recently heard James Lindsey embrace a position that I've held for a long time now: transgenderism as an ideology is a gnostic cult. The material world is the work of an evil creator that has to be transcended to become one's true self.

Biology, culture, these are all the means to the end of what is most essentially a metaphysical argument about the very nature of the world and of oneself. This totally explains the paradox of gender abolitionists who nonetheless make a gazillion different genders: if you listen to them what they are looking for is communion with their true essence.

It feels like a while since the term "reality-based community" was in vogue, but I remember wondering how support for trans rights could possibly fit well with that back when I first saw progressives using it, without realizing it was just a shorthand for "we believe in The Cathedral, not The Church".

Yes I've also long held that "reality has a liberal bias" and "Gött mitt uns" are phrases with essentially identical meaning.

It is an argument about the nature of the world, I guess, but it's happening on the other side of the is/ought divide.

Gnostics drew their dividing line between the two: observable reality was on one side, moral authority on the other. The gnosis itself was a way to bring that authority across the line. There's no equivalent for transgender, because the trans line is drawn entirely within the "is" side. Is sex separable from gender? Are gender roles tied to objective reality? Any moral oughts are outsourced to the usual classical liberal principles.

Consider the concept of "validity." As used by the trans community, it's an assertion that one's internal experiences are real. That they are as real as the external presentation which traditionally signifies gender. There is no gnosis to be internalized; it is a materialist divide.

I also don't think the gender abolitionists are on board with xenopronouns or, often enough, transitioning. My impression has been that mentioning gender abolition in modern extremely-online communities will get you labeled a TERF. If true, there's no paradox to explain.

There's no equivalent for transgender, because the trans line is drawn entirely within the "is" side. Is sex separable from gender?

I disagree. What is self-id if not gnosis? I have the authority to decide what my true essence is and am therefore above the laws of society in dictating my role within it.

I fully maintain that the flipflops of sex/gender and nature/nurture are meaningless rhetorical artifice. That are ditched or swapped based on pure utility.

I also don't think the gender abolitionists are on board with xenopronouns or, often enough, transitioning.

You'd think so, but reading their litterature, xenopronouns are actually a specifically abolitionist concept in trying to destroy or dilute the binary into absurdity. A escape into creativity if you will. All those endless videos of conservatives mocking the absurdity of them are missing the point. It's meant to be absurd in some sense. Of course the autists that maintain the wikis might just be so much into it that they actually believe in they/them astrology, but xenogenders are at at core a tactic. A political tactic.

If anything I think the people who talk most about gender abolition that I've seen are some of the most radically trans you can find. It is true that if you try to use this as an excuse to rebuke the necessity of medical transition they will pounce, and there is some latent hostility between the woman-in-jeans with a fancy title FTMs and the hardcore medical transhumanist MTFs for obvious reasons, but overall I've seen honest discussion of gender abolition among the left wing of transgenderists to be relatively unanimous on the goal being positive, and very staunch disagreement on how to get there, in a way quite similar to full communism.

Recently, I was again moved to reiterate that I will not tolerate negative fixation on trans people in my comments. I have in fact felt compelled to declare comments on this issue off-limits in general unless I specifically bring the subject up. The problem stems from a small minority of commenters, and commenters are a small minority of readers. But discussion of trans people in the comments space too often creates an environment that’s unwelcoming and hostile, and I’m not willing to accept that.

It seems like most of his problems stem from the comments. He may as well just disable them for good. The vast majority of readers do not comment (I think it's something like 1% of readers will comment), usually the most loyal or committed. There are still userhandles from 2014 commenting on Marginal Revolution. I sometimes skim the comments on his blog (you must pay to comment), and the vast majority of the comments seem pretty civil and in agreement, so I am not sure what he is seeing that I am not. Compared to reddit, he gets way less shit than most people (I took lots of shit from that article I shard a while back about TED Talks). Given how long he has been online and writing for the public, I figured he would have a thick skin.

The trans issue is not even that controversial. If he really wants to annoy his readers, push for higher marginal tax rates on upper middle class and above, which used to be the mainstay democratic position. That is way more contentious. And it affects him. This is why wokeness and trans issues is the opposite of skin in the game. None of these people are going to be affected by it, hence moving away from economics issues to identity ones.

As one of Freddie's subscribers and occasional commenters, prior to his "talking about trans people in the comments of one of my posts about an unrelated subject = instant ban" policy, it really was common for at least one comment thread on all of his posts to end up centering on trans issues, no matter how unrelated the post's subject matter. It was annoying.

I believe that this community experimented with a ban on the HBD topic for a while for similar reasons, and I don't think it was because the mods were anti-HBD per se, they were just tired of it being the only goddamn thing we talked about. That's my memory, anyway.

About the least charitable take I have on Freddie's banning commenting on about trans issues is that he may realize just how badly the social justice left has shot itself in the foot in the last five years with the trans issue, and is tired of having people using it as a generic gotcha attack on social justice politics in general.

I do get that if any and every post ends up being diverted by people in the comments going "So what about this latest trans outrage?" even if it is totally unconnected to the subject of the post, that is bad, and he's perfectly entitled to ban, shut down, and tell them to shut the hell up for doing that. And there are bad actors out there.

But a blanket "this is the official line and I don't listen to anything else" comes across as being censorship, you know, like the bad right-wingers who can't cope with diversity of opinion or anything that challenges their fixed notions of How Things Ought To Be engage in?

Freddie saying "I am fed-up of people dragging in trans issues where it's not pertinent, knock it off or eat a ban" is perfectly fair and his right as the Substack owner. Freddie saying "I'm not discussing this at all because any criticism is only bad-faith right-wingers who are all prejudiced bigots" isn't great. But then again, if he has a trans family member, sure, this is natural human behaviour.

Not to be uncharitable to Freddie, but it seems to me that he's toeing the line here because he's blood-related to a trans person and trans activist. (Giving details about this person is probably against the rules, so I won't.) So, he simply doesn't want to be cut off from them. It's why every time he writes something about trans people, it just seems so intellectually hollow, like he's fundamentally refusing to question any of his assumptions and preconceived notions about trans people and trans activism, and just wants to go along with the flow to keep them happy. For example:

I also just don’t agree with the conclusions drawn from some kinds of evidence. For example, it’s entirely possible for clinics that specialize in adolescent transition to be mismanaged or otherwise imperfect. That’s simply the reality of medical care at scale. What I don’t understand is why this would be uniquely disqualifying; there are no doubt dialysis centers and radiology labs and pharmacies that have serious operational problems, but no one thinks that this discredits those kinds of medicine.

No, it doesn't discredit dialysis centers, radiology labs, or pharmacies in general. But, the first objection people take here is to the existence of adolescent transition in the first place. Ignoring that though, the bigger objection is that there's no feedback mechanism to root out and address these mismanaged clinics, and not only is there not one, people are discouraged from doing so and branded as "alt-right fearmongerers" if they ever attempt to call them out. It's a self-coordinating conspiracy (prospiracy?) that Big Pharma can only dream of. Big Tobacco is wishing people would've done the same for any anti-tobacco talk in the '90s.

And in general, it's like this for any proposal of the trans movement. You ask, what if men take advantage of trans identification to creep on women in the bathroom? You're told that that's not going to happen and you're just repeating a scenario that only originates in the minds of alt-right Nazis. Okay, then some men end up doing exactly that, so you ask what will be done about them, and then you're told that you're just making up lies and that they never actually creeped on women. Or, my favorite, that man is actually just a right-wing psyop to discredit trans people... so it did happen, but it doesn't reflect bad on the trans movement. Which is a really convenient way to avoid any blame for any of your implemented proposals. How about another one: You object that normalizing policing behavior against anyone deemed anti-trans (i.e. being a cop) is simply harassment and bullying that is legitimized under the guise of trans activism. "Well, uh, we tell them not to harass people, we don't condone harassment!" Okay, so a VTuber announces her intent to play Hogwarts Legacy and is immediately dogpiled to the point that she quits streaming. "All those harassers are just right-wingers in secret trying to discredit and kill trans people!" and "She deserved it anyways." You point out that detransitioners exist and go over why they detransition, and then:

Worse, right-wing fixation on detransitioners has had the ugly side effect of making some people who are supportive of trans rights suspicious of them, when they should be treated with respect and understanding.

Sigh. Should I go over how trans activists treat detransitioners in the first place? (Spoiler alert: Very poorly.)

Trans activists always react like this when something bad happens. Every single instance of trans policy producing bad outcomes is ignored, dismissed, or discredited under the fear that this legitimizes opposition to trans people and will threaten their lives. There's no mechanism in the movement itself to stop bad behavior, proactively or reactively, so the brakes are ripped out and the foot is pushing the accelerator to the floor. If that doesn't give you pause at agreeing with shibboleths like "trans rights are human rights", then I don't know what will.

