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When Progressives Defend Pedophiles: The Curious Case of Sarah Nyberg
In my previous thread about Gamergate where I challenged a speech Ian Danskin made on the topic for UC Merced, I said it would probably be the last thing I would write about the incident for a long while, and this is certainly flouting that.
But this writeup is not about the core issues of Gamergate. Rather, it's to highlight an egregious instance of misconduct from the progressive camp that is far too damning not to write about. It's definitely old news now, but sometimes this stuff needs to be dusted off so it won't languish in some archived page in the asshole of the internet where progressives would undoubtedly rather have it stay.
So who is Sarah Nyberg?
Sarah Nyberg (srhbutts on Twitter) is a trans woman who became a prominent anti-Gamergate figure through constant attacks on Gamergaters on various forums and articles. Included among the things she's participated in is repeatedly dragging 8chan through the dirt over accusations of child porn and for being an "active pedophile network".
However, just 6-10 years before her involvement in anti-GG, Nyberg herself was an open pedophile who actively defended pedophilia, posted borderline CP on the forums of FFShrine (a site she ran), and also actively lusted after her 8 year old cousin, whom she called her little girlfriend (often abbreviated to "lgf"). This hugely came out in the mainstream when a series of videos was made about her by TheLeoPirate, and culminated in an article being made on Breitbart about her... leanings.
The original "slam dunk" evidence against Nyberg came from a series of WebCite archive pages, which came directly from FFShrine. Unfortunately, they can no longer be accessed - there is a reason for this, but I'll address that later. For now, just keep in mind that the primary trove of evidence that was initially used to indict Nyberg is currently missing, but they are online in various forms, in screenshots, videos and so on. Regardless, one can start building an extremely strong case for her pedophilia - and can do so even without the benefit of these sources.
The first part involves proving that the "Sarah" on FFShrine was in fact Sarah Nyberg, and that's a trivial task, since FFShrine was outright registered under her name. In addition, here she is on her main Twitter account, openly admitting to it being her site.
https://archive.is/2ciMR
Oops.
In addition, Sarah has had more accounts under different names. The email her site was registered under was called retrogradesnowcone.gmail. com, and you can see a user called retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums admitting they run FFShrine. And just to properly cement that retrogradesnowcone is Sarah, here is Sarah on Twitter approvingly posting a Ravishly article with her face in it with the caption "my face is out in the open", and here is a Hotornot profile called retrogradesnowcone with the very same photo of Sarah's face in it. Sarah also shares her pictures under her handle retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums here.
In short, srhbutts on Twitter, Sarah on FFShrine, and retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums are all the same person: Sarah Nyberg.
To begin, let's look at the logs on FFShrine. While the WebCite pages directly archiving the chat logs from FFShrine are not directly accessible anymore, there are images on the internet, taken from there, which are still up. One can also confirm that these WebCite archives contained in that pastebin page were directly archived from 2005 FFShrine logs when combing archive.is for archives of the WebCite pages.
Among the images of the WebCite logs floating around, there are a few which are quite incriminating. Like this one, where Nyberg openly admits to being a pedophile, admits to being attracted to her younger cousin, Dana, calls her her little girlfriend, and states that "let me see Dana and I will get you all the silverware you can eat". Here, Nyberg says again "Dana is my cousin that I miss very much <3" and notes she doesn't know what to tell her cousin's parents to make it not seem weird. Then states she wants to kiss her, although don't worry, she wouldn't unless her cousin wants to learn how to kiss or something. Here, Nyberg confirms that Dana is 8 years old and here, Nyberg admits Dana gives her erections.
In addition to this, a former user of FFShrine, Roph, also uploaded further leaks of FFShrine IRC chats to his own website, slyph. org. Although slyph. org is no longer working, you can download the zip files of these IRC logs once uploaded there at archive links such as this one (warning, the logs will auto-download). Things get even worse here, and here are some of the more incriminating sections of the logs:
In file 2006-12-29.035011.html, Sarah posts a bunch of links to photos on 12chan and asks "how old are they", along with one she calls "cute ^T^". The response from a user called thetruetidus is "below 10 - Sarah ???"
In file 2006-12-30.101829.html, she posts links to online organisations for "girllovers and boylovers", then again posts a bunch of links to photos. Then subsequently says this:
In file 2006-12-31.015010.html, she posts yet another set of links to photos on 12chan (which, by the way, makes her denunciation of 8chan incredibly hypocritical), then says when linking one of them:
The response from other users is as such:
Sarah's response is to say that "nudity isn't CP, also I can't see anything", and in response LiquidCruelty and ivorynight state "Oh bullcrap" and "well take some vitamins and try harder, I know you went over this with a magnifying glass". In another section from the same file, Sarah states she's 6 on the inside but admits "I just turned 21".
To further confirm the veracity of the logs, there was a period of time where the latest IRC chat lines from FFShrine were embedded on her video game music download site Galbadia Hotel, archive pages of which Roph posted on KotakuInAction. Let's see some of these chat logs (which are direct archives of the page, by the way):
On 2006-01-29, Sarah states "thank heaven for little girls" and expresses concern over the fact she "only sees her lgf a few times a year". When asked when she's seeing her again, she responds "at the very latest I will in summer sometime. my dad wants to go visit her place because he wants to go fishing there and I'd tag along and hopefully convince him to go fairly regularly !" On 2006-03-05, Roph asks her "so who is dana? =o". She responds: "dana's my lgf ^________^ - little girl friend !" It's notable how well the content of the logs embedded here match up with the ones previously mentioned, and the fact that she continuously tries to get close to Dana just to get herself off in secret without informing anyone of what's happening is frankly quite unsettling (and that's not even addressing the posted pictures of children). And just to confirm that the Roph who owned slyph. org and posted the IRC chat logs is indeed the same Roph in the FFShrine IRC chat, here's him linking to slyph. org in the Galbadia Hotel IRC chat lines.
In addition to the evidence from FFShrine and all the related sites, there's also her postings on the Venus Envy Comic forums under the handle retrogradesnowcone. In this thread in the Venus Envy Comic forums on 2006-01-14, Nyberg openly admits "for the record: yes, I am a pedophile. no, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. no, I don't-- I wouldn't ever-- have sex with children. no, I don't look at child porn." Just remember, this is someone who later in the year went on to say "nudity isn't cp" on FFShrine and decided it was perfectly acceptable to post photos of a potentially drugged kid on internet forums - photos which users went on to identify as having "underage twat".
A user named DJ Izumi, in that thread, goes on to post chat logs from elsewhere where Nyberg, again under her retrogradesnowcone handle, talks about her "lgf" and says an array of other questionable things. Such as:
If further evidence is still required, I'd also note that Nyberg was known as a pedophile as early as 2007, long before Gamergate was a thing. As user ItsGotSugar writes about FFShrine in October of 2007: "Another character [on FFShrine] was Sarah, an administrator who was allegedly a pedophile. (Don't ask me whether "she" was really a girll; it was hard to tell.) I think Sarah had been expressing an unhealthy fixation on children from the very beginning, and I could only hope it was all some disgusting in-joke that had gone on for too long." Similarly, in 2010, 4 years before Gamergate existed, user BasilFSM notes that "You know what the worst thing about this Sarah is? She/He's a known pedophile. That's deplorable in itself."
Furthermore, in this interview with Milo there's this accusation by an anon called "M" accusing Sarah of initiating inappropriate roleplay with her, despite knowing that she was underage, and she would say things like "mommy tickle me where it's wet". And later on in the interview M states that her claims were ignored on Twitter. Keep in mind, this is an unsubstantiated allegation, but it is an unsubstantiated allegation that aligns with what we do know about Sarah. While this alone is not something that the argument of Sarah's inappropriate behaviour can rest on, the contents of all these disparate pieces of evidence align so well with each other that it's honestly quite implausible that all of this has somehow been faked by Gamergate (a common accusation by anti-GGs looking to defend her).
Nyberg herself on Twitter and elsewhere has also made statements that often basically are tantamount to an admission that these logs are hers. Apart from the open admission by srhbutts that "GG hacked into my server to get 10 year old logs to harass me over", there's this Twitter thread wherein she tries to defend herself with this response: "View the unedited logs. Everyone behaved in similar ways".
Eventually, Nyberg writes a medium article responding to the whole thing where she never concretely refutes the claims against her, never even claims the evidence against her has been faked, but defends herself by stating that she was "just being an edgelord". She states "Chat logs from an IRC room I was in nearly a decade ago were leaked to gamergate. To say the contents of those logs were not flattering would be putting it lightly. They are, in some ways, much what you’d expect from an early-2000’s chatroom of 4chan expats trying too hard to outdo each other for shock value. Even with that context, much of what I said was gross and disturbing, and I have no interest in defending it. Since then, I’ve learned that intent isn’t magic, and a playground of the taboo isn’t particularly conducive to moral growth. That I’ve grown past the person I was back then is something I am deeply and forever thankful for." She tries to paint it as regrettable teenage edgelord behaviour (she was 21) that she's grown out of, paints the people accusing her of being a pedophile as acting in bad faith, and casts herself as a victim of Gamergate harassment.
So even Nyberg cops to these logs being hers. And it's noticeable how her response to this is the anti-GG version of The Toxic Gossip Train. Even a good portion of the comments on her medium article are incredibly disgusted with how she treats the whole thing, with one stating "I’m sorry but I don’t think you get to just wash your hands of it and claim edgelord status. From the looks of it you were pretty deep into the role. Vieweing, discussing, and distributing child porn. That’s not edgelord that’s criminal." Another states "Pedophilia is a serious accusation. The evidence against you is disturbingly accurate. Your sob story won’t help you." In the same fashion as Miss Ukelele, the point of this post is not to issue an apology, she's essentially trying to trivialise her acts, claim victimhood and scold people into shutting up about her behaviour. It is true that "teenage edgelords" claim extreme views all the time, and sometimes objectionable ones. But what Nyberg did clearly falls far beyond that.
Yet in the light of Nyberg's medium article, the progressive crowd immediately comes out celebrating her and calling her stunning and brave. Here's Leigh Alexander's reaction (yes, that Leigh Alexander) as an example:
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643799292067610625
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643800965943005184
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643803653082644480
Writer for Houston Press and Cracked Jeff Rouner had a particularly flabbergasting reaction, which was to send Nyberg a photo of his kid wearing her new hoodie to cheer her up. He would later go on to delete this post.
https://archive.is/B8jBZ
In contrast, other people who knew her from way back when start picking apart her article. Roph notes "Sarah is right in that ffshrine had “edgelords”. I was one, too. I visited 4chan almost daily, used the current hot memes and phrases, joked about stuff. Shared the funny, hot or shocking meme images. Many people there did. Then why does nobody give a damn about any other user in all those logs (which are absolutely genuine, don’t get me started)? Because none of us were paedophiles. An open, proud, adamant, often very defensive paedophile. Defensive of paedophilia. Often justifying it through various arguments. Attempting to normalise it."
Plasmatorture, a former mod on FFShrine, notes "The amount she talked about it and the great lengths she went to convince everyone that she was a suffering martyr for having these feelings she knew she could never act on (supposedly) made it pretty damn clear she wasn't just trolling. That's like 5+ years of playing the long con. No troll has ever had the patience for that." CoryMartin similarly notes "The members of FFShrine and other communities you and your members mixed with (crankeye, kefkastower) didn’t interpret your ongoing demonstrations and admissions of pedophilia as you being an edgelord: they took it as you being an actual pedophile. It was taken as fact, and you had no issues with people knowing it at the time. I believe I was around 14 then, and it certainly creeped me out. Either you’re incredibly inept at comedy to the point where even people who interacted with you casually on a daily basis thought you were serious, or you’re deliberately lying to cover up something about you that most people would find deeply troubling. I think the latter is far more likely."
Now, all of this would just be hearsay if we didn't have the chat logs, as well as Nyberg's own admissions that she did in fact author these logs. However, with these corroborating pieces of information, they become part of an ever-strengthening case against her. Yet despite this evidence, news articles often gave her the Zoe Quinn treatment, painting her as an Oppressed Victim which Nobody Had Any Reason To Be Angry With, such as this article by The Verge that links to Nyberg's genuinely terrible medium article as the only source on the topic and states that she was "subject to one of the biggest and nastiest organized harassment campaigns of Gamergate".
After the initial video and after Nyberg's sordid internet history came to light, anti-Gamergaters started attempting to damage control to an almost incredible degree. One instance of this was when Randi Harper posted lists of Gamergate supporters on public facebook groups. To be charitable, these people publicly associated with Gamergate, so this doesn't constitute doxxing. To be less charitable, part of her stated reasoning for engaging in this behaviour was to "take the attention away" from her pedophile friend Sarah Nyberg. Other anti-GGs, including currently prominent YouTube voices such as Dan Olson of Folding Ideas, were there and openly encouraged this behaviour, with some calling it "noble" of Harper to divert attention away from Nyberg's pedophilic behaviour. All this can be found in Crash Override, the anti-GG chat group Zoe Quinn and others were using to coordinate plans.
https://archive.vn/eBVCb
And:
Notice what Athena Hollow in particular says about this. There's not even a denial of what they found. She only cares that GG got "lucky" by discovering Sarah's pedophilic behaviour and she's angry they could use it as a cudgel against anti-GG in general. This is what an unprincipled tribalist looks like. Imagine being so utterly unscrupulous that you would provide ballast and cover for a pedophile to win internet points against Gamergate.
