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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Aging whore asks her simps if they are happily married, finds out that they would rather pay her for secks than pursue meaningful relationships with their wives.

This is extremely fascinating.

If a “fat acceptance” movement, morbidly obese female tik toker were to ask her audience “to those of you who are living unhealthy skinny lifestyles deprived of food and joy, do you enjoy your joyless horrible boring life?”, and then if the overweight audience responded with “no we hate being skinny being fat is much better!” Would this be a topic of discussion here? I mean other than yo ridicule it?

How many happily married men with consistently growing families down at my local SSPX parish do you think have ever heard of Aella? Do you think my wife’s parents, very clearly happily married for 50 years and still constantly getting annoyingly drunk and cringing us out by acting like horny teenagers have ever heard of Aella?

The fact that anybody pays any mind to these absolutely ridiculous “polls” is embarrassing. It is absolutely no surprise to me, and I don’t think should be a surprise to anyone, that unhappy men are the ones following this person around online and parroting her nonsense.

Lets take it a step further: the poll describes her customers. Perhaps the conclusion is that obsessively following around a prostitute, reading the things she writes, and integrating her understanding of the world into your own, is bad for building healthy relationships. So maybe a recommendation could be: stop reading this e-girls marketing materials, its ruining your marriage in service of her.

A couple months ago, you got dinged for posting a low-effort sneer.

This one is... well, you used a lot more words this time, but it's basically the same post.

I don't know why Aella is your trigger, but whatever, clearly you really don't like her. You are certainly free to criticize her and her polling methodology. But "I think she's a stupid whore, why are you simps talking about her?" is just telling people you don't like the topic of conversation and you want them to stop.

Instead, try just not reading threads that are of no interest to you.

FWIW, I didn't think this was a low-effort sneer, and I thought it was very much relevant and on-topic for what the person brought up. It's the core criticism.

Is it basically the same post, though? Same target, still kind of derogatory, but this time it looks like he's actually making arguments.

If I read it correctly, his argument is as follows:

  1. A decent amount of Aella's following is probably due to sex appeal

  2. People who are following people due to sex appeal are probably in worse marriages on average

  3. The people in the polls probably disproportionately consist of people following Aella

  4. Conclusion: the people in Aella's polls probably have worse marriages than average

And then (the step further)

  1. It seems plausible that consuming Aella's content might hurt marriages

  2. The people in her survey seem in kind of a worse state than one would expect

  3. Maybe stay a little further away from Aella if you want a healthy marriage

(Okay, this was presented significantly less after the manner of a syllogism than the first)

This second part seems less well supported, and since it follows the data the opposite way from the first set, it might be hard to disambiguate effects (how can we tell the direction of causation here? How do we even know that there is a difference, aside from anecdata and a priori sorts of things?).

It wasn't exactly the most courteous way of saying things, but there was definitely more substance to this than in the linked post (well, the directly linked one. His further reply had more depth, but wasn't quite saying the same things as this post, if I'm reading it rightly).

FWIW I agree with you

Well, hold on a second: I obviously disagree with this person, their methodology, and even the conclusion from what are in my opinion poorly constructed polling.

But: is it in an insult to call her a whore? Isn't that...her job?

Instead, try just not reading threads that are of no interest to you.

This thread, as well as the phenomenon of people it rat-spaces developing this much of a blindspot is incredibly interesting to me, whic is probably why I've responded to both things with similar criticism.

Ymeshukeut or however you spell his username is obviously very critical of any criticism of the 2020 election and has been since when we were still on /r/ssc. Do you make mod posts telling him to just avoid the topic? If not why not?

I was previously "dinged" for being overly concise, so I expanded my point substantially. I understand that you disagree with the conclusion, but I don't think it's fair to imply that it is unacceptable to be critical of this person and her polls.

Aging whore asks her simps if they are happily married, finds out that they would rather pay her for secks than pursue meaningful relationships with their wives.

This is what you appear to object to. I can restate it as: "a person who sells a product is losing access to the product and has switched to writing about why fans of her product are anti-fans of other products", but that seems...unnecessarily vague.

But: is it in an insult to call her a whore?

Well yeah, that is why you called her a whore. If calling her a whore was not insulting then you would have found some other word.

I think there's the significant point that the job of person making a poll on sexual satisfaction with partners is offering sexual satisfaction as a non-partner. Yes, maybe he could have used another word, but the point was (primarily) to draw attention to that.