I don't really want to blame Freddie, because no one is perfect at everything and there will always be some blind spot they'll miss. Still, for all his dissident writing, it's a shame he fell in line on the trans issue. For some far better dissident content on the excesses of the trans rights movement, I recommend Sophia Narwitz's video "Trans Activists Are STILL Their Own Worst Enemy".

so a VTuber announces her intent to play Hogwarts Legacy and is immediately dogpiled to the point that she quits streaming. "All those harassers are just right-wingers in secret trying to discredit and kill trans people!" and "She deserved it anyways."

I wanted to talk about this one, but couldn't write anything dispassionate enough. Watching the narrative flip back and forth in real time was enraging, but it was so blatant that even redditors noticed and started quoting the "narcissist's prayer."

People keep saying things like "shooting themselves in the foot", but I don't see that. I see an exercise in total narrative dominance that's only strengthened by how indefensible the claims are. If even a contrarian like Freddie will bend the knee to it, how can it be a strategic error?

The theory goes that normal people will see this extreme behavior and "peak", i.e. change their opinion on the trans movement, and trans people in general. It's an optimistic theory for sure; I can't claim anything on how it will all play out one way or the other.

God, I also wanted to talk about this, but I figured it was too "rest of the Internet" for the Motte and I also figured I wouldn't have anything of substance to say.

The incredible levels of cope and blame avoidance had my mind wandering back to the discussions around the book Sadly, Porn, it's author The Last Psychiatrist, and his general fight against narcissism. Trans, cis, or whatever, there sure seem to be a lot of people in desperate need of admitting fault. The fact that people thought Silvervale's* "Twitter freaks" comment was a dogwhistle aimed at trans people and Jews was very much an "if you're reading it, it's for you"-type of thing, and if anything, I think it's only made the term "Twitter freaks" into more of a shibboleth.

The accusations of right-wing "gayops" smack so heavily of "big if true." I can believe that it may be possible, but if so, then trans activism has a bigger problem than a stupid wizard game if they can be reliably punked by 4Channers in such a way.

This and other events related to the general online trans community (and real-life stuff like Montana's recent bill) definitely seem like a string of PR hits for them, but it's hard to say if it'll actually move the needle on public opinion or just settle back down to the status quo.

*Silver is not the VTuber who is quitting streaming, for those unaware. That would be Pikamee, who was already planning on "graduating," but speculation says that the harassment may well have accelerated the plan.

The accusations of right-wing "gayops" smack so heavily of "big if true." I can believe that it may be possible, but if so, then trans activism has a bigger problem than a stupid wizard game if they can be reliably punked by 4Channers in such a way.

I very sincerely doubt it's a possibility. There are plenty of people in the crowd dogpiling Pikamee who have internet presences dating back years, that don't seem to be fake (but I can't prove a negative). I have yet to see a convincing argument that the majority of people dogpiling were, say, avatarless randomly-generated usernames who joined Twitter yesterday.

Of course, the standard response to an argument against a conspiracy theory is to double down on the conspiracy further and postulate an even bigger conspiracy to cover up evidence of the conspiracy being a conspiracy. I have no doubt they'll just say the 4channers will have planned this out years in advance or something. It reminds one of a JFK truther going to heaven, being told by God Himself that JFK was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, and concluding that the conspiracy runs deeper.

Good point, I didn't realize that the proportion of "Twitter eggs"* would be a factor of evidence.

*GamerGate-era term for new and anonymous Twitter accounts--back then, I think the default avatar for new accounts was an egg.

You're told that that's not going to happen and you're just repeating a scenario that only originates in the minds of alt-right Nazis.

What some of us scum and villains who hang out around wretched hives refer to as "That thing that never happens just happened again".

There's even a Tumblr blog named They Say This Never Happens. It contains quite a few instances of the thing very much happening.

I think you're right when it comes to Freddie's motivations here - it looks to me like he is already dancing close enough to the edge with his writing that he would not survive the eye of trans Sauron poring over his work for anything cancellable.

The basic progressive argument about gender is precisely that gender identity isn’t tied to either genetics or physiology.

Well then eff me, Freddie, if it's not genetics and it's not physiology and biology not real, what is gender identity tied to?

I saw it earlier today, but I didn't have time to read the whole thing. In any case I almost spit out my drink when I first read that line. What I want to know is how is it decided which identities can be disembodied, and which are connected to genetics and biology? Because, call me crazy, but if race gets to be biological, and gender does not, then it sure as shit doesn't look like the determining factor is the magnitude of biological differences.

Anyway, I'll get to reading the post, maybe I'll have more to say when I finish.

I also did not like him handwaving away the social construction model for race but allowing it for gender. He needed to make a much stronger case for that to make any sense.

It’s funny for a supposedly anti woke Marxist to not condemn the trans movement because it’s the ultimate example of what’s really an ultimate individualist and American philosophy.

However I see Freddie do this every so often, the last was a few months ago

No, a Weimar Republic philosophy.

The thing is, Freddie is a real live Marxist, which is part of the (far) left in American politics, but he otherwise has traditional leftist views of the remnants of the old socialist working-class type. So he doesn't realise that the Overton window has shifted past him, and he's being left behind on the wrong shore.

He's protesting for economic leftism, but the progressive leftism of right now (whatever about Occupy, which I thought at the time and continue to think was a steaming mess of clashing ideologies and even worse, no ideology, just 'let's protest and something something magic underpants gnomes profit! will happen') isn't interested in economics as such. Social liberalisation is way easier and cheaper to achieve, as all the formerly centrist-right governments (such as in my own country) discovered when they woke up to embrace the rainbow flag and legalise same-sex marriage. Instant popularity, doesn't cost a red cent to implement, the old problems of lack of housing and all the rest of it still remain but look - we've got Pride flags now!

So being a good old-fashioned leftist and liberal, he is exactly what he says - "conventionally progressive". So he thinks yeah, let trans people use the bathrooms they feel most comfortable in, yeah trans people aren't trying to trick anyone, they know they're not really changing sex, yeah let's just be tolerant and open and supportive.

And that's not enough any more. I don't think he gets the crazier extremes, so he just goes along with "well I'm not trans but if this is what trans people say, that's good enough for me". Hence the bits about biology - there is more to it that I didn't quote, and he does take the old line that sure, having XY chromosomes and a dick does indicate masculine biology which is how we identify men and the likes, but he just goes along with the line that the trans movement tells him they're taking.

So he's safe so far, but if he ever says the wrong thing (and it's very easy to do that right now), he'll be condemned just as harshly as if he had been one of the transphobes all along.

But it’s all crazy extremes, isnt it? If it was just “make getting a grc easier” the that would have been ok, but self identification is a clear extreme disaster.

And I don’t get how supposed rationalists don’t get that.

Because the motte of "XYZ is obviously bad" defends, as always, a more oppressive bailey: "so let's ban U, V and W just to be safe." The people who most loudly criticize self-ID are usually LGBT-unfriendly on various other issues. Maybe they thought DOMA was pretty great, or are on camera deadnaming someone, or sent their kids to conversion therapy. It could be for deep-seated beliefs, or it could be political strategy. Doesn't really matter. Why should trans supporters trust them to come to the acceptable compromise on GRCs?

It's more or less the same slippery-slope argument that gets deployed in reverse. Maybe a lesbian woman is capable of teaching kids, but what if she makes it sexual? Give an inch and those activists take a mile. They used to be aligned with pedophiles, too...next thing you know, they'll be defending MAPs in schools...better to cut this off from the start.

This is a negotiation tactic, and it's not unique to any one cause.

I’m not sure that makes sense. The opposition to self identification is much higher than hostility to, say gay marriage. And trending in opposite directions. Outside of the US the primary opposition is feminists, which is clear from the acronym TERF.

And in the US the Christian right was anti gay anyway.

True, but I think that's normal for any policy issue with a spectrum of responses. The fringe pushes something extreme and the base either closes ranks or shuffles around uncomfortably. People who get too uncomfortable peel off to the other camps. Repeat until the fringe moderates or the opposition wins.

The people who most loudly criticize self-ID are usually LGBT-unfriendly on various other issues.

The people who most loudly criticize it are LGBT-unfriendly on other issues because an LGBT-friendly person has a lot more to lose by being accused of bigotry than a LGBT-unfriendly person, who's probably lost all that he could already and whose remaining friends and family won't care about the accusation. This situation is of trans supporters' own making.

Maybe a lesbian woman is capable of teaching kids, but what if she makes it sexual?

It doesn't work in reverse unless the lesbian's environment is controlled by rightists who can easily make such accusations stick against even innocent lesbians.

I really don't think so. Fear of cancellation is not the deciding factor in the LGBT+ coalition. Either way, opposing self-ID is a pretty good predictor of opposing other LGBT policies. That means supporters are likely to cry "slippery slope!"