It gets worse. You know why you can no longer access any of the original WebCite caches that were used to implicate Nyberg? The reason is because of an upstanding citizen called Izzy Galvez, who was another anti-GGer who was also part of Crash Override. In a Twitter thread, he gleefully posted images of him actively working to conceal evidence of Nyberg's pedophilia from the public (archive link here). The images in question demonstrate that he sent emails to WebCite claiming the material was being used for harassment, which resulted in WebCite making the snapshots of her domain unavailable to the public.
Not only did Galvez actively try to conceal information, he also attempted to manufacture misinformation to try and paint the logs as faked. He makes a post on GamerGhazi supposedly providing screenshots that supposedly show that the logs were last edited in 2015, therefore they were were "tampered with by GG" to add pedo material. The screenshots actively redact any identifying information about the site to make it appear that these are from FFShrine, but as this source notes in reality these screenshots came from Roph's backup of the logs in slyph. org, and not actually from the FFshrine website. In other words it "only proves that Roph uploaded files in 2015, NOT that the files were edited in 2015, or that they were created in 2015".
There's plenty of other instances of progressives trying to provide cover and ballast for Nyberg, such as an article by Margaret Pless entitled "5 Reasons Why I Stand with Sarah Nyberg" (which was then fully rebutted by this medium article called "5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Stand with Sarah Nyberg"). But of course, any discussion about Gamergate isn't complete without a discussion of how RationalWiki has covered it.
RationalWiki, as you can imagine, fervently defends Nyberg, courtesy of an obsessive anti-GGer called Ryulong who frequently vandalised the Wikipedia and RationalWiki articles on anything even slightly related to Gamergate, and who was even funded by GamerGhazi after he posted his GoFundMe on there and it was stickied by an admin. Because of Ryulong, RationalWiki is hosting two contradictory (and false) defences of Sarah Nyberg: "Timeline of Gamergate" claims that Nyberg was simply "expressing disgust at pedophilic roleplay" (this is completely unsupported by the link they use to back it up). "List of Gamergate claims", on the other hand, tries to state that, okay, "she made claims of being a pedophile, but she has since said was her and her friends making 4chan-style trolling jokes at each others’ expenses" - a claim that, as you can see by the evidence provided so far, is based on an attempt by Nyberg to misconstrue her own behaviour. A recent (2021) attempt to correct these false claims on RationalWiki by a person called Doris V. Sutherland resulted in the edits being completely reversed by a user called TechPriest, and the argument eventually reached the talk page. Without warning, Doris was then completely banned by the RationalWiki moderators, with the only rationale being "gator sock" - despite the fact that if you read Doris's article she is clearly not in favour of Gamergate.
Doing research on this post made me want to scrub myself with sandpaper, and the fact that this behaviour has been engaged in by a group of people who make claims of having the moral and intellectual high ground is frankly incredible. Unfortunately, most of the incriminating information now resides in heterodox news sources at best, now-defunct blogs and sites that have to be reached through archive links at worst, and as a result this information has pretty much disappeared from the eyes of the public. Most "authoritative" sources and large scale collections of information are strictly policed to make sure that reporting is sufficiently congenial to the progressive viewpoint, and the only thing the public ever hears is a skewed view of the entire affair.
This is, in real time, how history gets written. Once all the dissenters disappear for good, all this stuff will be forgotten, and the only thing left will be a bunch of seemingly authoritative articles that will cause people to harbour a distorted view of how the culture war actually played out.
I still don’t know what gamergate is or was, other than ‘a sufficiently massive train wreck that everyone involved on either side should be fired into the sun’, but I don’t see how it’s notable that a not-very-prominent participant is a minor attracted person.
Why use minor attracted person? First it is three words instead of pedophile. Like all woke language it is ugly. Second, it is often used to try to legitimize something we should keep highly hated.
I have no dog in this fight, but I don't think we should keep anything "highly hated." Hate is a bad thing. I think that there is probably an optimal level of social scorn we should direct towards pedophiles in order to minimize the amount of pedophilia in the world, and I think we should calculate that amount rather than just go nuts and hope for the best.
My best guess is that the target should be just enough scorn to dissuade them from committing crimes, but not so much scorn that we dissuade them from seeking professional help. I'm reasonably confident we've overshot the mark. It's quite possible that a modest reduction in hatred directed at pedophiles would actually result in fewer children being molested.
Hatred for evil is appropriate. Pedophilia is evil. Controversial, I know.
Paedophilia the sexual preference is not evil. Rape of children is evil.
I'm not particularly defending Nyberg here; she did some stuff that crosses my line. A paedophile who sticks to loli hentai, though, is perhaps pitiful but not evil.
No. It is, in itself, evil. Even if never acted upon.
Why?
I am rapidly losing faith in humanity here.
This is very much like saying "the desire to genocide armenians is not evil, only acting on that desire is evil." Or "the desire to torture dogs is not evil, only actually torturing dogs is."
No. The desire to commit evil acts is evil. Pedophilia is evil, even if never acted upon. And everyone is right to be wary of anyone who claims to be, or appears to be a pedophile, because that is evil.
That said, it is laudatory to resist temptations and to refrain from evil, even if you desire to do evil. And the Lord will reward those who are faithful and commit no evil though they have the desire.
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This is both low-effort and building consensus. Put more effort into your arguments and avoid this kind of flat evidence-less claim, please.
Are you saying that the rape of children is not an inherently evil act? I’m not sure how I provide evidence for this. Is a simple moral fact not enough?
There are literally people disagreeing with you in the replies. Read those, and don't make universal moral statements if people are going to disagree with you, because then it's not fact, it's opinion.
So you’re saying child rape isn’t evil?
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Despite hatred of the sin being obviously appropriate, there is something to say for redemption being possible even for the worst of sinners.
Of course in practice this is so difficult that we literally need God to intervene to make it possible, but isn't the principle good?
Redeeming the worst of humanity, even as we may need to imprison them perpetually or even put them to death, is still something that ought to be attempted. And I've seen too many lives destroyed by blind hatred of even things that ought to be hated to recommend it to anybody.
All well and good, but the progressive movement is wedded to the idea that sexuality is something you're born with and which cannot be changed through outside interference. As such, no paedophile can be "redeemed": from the perspective of the progressive movement, if you are sexually attracted to children, you always will be, and nothing you do (or anyone else does to you) will change that. Ergo, every paedophile must be treated as a potential future child rapist.
If we were to move away from the "born this way" framework, acknowledge that sexuality is susceptible to direct outside intervention and that "conversion therapy" for paedophiles might actually work (at least in some cases), we can have a conversation about paedophilia as a sin distinct from the sinner. Until then, paedophiles will be forever irredeemable, as a consequence of the framework progressives called for to interrogate sexuality.
Don't forget that "born this way" is self-justifying as well as unchanging. If you're "born this way" it's "natural" and good and any shaming or even different treatment is bigotry.
Well the people on my socials most inclined to trumpet, and/or presuppose, the "born this way" narrative WRT LGBT+ people definitely don't apply that logic to pedos - think wood-chipper memes - regardless of whether that's consistent with other things they say.
Don't assume SocJus crusaders believe something just because you think it follows logically from other things they believe. They are, IME, almost all capable of compartmentalizing to an extent that makes my brain hurt.
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The problem is we focus too much on hatred specifically of pedophilia rather than of child molestation. There are a number of problems with this approach beyond the one @Sunshine mentioned. Most relevant to your argument is the assumption that only pedophiles molest children, and the corollary that if you aren't a pedophile then your behavior must be "okay". The majority of child molesters are not pedophiles and they will often justify their behavior based on this fact.
On a more personal note, I think taking a harder line on troublesome behaviors would make my life as a pedophile much easier. Almost all of my sessions with my therapist boil down to some variation of "What is the appropriate behavior in this situation?" (eg, "A child comes up to me while I'm walking my dog and asks to pet her. Do I let the child pet my dog or not?"). It is extremely confusing how many behaviors are considered problematic based on whether the actor is attracted to someone rather than judging the intentions of the actor and the actual impact on others.
The idea that a child molester is not also a pedo just seems like trying to find a distinction. Are you honestly of the belief that a person raped a child has zero attraction to side child? That beggars belief. We are already talking about monsters, but that is beyond.
This sounds unsurprising so I'm willing to assume it's broadly correct, but if you're going to cite specific statistics like “5 years after conviction, 14% of offenders have been charged with or convicted of a new sexual offense” could you please explicitly cite the sources behind your claims?
Numbers that are so specific must come from one specific source. There is no way that there are multiple independent sources that investigated this and they all agreed the number was exactly 14%, not 13% or 15%.
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So some "duh" factors(obviously pedophiles are more likely to sexually offend against children than the general population and obviously the factors that make recidivism more likely for all crime apply here) and characteristics strongly associated with transgenderism/LGBT?
Listen, at some point society is going to have to confront that heteronormativity is a good thing. That doesn't mean any individual non-heteronormative person is a pedophile. But it does seem that "having LGBT-typical sexual interests is a risk factor for sex offender recidivism but not for recidivism more generally" is a pretty major argument against queer theory.
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To choose an extremely common case, someone who molests a young person who is physically a young adult (because of early puberty, or because society keeps defining the age of adulthood upwards) still socially and legally a child is a child molester by definition, but is almost certainly not a paedophile. I would like to insist on this distinction, but even I struggle to when the child molester in question is a prominent politician on the wrong side of the aisle.
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Maybe there's a gendered difference? When I reported being fondled and groped the response was always that it was okay and I shouldn't be bothered by it because it wasn't sexual despite people literally grabbing my penis. A few times I was punished for trying to pull their hands away, and one particular person chasing me as I tried to avoid her at get-togethers became a running family joke. Those experiences make me feel like that belief isn't that uncommon.
Yes, such behavior is not acceptable. I feel like a lot of the hatred of pedophilia comes down to people wanting an easy way to show they are against child molestation without having to actually put in any real effort in preventing it, like confronting someone actually molesting a child.
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We tried that; it's already been twisted into "man interacting with his own children in public is obviously a pedophile". Of course, this conversely gives women freer reign to perpetrate molestation, and if the [overwhelmingly-female] education system's obsession with sex/gender stuff is any indication they're taking full advantage of that privilege.
[At the population level]
Why? Out of sociobiological necessity, the adult gets the benefit of the doubt by default because they are the adult. Children are subordinate property that usually turn out good enough no matter what we visit upon them- besides, there are plenty of times when parents will place their own wants and well-being above that of their child, so why would "I enjoy my charming family member's company, and it's just a hug or two they insist on, right? Can't my kid just deal with it, follow my orders, and stop being weird?" be any different?
Besides, they only touch my ass once or twice a visit, and I can tolerate that- and they're not taking that further with me because they know I'll hurt them if they go further. Clearly, the same calculus is in play when they're interacting with my kids, and surely won't be tempted to take it any further despite their complete lack of similar defenses.
In the same way (and for exactly the same reasons) women complain about men trivializing their safety concerns, that goes double for children. "Must be exaggerating or mischaracterizing the interaction", "saying this just to get a reaction from the adults", and "doesn't even have the vocabulary/grammar to explain what's even happening clearly enough to take action" (or a combination of the 3 at the same time) is not actually a bad heuristic when dealing with children in the first place (especially because a good chunk of the time it's true).
Other than that, this isn't a tractable problem for any kid whose parents don't think it's a big deal. The only way around that is to destroy the family structure entirely, and now instead of the family molesting your kids you have standardized State-mandated molestation for everyone; whether that's an improvement or not is an exercise for the reader.
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There's more to "legal and social consequences" than your family. Frankly, you can never expect family to hold their kin accountable for serious crimes. Violence, robbery, corruption, false testimony, rape – family will offer every possible excuse, and when excuses run dry, every opportunity for rehabilitation. Blood runs thicker than morals.
For legal consequences, criminal abuse gets an average of 16 years, while statutory rape gets 3.6 years (source). It's hard to parse where "child molestation" fits between these two, since the latter probably includes a lot of non-central examples like teenagers dating adults. I'll acknowledge I really don't know how I could recalibrate my intuitions on this. The only time I hear about child molesters being sentenced is when there's a news story about the penalty being shockingly low. But if I trusted this heuristic, I would believe tens of thousands of unarmed blacks were being killed by police officers, or that shark attacks are rampant, and a hundred other false impressions.
Socially, outside the family, I'm not sure what universe you live in if you think chomos don't get serious social consequences. Perhaps your cultural milieu is different than mine.
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Should we hate murderers? What about people like SBF who stole billions?