This is part of why I think this discussion is interesting, and want to see it happening despite amadans wishes.

This is not an accurate statement of my wishes. I did not shut down the discussion. You are the one who appeared to be trying to shut down the discussion.

You're also free to start a thread about the etymology and ethics of "whore."

What you're not free to do is try to derail the thread every time Aella comes up with a rant about how you don't understand why people are giving the whore attention.

The poll is biased. It is biased due to the profession and stated motivations of the person who conducted the poll, and her audience.

How on EARTH is this not relevant to the discussion?

Discussion about the use of the word “whore” wasnt started by me. The crux of my post was talking about bias and selection. You and the person my deleted post replied to wanted to get into some semantics argument about words.

Maybe start throwing vague threats about what is “allowed” (or perhaps who is allowed criticism) at “goodguy”, or tell him to break his desire to discuss semantics into another thread. I’m trying to talk about polling bias here.

I didn't mod you for calling her a whore. She is a public figure and we don't really have a rule against insulting public figures. On the other hand, we'd prefer people comment more substantively than "This public figure I don't like is a retard/incel/whore." But that in itself wouldn't be modded. It certainly set the tone for your comment, though, which is basically to dunk on your outgroup.

Ymeshukeut or however you spell his username is obviously very critical of any criticism of the 2020 election and has been since when we were still on /r/ssc. Do you make mod posts telling him to just avoid the topic? If not why not?

Because he's not telling other people that it's a stupid topic and only loser simps are still talking about it.

but I don't think it's fair to imply that it is unacceptable to be critical of this person and her polls.

I just said in the post you are replying to that you can criticize her and her polls.

Isn't she a sex worker/former sex worker, though? Whore is a bit of a strong word, but "whorelord" is on her Twitter profile.

I don't have anything against this person, but I guess her following is mostly based on the fact that she's literate and pretty and a libertarian?

Pretty? Lmao she's not even very attractive.

The fact that anybody pays any mind to these absolutely ridiculous “polls” is embarrassing. It is absolutely no surprise to me, and I don’t think should be a surprise to anyone, that unhappy men are the ones following this person around online and parroting her nonsense.

Setting aside the negative tone and adjectives about this character in the first paragraph, I have to agree on this. Don't understand what's the deal with this Aella person, first time I heard about her was here and then watched a recent podcast. My impression is, this is just a regular girl that escorts and do polls on twitter. Why people care so much. I can't find any other reason than 'simping'.

A lot of women in highly visible positions seem to be very much aligned with the progressive Zeitgeist in regarding rationalist adjacent spaces as *-ists. Aella seems to be an oddity in this regard. I am pretty sure if any other woman even makes a superficial attempt [1] at hearing out rationalist positions, she will build up a similar following of simps.

[1] By superficial attempt I do not mean to say anything about Aella. I don't follow her and don't know anything about her.

She's simply a semi-famous figure in the rationalist community. Even here she's revered a bit, with a moderator describing her as "friend-of-the-motte", despite her never having commented on /r/TheMotte or even registered on here as far as I'm aware. I don't even know of any evidence that she even knows of the existence of this place. Then there are people like Scott Alexander, who describes her as a "national treasure", and Eliezer Yudkowsky, who brags that he can satisfy her because he's immortal.

If I had to wager a guess, she got her notoriety from doing a ton of provocative Twitter polls, because the easiest way to get engagement is to get negative engagement. It's why PETA is infamous and behaves the way they do.

I'm pretty sure she got her notoriety from certain photos with lawn gnomes.

The polling--and the SSC comments, and the pingbacks from other rationalist figures--came later.

Correct. She was the gnome-fucker on reddit before she was anything else.

I'm still not sure why she would be called friend of the motte. That just seems like consensus building. "This is a person we all know and love." Not exactly.

You're right, she was on the podcast. The Bailey Podcast E012: Polyamory (Feat. Aella).

I'll take it. That's close enough for my book.

I honestly took calling her a "friend of the motte" as a joke. At least half a joke. She's brought up a lot, but she's a polarizing figure.

It's an applause light. "Oh cool, I've been told that she's a friend of The Motte! That means she should be trustworthy!" It'd make sense to place her in as much a positive light as possible, because the very next thing in the post is the author attacking the arguments of Aella's debate opponent.

Some of us were raised in a time when a regular girl would never escort, and never ever do polls on twitter.