And yeah, that's exactly the environment I had in mind. Some employers clearly would fire people based on sexuality. I realize that Title VII preempts such an option, but it still shows up as a rhetorical strategy.

Fear of cancellation is not the deciding factor in the LGBT+ coalition.

It may be the deciding factor as to whether someone who is the coalition chooses to oppose part of it.

Fear of cancellation is not the deciding factor in the LGBT+ coalition.

It's not just that, but also fear of social stigma, as well as tribal loyalty.

When opposing X gets you declared a bigot, it's a lot easier to do it if you're considered a bigot anyway due to your opposition to Y and Z.

Or if you think opponents are using it as a wedge, in which case breaking ranks is going to slide the Overton window.

When was the last time you heard a gun owner say "oh yeah, the suppressor tax stamp bump stock ban is perfectly reasonable"? I'm sure people do actually believe this. But they're not speaking up about it because it is seen as a referendum on federal authority. There's no incentive to give up ground until pressed.

So yes, the LGBT coalition makes it hard to oppose the wedge. Welcome to tribalism.

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Either way, opposing self-ID is a pretty good predictor of opposing other LGBT policies.

Really? Which other LGBT policies am I opposing then? Bonus points if you focus on the L, G, and B.

I dunno. How'd you feel about Florida's Parental Rights in Education bill? Was Bostock decided correctly? What about the whole cake-baking debacle?

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just 'let's protest and something something magic underpants gnomes profit! will happen'

Ah! Populism. Truly the illness of the age. In some sense 1/6 and its doubly farcical Brazilian reenactment was exactly this same sentiment. People have been raised on stories of heroic figures who just needed to stand up to the evil dictatorship to have everything magically fall into place and a new dawn shine on the liberated victors of oppression.

Turns out politics don't work that way and protesting is worse than useless if you don't have any power. Maybe people will eventually take the hint but this is such a powerful and deeply ingrained delusion that I'm not holding my breath.

In some sense even the most hardcore cynics you'll find on the far left and far right still cling to it deeply within their soul even as they openly denounce it. I don't know that I've lost this magical intuition to "trust the plan" myself. Deep down I'm probably still hoping a secret cabal of 90s liberals can just fix everything and finally restore the glory of the Roman Republic.

More songs about buildings and food discussion of trans matters, this time courtesy of Freddie deBoer.

Care to explain the reference? Is the album name a spoof on buildings and food being a common topic in the 70s musical zeitgeist?

Having seen how the progressive agenda around education is a steaming pile of what makes the roses grow

It's not clear to me how the conservative agenda (at least in America) is much better, but we can let that potshot slide for the moment.

Well then eff me, Freddie, if it's not genetics and it's not physiology and biology not real, what is gender identity tied to?

Maybe... feelings? I feel like a woman?

To perhaps offer a steelman, there are certain cultural practices and norms tied to gender that are essentially arbitrary in the modern environment. There's no inherent reason that women should be forced to shave their legs/armpits to be considered attractive, for instance, or that men shouldn't do the same. There's no biological imperative that men shouldn't be allowed to wear dresses, or makeup, or be considered submissive or cute. Ditto for being the majority caregivers after your child is more than a few years old, and earlier if you aren't breastfeeding. We long ago left the Hobbesian jungle of burly men hunting megafauna with stone tools, and physical strength is largely irrelevant in a world of Zoom meetings, work-from-home and knowledge economies. I'd argue that many of these gender norms have fluctuated throughout history. So what if someone identifies with a set of traits or characteristics that our society would typically associate with the opposite gender, regardless of whether this is caused by genetics/early childhood experiences or environmental exposures/'feelings' (themselves a product of all of the above, even if you try to use vocabulary suggesting that they are transient or unimportant)?

This in and of itself causes problems for people arguing that we should eradicate the gender binary entirely, and I haven't seen anyone square that circle convincingly. I'm personally more particular to those worldviews where most gender norms should be abolished and trans identity is more of a kludge in response to society enforcing a binary, but I'm not representative of everyone on the left.

Frequent rebuttals to this argument are often rooted in evolutionary psychology or Chestertonian fences. Or, as you frequently argue in other posts, it's 'just a fetish' and/or sexual predators trying to sneak under the radar to rape people, none of which I find particularly convincing. You can point to trans rapists; but then again, so can I for most of your favored groups, and these niche cases don't invalidate the cause as a whole.

It does seem that society is undergoing some kind of upheaval in response to generations of Women's lib, and where the new equilibrium will fall, I can't say. Perhaps the optimum would be one where everyone could freely choose for themselves, and while most people would naturally occupy the gender roles the correspond to their birth, there wouldn't be any stigma or disgust associated with people who (for whatever reason) do not. But...that just sounds a lot to me like trans acceptance, no? There used to be a futurist transhumanism strain here that was more optimistic and trans-positive that has either been driven off or converted to conservative trad thinking, which is a shame.

Then why isn't it possible to feel like a black woman? To have that same yearning about identity and conviction that what you are "assigned at birth" is not the truth of what you really are?

It's not a bad question. My personal response would be that black women are typically viewed as less attractive, as loud, stupid, etc. externally by society, regardless of whether they personally identify with any of those traits as well as a shared cultural history/tradition that is frequently tightly intertwined with the history of racism, segregation, slavery, etc. in the west. Thus the many examples highlighted here like Rachel Dolezal and the fake native American women which are most often rooted in self-advancement or Munchhausen-like addiction to sympathy, no? A white man who likes basketball and rap is viewed by society as...just a normal man as opposed to transracial, whereas a black man doing the same is viewed significantly differently. Meanwhile, a white man who likes wearing dresses and makeup is certainly not viewed by society as just a normal man, thus the 'trans' identity and pushback against social norms.

There's also the everpresent (although perhaps less frequently explicitly expressed of late) undercurrent of a post-racial/gender GLSC future. Such a world could still have 'trans' people who are born one sex and express traits that current times would code as of the opposite sex, whereas black women would just be women with more or less pigment. Assuming we reached some kind of equality without racialized underclasses, and maintained it for at least several generations.

But I can recognize that the logic isn't perfectly airtight.

He sings along to the chorus like a good right-thinking person on the right side of history. But maybe those who don't hold the conventional progressive position aren't all dishonest or activated by unthinking bigotry and prejudice? Something to think about.

This reads like 'mainstream view bad!' boo-outgroup. Ironically (considering the second half of your statement), you act as if the only way one could hold mainstream views on LGBTQ issues is to be a self-righteous, intellectually dishonest NPC. Just as I don't believe that you are dishonest or bigoted, maybe consider that Freddie and I actually do spend some time thinking about issues and arrive at our own conclusions.

Trans rapists don't invalidate every single trans person. They do cast a really negative light on the thoughtlessness of some significant strand of trans activism, who prefers they just be swept under the rug and never figured out an "acceptable" answer.

I'd go as far as to say as this should be entirely what we talk about. This isn't meant to throw any sort of shade at trans people, to make it clear, the intention is exactly the opposite. In fact, I think the argument should be made that this really doesn't have anything special to do with Trans people.

Someone on Twitter asked an interesting question, which was essentially, why is this topic so fraught? And the best answer I can give, is that it's the first topic (maybe) to be "born" in the forge of Postmodernism and Critical models of power at a popular level. Sure, they existed in academia before this, but I do think there was this divide between these ways of thinking and a much more transactional, retail, boots on the ground level productive politics. Frankly, it's possible that the other candidate for the "First topic" is COVID, and I do think you see a lot of the same patterns in that debate as well.

But this creates an activism, where anything less than everything is nothing. And I think that's what we see. And I'll be blunt. Even though I do think, on an instinctive level, that brain-body gender/sex mismatches make sense at the extremes...we're talking about more than that now. We're talking about people who internalize these Critical models of sex/gender and develop something approaching gender dysphoria (ROGD). We're talking about people who do this not from a gender, but from a sexuality PoV (AGP). And frankly, we're also talking about narcissists and sociopaths who understand the underlying power dynamics that come from these Critical models and seek to exploit them.

Covering for the latter is just going to drag down the whole thing. But that breaks kayfabe. That all the bad people are on one side and all the good are on the other. Frankly, same with the Critical model stuff.

That's where we are, I think.

Credit where credit is due, it's amazing that the trans community has gotten as far as it has with seemingly so little self-policing*. I have to wonder how it compares to previous civil-rights movements.

*Modulo conflicts like the truscum-tucute thing.

FWIW, my argument is that the topic itself doesn't really matter. And because of that you don't need self-policing, when it's all about power, essentially.

Modulo conflicts like the truscum-tucute thing.