I hold that justice is primarily neither for punishment nor for rehabilitation but for ensuring the security of peaceful society.
The man who stands condemned is not to be hated, and he isn't to be pitied. He is to be shunned, to be banished, to disappear, he ceases to exist until he has done enough penance to be acknowledged again or bar that possibility he does so forever as we recommend his forgiveness to higher powers.
We are not perfect, that is true. But lest you are a victim (in which case emotions are tolerated), justice is to be treated with a solemn dignity that precludes all emotion.
CS Lewis has something to say about that http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ResJud/1954/30.pdf
I hadn't read this particular text, but I'm familiar with this point and I certainly agree with his analysis that treating crime as pathology that can be cured is dangerous, and I can furthermore notice that the problems with this approach have only become more apparent today.
That said, I do not believe this particular argument is valid against the theory of justice I subscribe to. I do not wish to cure crime, neither am I under such delusions as to believe it possible to eliminate it from society. I merely wish to carve out an island of dignity and civilization from the brutish state of nature and exclude those who can't or won't restrain themselves from it.
This is something that is compatible with both approaches that are discussed by Lewis here. Indeed one can argue it from both sides: the rehabilitation proponent will argue the criminal needs to be isolated from society for the cure to be administered, whilst the retribution proponent will argue the criminal deserves his isolation as punishment.
I see no need for either kind of cruelty in justification. The criminal needs to be isolated solely because he can't behave himself in a way that can have him participate in society, and I see no practical need for emotion in the process except as to allow the victim to feel sated enough that they can remain secure from future abuses.
I know people will argue the need for a more transcendental form of justice that restores some order to the universe by either enacting the victim's revenge or removing the criminal pathology from the perpetrator. Neither seem practical to me, as I do not believe in a cosmic justice. At least not one made of men.
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I agree with you. My question was in response to apparently not hating pedophiles.
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No. Again, hate is bad. Hate does not help you make good decisions, and hatred-based law enforcement mechanisms are not known for their efficiency. The appropriate angle to approach social engineering problems like "How do we stop people from committing fraud and/or murder in the manner that gets us the best value for our tax dollars," is heartless rationality, not hatred.
Hatred is for suckers. It makes you easy to manipulate and prone to error.
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Presumably, to facilitate distinguishing those who commit sex offenses against children and those who are sexually attracted to children but refrain from acting on that attraction and wish to continue refraining therefrom. However much the former should be hated (though I seem to recall something about hating the sin but loving the sinner), it is not clear to me why the latter should be hated.
That distinction already exists: "child molester" vs. "paedophile".
It seems to me that, in practice, those are used as synonyms. Would the use of the new term make it more likely that people like those in the link would get help? I don't know for sure, but if the answer is "yes," then that seems like a good argument for using the new term. Assuming, of course, that our goal is to reduce the incidence of child abuse, rather than simply to identify targets for vilification.
I don’t see much of that. I recall watching Reddit on that very issue, and while they sort of managed to talk a good game about “wanting help” and so on, there were a lot of things about that discourse that made me suspect that “therapy” as they were looking for it was more of a fig leaf than a honest search for help.
I don’t recall any of them being focused on the potential harm actually molesting a child would cause, or any type of moral repugnance against molestation by people who claimed this condition. They instead focused on their situation, how they were mistreated, how they were at risk of losing everything, and how they were not allowed to be sexual as they wanted. At the same time, they were very quick to point out the difference between pedophilia and ephebophilia. Now I get the risk of coming forward, but I just never noted anything that suggested that they really understood what molesting a child did to the child or that they even cared.
Second, they simply aren’t that interested in actually solving the problem or doing anything to make it more difficult to offend. They weren’t asking for drug intervention, they weren’t asking for in patient treatment. They weren’t even willing to inform anyone else or restrict themselves from working in places where they would have easy access to children either in private life or at work. What they wanted was once a week outpatient talk therapy and nothing else. That’s not much in the way of treatment and would not protect kids. The pedophiles attending would still be able to get jobs in places where they work with kids, they’d still have full libido, and nobody around them is alert to the problem.
I think you're right to be deeply skeptical of any "support" groups, but I think the problem is worse than any specific support group but would instead be inherent to them.
The average dangerous criminal knows that the crime they committed is morally wrong, but rationalise their crime to themselves due to some circumstance or exception that 'permits' them to commit that crime. The fancy term for this is Techniques of Neutralization. For instance, the average murderer is not a cold-blooded killer. They know murder is wrong. They'll repeatedly reiterate that they know murder is wrong. But there will be this one guy, this one exception, who absolutely deserved what he got, for whatever rationale they either had beforehand or constructed in the aftermath. So the average murderer commits only one murder, and usually do so in a fairly reckless way with minimal effort to avoid being caught.
Child predators do not behave like this. The typical profile of a child predator is someone who knows that the law regards their actions as wrong, that almost all of society regards their actions as wrong, but personally does not regard their own actions as wrong. This makes them an unusual combination of extremely opportunistic, far more apt at preparing and covering up their crimes than any equivalent, and also far more likely to be a serial criminal.
How to tell if you're not at risk of predating on children? The same way everyone else manages to not commit violent crime. The average human is attracted to adult men or women in some combination, yet can easily go their entire life without committing rape primarily because they believe rape to be wrong. A pedophile who seriously believes that molesting children harms them is unlikely to act on that impulse and unlikely to need or care about support, and hypothetically this is the majority in much the same way that the majority of people don't commit rape and don't need support groups to tell them not to rape. The real dangerous individuals are those who do not genuinely believe that their potential crime would harm children, though they may certainly make a good act of claiming to hold that belief. Nyberg's statements fit that profile.
And that's exactly the dangerous circumstance.
For this reason I don't think any self-created "support" group could ever be useful. If you join a such a group, then you believe yourself to be sufficiently at risk of committing such an act, which in the first place requires you don't think it to be morally repugnant. So these support groups end up self-selecting for people who don't think it's morally repugnant and will soon start constructing elaborate justifications of it for each other to use. Any actually productive support would need to be imposed externally and in a fairly hostile way, with the express intent of distilling the same sense of moral repugnance anyone else gets in such a circumstance.
None of this accords very well with what we know about sex drives, and about the behavior of many people with sexual proclivities that society deems immoral. How many people actually have the will power to resist their sexual urges, especially when, as for many of the people in question, they are solely attracted to underage persons? And, how many gay youth attempted suicide back when homosexuality was considered beyond the pale? Why did that mayor commit suicide the other day after he was outed as a transvestite? Odd behavior for people who don't think their behavior is immoral. And, I note that you provide no evidence for any of your claims.
This avoids the issue, which is the distinction between people who are attracted to children but do not want to act on that attraction, and people who who are attracted to children, think that is fine, and act on their attraction. And the first group has at least two subgroups: a) People who have acted on that attraction but want to stop; and b) People (usually younger) who have not yet acted on that attraction and don't want to start.
You have no idea which group is most numerous. More importantly, even if you are correct and the "it's perfectly fine" group is typical, that says nothing about how we should treat the other groups.
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People who need to rationalize things they want to do are way above average (in HBDIQ terms).
Average "dangerous criminal" needs rationalizing his urges as much as wolf, tiger or other predatory animal.
Thought process of average criminal is:
"I am thirsty." "I need some vodka." "No money left, not even a kopeck." "I really need vodka." "My neighbor is old woman with money. I smash her head with axe, take money, buy vodka." "This plan cannot fail, lets' go!"
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I think Scott covered this.
My approach also has the benefit of linguistic accuracy: if you're using "paedophile" to mean "a person who has raped or inappropriately touched children", that's an actual misuse of the term given that its literal meaning is "lover of children".
As are all of the "phobias"; the only reason people use faux-Greek is to sound intelligent/accuse opponent of anti-intellectualism anyway.
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Strictly speaking yes, but too many people fail to recognize that distinction for it to actually be useful.
I don't think I have any good reason to believe the progressive movement will have any greater luck with "minor attracted person" being made the term of choice.
True, but "minor attracted person" originated in academia in people studying pedophilia specifically because the distinction you mentioned had broken down to the point of being unusable. The progressive movement adopting the term is merely the inevitable progression to it too losing its distinction. I don't know that it is possible to ever maintain the distinction since the topic holds so much power over people's emotions.
At this point, that's a mark against whatever is under consideration. "originated in academia" might as well be a synonym for "pulled out of someone's butt with zero basis in reality" for anything except the hard sciences.
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Because it’s a perfectly valid word and while I wouldn’t hire her to babysit, I wouldn’t hire a trans activist microceleb anyways. It seems like a very long top level post that has no point other than relitigating a pointless and toxic culture war battle.
It seems to me like you are demonstrating problem's point - you don't know or care about the issue, so you assume the mainstream take is correct. But the mainstream position is so helplessly corrupt and biased that this results in you defending a documented cp-sharing pedophile. On the grounds that it's pointless to talk about him, in the same thread where people are arguing about shoe on head's socialism and how anti-semitic hlynka is. I notice that I am confused.
Also it's three words.
Frankly I've noticed I can't predict at all how people will react to things here, or what the basis is for people liking or disliking a post. People here will consistently upvote, say, source-less rants about how they feel like immigrants degrade their home country as top-level posts (which I find to be immensely low-effort content), but will react badly to other posts even if more well sourced. I also don't feel like my post clearly broke any rules in a way most of the other contributions here already don't.
I mean, I understand that people don't necessarily care about this, and that's perfectly fair. There's lots of things I come across here that I don't personally care about either, but I just ignore it and move on. It's a consequence of being in a general purpose political community. I certainly don't go on to leave pithy, low-effort comments about how little I give a shit about what's been posted. I also don't think that it's completely irrelevant to the current political climate.
It seems that people here upvote and downvote posts based on a completely alien set of criteria to me, and I'm too much of an autist to predict what's acceptable posting and what isn't. The only thing I can find that's consistent is that even here, speaking about Gamergate in 2023 is low status, and will be treated as such. It's the closest thing to something everyone has silently agreed not to touch, and doing so is considered a faux pas.
Gamergate is definitely low status. Really though, that just makes it stranger - this is the motte. We left reddit specifically because we are incapable of not discussing low status things. We have regular discussions about the holocaust, physical differences between men and women, and whether or not rich people are just better than everyone else. They are easy enough to ignore when I don't feel like reading them, and I can't see what makes gamergate different.
When I'm confused I go back to basics. Who, in this space for discussion of controversial topics, benefits from talking about gamergate? People who want to crow about sjws, people who are interested in internet history, people who are interested in how mainstream opinions are formed. Who benefits from not talking about gamergate? More importantly, who benefits from trying to stop other people from talking about it?
In my experience, when a strict taboo isn't involved, the people who benefit from stopping others from discussing a topic instead of just minimising the thread and moving on are people who are afraid their previous position on the subject made them look foolish. Usually because they still maintain that opinion, but don't feel they can argue for it successfully within the constraints of the current environment.
I don't know that that's what's happening here though, I'm sure there are other reasons someone might do that and I just haven't encountered them, and my experiences are no doubt coloured by covid.
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There doesn't seem to be any rules or guidelines on upvoting/downvoting, so it would depend on the individual's own whims. I would think you should aim to upvote comments that add to the discussion, even if you disagree with what is said.
I think your observation is generally correct, people seem to in general upvote comments/posts that bash immigrants or is anti-trans, or anti-establishment, or anti-woke. Conversely, anything that can be seen as a defense to those things seems more likely to get downvoted, even if those are good comments with sound logical arguments and good sources. I think if you frame it in a way that it makes it sound like you don't personally endorse that line of thinking, but that this is how people that might defend it might think that way, you're less likely to get downvoted.
Ultimately the only way to know for sure is to get a direct answer from the people that are upvoting/downvoting in the specific pattern you are observing.
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I’m not actually defending it- I think anybody involved in gamergate on either side can redeem themselves only by entering a very strict monastery for the remainder of their natural lives. Nor do I think this pedophilia is good or defensible.
I simply do not think it’s notable that someone who made a name for themselves as an activist around gamergate is a horrible person.
You can say that you weren't defending him on purpose, but you are in fact defending him by dismissing and disdaining anyone attempting to talk about him. Also I don't think talking about video games online in 2014 makes problem just as bad as nyberg, and I find it hard to believe you do.
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I think it is an abusive of language; both to try to change the way we think about something and to make words ugly. I hate the new speak.
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In my humble and likely heterodox (for now) opinion, the proper terminology for what a "normie" might call a "pedophile" is "anti-agecuck" (as almost all men, because of basic biology, are inevitable sexually attracted to women under 18 not uncommonly and even pre-pubertal girls (due to humans being a K-selected species, meaning it is natural/reproductively optimal to develop romantic/sexual attachments to potential reproductive partners in anticipation of their fertility to already have a pre-existing pair bond available to enhance the nurturing of eventual offspring once fertility is achieved) and thus those who allow feminist age of "consent" mandates (which were the first major "wins" of the modern feminist movement) are inevitably cuckolded by younger, more enlightened/freer, or just more immoral men (guys who believe in the traditional narrative about the alleged irreparable harm that results from youth-adult sex but just don't care, who often tend to be non-White as conviction rates for child "molestation" show, giving this cuckoldry an interracial element), thus leaving "pedophiles" to basically exclusively oppose this (again, interracially-flavored and anti-White) cuckoldry), "non-agecuck" (for the same reasons as before), or "possessor of natural masculine sexuality" (due to there being little record of these modern feminist age-based attraction taboos in more natural, less artificially estrogenized times).
But until society has been freed from the grip of a memeplex I might deem "Judeo-feminist quasi-matriarchalism" or "talmudic-demonic-feminist quasi-matriarchalism", if I had to pick a phrase, enough to properly appreciate these terms, "pedo" is necessary for understanding. Thus "pedochad" is always an acceptable term as well.
"MAP" isn't necessarily inaccurate per se but I reject all woke newspeak right off the bat, and it is unfortunately that.
Note: As usual all of my posts are generally/almost always unironic (minus an allowance for a reasonable amount of rhetorical irony same as any other poster here might apply, but not in my fundamental perspective), good faith attempts to inject a perspective that I believe most are afraid to acknowledge into the conversation, and this one is included. (Including this disclaimer since I haven't posted here in a while and I had problems with people thinking I'm not serious even when I posted regularly.)
Edit: Copying the below for the reader's convenience, but updated:
The big increases in the age of consent happen in 1885 in the UK and between 1900-1920 in the US - by 1920 the (hetrosexual) age of consent in the UK had reached its current level 16, with an attempt to raise it to 17 failing in 1917, and it was 16 or 18 in every US state except Georgia. In the UK at least, this is part of the Victorian re-moralisation movement, which was heavily driven by women but explicitly dissociated itself from the first-wave feminists, who were still something of a joke. In the US, the timing suggests it was a Progressive thing - I don't know enough about Progressive-era US politics to understand the relationship between Progressivism and first-wave feminism, but they seem to have been allies. So on net I wouldn't say that age of consent laws were feminist laws.
During the sexual revolution, there are attempts (supported by some but no means all feminists) to reduce ages of consent or to undermine enforcement. In the UK, for example, Gillick (doctors can prescribe contraceptives to girls under 16 without the parents knowledge or consent) was widely supported by feminists on harm reduction grounds. Again, age of consent laws are not feminist laws. More recently, you see third wave feminism focussing on abuse of authority (such as teachers banging students) rather than how young the girl is.
As a separate point, the only licit sex with under-16 girls in the pre-age-of-consent era was after marrying them with the father's permission. It has never been socially acceptable for a man to seduce a 14-year-old girl.
Women like Helen Gardener (a suffragette and early advocate of atheism), Josephine Butler (also a suffragette and anti-coverture activist), and Frances Willard (also also a suffragette and president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, yes the one that successfully pushed alcohol prohibition (which was also a policy commonly promoted on women's welfare grounds, that male "drunkards" were a threat to women) as well), three of the biggest advocates of raising the age of consent in the 1800s in the UK and US, were absolutely feminists of the genealogy leading directly to modern feminism, even if some of them later may have felt that other feminists went "too far" (though as demonstrated in many if not most cases they did support women voting, so they wouldn't have disavowed later feminists on those grounds). (Second-wave feminists often disavow modern third-wave feminists, also feeling that they've gone "too far", because of their support of transsexuality; are these in some cases contemporaries of Andrea Dworkin not actually feminists then? Or they never were? Despite being as pro-matriarchal, anti-patriarchal, and in many cases straight up anti-man as it gets?)
So unfortunately I'm afraid your information is incomplete/incorrect. Of course there were general prudish Victorian anti-sex types (like Ellice Hopkins, who was still feminist in function but not all that explicitly, nor do I think she had much real intention of upsetting masculine authority or traditional gender roles, though she died in 1904 and might have become a suffragette eventually) mixed in (though even these were still usually women thinking they could dictate to men, which is de facto feminist), and of course because of the time period involved some of even the explicit feminists were organized according to Christian principles, but they were still feminists (that is, to be clear, many/most of them explicitly called themselves "feminist" (a term coined in the early 19th century), even again if some of them would eventually denounce other later women who also called themselves feminists. (Isn't it the inevitable end of many if not most progressives to feel that other later progressives have eventually gone "too far"? "I wanted X sure, but Y's crazy!" Were the Old Bolsheviks not real socialists or Soviet patriots in the end because they probably didn't much appreciate Stalin later purging them all?)
The fact that almost all age of consent raising advocacy of the time focused on the alleged welfare of women and girls as opposed to men/boys is proof enough of this. If biased gynosupremacy and gynocentrism isn't allowed to be considered feminist, then what is?
So yes on net modern age of consent laws are absolutely feminist in origin in that they are the product of gynocentric and gynocratic political organization and advocacy (quite often, again, by women who explicitly called themselves "feminist" at the time again even if in some cases they didn't necessarily agree with every other woman who would later identify as one). Only a modern man would even try to deny that. "Well, sure, they were women thinking they could dictate public policy to men on the grounds of alleged 'women's rights', but they weren't, like, burning bras or anything crazy!"
Even the purely "remoralization"-oriented stuff you highlight was mostly feminist in practice (even if not explicitly) as it was significantly feminized in terms of the composition of its supporters, policy aims, and rhetorical practices. Women thinking they know better than men what morality is and that they can or should dictate their emotionalized "care"-based "morality" over men's virtue-and-honor-based morality is feminist no matter what terms they couch it in and even if they pretend it's not explicitly pro-woman (even though in most cases as highlighted it was).
Were they totally feminists in a strictly modern sense? Well of course not because full modern context necessary for them to be so didn't exist. But modern feminists are even more extreme about the issue and often more supportive of higher ages of consent than ever before (as I've seen calls by some to raise it to 21, 25, etc.), so that still kind of proves the opposite of your point.
And again, a significant portion of them if not the majority of them were at least (usually not even only later but at the same time) very early suffragettes (which means most of them denouncing first-wave feminism seems unlikely, so I think you're wrong on that point) and thus I'd say that firmly qualifies them as feminists, given that the modern feminism movement still tends to claim women gaining the ability to vote as its own achievement.
This is true but this was driven mostly by (often gay) men (organizations like NAMBLA, Vereniging Martijn, etc., overwhelmingly male-led organizations), not feminists.
This has nothing to do with age of consent. You do realize that underage people can have sex with other underage people right? This is just general sexual liberalization stuff (which tends to not include stuff that men will actually benefit from, so no properly restoring men's dominion over younger girls/women in general).
Yeah, no. I'm afraid this is the point where anyone who reads stuff on social media outside of this site is going to instinctively call bullshit on you. Modern feminists and woke types have become utterly obsessed with anti-"age gap" rhetoric (when it's in the man's favor), like literally getting mad at a 27 year old man for dating a 22 year old woman-tier even when there's no authority-based relationship between them. Just search "age gap" on Reddit.
This is irrelevant. You conventionally sought the father's consent to marry women/girls of any age in those eras (outside of which sex was taboo for everyone of every age assuming a relatively modern monogamy-oriented culture), because a female was considered her father's property/ward before she became her husband's.
Again, no. Asking the father for permission to marry a girl/woman was a part of the courtship process which would have been considered (the acceptable version of) seduction back then. And you've already admitted that this was acceptable for most of human history. So it was definitely acceptable. (And that's not even getting into prostitutes, slaves, etc. where if anybody had any objections to having sex with them then it was almost certainly on the grounds of fornication/adultery/promiscuity, not their age if they were young.)
So I must regretfully say that I do consider your post basically entirely incorrect and confused about the facts in almost all areas.
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I don’t see how this is evidence of anyone attempting to lower the age of consent or reduce enforcement? Age of consent laws in practice have never focused on minors of similar ages having sex with each other. The focus has always been on people over the age of consent having sex with those below it (with some allowances in jurisdictions with Romeo and Juliet laws), along with the occasional case of minors with significant age gaps.
The most common situation a doctor is prescribing birth control to a girl under 16 is when she wants to have/is having sex with her boy friend who’s about the same as her.
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With parentheses unfolded:
Nice formatting man. Maybe I should start writing like this for some. But
should be:
With that being said I am a chronic post editor, word rearranger, and adder of little phrases into my posts to better clarify my meaning, so your nice post will probably be outdated soon enough, but I appreciate the effort.
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I don't know a huge amount about GamerGate either. At least, not the start of it. We'll get to that.
The end part, the part that... well, not quite "matters", but the part that turned heads, was basically this: SJ openly declared culture war on nerdy men; the Grey Tribe ruptured fully from the Blue Tribe. I say it doesn't matter because the cracks had been growing for a while due to SJ's increasingly-censorious nature (indeed, Scott's criticism of SJ started a couple of years before GG); something was going to explode sooner or later, and it merely happened to be GG.
...all of which means there's a bit of an issue with reading up on it: since the Grey Tribe as a separate identity didn't actually exist for the most part until GG, it didn't have any narrative-producing institutions of its own, and the Red Tribe didn't care yet. So nearly all the media coverage is Blue propaganda intended to make the "pro-GG" side - the Grey side - look as bad as possible. Frankly, at the time I mostly bought it.
GamerGate is one of those cases, in hindsight, where each side had a public definition of what they thought it was about, and both of them were lying or self-deluding. This is necessarily a simplification, since neither side of GamerGate was univocal - both were unsteady coalitions and contained substantial diversity of motive - but it's one that helps make sense of it to me.
What pro-GG said GamerGate was about was ethics in game journalism. They were concerned about lack of disclosure, conflicts of interest, a journalistic field controlled by the industry it claims to report on, and to an extent (though GG was always a bit cautious and divided in expressing this) by journalists who were not culturally members of or sympathetic to their audiences.
What GamerGate was actually about, to pro-GG, was video games as a cultural scene being taken over and gatekept by cliques of progressive journalists, people alien to and contemptuous of the traditional gamer demographic, but who, by taking over journalistic institutions, arrogate to themselves the power to define who is and is not a 'gamer', and who also seize privileged access to publishers and developers and thus influence the types of games that get made. What it was really about was entryism.
What anti-GG said GamerGate was about was a harassment campaign. It was about a bunch of reactionary troglodytes who hate women and minorities lashing out to try to punish the diversification of video games, both as products and as an audience.
What GamerGate was actually about, to anti-GG, was a bunch of gross ugly people being gross and ugly in public, and worse, trying to exert control over a cultural or media sphere that anti-GG felt they were rightful custodians of. GamerGate was about a bunch of basement-dwelling virgins acting out their resentful misogyny against people who are leading the rise in diverse games. I realise this sounds very similar to what anti-GG said it was about, but I think the distinction is that the public anti-GG line was about behaviour ("they're harassing people") while the real feeling was about identity or even essential attributes ("they're gross").
In a sense, what GamerGate was about was control of 'gamer' as an identity - about who gets to decide what it means to play video games, what 'gaming' is as a subculture.
Seen in that light, I feel like the ultimate result of the controversy was probably a marginal pro-GG victory. Anti-GG got to control the narrative, to the extent that e.g. the Wikipedia article on GamerGate is pure anti-GG propaganda, but that control didn't translate into success because the traditional video game journalistic scene that anti-GG had their base in was becoming irrelevant. If I think about the movers and shakers who get to define gaming as a subculture now, it's all much more crowdsourced - it's streamers and YouTubers and content creators. If I think about the people with privileged access to gaming companies whose feedback changes the way games are made now, it's, well, it's content creators. It's not journalists. Asmongold doesn't have a journalism degree, but he has significantly greater access to Blizzard than anyone working for Kotaku.
It's not a total victory and journalism still matters - Jason Schreier, say, still has a lot of influence - but it's not got the stranglehold that I think it was felt to have in 2014.
Whether this is good or bad overall is a separate question - I think personally I prefer the streamer/content-creator-based world to the progressive journalistic clique, but frankly I dislike both of them - but insofar as it was about gaming as a scene, I think pro-GG have probably come out better than anti-GG have. Even if all the official histories favour anti-GG and will probably do so forever.
Your breakdown of the motivations and rhetoric of both factions seems accurate.
I don't play many video games these days, but of the few recent ones I bought, Elden Ring seems celebrated in GG circles for being especially non-woke. Its character creation uses "Body Type A / Body Type B" rather than a gender option. Another celebrated non-idpol game, Hogwarts Legacy, apparently lets you play as a black male witch in the female dormitories in 19th century England, and has openly transgender NPCs.
Yes, traditional gaming journalism is a shadow of its former self, but that's just social media killing the legacy press. The culture of AAA games shifted with everything else. Calling the situation a pro-GG victory seems like telling a 1924 Russian white that he won the civil war because Lenin died.
Yeah, in the context of gaming I'd have to say anti-GG won.
In the broader political context, it's hard to say, particularly since as I said something like GG was essentially inevitable.