I wonder if that's going to make a comeback and break it up. Like I said, I think we're talking about at least 4 substantially different phenomenon here, and frankly, I think 2 of the 4 are much more innate than the others.

Someone on Twitter asked an interesting question, which was essentially, why is this topic so fraught? And the best answer I can give, is that it's the first topic (maybe) to be "born" in the forge of Postmodernism and Critical models of power at a popular level. Sure, they existed in academia before this, but I do think there was this divide between these ways of thinking and a much more transactional, retail, boots on the ground level productive politics. Frankly, it's possible that the other candidate for the "First topic" is COVID, and I do think you see a lot of the same patterns in that debate as well.

Please help me understand this paragraph, because I'm having trouble. By "this topic" I assume you mean either trans issues generally or something more specific. If this topic was "born", what is it's "birthday"? 2020? 2014? 1969? Is the birthday when the public first becomes generally aware of the issue? How long has the "forge of Postmodernism and Critical models of power at a popular level" been operating? 2020, 2016, 2014...? What other topics might qualify as being a "first topic"? Russiagate? Gamergate? Brexit? Ukraine War?

I only ask these questions because it sounds like you have an interesting model, but I can't put the puzzle pieces together in my head.

To be frank, I think Gamergate was the "Dirty Bomb" that blew this model/culture of Critical Theory into the world. Or at least the reaction to such. It existed, to a degree, before that, but that's when I think it became fairly well known. So, when I'm talking about the culture of Postmodernism/Critical models of power, I do think that begins in 2015 or so. Maybe some people might look back to what happened to Operation Wall Street and take that into account..and they're not incorrect there to be clear, but I don't think support for that hit any sort of influential mass until the mantle was taken up by parts of the media/activist base, because it was being actively challenged for its own particular power/influence dynamics. Critical theory/Postmodernism is an easy "antidote" to those criticisms.

That's my opinion at least. And I think it's fairly obvious that Trans status as a mainstream issue came after that point.

But yeah, I think there's a reason that some people/communities hold on to Postmodernism/Critical Theory like a life vest that if they release they're going to fall down into the depths. And let me be clear...I don't think that's entirely wrong. I do think there's a legitimate self-interest at play here, even if frankly on the other hand I couldn't care less about said self-interest.

Trans identity reifies the gender binary, so I'm not sure how it's a kludge in response to it, exactly.

In a world where none of these behaviors were coded as male or female, one could choose to land anywhere on the spectrum without being forced to identify as x, y or z. In my mind, the trans label is necessary insofar as we live in a society that does have the binary. I doubt this is a widely held view, although I also doubt that many people think that deeply on it without being pushed.

To, sigh, steelman that point of view: it was incredibly predictable, "we" were told that'll never happen, and then when it did it's just Shocked Pikachu.jpg. It's not (merely) trying to Chinese Cardiologist away the problem; it's "what are you going to do about this failure mode" and then being shocked and having no answer when that failure mode comes up again and again.

And to steelman the rebuttal to that, something like 80,000 prisoners are raped per year in the United States. Huge proportions of female inmates report being raped or harassed, correctional officers have storied histories of raping female inmates. Trans inmates are raped at much higher rates. When's the last time Tucker Carlson ran a segment about prison rape in general? When's the last time anyone here wanted to discuss anything other than the hyped-up rounding error that is men faking being trans to rape female inmates? It's easily possible that a policy allowing trans folks to transfer prisons would result in a net negative number of prison rapes given how often they're victimized in men's prisons.

Small comfort to the victims, I know, I do care and you are correct that those were fairly predictable mistakes, but to say that the sudden concern for the safety of inmates rings hollow would be the understatement of the year. Maybe I'll start to take your argument seriously when conservative politicians/electorates are interested in prisoner welfare more generally.

But there's this big strain in progressivism and liberalism that has this fantastic lack of curiosity, full of weirdness and contradictions, #trustscience (except when it touches on this one topic in a way we don't like), and that's... really concerning.

Fair enough.

Hinges a lot on the details. What does "no stigma and disgust" mean, exactly? What does that mean for gender-segregated spaces? Or sex-segregated? Or genitalia-at-birth segregated spaces, or however you want to define it? Would none of those exist?

A fair question, but a difficult one to answer. 'No stigma and disgust' at least is independent of gender-segregated spaces, as it's easy to campaign on simply being more open-minded and affirming to people who want to dress/act/present themselves in ways that society frowns upon. I don't personally think I have a good answer to your second question and to the extent possible would defer to what women wanted.

Dropped a thought there, hoss.

I knew it was you, with a blackpilled name and slightly different writing style.

Many people view MtF trans the same way, as self-advancement or Munchausen-like trying to enter the "women are wonderful" effect (or trying to escape the "men are guilty until proven innocent" effect).

This doesn't answer why FtM are now considerably more common, but I think MtF and FtM are explained by mostly different mechanisms and it's practically accidental they're treated as one umbrella.

Frankly? I seriously wonder if you're right, particularly given the eye-popping numbers of trans teens right now. But I also wonder if trans acceptance becomes widespread and normalized we wouldn't see a decrease in the number of trans people as being trans lost it's luster of rebellion/counter-culture/righteousness and was treated like being a cis-gay guy in 2023.

It starts off snarky, but I think the point in your quoted section is that Freddie does think anyone that disagrees is only motivated by dishonesty and bigotry, so he's not extending the same consideration that you will.

Fair enough.

Somewhere, quite a while ago, de Boer said his position basically boiled down to always supporting the underdog no matter what.

There are worse heuristics.

In a world where none of these behaviors were coded as male or female, one could choose to land anywhere on the spectrum without being forced to identify as x, y or z.

Or... you could just do it anyway? I never understand this. So society frowns on the thing you want to do. So what? As long as it's not literally made illegal, why would you possibly care? Why invent a whole new identity to justify doing the thing you want to do, instead of just doing the thing you want to do? And why, oh why, make it everyone else's problem and responsibility to go along with that identity and validate you in every possible way at every possible opportunity?

You know the answer. The trans condition is mired in insecurity. They don't need permission. They need validation.

And to steelman the rebuttal to that, something like 80,000 prisoners are raped per year in the United States. Huge proportions of female inmates report being raped or harassed, correctional officers have storied histories of raping female inmates. Trans inmates are raped at much higher rates. When's the last time Tucker Carlson ran a segment about prison rape in general? When's the last time anyone here wanted to discuss anything other than the hyped-up rounding error that is men faking being trans to rape female inmates? It's easily possible that a policy allowing trans folks to transfer prisons would result in a net negative number of prison rapes given how often they're victimized in men's prisons.

Small comfort to the victims, I know, I do care and you are correct that those were fairly predictable mistakes, but to say that the sudden concern for the safety of inmates rings hollow would be the understatement of the year. Maybe I'll start to take your argument seriously when conservative politicians/electorates are interested in prisoner welfare more generally.

No. Men wearing wigs so they can enter women's prisons was not an issue 20 years ago. You try to shift the blame around, but conservatives didn't 'suddenly' get concerned about prisoner safety, they are concerned because progressives did something which everyone knew would end up with men putting on wigs to enter women's prisons. It was ignored however, because of progressive ideology - those who said anything were threatened into silence.

So there is no sudden concern for the safety of inmates, there is just the long historied concern about putting a convicted sex criminal in a building with a bunch of women and whistling nonchalantly as you lock the door behind you. It is the fact that the outcome was 'fairly predictable' which outrages people, because you are basically saying that you see those rapes as an acceptable price to pay for advancing your dogma. You do care but you won't take those rapes seriously until conservatives care about other prisoners, or trans rights. How is that different from not caring?

Small comfort to the victims, I know, I do care and you are correct that those were fairly predictable mistakes, but to say that the sudden concern for the safety of inmates rings hollow would be the understatement of the year. Maybe I'll start to take your argument seriously when conservative politicians/electorates are interested in prisoner welfare more generally.

There is a fundamental difference between being stuck with a fucked system that no one actually knows how to improve, and inventing new forms of fuckery out of whole cloth. Male rapists getting themselves transfered to female prisons wasn't a problem we had before, and it shouldn't be a problem we need to expend much effort to prevent, given that we can, you know, just not do that. People are outraged about it because its advocates seem to be making the world a strictly worse place, for no reason but blind ideology.

That last sentence, though... the moral lacunae grow. I think you're dead wrong, but boy, do I understand the doomed logic of the argument.

...Put it this way: your best defense is that there might be a net-reduction in rape, because transgenders and transtrenders together have such high rape numbers. If it turned out to be the other way around, and this was just a straight increase in rape, would you agree it's a bad idea?

There is a fundamental difference between being stuck with a fucked system that no one actually knows how to improve

Really? Nobody on the left has suggested any improvements for the American carceral system, nor have they been extolling the virtues of European systems for years now? Issues like forced labor, chronic understaffing, murder and rape1 2 and so on and so forth are rampant. The first time I've seen anyone on the right express any kind of sympathy for the plight of prisoners was the J6 rioters.