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Oh, certainly the last decade or so has been a defeat for social conservatism in video games. Actual conservatives have been consistly losing. Even in games or franchises that in my experience are particularly beloved by conservatives we can see this - BattleTech, for instance, has no gender selection for PCs, but merely lets you select 'pronouns', which can be mixed-and-matched with any body shape or facial features without limitation.
But I think it would be a bad misreading of GamerGate to see it as a social conservative response? GamerGate was never conservative.
Thus to take the case of Hogwarts Legacy - that game's success strikes me as much more compatible with the narrative that pro-GG won? The anti-GG position on Hogwarts Legacy isn't "Hurrah for trans representation!" The anti-GG position on Hogwarts Legacy is "boycott this transphobic filth". (Indeed that review is a perfect example of everything that drove GamerGate up the wall - a 'review' that barely touches on the game itself, which is mostly an autobiographical ramble, and which doesn't even seem to care about the question of whether the game is fun to play. At the time I remember pro-GGers citing this review as an example of what they were angry about - a review that seems more interested in passing moral judgement on a sin, in this case sexism or objectification, that it does in considering whether or not a game is fun or well-made.)
Pro-GG never cared about gay or trans characters in video games. Pro-GG was team "shut up and play video games", and was opposed to any sort of moralising. GamerGate was not anti-woke in the sense of "don't have LGBT characters in games". GamerGate was anti-woke in the sense of "stop lecturing me you puritanical douchebag".
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I have seen plenty of complaints about the latter from people who care about IDPOL.
My gripe with it is more that it makes absolutely no sense in the Harry Potter universe, they've got polyjuice potions, presumably other means of body altering via magic too. There shouldn't be any trans people who have a visible mismatch between their expressed phenotype and what they desire to be, let alone a glaringly obvious case.
They could easily have just had a character who you don't even know is trans until you dig into their backstory and figure out they're on it
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W/o evidence, this doesn't strike me as charitable as your "What GG was actually about, to pro-GG..." explanation. Pro-GG cares about entryism, but anti-GG is just about denying people who trigger a disgust response?
All right, that’s fair. I suppose I’m not unbiased. I remember the narrative from GamerGate at the time was obsessed with expressions of contempt towards them (e.g. that Sam Biddle tweet), but it would be unfair to present that as necessarily representative.
I'll admit that I might be reading a more general progressive politics of contempt into it - the smug style and all that. But it may not be helpful of me to pattern-match GamerGate to later cultural disputes.
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I think there's another layer to it, where even within behaviour the Blue perspective insistently defines GG as being a "harassment campaign" despite GG doing stuff other than harassment (most obviously, awareness-raising, and IIRC also boycotts) and TTBOMK only a tiny minority of GGers actually doing things normally considered to be harassment.
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I don't think the red tribe cares about gamergate even now. "Some degenerate internet weirdos getting into it over something retarded, IDK and IDC, it's so stupid it really just demonstrates why the blue tribe shouldn't be in charge of things that they care about this enough to blow it up" is probably the median red tribe opinion when it's brought to our attention.
Even at the time, they were pretty divided? GamerGate made conservative media for a short time in 2014, but the reaction seemed to be mostly incomprehension plus a little contempt - look at those weirdo nerds.
There were a few people who thought it might be a chance to do outreach to gamers (re: Milo Yiannopoulos and Breitbart), but they didn't get that far. Even post-2014, there is still the occasional, token attempt to reach out - consider something like this, arguing that games are a conservative medium and describing GamerGate as a "gamer-led consumer revolt" against "the attempted control and corruption of leftist-dominated gaming journalism sites", but it never went past a few lone voices. The traditional right, overall, just isn't really trying.
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I mean, of course it doesn't care about GG; GG's long-past. But there've been quite a few Greys who've become Red-adjacent in the years that followed (the alt-right and alt-lite), which means this sort of fight gets more attention. Elon Musk buying Twitter and the AI debate are, of course, more important, but they're also centrally Grey-on-Blue conflicts (Grey-on-Grey-on-Blue in the latter case, since Grey has both Butlerian Jihadis and uncensored-AI-for-all types), and you do see Red media taking some sort of interest and sympathising with Grey.
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I mean, one side completely owned the narrative, to the point where they felt secure in defending an overt pedo.
Isn't that tactic notable?
SJW’s will defend mass murdering dictators if they can be convinced he was on their side, it’s not particularly notable that they’ll defend pedophiles.
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What exactly did gamergaters do that justifies "firing them into the sun?" I followed the movement pretty closely and I don't even know what you're getting at here.
Do you mean the 0.01% of people who sent death threats to Quinn/Sarkeesian/Wu and were loudly denounced by the rest of the movement? I think it's been established that there were about a dozen or so people who sent death threats and there are ~100,000 kotakuinaction subscribers. Can you name a social movement that has fewer than 0.01% of people who are psychopaths?
If you mean something else, could you please be explicit about what it is?
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Is there a reason you choose to use the pronoun she for a male pedophile?
The reason for the choice of pronoun is obvious: That's the pronoun Sarah would want us to use. If you have a point to make, speak it plainly rather than asking stupid rhetorical questions.
Should you use the pronoun Sarah wants you to use or the pronoun for the gender you think Sarah is? If Sarah isn't in the conversation, does Sarah's preference even matter? Is there a "correct" language? Or is a word's correctness judged only on whether it facilitates a common understanding between speaker and listener? You obviously understood who all those "she"s and "her"s referred to, but would "he" and "his" have been a marginally easier read for you and other Motte readers?
I honestly don't know anymore.
I’d like to suggest that for historical explanations we use their pronouns at the time, then change after the transition comes in the story.
I'm not sure we've ever actually had to enforce this, but the official policy with Motte pronouns is:
The good news about these policies is that everyone finds them slightly uncomfortable, which is probably about as good as we can get.
I think this is extremely silly and enshrines into the rules the disputed premises of one side of the culture war (i.e., that pronouns refer to self-described gender and not sex). I think that's quite uncharacteristic of The Motte. Why not just let people use whatever pronouns they want to use for other people, and if there's confusion then other users can ask for clarification?
Because people tend to use these things as a way to reinforce their beliefs and make it a hostile environment for others.
I think this falls generally under the "don't be antagonistic", "don't enforce ideological conformity", and "provide evidence in proportion to how partisan your claim is" clauses.
Some might argue that not being allowed to use the pronouns we think accurately apply to someone is enforcing ideological conformity.
As I said, "everyone finds them slightly uncomfortable". I'll take that over "one side is perfectly happy with it and the other side is not happy at all".
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Aside from pronouns, does this rule apply to qualifiers as well?
Should commenters be modded for referring to Hamas as terrorists instead of the self-identified 'islamic resistance movement'? Using 'incel shooter' instead of 'supreme gentleman'?
The general antagonism clause applies as it always does, as do a bunch of adjacent rules. No individual word is banned, no individual word makes you exempt from the rest of the rules.
I could write both bannable and perfectly-fine comments with any of those above phrases. If you want to come up with a more specific example, I can tell you how I'd judge it.
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This is confusing to me. Is the issue that the Wachowski sisters do not use the pronoun "they", but they did use "he" at one point?
It's to prevent people from maliciously using "he" by slipping in a historical sentence. You can write a post about the pre-transition history of the Wachowski's and only use "he", you can write a post about their entire history and use "he" for the pre- section and "she" for the post- section, or "they" for the entire history, but you cannot write a post where you use "he" for the pre-transition part, and "they" for the post-transition part.
How can this be malicous? If one talks about what the directors of Matrix are up to today, mod-approved options "her" or "they" if one didn't use "he" to refer to them when they identified as men. The latter exception seems absurd.
It can be malicious if I think to myself "haha, using 'he' will trigger the trannies, so I will slip in a historical sentences to have an excuse to use 'he', and use 'they' otherwise to stay one the good side of the rules".
The rule also hits legitimate uses, but it's a compromise, that's inevitable.
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Yup, exactly.
(You could also use "she" for the entire history if you wanted.)
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This needs to go to the sidebar, I think. I wasn't aware there's an official policy.
I'm honestly trying to figure out what to do with the sidebar; right now it's kinda just overly cluttered, and I'd like to slim it down. But I'm not sure how.
I've refrained from putting this up just because it doesn't come up often and doesn't seem worth the clutter right now.
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Gah! You really split the baby on that one. I think it's worse.
How so? That’s how I’ve always referred to my trans cousin since they’ve come out. It seems the most intuitive way to speak about things to me. What’s your issue with it?
Would you use differently-gendered pronouns to refer to the same person in the same sentence?
Sounds like utter madness to me.
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I have independently thought that is the best way.
Bruce Jenner won his gold medal in 1976. The identity known as Caitlyn Jenner didn't exist (at all probably, and certainly not publicly). So it's simply wrong to say Caitlyn Jenner won her gold medal in a men's Olympic event in 1976.
If people are capable of fundamentally changing their identity, then we should refer to their current identity now and their previous identity(ies) when speaking in the past tense in which the previous identity(ies) was(were) acting.
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My facetious proposal: respect the pronouns of well-behaved trans people, but disrespect the pronouns of those credibly accused of bad behaviour. On the theory that respecting pronouns is a thing done as a courtesy to your fellow human beings, but only extended to those who act courteously to others.
So Sam Brinton is born a He, gets to become a They by choice, but then as soon as he steals some lady's luggage he automatically reverts to a He again.
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If they were "he" at the time of the offense, I think that should be used. I don't think "Angelique raped six women over ten years and one of her victims described how she forced her penis into her mouth" is either clear or accurate, when Angelique was still going by "Ed" at the time.
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Presumably because there's no reason to let one's disgust with a pedophile inform as to whether they are actually trans.
My read is that joyful isn’t saying this person isn’t really “trans” but that trans people are just role playing in their chosen sex. I agree. Sarah is a male even if he calls himself a female. Just like how an 80 pound girl isn’t fat even if she starves herself because she sees herself as fat. Objective reality trumps personal identification.
I'm not entirely sure that's the reasoning behind the original comment. This site has quite a few people who seem unwilling or outright incapable of speaking about trans people without words or a tone of deep disgust. Note that joyful didn't say "Why do you use the pronoun she for a male?", but rather "why do you use the pronoun she for a male pedophile?" This should increase the likelihood of this being a disgust response in our eyes.
But even we granted that this is just about objective reality, it wouldn't have an impact on pronoun policy. There is no inconsistency between your view and the idea that one should respect the pronouns of others.
One of the ways in which sex differences are real and important is in regards to paedophilia. Male paedophilia is a much bigger problem than female paedophilia in terms of both how prevalent it is and in terms of how harmful it is. Using female pronouns for a male paedophile rhetorically downplays the seriousness of the situation.
Language comes with connotations, which are neither explicit nor objectively necessary inferences. Nonetheless spreading those connotations and that framing is the first step in winning a broader argument, which is why you get so many fights over what language to use.
I don't agree. I think that at least nominally, pro-pronoun people would consider it serious regardless of the pedophile's sex. Obviously, there are the usual caveats (humans can think one thing and feel another, etc.).
Maybe so, but when the average person hears "Sarah is a paedophile - she has openly admitted to a sexual interest in children", they make a number of reasonable assumptions:
These assumptions are true of female paedophiles. These assumptions may not be (likely are not) true of Sarah Nyberg.
Until the average person has fully internalised the idea that the pronouns a given person uses are wholly uncorrelated with their sex, affirming Nyberg's transgender identity carries with it the unavoidable side effect of downplaying the risk Nyberg poses to young children in the mind of the average listener. It's undeniably true that an adult female molesting a small girl is bound to be deeply distressing for the victim, but there's still a vast qualitative difference between that scenario and the scenario in which an adult male physically overpowers a small girl, penetrates her with his penis, infects her with an STD and possibly impregnates her.
I concur, but this sounds to me like an attempt to ensure Nyberg isn't allowed to escape the instinctive feelings associated with male pedophiles. Which is a goal you have to actually declare, otherwise I'm going to assume you don't think people's feelings should decide how pedos of either sex are treated.
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There’s a principle here of never letting a liar define the terms, and never letting a bad guy have an inch of ground lest he take a mile. There’s a heavily tribal “scissor statement” embedded in attempting to describe the situation, and Joyful’s question may be a disgust response to the concept of transgenderism-as-divisive-social-lie as much as to transgenderism-as-ugly-behavior.
Having said that, I’m personally fine with the OP having described this Sarah Nyberg pedophile consistently with the child-luster’s pronouns of identification. I don’t need to know the “deadname” of the kid-unsafe transwoman or be constantly reminded of fundamental lies via the narrator’s pronoun choice. The post is all about the tribal lines and about one side protecting a dress which hides an erection for little girls; I don’t need to see a humiliation ritual of that dress being verbally ripped off in every sentence.
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Mod intervention!
It's totally fine to express disagreement with the general concept of trans. It is less fine to make statements that flat-out imply trans is a thing. Not everyone agrees they're "male", and I think this falls under the whole building consensus rule.
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Nyberg appears to be some small-time individual who got 15 minutes of fame and has moved on to doing whatever she does now. Her twitter feed is mostly about plugging her own stream/Patreon, quote-tweeting some lesbian novel bot, and talking about trans politics from a clearly pro-trans perspective (and I mean in the normie online progressive way). Of this, most tweets don't even seem to break a hundred likes.
In fact, this whole damn thing seems fairly confined to people whose only power is on the niche pieces of the internet they occupy. The most egregious is arguably RationalWiki, but that site isn't some powerhouse or progressive mainstay. David Gerard's power on that site might be vast, but it's fundamentally limited.
"This story is small-time" wouldn't be a problem necessarily, even a murder in a small town matters. But it's worth considering that when you search up Nyberg on Google, you get her twitter, a LinkedIn profile, and then a Medium piece which clearly comes down on the side that Sarah is an actual pedophile. DuckDuckGo straight up links to the "Why you shouldn't stand with Sarah Nyberg" piece at number 1.
So I don't really think it's obvious that Nyberg and the anti-GamerGaters got what they want. The anti-Nyberg pieces are still up and coming up in top results.
Rarely a good defense of a movement. Worse so because Nyberg appears to have gotten that 15 mins (more like a few years). This is a classic example of pedo/LGBTQ overlap, and attempts to downplay the interaction are, IMO extreme bad faith.
Sure, but what makes you so sure it's not a Chinese cardiologist issue?
Or to take a more relevant comparison - does Roy Moore discredit all conservative politics?
If no, how can Sarah Nyberg discredit all progressive or LGBT politics?
If there's a significant problem of a paedophilia/LGBT overlap, or the LGBT rights or more generally progressive movement committing to defend paedophiles, I think you need more than a single anecdote, especially one as small-time as this. Okay, Nyberg is a terrible person, and okay, defending her at all was a terrible decision born out of pure partisan allegiance. All conceded. But what does that prove?
I'd like to see a better case for this claimed overlap.
Reddittors would say yes, but everyone else would point out that conservatives disowned strongly enough that he managed to lose a general election as a Republican to a liberal democrat in Alabama.
It’s also not entirely clear that Moore was in fact trolling for minors.
Bro, he had sex with a 13 year old after confirming with her mother it was OK.
Are you getting him confused with Gaetz, who hired a prostitute that turned out to be 17? Because in that case it seems like you’re probably right. But while the Moore situation has blame to go around, it seems pretty clear he knew she was a minor.
I recall their being a dispute re the facts. I’ll look into it.
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Can you substantiate that? I recalled the girls he approached were older, and there were allegations of him chatting up teenagers above the age of consent at the time, and there was a single allegation of inappropriate touching but not rape. His Wiki bears this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Moore. And he won a defamation lawsuit about last year.
In the south in the late 1970s it was probably not at all uncommon for men in their 30s to date older teenage girls. Moore did and married one of them and is still married to her today.
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He lost 48% to 50%, though, right? With Alabama something like 62% Republican, that means perhaps a quarter of Republicans there who would have voted for him didn't, and the rest held their nose and voted for him anyway.
I suspect the vast majority of his voters believed the allegations to be false, so their votes aren't evidence of evil, but willful ignorance isn't a great alternative. The guy's denials were waffling, self-contradictory, and self-incriminating. "I don't remember ever dating any girl without the permission of her mother." is not the sort of thing you say when you're into adult women.
A lot of them are probably low information voters. I mean, yes, it’s higher profile than a typical generic Republican vs generic democrat contest, but the average voter is not very abreast of political news.
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Because its like data point 1000, and pedophilia is a natural extension for the LGBT movement.
If you have that many data points, perhaps you could point to a more rigorous argument?
I'm not dogmatically asserting the case is false. NAMBLA existed, and the line from LGBT rights simpliciter to more radical positions around sexual morality seems fairly intuitive - we saw the shift from gay to trans, there are spaces where there are now serious attempts to normalise polygamy or open relationships, and there was a brief attempt to add MAPs. I take the argument seriously.
But I'd argue that even then, there is something beneficial in asking for rigour, or in going to the effort of trying to construct a stronger than "it's like the thousandth time we've seen this" or "come on, open your eyes, man". Not only does it create a stronger argument that could be presented to skeptics, by going to the effort, you might come to understand your own position better as well.
Let's say you do the study, where do you get it published? What university are you allowed to remain at? Which newspaper will publish a story about it?
Once you ask that you see that a person asking for evidence will not accept the evidence that could come to be available.
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To extend and confirm your logic, this is why all papists should be tied into a sack with a rock, a snake, and a badger and thrown into the river outside town, what with the prevalence of pedophiliacs in the church springing from it's policies and traditions.
Well, unfortunately, the Catholic Church is far out done by the public schools.
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Man, you've been around here long enough to know that this doesn't fly. Three-day ban and frankly this is lenient because you've been here so long, but, like, that won't last forever, calm down with the accusations.
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The part where a bunch of prominent anti-GG figures lined up to cover it up, despite clear proof. Anti-GG communities like GamerGhazi too, where the moderators set related threads to only show posts individually approved by moderators, not letting through any posts linking proof that the accusations were true. It is not a matter of a single semi-prominent individual being a pedophile who groomed an 8-year-old and shared pictures of her with other pedophiles online. It is the strong tendency in the SJW community (and SJW-aligned organizations and media outlets) to defend or censor mention of bad behavior by those with the right identity and/or enough SJW ingroup affiliation.
This is a tendency among many groups, but with social-justice it seems much stronger than normal, and they have more power to do so. The exception of course is violation of SJW taboos, so there tends to simultaneously be a witch-hunt atmosphere for harmless, trivial, or unproven behaviors even as worse and more proven behaviors are denied or excused. An unproven accusation of sexual harassment made decades after the fact against a white male non-SJW is damning, but someone like Donna Hylton can become a well-regarded activist despite having spent days torturing, raping, and murdering a man. This is part of it being a totalizing moralistic ideology, in which adherence to the ideology takes precedence over all other concerns. This was the root cause behind GG itself, the drive to cover up or defend the bad behavior of Quinn/Grayson and SJW-aligned game journalists in general. But we also see this tendency at work in countless other areas, from UK police being more concerned about racism than shutting down rape gangs to scientific journals and dataset providers adopting censorious policies that prioritize the censorship of ideologically-inconvenient research over the pursuit of science.
So I agree that this is probably a case of people with their brains poisoned by partisanship - people in general are strongly inclined to cover for their own tribe and excuse its slips, while simultaneously condemning every possible mistake by their opponents. I was around on the front lines during GamerGate so I saw a lot of this directly. Certainly one of the things I saw was the way that each camp seemed to zero in on the idea that if they could just prove that so-and-so supposedly representative member of the other camp was a bad person, that would somehow prove something or deliver victory - and naturally when they did that, the obvious response was for the other tribe to defend the member, no matter whether the accusations were true or false.
But here we are almost a decade a later and in hindsight it seems pretty obvious to me how silly that all is. Is Sarah Nyberg awful? Probably, yes. Is Milo Yiannopoulos awful? Probably, yes. But what any of that has to do with the specific issues at hand in GamerGate is beyond unclear.
To go up a level, I would tend to agree that social justice activists in particular seem especially prone to this sort of tribal partisanship. They have an ideology that nearly-explicitly puts group identity above all other moral considerations (one opponent calls it 'Associationist Manichaeanism'), so naturally that's going to favour extremely high in-group loyalty and similarly high distrust of people from outside. This has completely absurd consequences. So I don't think I disagree very much with your conclusion.
It's just that I can't help myself from being critical of bad arguments even for correct conclusions. The tribal tendency is bad, certainly, and I agree that social justice activists are especially (if not uniquely) vulnerable to it. I just don't think that dredging up a Twitter loudmouth from 2014 is a particular demonstration of any of this.
No, however it's certainly an example of the behaviour in question. I wasn't really trying to make that total, overarching point in this singular post though. I don't believe you need to address every single other case of when this has happened and try to address a general trend in a post meant to hyper-focus on a specific case of this behaviour.
Your claim is that investigating a singular case doesn't prove anything, but trends are made up of collections of individual cases, and without putting work into investigating these cases you can't establish that a trend exists. There's value in putting work into investigating examples that illustrate a larger trend. Sure, everybody here "already knows" that wokes are incredibly tribal and often unprincipled in the name of tribal identity and this doesn't necessarily give anyone who already believes so any new information. But to an uninitiated skeptic, especially one who's heard many examples of how terrible opposition to woke is, being able to rigorously cite many examples of this behaviour does build up the convincingness of the argument.
What if the existence of the trend is the thing in question, though?
That's the point of the original Chinese cardiologist example, right? You could write a detailed investigation of a horrific social justice activist like this every day for years and still not prove anything. All that would require is that there be a few hundred noticeably repulsive people advocating for social justice, and that the progressive movement, like all political movements, is prone to rallying around its own.
I tend to think that single examples can be significant if large movements form around them, or if statistically significant numbers of people sign on with them. I think you can draw conclusions from Donald Trump - one Republican like him wouldn't prove much, but the support of tens of millions seems enough to make that case revealing.
But I'd just be cautious about a case like this, especially one where I suspect the temptation to just point and laugh at the freak is very strong.
I mean, if you want to subject it to that level of scrutiny, very little other than a full-scale statistical analysis of wokists and their tendency to "rally around" clearly corrupt people, using other political tribes as comparison samples, would suffice to truly demonstrate the point (and in such a study having cases to analyse is still required). Anyway, I think we both know that doesn’t exist, and that TPTB would never conduct that study.
To say something that may get me in trouble, on a more practical level, I think we also both know in colloquial discourse nobody ever adheres to this standard or forms their opinions on it, except Rats, and when you're talking to normies these standards do not apply and you will have to address arguments that do not adhere to that standard of rigour in the slightest. You'll notice I've repeatedly talked about how convincing having these examples is to people. If they are throwing examples of, say, anti-woke bad behaviour at you, having examples such as this to throw back is necessary. Appealing to them with Rat hypotheticals like Chinese Robber isn't going to change their opinion and is going to make you look like you have no counterexamples. Trust me, I've tried, and in the beginning I cited heaps of good sources and made rigorous arguments that would very much make a rationalist piss themselves. In actual debate, this does not work and is completely unrelated to how normies conceptualise things, and you'll very easily find that your rationalist thought experiments fail miserably against an opponent and an audience that doesn't care. How argument should go is not how argument actually goes. Not now, not ever. I wish this was not the case.
Additionally, I'm not even sure how much people here adhere to that standard, either. Applying this standard consistently would exclude a huge portion of content on TheMotte (and an even greater portion of content on most other discussion spaces), and kind of feels like an isolated demand for rigour that almost nothing else here gets subjected to. I'm more than happy and able to submit to that standard of proof for the claims I make, but it is noticeable that in general the standard doesn't seem to be enforced in almost every other situation.
EDIT: added more
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I'm not the person who made the claim about the pedo/LGBT overlap, and I didn't actually set out to make a point about that (though I will say NAMBLA was a bit too close for comfort with the early LGBT movement, I wouldn't necessarily think it automatically discredits all LGBT politics).
Rather, the point I was personally trying to prove was more defensible - just to point out that many of the people who engaged in anti-GG (including some very prominent ones) were willing to provide cover for terrible behaviour while at the same time being moralistic crusaders who claimed that those who would disagree with them were bigoted. Sarah Nyberg herself is less interesting than the reaction to her. You'll see people bring up Gamergate even today in order to make a generalised point about how "the alt-right" functions or something or other (like an Ian Danskin video I addressed here or this Kotaku article posted just on Tuesday), and having these examples of undeniably bad behaviour on the anti-GG side (which seem to have been quite widespread) helps to counter that.
You shouldn't concede ground to your opponents or let them define the narrative, even concerning culture wars that are long over, because these things can be used against you. And having many little examples like this can help tip someone's perceptions of who it is they've been associating with. I'm not saying this alone is a bombshell piece of evidence and it's not like I'm stating that you can "discredit" all of progressivism with one instance of misconduct, it's just something that taken jointly with plenty of other evidence (some of which was outlined in my other post on the topic) can help to demonstrate an overarching point.
I don't see how, realistically, litigating Nyberg's badness is going to change any public perceptions of GamerGate?
I agree that the mainstream consensus view of GamerGate is almost entirely false - but I don't see how you would go about changing it, or how that's likely to be a particularly beneficial use of time compared to other issues one could work on? Ultimately, despite being roundly condemned, GamerGate got most of what they wanted (the decline in legacy media has continued apace and the centre of gravity in video game criticism and reviewing has in fact moved to crowdsourced or amateur media, with YouTube and Twitch exploding in popularity), and if you want to make the case that Ian Danskin is a hack (which, for the record, I believe he is), you don't need to dredge up nine-year-old internet drama like this. The case against Danskin can be made entirely from his public-facing videos, even with zero reference to GamerGate.