Would you disagree with that characterization? Are there communities of conservatives decrying prison conditions that I'm unaware of?

...Put it this way: your best defense is that there might be a net-reduction in rape, because transgenders and transtrenders together have such high rape numbers. If it turned out to be the other way around, and this was just a straight increase in rape, would you agree it's a bad idea?

The thrust of my argument is that I don't trust any of you on this topic because I think you're motivated more by anti-trans animus than compassion. You can't spend days talking about how trans people are ugly, disgusting, mentally ill freaks and then turn around and expect me to believe that You (the right) care for their wellbeing, just like You can't say things like FAFO/carjackers and rioters should be shot/prisoners experiencing rape and violence deserve it and claim some moral high ground. And so far, while all the replies reiterate feeling gaslit and frustration about being told that this would never happen, nobody has actually responded to that point.

...Put it this way: your best defense

You're acting like I'm dead set on allowing anyone into female prisons at any time for any reason. I don't personally have a well-thought out opinion on the issue; probably some screening based on whether they were living as trans outside of prison prior to arrest would be useful if messy. But even there, I strongly suspect the real reason most of you want that is to get a foot in the door for limiting the rights of trans people such that in the future you can say 'Well, look at the example of prisons! If you've already accepted these limitations on trans identity, why should I be barred from doing X?'

is that there might be a net-reduction in rape, because transgenders and transtrenders together have such high rape numbers. If it turned out to be the other way around, and this was just a straight increase in rape, would you agree it's a bad idea?

If you're appealing to my inner utilitarian. There's also an argument that the majority of trans people are malicious actors and should shoulder a higher burden of the externalities (OP's usual favorite hobby horse), but I've yet to see evidence of it.

And lastly, as I state above, I'd accept that you could probably do better than either with some very forgiving screening or a much smaller third set of institutions for trans people if you could get it past the 'trans women are women' crowd.

For what it's worth, while I am dead set against self-ID as a policy, I do think there are instances in which it may be appropriate to house trans women in female prisons. I outlined my preferred arrangement here, and I think it's a compromise that most reasonable people would find agreeable.

I have yet to see evidence that rape is a failure mode of trans rights specifically and not just human nature generally. To restate, being trans does not cause you to be a rapist.

Generalizations aside, among all strategies to reduce prison rape, putting trans prisoners in with their birth sex population is surely one of the least effective ones. Anything else is honestly more likely to eliminate the problem entirely. For example, getting the guards to stop raping the inmates will make them more effective at preventing rape among the inmates, including rape done by trans people.

Housing sex criminals separately would be another good thing to try. In some of the articles and stuff I looked at while writing this post, some people proposed we house trans sex criminals separately. But housing all sex criminals separately would obviously address the problem too. Even if we had limited space, severity of crimes would obviously be a better way to prioritize than being trans.

I guess some people see other people getting worried about prison rape by trans people and think they're calling trans people rapists. Obviously they're not, but it's still fishy. To focus on prison rape by trans people instead (and, observably, it's very much instead) of prison rape generally implies there's something special about prison rape when trans people do it. Maybe one argument in favor of such specialness is that we can apply a very straightforward intervention (no trans women in women's prison) and it straightforwardly gets rid of this one subcase of prison rape. But there are even simpler interventions that obviously work better, such as not housing sex criminals with everyone else. In summary, it's more effective to target the "rapist" part of "trans rapist" rather than the "trans" part.

Housing sex criminals separately would be another good thing to try. In some of the articles and stuff I looked at while writing this post, some people proposed we house trans sex criminals separately. But housing all sex criminals separately would obviously address the problem too. Even if we had limited space, severity of crimes would obviously be a better way to prioritize than being trans.

This is what is done in Ireland iirc. There are some sex offenders in every prison, but Arbour Hill is where they are concentrated as they have teams of clinical psychologists there to try and reduce recidivism rates.

Given the lack of female prisoners I don't think they have a specific place for female sex-offenders.

Re people abusing self-ID, see answer downthread, which I shall copy-and-paste for convenience (please reply there):

In that case, existing protections against rape in general should be enough. It shouldn't be difficult for the guards to observe creepy behavior leading up to any incident, for example. If the guards fail to prevent rape by a trans woman, then they would've failed to prevent any other sort of abuse between inmates. I continue to not see a problem with trans rights here.

Re guards, I find it straightforward that rapists foster rape culture, and non-rapists foster less rape culture. You might even get excellent RNG and get a guard who actively works against rape culture, but maybe that's a bit too much to ask for.

Re solitary, I did not intend that meaning: I just mean put all the sex criminals with each other. Yes, solitary confinement is pretty bad and should be avoided when possible.

Freddie must suffer awful cognitive dissonance around this as how could you be heterodox and shun curiosity? Same goes for decoding the gurus. It's a hard time to be heteredox on the left if you already have an audience you have to structure yourself around.

You can point to trans rapists; but then again, so can I for most of your favored groups, and these niche cases don't invalidate the cause as a whole.

A rapist advocate for color blind racial policy doesn't invalidate color blind racial policy because rapists can't use color blind racial policy as cover for raping. There have been multiple instances of rapists using trans rights as cover for raping. And I have to say, if color blind racial policies did provide cover for raping, I would at the very least try to figure out a version of the policy that didn't.

Anyone can commit crimes while claiming any ideology. There's nothing about trans rights specifically that encourages rape.

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True, but this is not the complaint at hand--it's what is done with rapists that is at the heart of the dispute.

I beg your pardon, but my Google skills are momentarily not up to snuff. What is being done with rapists?

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They're being put in women's prisons, for example.

If rapists - people who have raped - are put in with the general population of prisoners, that's a failure in and of itself and doesn't have anything to do with trans people.

And if a male rapist is put in a female prison, then it's an even greater failure of the prison system, and it does have something to do with trans people.

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Some dude gets convicted for raping women. He's sent to prison. In prison, he discovers that he's actually a trans woman, and so needs to be transfered to the women's prison. The authorities go along with it. Women prisoners get raped by the "trans woman" rapist who is bigger and stronger than them, and has a fully-functional dick.

In that case, existing protections against rape in general should be enough. It shouldn't be difficult for the guards to observe creepy behavior leading up to any incident, for example. If the guards fail to prevent rape by a trans woman, then they would've failed to prevent any other sort of abuse between inmates. I continue to not see a problem with trans rights here.

Also, I don't think this is a problem, statistically speaking. I currently think every other possible sex offense that could go on in a prison is way ahead of this one in frequency. I would be interested in seeing some numbers on this. I am aware of some news articles on the topic, but see Man bites dog:

The phrase man bites dog is a shortened version of an aphorism in journalism that describes how an unusual, infrequent event (such as a man biting a dog) is more likely to be reported as news than an ordinary, everyday occurrence with similar consequences, such as a dog biting a man.

In that case, existing protections against rape in general should be enough.

The existing protections, i.e. keeping male rapists away from women, is being actively subverted.

It shouldn't be difficult for the guards to observe creepy behavior leading up to any incident, for example.

That's not how it works. I doubt you can prevent rapes simply by "observing creepy behavior". And even if you could, there's still the fundamental problem of legibility. Let's say a guard does in fact notice some behavior that they consider to be creepy. What do they do then? If they take any sort of disciplinary action it's not hard for one to argue that it's overkill and say just because there's creepy behavior doesn't mean a rape has been committed yet. It's the same problem as the cops being called to a domestic dispute, then being unable to do anything because they didn't personally witness anything illegal happening, and they can't just take someone else's word for it. This idea of recognizing creepy behavior sounds like one of those ideas that only makes sense in hindsight after an incident has occurred, yet isn't workable in practice.

Also, come on. Are you really suggesting that it's easier for guards to "just prevent rape" than it is to place trans women rapists in men's prisons?

If the guards fail to prevent rape by a trans woman, then they would've failed to prevent any other sort of abuse between inmates.

This does not follow. There are all sorts of offenses a guard must prevent, and rape isn't equivalent to all of them in difficulty or observability. So them failing to prevent rape doesn't give us any information about what other things they have failed to prevent.

Besides, the easiest way to prevent men raping women isn't to have guards on duty. It's just keeping male rapists away from women.

I continue to not see a problem with trans rights here.

Trans rights have resulted in demonstrable negative externalities to other people. These externalities would straightforwardly not have happened if there weren't trans rights. It's as simple as that.

Also, I don't think this is a problem, statistically speaking.

Okay so, using statistics to triage the collective effort we spend on problems (and thus dismissing statistically insignificant problems) only makes sense if it would take too much effort to eliminate them. In this case however, the effort is relatively easy. All we have to do is not put male rapists in the same building as women. In fact, that's what we were doing before, until trans rights activists rolled around and demanded we do otherwise.

And yet MtF trans want inclusion into spaces in which women are available and vulnerable. Even if it doesn't encourage it, is sure makes it easier.

Women are available and vulnerable basically everywhere. Trans women wanting to be in women's spaces axiomatically follows from them being trans women. This is insufficient fodder for an argument against trans rights.

Care to explain the reference?

It's an album by Talking Heads.

There's no biological imperative that men shouldn't be allowed to wear dresses, or makeup, or be considered submissive or cute.

Are you sure about that ? You think sexuality is entirely environmental, there are is no genetic component to it ?

That's bullshit.

The fundamental asymmetry between male and female genetic interests has been there essentially forever. Submissive men do exist, but they're more rare than the other way around.

And as to cute... ditto. Men aren't cute. You can try to 'consider' them cute, but that's the same level of as talking about feminine penises.

Are you sure about that ? You think sexuality is entirely environmental, there are is no genetic component to it ?

That's bullshit.

With all due respect ma'am/sir, misstating my argument and then rebutting it with nothing more than 'that's bullshit' is remarkably poor form. But anyways:

  1. Sexuality typically refers to sexual attraction/orientation, which I only tangentially mention.

  2. I don't assert that it is entirely environmental.

  3. I'm not sure about anything. It's a worldview, and I'm open to changing my mind. You'll have to try a bit harder though.

I do believe that many of the things we're discussing happen to be largely environmental, though. Male preference for pants versus 'dresses' varies wildly across cultures; from kilts, thawbs, thongs worn by many tribal peoples, togas and roman tunics, whatever. So no, I don't believe men have a genetic imperative against wearing dresses, nor do I believe that women have a genetic imperative to find men in dresses unattractive. There are centuries of wildly different fashions and norms, even amongst Europeans who (presumably) share your genetic background.

Even if you just want to consider sexuality, I do believe that there is significant plasticity and environmental influence on what and who people find attractive. We oscillate between finding short hair on women attractive, to unattractive, to attractive ad nauseum. Repeat for most traits.

And as to cute... ditto. Men aren't cute. You can try to 'consider' them cute, but that's the same level of as talking about feminine penises.

Speak for yourself, I find plenty of men cute. I suspect if you ask some of the women in your life they'll have plenty of examples of men they would describe as cute.

Ditto for being the majority caregivers after your child is more than a few years old, and earlier if you aren't breastfeeding. We long ago left the Hobbesian jungle of burly men hunting megafauna with stone tools, and physical strength is largely irrelevant in a world of Zoom meetings, work-from-home and knowledge economies

Women are nowhere near as competitive as men, which means they get underpaid in the workplace.

Women are worse at cooperating than men, because friendships between women are harder and they are more prone to seeing each other as competition.

They're far more prone to use socially approved form of aggression (gossip, exclusion, etc), which doesn't help organisations either.

Furthermore, childcare is low status in society now, hence a man who is willing to forgo a career to take care of children will be seen as less attractive.

If you think you can just snap your fingers and fix this, no, it doesn't work like that.

So, women are less suited for workplaces, will make less money

I do believe that there is significant plasticity and environmental influence on what and who people find attractive.

There simply isn't. Male preferences through history are largely unchanging. Judging by pornography, not fashion which is subject to fads.

Speak for yourself, I find plenty of men cute.

You find them attractive. You don't find them cute in the sense of you find kitten or babies cute. It's a problem of vocabulary.

We oscillate between finding short hair on women attractive, to unattractive, to attractive ad nauseum.

Those are fads, not genuine preferences.

Apart from a very small amount of men with a fetish for short hair, or baldness in women, no one else thinks it's attractive.

Long hair are a good signal of health, same as firm breasts, same as shapely figure.

There simply isn't. Male preferences through history are largely unchanging. Judging by pornography, not fashion which is subject to fads.

But is pornography not also subject to trends? I recall an article from years ago bemoaning that all big mainstream porn was trending towards "big dicks fucking big tits." And you'll also notice that moden porn has signifcantly less pubic hair in it than compared to the 70's. Culture is weird like that.

Frankly those are irrelevant. Look at the woman's asses - there was never a popular pornstar with flat ass.

Looking at the most popular pornstars on this list, I can see plenty (https://fameregistry.com/).

Tori Black, Elsa Jean, Sasha Grey, Sunny Leone, Emily Willis, Riley Reid, Mini Stallion, Lulu Chu, Clara Trinity.

All of those first 5 had perfectly shaped assed.

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"big dicks fucking big tits."

Can't comment on penis size, but this guy did a deep dive into the Internet Adult Film Database and found that, contrary to the widespread impression that most porn stars are buxom blondes, the "average" porn star is a brunette 34B. Granted that the study is from 10 years ago.

We oscillate between finding short hair on women attractive, to unattractive, to attractive ad nauseum.

But waist and hips and well shaped ass is immutable.

You sure about that? I'm obviously not in a position to offer anything more than hearsay or anecdote, but there are plenty (possibly a majority) of modern models with tiny waists rather than child-bearing hips. Ditto with variation in preference for ass size.

Not sure how you'll take this but I've enjoyed this autistic rant that explains «models» by preferences of predominantly gay modeliers rather than median men or organic looks hierarchy of women.

The voluptuous hourglass figure preferred by so many men is a well-known stereotype, but oddly excluded from magazines and media that address the topic of fashion and beauty for women. The narrow and skinny ideal that replaces it is both less attainable and less attractive.

Some women feel compelled to make excuses for the errors of the beauty industry. It's Stockholm syndrome. They claim a boyish figure is what women really want, and that rail-thin models are necessary to put clothes on display properly. These defenses are absurd.

It's a verifiable fact that many and perhaps most of the top fashion designers aren't attracted to women. It would be unreasonable to assume this has no impact on their tastes, and also unreasonable to assume their tastes have no influence on their work.

"Designers choose models who look like boys because they show off women's clothing better." Is this really the most plausible explanation?

The images below reveal a double standard. While male fashion models have pronounced masculine sexual traits, female fashion models have diminished feminine sexual traits.

Left: a typical male model for a top fashion designer. Right: the same top fashion designer's boyfriend.

Left: A typical female model for the same fashion designer. Right: a glamour model with prominent feminine sexual characteristics. The two men above match. So why don't these women?

Edit: I may be biased here. One of the most miserable women I know is a short, voluptuous and fairly inept girl who very reasonably guessed she could make an easy living with her looks (a few mutual friends have rated her 10/10, I'd say 9 is about right), but tried to achieve this through traditional modeling – which completely destroyed her self-esteem through comparisons with lanky scarecrows sporting chiseled cheekbones. Honestly, everyone likes to hate on onlyfans, but in her case it would have been better.

Not sure how you'll take this but I've enjoyed this autistic rant that explains «models» by preferences of predominantly gay modeliers rather than median men or organic looks hierarchy of women.

Wasn't this JuliusBranson's shtick? I've read it before and seem to remember him writing a long post about how ancient Babylonian porn proves evo psych arguments that liberals are ugly or something. May have been someone else. Funny either way.

That said, you don't need gay designers to convince normie men that the majority of the women on this list are attractive. A huge fraction of eastern European and Asian sex symbols buck your sex doll trend. Bill Gates and Papas Elon and Bezos who are all richer than G*d could easily have maximized for breast size and didn't.

The flip side of the 'sex doll' argument is that most modern men actively wouldn't marry a stacked girl with >double Ds and a huge ass given the choice because they aren't viewed as respectable. I believe our wiser forebears called this the 'madonna-whore complex.' Meanwhile, whispers from the lost generations living before the Great-Depression (or East Asian countries a generation ago) counsel us to marry someone with 'meat on their bones' and to eat heartily or nobody will find us attractive. All of which suggest that life is more complicated than a genetic drive for bigger ass and tits.

We could make up any number of bullshit evo psych arguments to fit the data. Or talk about barber poles and elites, changing material conditions and environment, the emerging matriarchy, Freudian impulses and Jungian shadow selves and so on and so forth. But my head would hurt and it would still be made up.

you don't need gay designers to convince normie men that the majority of the women on this list are attractive

While arguably not a normie, I am a man and I posit they're not exceptionally attractive. They have sometimes amazing faces and are all around okay, but this is despite them lacking feminine waist and hips (I don't mean Beyonce, Megan Fox and other celebrities who got on that list because of being actual sex symbols). I think we can learn more about male preference from actual, organically emerging markets. How prominent are women of this type among [some high percentile] Onlyfans? Among strip club dancers? Are these bodies present in escort girl catalogues? Do women photoshop themselves into that shape? Do they seek out clothes exaggerating those traits?

And how much effect does a typical male's preference have on who gets to the runway?