Moreover, I'd suggest that posts like the top-level one here, to the eyes of anyone who isn't already deeply enmeshed in GamerGate-related drama, are going to come off as obsessive and weird. No casual observer would read that post and change their mind on GamerGate. It's too bogged down in trivial detail, and frankly comes off as a bit too close to cyber-stalking for comfort. But even if someone is determined enough to wade through it all - nothing about GamerGate stands or falls with Sarah Nyberg. She's just not worth it.
I'm not saying I'm personally going to change the mainstream consensus view in its totality. For some further context about why this exists, I did research on this "9 year old drama" specifically to try and present a different perspective to someone in my personal life who was exposed to the culture war at least in part through Gamergate and had certain preconceptions around the topic that weren't quite correct, and who also watches Dan Olson's channel - and this is drama that Olson was involved in and is relevant to an appraisal of his character. Trying to convince someone in meatspace is more valuable than trying to convince someone on some anonymous forum who doesn't know you. I decided that since I'd already done the work some of it should be put up since someone might find it useful. If it really invokes so much ire that this gets brought up at all, I won't put it up here and I'll exclusively write about other things.
Frankly, being "obsessive and weird" is the only way I've ever gotten anywhere when it comes to politics, and when I'm writing here, I'm not typically writing for casual observers nor am I writing for the purpose of optimising my optics. I'm writing to make sure everyone can independently confirm every claim that's been made for themselves. A strong sense of skepticism and the ability to get yourself to sift through an impressive amount of trivial details almost no one would care about is the only way you're going to be able to handle the sheer wave of terrible reporting and misinformation that's thrown your way, and if that comes off as strange to some people, so be it. I suppose I've typical-minded too much, but I also don't feel like there's anything wrong with trying to get a full and comprehensive picture of how a situation played out.
For what it's worth, I'm not angry and I'm not expressing any displeasure at your top-level post. On the contrary, I entirely approve of top-level deep dives into weird topics of no immediate importance!
I just meant to comment on how persuasive I think it would be in a broader sense? This specific community probably has an unusually high tolerance for weird deep dives, and is also already strongly predisposed to dislike the whole media progressive clique that made up the anti-GamerGate side back in 2014, so here specifically you are probably preaching to the choir.
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It could be a Chinese robber fallacy but it doesn’t mean it is and sadly there is no good evidence (since it would be career suicide for someone to publish data showing the connection).
Well, no, but the positive case is the one that requires evidence. It seems to me that it's on the person asserting that Nyberg's case is significant to put those links together.
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Who was defending the movement? My point was that when you wonder why something gets swept under the rug, you should ask how large the thing itself was. It's unclear to me that Nyberg was another Sarkeesian or Wu.
Even granting the idea that she was, it would be wrong to say that the entire story was suppressed. As I said, even a naive search for just her name returns the articles talking about her being a pedophile. RationalWiki has no control over that, they can only dictate the content of their own pages.
At the moment, Nyberg has 13.3K followers on Twitter, which is a fairly high number considering her last post was in 2018. The people who defended her, such as Dan Olson, are fairly prominent even now (Olson is a fairly popular YouTube documentarian nowadays, who's roughly BreadTube-adjacent). He accused 8chan of hosting CP and yet changed his twitter handle to include "Butts" in solidarity with Nyberg.
I'm not saying the entire story was suppressed, rather that the reporting about this subject has been slanted and that the media has been silent about this in a way they wouldn't be if the shoe was on the other foot. For you to consider something as "suppression" it basically needs to be scrubbed from the internet, which clearly isn't the situation we're talking about here.
This is rather something that hasn't reached the mainstream because no mainstream news sources will report on it in any honest way, and the ones that do report on it from what I've seen have simply painted Nyberg as the victim, such as this Quartz article that alleges that Gamergate spread "baseless accusations of pedophilia" about Nyberg. The Young Turks were willing to cover her, but not to talk about her pedophilia - to talk about her Twitter bot. It seems that the mainstream certainly doesn't consider her insignificant enough not to report on at all, rather they would rather just not report on her in the "wrong" way.
I'm not saying she was as nearly as big a deal as Sarkeesian or Wu, but this situation most certainly wasn't a complete nothingburger, either.
People can forget to unfollow creators. There are YouTube channels with millions of subscribers that don't get more than a small fraction of that in terms of views. While some of this could be bots, it's also the case that people can just forget to remove a creator from their lists/feeds/follows. Remember, removing is an action, and unless you engage in periodic clean-up or you find a moral reason to dislike the account, you'd be disinclined to remove anyone.
Nyberg's real audience is probably much smaller than her listed count.
While Quartz had an obligation to make their statements factual, I don't think TYT have to cover the pedophilia allegations if they don't think it's relevant. A story about a bot that angers alt-righters is engaging enough for the left as it is.
I don't think it's a nothingburger either. But I don't think Nyberg is or should be anything other than a third or fourth point at best when talking about how Gamergate was villified by the mainstream. She's just too niche for it to be that strong unless you're a terminally online person with an interest in what is now part of the Internet's ancient history.
I didn't think they had an obligation to cover the pedophilia allegations, but I do think it shows that Nyberg and her actions were engaging and significant enough to warrant coverage. Just not the wrong kind.
To clarify, the primary point of making the post was not to demonstrate how Gamergate was vilified by the mainstream. It was to demonstrate just how far a good portion of the prominent figures in that culture war would go to defend and cover up and ignore acts that were frankly indefensible to score points against their outgroup, while at the same time claiming moral superiority.
The part where I said that I do believe the lack of mainstream coverage is because of the people it would implicate was just a side note towards the end of the post. It was not the main point.
This is the part I'm not getting. What is this "good portion"? Dan Olson + David Gerard +...some others? I genuinely don't understand how many people are supposedly involved here.
Leigh Alexander was a key player, who wrote off existing gamers with her nasty "gamers are over" piece. This, together with the support this hateful piece got from the gaming and regular press, who dismissed criticism of her piece as sexism, really energized the GamerGate side. Leigh really was one of the most prominent people on the anti-side, so her support of Nyberg cannot be dismissed as being from a niche player.
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I'm not exactly sure why "her last post was in 2018" would be an argument for Nyberg's relevance.
I wasn't claiming she was relevant anymore. Acknowledging that people drop off the map doesn't also exclude acknowledging that there was a time when they had more relevance.
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I definitely agree that at the moment she's not someone with a huge amount of cultural reach (she did have more during Gamergate), I posted this more because it's probably the most stark illustration of just how unprincipled a good amount of the progressives engaging in that specific culture war were.
Interesting, it doesn't show up like that for me on Google. The very first result is Intelligencer, which links to this article speaking with a good amount of mirth about Sarah Nyberg's Twitter bot that exists to troll the "alt-right" online. The second result is to her Twitter. Further down, articles about the whole debacle do show up, and I will concede that the information about Nyberg being a pedophile is on the internet and can be found - but only as long as you know about Sarah Nyberg in the first place, and almost always from non-mainstream sources.
My comment at the end of the post was more to do with the fact that any memory of her 15 minutes of fame (and how she was defended by the progressive camp) doesn't really exist much on the internet. When you search up "Gamergate" you often get long lists of what the mainstream perceives that Gamergate did wrong, and meanwhile things that the anti side did that's objectionable - even something as objectionable as this - has been mostly scrubbed from the general discourse around the topic. I've seen people in real life that know absolutely nothing about it, and essentially just parrot stock anti-GG talking points from videos and articles they've found around, and often they are surprised when I tell them these things. Hell, my dad at one point read something about the topic and I had to disabuse him of certain notions about how it all actually played out.
It's not impossible to find sources that are congenial to Gamergate, but they're a definite minority, and represent the parts of the internet that are frequented almost exclusively by the terminally online.
I mean, yeah? Is that surprising? Why would a mainstream org even care? Progressive hypocrisy isn't that hard to find and it's over some nobody? Even if I ran the most anti-woke paper in existence, I probably wouldn't dive into the specifics of one pedophile and her progressive defenders from the Gamergate era.
But that's just me.
That's fair, but I don't think this is the best example of how Gamergate was poorly treated. The nicheness of the story itself overshadows the "progressive hypocrisy/culture-warring" aspects, imo.
The mainstream tends to love excavating initially niche things and making them into huge stories, as long as it conforms to their preexisting ideological bent. They kind of control what is niche and what's not, and typically the things that get dragged into the spotlight are culture wars they feel they have a good likelihood of winning. The media dictates the cultural reach of a story as much as it responds to it.
In addition, I would like to record as many instances of progressive misconduct I can find. It's not just the magnitude of these instances that matter - the frequency at which it occurs also matters when you're trying to convince normies of your point, and finding more than a few fairly egregious instances and being able to document them exhaustively - niche or not - does help you. And some of the people who supported Nyberg - such as Leigh Alexander and especially Dan Olson of Folding Ideas - are not niche.
I mean, I agree, but I've already covered the main thrust of my point as to how Gamergate was poorly treated in my previous top-level thread about it and don't really care to write about what I've already addressed a second time. This just builds on that. The issue is that at this point I've covered most of the major, mainstream topics in the culture war that I have strong opinions about. I am very much a specialist with a very limited scope who espouses the approach in this blogpost: "So if you want to stop being an NPC, simply say “I don’t know” to all the matters that don’t concern you. And that will give you the time to not be an NPC on all the matters that do".
I've addressed the topics I care about (mainly identity-progressivism) ad nauseam in many forums IRL and online for years, and so most of the new information that I'm coming across is necessarily going to concern less mainstream topics and situations. Of course, I definitely don't expect everyone to care about the minutiae of the culture wars I look into. But this is a weird forum with weird people that may or may not find it interesting. If there's a place on the internet at all it belongs to, I think it's this one.
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The curious part is that there are many things Nyberg could have said and done which would have got them into trouble even with their own side. Circular firing squads are hardly uncommon among these types of communities. Is it because the accusations came from outsiders? Is it because these particular accusations are not considered as awful as others?
Almost certainly the former. If these screenshots had been dug up and passed around by someone with progressive bona fides as a result of some internecine dispute, this would have gone done much differently.
A fact which often has good Bayesian foundations!
Given epistemic learned helplessness and the ability of the internet to invent narratives and fabricate 'evidence', considering the motives of the source when you hear a surprising piece of information meant to motivate you towards some action is often a good idea.
Frankly, reflexively defending someone with the rest of your in-group simply because your out-group attacked them does not have good foundations of any sort. "Considering the motives of a source" is generally a good principle, I agree. That just as much applies to your in-group as it does to your out-group, and defending someone from critique without knowing whether that critique has basis or not is not epistemically justifiable. The motives of those making a claim are ultimately irrelevant to the truth of a claim. "Being skeptical" does not entail "knee-jerk rejection", especially in situations when the evidence is already there for you to look at.
Regarding your other comment on this, I have no doubt that at least some of the people here were ignorant in some way or other (though some, such as Galvez and Ryulong, were almost certainly being dishonest). I tend to believe, however, that this lack of knowledge was because they actively decided not to look at or consider any of the evidence although, again, it was readily available to them at the time, then formed their own opinions based almost solely on preconception. It was wilful ignorance borne out of tribal partisanship that caused them to defend this, and that definitely deserves scorn.
Well, I would agree that believing something is correct because people like you/on your side believe it is double-counting evidence and improper.
However, I'm not sure that generalizes to discounting attacks, which are different from neutral beliefs. People who make the most vocal and virulent attacks against a side are not ussually the ones most motivated by a dispassionate commitment to the truth alone, and their vitriolic attacks are often motivated by more-extreme-than-median beliefs about the thing they are attacking.
These are reasons to expect that an attack will be less likely to be accurate than the median belief of the defender in general. I certainly admit that the most virulent attackers on my own side are often wrong or being misleading about my opponents, in ways that often make me cringe or make me angry at them. This belief about my own side's bulldogs being unreliable transfers to my beliefs about the other side's bulldogs.
There's also something to be said about when it is sensible to believe that your own side is more likely to be correct about something from the outside view, and I think this judgement often falls with defenders rather than attackers.
For example, I think people who personally know a lot of trans people well or follow a lot of trans creators or etc. are more likely to be in favor of trans rights than people who don't, and also that this personal knowledge makes them on average better informed about the topic.
On the other hand, I think strict gun control is probably a pretty good idea that would save a lot of lives, but I also know that the people who disagree with me know way more than I do about guns and gun culture, and so I actively discount my confidence in my position there and rarely advocate about this topic (or try to give this caveat when I do so).
I think it's often true that familiarity and actual knowledge breeds defense and allegiance more often than the opposite, and this gives defenders on average an epistemic advantage form the outside view.
Of course, there's an extent to which everything I have said are just-so stories that can be pulled out to justify one's own beliefs, but conveniently forgotten when those beliefs are challenged. I could tell a different story appealing to the metaphor of an investigative journalist, claiming that most people are happy to lazily believe whatever propaganda is convenient to them at the moment, and that the most virulent attackers are ussually the ones who have bothered to do their own research and actually found the proof of the problems that need to be addressed.