A huge fraction of eastern European and Asian sex symbols buck your sex doll trend.

Seeing Japanese lingerie models, I very much doubt it. Asians may have less interest in bottom-heavy physiques, of course.

Bill Gates and Papas Elon and Bezos who are all richer than G*d could easily have maximized for breast size and didn't.

There's the notable "billionaire wife" meme, I think they didn't prioritize looks in any case.

most modern men actively wouldn't marry a stacked girl with >double Ds and a huge ass given the choice because they aren't viewed as respectable

I am not sure about that, and the idea that rail-thin (as opposed to just tall) women are inherently more attractive to the higher-status men is on par with the most hare-brained evo psych stories. A fit, non-sagging woman with bigger tits and ass wins, although of course there are trade-offs.

We could make up any number of bullshit evo psych arguments to fit the data.

Sure, but I think we don't have to, because the data in all conditions where large numbers of representative men actively express their preference and are in a position to demand the subjectively best possible pick is overwhelmingly in favor of the blogpost's hypothesis, which you are unjustifiably dismissive of.

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That said, you don't need gay designers to convince normie men that the majority of the women on this list are attractive.

I don't think the majority of women on that list are very attractive. Like, at all. The only ones who stand out as notably attractive are Kate Upton and "Angelababy". Besides that, I can easily think of many women I've known in real life who I would rather sleep with before the women on this list.

I know that my own preferences aren't exactly the norm, but, generally women overrate how attractive models/celebrities are to men. There's clearly a specific type that's been selected for by the people who run this stuff, and that type is not to everyone's taste.

The waist to hip ratio is usually the same on both types of models.

People constantly conflate gender/sex preferences that are culturally/socially contingent and those that are universal (and thus almost certainly biological in nature).

Some actors obviously do this in bad faith. Like the typical feminist/queer theorist who says 'pink used to to be for boys, blue for girls, now it's the opposite, thus proving all gender preferences are arbitrary and that the idea that women prefer people and men prefer things is also arbitrary and socially contingent!' Gotta love those huge non-sequiturs.

Really, you can seperate gender preferences (including sexual preferences) into three rough catagories - (1) things that are universally/biological, (2) things that are socially determined but are influenced and constrained by biology to some degree and thus are not completely arbitrary, and (3) things that are socially determined and are completely arbitrary.

Men liking things and women liking people is an example of number 1. It is universal and biological, and reflects the biological division of labour.

Most (historically) gendered clothing fits into number 2. Clothing still has to reflect the practical needs of each sex, which is in turn derived from the gender role (which in turn is derived from the biological division of labour). But there is obviously a significant degree of wiggleroom which is culturally contingent. An obvious example is the fact that women wear bras and men don't. This obviously isn't an arbitrary completely socially determined choice. Though the specific designs or styles of bras might be.

Colour preference for genders is an example for number 3. There is generally no compelling reason why certain colours should be assigned to either men and women. This is culturally socially determined (though I suppose someone could try to make an attenuated evo psych argument about how red is biologically masculine cause blood or some shit).

All this basically applies to sexual preferences too.

Sexual attraction to well defined, feminine hips might be an example of number 1.

Sexual attraction certain kinds of modes of behavior (e.g. stoic, dominant nature in men) might be an example of 2.

Certain kinds of decoration, such as tattoos might be an example of 3.

People constantly conflate gender/sex preferences that are culturally/socially contingent and those that are universal (and thus almost certainly biological in nature).

I'm not going to deny that there are certain behaviors or traits that are dominated by genetic influences (if we dropped a pair of children off on a deserted island and they made it to adulthood, I'm sure they could figure out how to propagate the species), and I do agree with what you say generally, however I do believe that even in your post you overstate your case.

Men liking things and women liking people is an example of number 1. It is universal and biological, and reflects the biological division of labour.

What do you think the world would look like if from birth all the media men were exposed to showcased men as caregivers while women were out earning a living? Where their male role models were all stay-at-home dads taking care of the domestic duties and their female role models were breadwinners? To the extent that we're all exposed to this pervasive monoculture(ish) it seems to me that it's impossible to say just how far we could move the needle on what you're describing with (benign) environmental changes alone.

Sexual attraction to well defined, feminine hips might be an example of number 1.

From my other reply:

You sure about that? I'm obviously not in a position to offer anything more than hearsay or anecdote, but there are plenty (possibly a majority) of modern models with tiny waists rather than child-bearing hips. Ditto with variation in preference for ass size.

What do you think the world would look like if from birth all the media men were exposed to showcased men as caregivers while women were out earning a living?

Men would watch less TV? For that matter, so would women probably.

Or if it's actually done well, they'd happily identify with the female characters, and not think about it twice, like they do with Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor?

Where their male role models were all stay-at-home dads taking care of the domestic duties and their female role models were breadwinners?

I would say that would be pretty dysfunctional society that wouldn't be able to operate effectively, most people would be miserable, if it didn't just completely collapse on itself. Men and women would immediately (unconsciously) attempt to reverse that situtation if it weren't held together by powerful social engineering/political force.

If you don't like the hips example (you can socially engineer people to deny their most basic biological instincts), another example is youthfullness being sexually attractive.

Many gender norms are amplifying existing sex differences. Eg men are naturally hairier than women, shaving exagerates this

To perhaps offer a steelman, there are certain cultural practices and norms tied to gender that are essentially arbitrary in the modern environment. There's no inherent reason that women should be forced to shave their legs/armpits to be considered attractive, for instance, or that men shouldn't do the same. There's no biological imperative that men shouldn't be allowed to wear dresses, or makeup, or be considered submissive or cute.

Absolutely.

That still doesn't imply that I should be forced to affirm that somebody with a penis is a woman just because they don't like traditionally masculine behaviors or prefer traditionally feminine behaviors.

This feels like beating a dead horse at this point, but it really all boils down to what information people expect the words "man/male/he/him/his" and "woman/female/she/her/hers" to convey. I want "woman" to mean "a biologically female human being with two X chromosomes and a vajayjay", and "man" to mean "a biologically male human being with XY chromosomes and a dong". Hermaphrodites and people with oddball chromosome configurations are so rare that our language doesn't need to account for them, and as far as I can tell they're not the ones at the forefront of the campaign to redefine those word clusters.

I have no problem if a man wants to wear clothing that is traditionally feminine and prefer knitting to video games as a hobby, or vice versa. Men who have more feminine interests and expressions and women with more masculine interests and expressions have always existed. Like, I see what you're doing there, girl with short hair and baggy clothes. You're de-emphasizing your femininity for whatever reason. I can still tell you're a girl. You're not fooling anybody. You also don't need to put "enby/they/them" in your Twitter bio or change your name to a gender-neutral or male one for me to figure out what your deal is. You can dress and groom yourself however you like, and nobody should harass you for it, and they should treat you the same as they treat anybody else in public-sphere interactions (teacher-student, employer-employee, customer-server, etc.). None of that means that you're not female.

Now, I feel like I have to acknowledge that there are definitely cultures, both past and present, that are much less tolerant of "deviant" behavior along these lines. Parents yelling at their boys for playing with dolls instead of army men, and vice versa. I feel like that is just a specific case of intolerance for misfits, which I believe is wrong and should be prevented. But the solution to "men who like to knit get made fun of" isn't "okay, then change your name to a female name and start insisting that the world treat you like an actual woman".

"okay, then change your name to a female name and start insisting that the world treat you like an actual woman".

Are we sure? That is an actual solution (though there are others of course). If you accept (as you appear to) that is should be ok for a man to fulfill all the social roles of a woman then a way to signal that is to dress, act and use the same words that are used for a woman. There is a built in set of words and roles that fit what he wants and that is much easier to utilize than creating a whole new categorization process and getting the world to accept it. It's easier to step into a role that already exists than create a new one. Even the word tomboy gestures in this way no? A girl who behaves like a boy would be expected to is called a tomboy. A man who acts like a woman perhaps used to be called a sissy (and still is in some circles) but if you want it to be socially accepted then is trans-woman really all that different? And is a trans man who doesn't actually get surgery or hormones and just socially transitions (the most common approach) really any different than a tomboy?

The directional goal of the saying trans-women are women (or trans men are men) and to treat them as such is to remove the social shame, which you agree should be removed. There are other avenues of doing so, but this one builds upon the existing rails so to speak.

This is one of the clash zones with Radical Feminism, which (generally) holds that those social gender roles/words/themes/ should be torn down in the first place. There are other trans people hold similar views (non-binary and the like) which is one of the fault lines withing the trans community itself.

One of the problems with this stance is that gender roles are not the same as behavioral preferences. Behavior in a liberal society is only very loosely constrained and not in many ways to actually limit gender nonconforming expression. As far as I can tell there are no serious attempts to stop adults who would like to behave like the opposite gender from doing so. But gender roles and the carve outs in society made for men and women are socially negotiated and these negotiations are about, because of and inseparable from biological differences. We didn't decide to divide the human race in half arbitrarily, we did so because males and females have very real differences and all the roles/expectations/carve outs flow from these differences. If you remove the fundamental grounding of those difference then you remove the fundamental purpose of those gender roles and the entire enterprise undermines itself and collapses. If we accelerate this trans thing, perfect acceptance in a few years, then the roles will be running entirely on the momentum of the past and eventually, inevitably, collapse.

As far as the transhumanist futurist strain, I'm still here, I still believe we can improve ourselves to super human. But if one takes this seriously and tries to look into the future that this movement is building for us I cannot help but notice it's a incoherent mess of people just being mistaken about practically every element of the human condition. You cannot build a proper transhuman future with such a confused understanding of humanity.

There used to be a futurist transhumanism strain here that was more optimistic and trans-positive that has either been driven off or converted to conservative trad thinking, which is a shame.

Futurist transhumanist here. I have no objection to gender transition in principle. If I lived in The Culture and could switch literally at will, I'd probably try it for a while despite being quite comfortable as a straight, gender-conforming (nerd subtype), cis male.

However, the reality is that medical transition at the current level of technology is dangerous, expensive, irreversible, often unconvincing, and can have life-altering side-effects like sterility or permanent dependence on elaborate medical intervention. Medical transition flows from trans identity. Against this dark background, promoting the concept of trans identity, rather than simple acceptance of gender non-conformity, is irresponsible. Promoting this concept to minors as if cis and trans are just two equal choices (or trans is even better — braver, more special, etc.), is wildly irresponsible.

The fact that such a large fraction of people who present at gender transition clinics have serious mental health conditions should be a huge red flag here. A lot of people will likely choose to be thinner in a transhumanist future, but that doesn't make me want to celebrate bulimics as transhumanist pioneers.

On top of this, we've got the social demands of the trans movement. The insistence that e.g. someone who appears male and has male-typical physical abilities must nonetheless be recognized in all social respects as female doesn't fall out of technological transhumanism. I would go so far as to say it's at least somewhat at odds with it. Technological transhumanism is deeply materialist and concerned with physical intervention in the human condition. The primacy the present trans movement places on some inner essence of self-identity, incongruent with physical reality, doesn't sit comfortably within such a framework.

Perhaps the optimum would be one where everyone could freely choose for themselves, and while most people would naturally occupy the gender roles the correspond to their birth, there wouldn't be any stigma or disgust associated with people who (for whatever reason) do not. But...that just sounds a lot to me like trans acceptance, no?

No? Trans acceptance requires that I adjust my worldview, and start seeing trans women as literally women, and clap with approval as biological males enter women's sports, prisons, domestic abuse shelters, etc.

If you want to advocate for an alternative form of trans acceptance where this is not required, then you're basically joining the club I'm already in. Welcome, fellow transphobe.

There used to be a futurist transhumanism strain here that was more optimistic and trans-positive that has either been driven off or converted to conservative trad thinking, which is a shame.

There used to be a strain of people arguing their points here, rather then going "people don't agree with me anymore, that's a shame".

More seriously - sure, I'll confess to turning my back on futurist transhumanism. If you think that means I endorsed "conservative thinking", so be it, though I think slapping broad political labels when discussing specific issues is a bit disingenuous.

And even if I switch back to my old futurist-transhumanist mode, how exactly does that make any of the problems with transition go away? We simply do not currently have the technology to change sex. Why am I required to ignore that fact?

strain here that was more optimistic and trans-positive that has either been driven off or converted to conservative trad thinking, which is a shame.

Just want to strongly agree here. I used to love the transhumanism and space oriented optimism. I’ve tried to do my best to bring it up here and there, but it’s difficult! I’d love to see your posts on the topic if you have an inclination.

If only @self_made_human wasn’t busy with totally pointless endeavors like med school or something and could endlessly entertain us with his transhumanist ideas. Alas!

Thanks for the call-out haha. I'm very much entertaining people with said ideas, given that I'm writing a hard scifi transhumanist story as I speak. Haven't had much to add on that regard for the Motte, but you want brachistochrone orbits as a consequence of torchships, launch loops, space elevators, the sun turned into a deadly lazer, feel free to check it out.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/65211/ex-nihilo-nihil-supernum

(Oh and I'm thankfully done with med school, barring PTSD dreams for the past couple years. Now it's on the grind to end up a shrink for me!)

Nice! What does the name mean?

Ex Nihilo means "from nothing" and Nihil Supernum means "nothing above"!

No, what I mean is that Freddie does exactly what he says he does: he holds the conventional, liberal to mildly progressive views on all the topics. And he shuts down debate in the comments because (1) he's fed-up of people starting up fights when trans whatever is not the topic of his post and (2) he holds the One Correct View and anything that clashes with it is wrong.

I don't think Freddie considers that his view on abortion might be wrong, or the other things he mentioned. So if his view is not-wrong, the opposite views must be not-right. And if they are not-right, then that must be a choice between Evil or Stupid as to why such people hold not-right views.

I don't think that the progressive view is that people can honestly hold dissenting views on abortion or trans rights or the rest of it, that it is all down to prejudice, bigotry, racism, homo- and transphobia and so forth. So I don't think Freddie is open to "I disagree with trans rights activism because I don't accept the foundational principles, let's discuss this" because he's put forward his position: trans identity is about yearning, not genetics, don't bother asking about biology or the rest of it, end of discussion.

This is not to say I think Freddie is Evil or Stupid or anything else, just that he's holding this view very tightly on the grounds that this is the view to be held as per being a good progressive, yet in other instances he can see where the progressive rhetoric fails and is not compliant with reality.

maybe consider that Freddie and I actually do spend some time thinking about issues and arrive at our own conclusions

I have read, with my own lying eyes, a Substack article by someone who earnestly and sincerely wished to get their fellow liberals/progressives to communicate with anti-abortion people. First, to do this, they have to understand something: anti-abortion rights people really do think it's a baby. Crazy, I know, but there you go. So what we have to do first is explain to them that it's a foetus, not a baby, and then all the objections will be overcome!

That was a good faith effort, and it was so wide of the mark in its understanding that I was banging my head off the desk. Yes, all we have to do is explain to the abolitionists that the negroes are not fully human to the same extent we are, and all the pother and fuss will be over!

If some people feel "I really want to wear dresses and makeup and be uWu" then I'd be happy to expand the range of gender roles so they can be men in dresses and so the hell what, rather than turn it all upside-down to be "oh you must really be a woman!", particularly as a lot of women don't care about dresses or makeup or being uWu, and it's really fucking annoying to have your sex/gender identity boiled down to "sugar and spice and everything nice" after years of feminism struggling about "women are not goddamn teddy bears".

The basic progressive argument about gender is precisely that gender identity isn’t tied to either genetics or physiology.

Which is an interesting shift: I remember "Transgender people's brains resemble those of their self-identified gender" being an argument for trans rights no more than 10 years ago.

Just getting people to openly admit to this would be a win. They will not admit to this. They will not admit that it was what the narrative used to be. They will not admit that it's not the current narrative now. I cannot imagine a Good and Righteous person even responding to the question, because the question is inherently 'problematic, racist, and transphobic'. Always remember to ask people if they think that trans folks have the brain of their self-identified gender, and if this can be validated using fMRI or whatever. Just ask. Record answers if you can. Share. We need to see what the mind virus is fever dreaming now.

I remember this too and it being one of the things that actually was a good swaying argument to me about someone using HRT to treat their dysmorphia. I used to listen to Loveline a lot and Dr Drew would talk with people who would say transgenderism is people being sickos and he would talk about how there were studies showing mri images of a patient's brain before and after hormone therapy and how the HRT would change the brain from showing abnormal function to normal function after they started taking the hormones. I think it being a medical condition garnered a lot of sympathy for transgender people that they still want to keep while also denying that it's a medical condition that requires treatment, while they get treated, and I think they lost a lot of sympathy from people that can remember the before times.

The thing is, I'm not even sure this is mainly a bad faith thing. I've encountered several times, when talking about neologisms with people, that they simply don't remember things but the present and that knowledge just becomes always. I remember when "binge-watching" became a popular term and I was talking with someone about how it's weird how the term suddenly came into existence along with the topic as if we hadn't said the word "marathoning" before to mean the same thing. They were the same age as me and had no idea that it was called marathoning and made me doubt myself. I had an almost identical conversation about the term "lowkey" with someone who said it had meant what it does now in the 90s because that's what it always meant.

I think about 1984 and "always being at war with Eurasia" and maybe about how you don't have to actually rewrite history because nobody bothers (or maybe can or cares) to remember it anyway.


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