On the whole, I think my initial bent towards defenders is more often true, though both definitely happen; I would be less skeptical of the investigative journalist metaphor if attacking the other side wasn't so much fun that lots and lots of people seem to spend all their time doing it without any personal expertise justifying it, swamping the signal there.
I certainly believe that, BUT, I believe it about both sides of the issue equally.
If 99% of the people on both sides are participating in the flame war without really bothering to do the level of research needed to form truly independent opinions, then I'm not sure that the ones who coincidentally happened to be on the right side are any more virtuous than the ones on the wrong side. Perhaps if one side was consistently correct in these types of battles, and allegiance was based on observing that; but I definitely don't think that's true with regards to GG, it was a complete fiasco where both sides believed tons of wrong things at various points.
(or at least, that is my belief having lived through it, and I don't have any real desire to try to hindsight-argue about it now)
I’m at work now, so can’t respond appropriately, but one point:
When making this post, I wasn’t necessarily trying to argue that GG was more virtuous (though I do believe they were) or that GG was more consistently correct (though I believe they were). Rather, the point of this post can be summed up in the following paragraph I wrote:
“[T]he fact that this behaviour has been engaged in by a group of people who make claims of having the moral and intellectual high ground is frankly incredible.”
In other words, anti-GG liked to portray themselves as having the moral and intellectual high ground, and so did the media covering it. They were the ones that made it into a social crusade and claimed they were situated on the right side of history. The mainstream view was that GG were bigoted, biased tyrants using ethics as a shield for actual hatred, and anti-GG were brave activists attempting to “expose” the truth. But when stuff like this happens, it illustrates the falsity of that predominant viewpoint and the utter hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness of those claiming the high ground.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable that if you’re claiming moral and intellectual superiority, you should be held to a higher standard and be penalised appropriately if you fail to fulfil it.
I don't think the GG side was claiming to be evil and stupid?
Almost everyone is claiming moral and intellectual superiority almost always, those are the two main reasons people claim to be on any side of any argument. I would think?
I mean, yeah, I think the heart of the GG movement was trolls trying to harass and victimize women in retaliation for entering their cultural spaces, but my impression is that everyone on the other side vehemently denies that and claims that GG was a lofty movement rooting out corruption and tearing down the lies and abuses of the SJWs.
And the same for the anti-gg side, they claim themselves to be lofty defenders of etc etc blah blah and the other side calls them sjw snowflakes cancel culture etc etc blah blah.
There was a popular media narrative that proclaimed one side the good guys, sure; but both sides were claiming to be the good guys in their own rhetoric.
Also, on another note: We applaud the old-school ACLU for protecting the rights of Nazis to hold parades because we recognize that they were fully committed to defending one specific ideal, an ideal that was incredibly important to have someone protecting, and they didn't cares who's 'side' this put them on along any other axis. We decried them more recently abandoning this purity of ideology and considering other factors in their allegiances.
There's an angle from which defending a pedophile against false charges of corruption is not different from defending a saint against false charges of corruption. If the charges are false and you are restricting your defense to those charges, someone should be there to stand up for the truth and the integrity of the system that produces and considers those charges.
Of course, anonymous internet flame wars with millions of participants are never that clean. Obviously even if 99% of anti-gg people carefully restrict their defense to the charges of 'corruption in games journalism' alone, that's still 100,000 of the stupidest 1% producing memeable screenshots defending them against the pedo charges or saying they're a great person or whatever else.
Just like there are 100,000 screenshots of the vilest 1% of the gg side making rape threats and posting pictures of women's houses and etc. etc.
Whether a side can be fairly judged by screenshots of its worst members is an eternal question in these types of debates, and a surprisingly complex one once you get into the weeds on it.
It's a matter of degree. My perception from being in these spaces at the time that it happened is that GG believed on the balance that they were more correct than the antis, but they were more than well aware that there was a good amount of shit-flinging happening on all sides, and often tried to actively police their own communities in order to weed out that behaviour. Like users of KotakuInAction early on creating "Gamergate harassment patrols" and even Kotaku crediting Gamergate with tracking down someone who was sending threats to Sarkeesian.
There's also the fact that none of the criminal harassment was ever tied to Gamergate. I was in KotakuInAction when the whole thing was going on, and didn't see harassment being celebrated. In addition, the Gamergate surveys basically showed GG to have strongly left wing demographics, so that's some data which should be considered when you're evaluating them.
I will say I hardly ever saw any such caution on the anti side, who seemed to be impressively secure in the belief of their superior morality to the point where they seemed to believe they were just better people who could never be on the “wrong side of history” - in part, I think, because they were offered legitimacy by the mainstream in a way GG was not. I did, however, have an anti private message me to fling racial slurs at me (so much for being against harassment). So you might forgive me if my perception of this whole thing is very different from yours.
The case in question here is not "defending a pedophile against false charges of corruption", but defending a pedophile against verifiable charges of pedophilia. The claims that were being made against Sarah Nyberg in this case were not that she was corrupt, it was that she was a pedophile, and as another user here has already noted GamerGhazi, at the time, basically censored info on their subreddit that might suggest that she was. The defence against her pedophilia was at least widespread enough for the largest anti-GG subreddit to actively police the dissemination of information about it.
I mean, if you can find me something like the mods of KotakuInAction moderating KiA to be an active hub for harassment or something in a similar vein, I will concede the point that yes, "both sides". But I have my doubts.
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There is a difference between believing you are good, but arguing that you have better policies and such, versus arguing that your side deserves to own a space because your side consists of a better kind of person. The anti-GG side went all in on arguing that the GG side consisted of horrible white male neckbeards who harass people and who should be kicked out of gaming for that reason, while they themselves were inclusive lovely people.
At the point where they argued that they were better than the GG people, it seems perfectly valid to point out when prominent members are, or defend abusers, pedophiles and other horrid people.
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I think this is missing a big portion of the picture, which is noticing that when my side makes statements of neutral beliefs, they are often misconstrued by the other side as attacks. At the very least, they react strongly and sometimes harshly in a way as if they thought they were attacks. As such, when I perceive people from the other side as attacking me, my first and main concern should be how I am misconstruing their neutral statements as attacks. I should also understand that my own biases against these perceived enemies will make it almost impossible to avoid convincing myself that these are attacks so as to justify my dismissal of them on the basis that attacks are more likely to be false than mere neutral statements of fact. As such, I would require an extremely high bar of proof to be convinced that something by a perceived enemy is an attack, because if I allow myself not to have such a high bar, then I'll almost definitely fool myself into believing what's convenient for myself and my ego.
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I think it is less that the accusations came from outsiders and more that those outsiders were just using the accusations to discredit her arguments via ad hominem.
Those arguments were what, again? GG is a force for evil on the internet and we all have an obligation to 'do better'?
I'm not sure exposing this person's dirty laundry qualifies as an ad hominem. Anti-GG mouthpieces made a big deal out of their moral superiority to their reactive, basement-dwelling, chuddish foes. Tearing off their robes and exposing them as mere creatures - and all the weirdness that entails - was practically a public good. But then I would think that given the level of disdain for them I carry, so take that FWIW. And if they wanted to circle the wagons for Nyberg because 'ad hominem' - to be understood as spotlighting a warped moral zealot as a problematic fraud - then double dumbass on them too.
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That's a pretty poor argument when the main argument by prominent anti-GG'ers was that gamers are smelly neckbeards that harass people, evidenced by cherry picked random tweets by unknowns or fabricated evidence. If they genuinely had a problem with ad hominems, then they had every opportunity to reign in that behavior from their own side, but they didn't.
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That's my impression too. The important thing in this instance was not allowing the opposing team to score a point.
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If the KKK attacks someone for being black, and that person also happens to be a pedophile but very few people know that and the evidence of it is currently hotly debated, a lot of people will take issue with the KKK attacking them for being black.
10 years later, anyone who feels like it can go back and curate a narrative about that and say 'hey look, they were defending a pedophile'.
/shrug. Not all victims are good people, that doesn't mean you do a full background check and wait for consensus to form before trying to protect them. Even if, yes, that will sometimes get used against you in hindsight.
If someone defends Andrew Tate while saying they don't believe him to be a sex trafficker, I give them the benefit of the doubt and say they defend a right-wing asshole and are probably suffering from motivated reasoning in evaluating him. I don't say that they defend sex traffickers.
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Okay. None of my beliefs about Gamergate and who was right or wrong turn on the question of whether Sarah Nyburg was a pedophile and whether particular people defended her.
How about which side was able to control the narrative enough to run defense for an open pedophile?
I understand that a lot of things were said/accusations made... So accusations made by one side against the other is suspect. But when one side says things about themselves, I think that is meaningful.
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Why does anybody have to be right?
That's what I don't get about the whole thing. I was trying to explain to this someone the other day, and it was like, I'm not actually defending GG here per se, unless you look at context as a a form of defense. But in reality, there was a LOT of crappiness that was coming from that anti-GG community, that IMO laid much of the cultural groundwork for modern Pop Progressive culture as I call it. Was it worse than the GG people themselves? I don't think that's a relevant question. I think the real answer is that online activism is just...well...crappy, or at least it has a tendency to be such.
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I remember Nyberg also shared pictures of Dana with other pedophiles online.
https://archive.is/rD6TL
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I remember the Nyberg story at the time, and a large part of the pushback was that some of the evidence proving that Nyberg was a paedophile was posts it had made under its previous male identity, which made it easy to shout about gamergaters "outing trans people".
Something similar happened with Aimee Challenor, except on a grander scale.
The serious point here is that "trans people deserve to have their pre-transition identities memory-holed under penalty of strong anti-discrimination laws and norms" and "people can self-identify as trans" implies that anyone can memory-hole their past. And this is particularly attractive to paedophiles and other scum.
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So, I watched Escaping Twin Flames this week. It's basically a documentary about a cult, with a fun twist at the end. The short version is it's a cult/mlm that promises true love to everyone paying in. The leader of the cult claimed he could channel who the soul mate, or "twin flame" to use cult speak, of the members was. Twin flames were often just random ass people in the cult members life. No matter what members were encouraged to stalk, harass and profess their love to their "twin flame". That approach wasn't going so great however. There was a manifest lack of success in the group, with vanishingly few members successfully entering a relationship with their "twin flame". Sensing things weren't going so great, the leader changed the rules so that everyone's twin flame was actually already in the cult. Only problem was, 80% of the members of the cult were women, and there weren't enough men to go around. But the cult leader had a fantastic idea. If you just convince half the women that they are actually "divine masculine", and get them to transition, everyone can pair off as "divine masculine" and "divine feminine". It's genius!
Why can't two ladies just be in a relationship? I donno, shut up. Cult leader says so.
So anyways, the final episode is about the cult forcing members to get "gender affirming care". Cross sex hormones, top surgery, you know the deal. And this is enforced through all the classic cult conditioning you've seen if you've ever watched a documentary about cults. The cult recruits from lonely, vulnerable, often young and impressionable people. You are encouraged to cut off everyone outside of the cult. All dissenters are exiled from the cult, creating a status quo where you must do whatever the cult leader says or lose your entire social support network. A lot of people even derived their income from the cult, making the control even more complete. Lots of struggle sessions breaking down the identities of cult members. Like I said, if you've seen a cult documentary before, none of this will be new to you.
What made this special to me is the many, frequent caveats the documentary included that you are not, under any circumstances, to apply any of the horrific trans brainwashing depicted in this documentary to anything else. This is unidirectional knowledge. You are only allowed to consider it in the context of this specific cult being bad. Now here is random trans expert we've hired to reinforce the point that these trans people have been abused into being trans, and not any other trans people you may have had in your life. Ignore your lying eyes. Especially insulting is that all the moms they interview about how their children were stolen away by the cult still use the new preferred pronouns and names of their abused and brainwashed children. Had me yelling at the screen "Have the fucking strength of your convictions you coward!"
Frankly, the nominal stories a lot of parents tell about their children deciding they are transgender doesn't differ that much from the cult experience. Their child is totally normal, not a hint of gender dysphoria, until a person the kid looks up to or wants to impress, often someone the parents can specifically identify, starts pushing it on their kid. Kid does it to fit in with their friend group, maybe a completely different friend group than they had before, maybe a friend group that only exists online. Then kid is encouraged to completely cut off anyone not 100% on board with their new identity. Most horrifying of all is how often the state involves itself in this, with schools serving as a vector to suggest to children, and glamorize, queer identities, facilitate their secret transitions, and CPS stepping in to take custody from parents who don't "affirm".
But going even deeper, where the fuck is the medical establishment? When the Heaven's Gate cult had members castrated themselves, I sincerely doubt they just waltzed into a Planned Parenthood and had it done no questions asked. How are the diagnostic criteria so wide open that a cult leader can have his members electively mutilate themselves at walk in clinics, no problem?
Most ironic of all, is there is a part of the documentary where they describe an incident where the cult leader had his top leadership watch a documentary about another cult. Then he instructed them to write essays about how he was definitely not a cult leader. This was the moment one of the interviewee's in the documentary realized she was in a cult and left. All the other cult members performed that feat of cognitive mutilation however. Meanwhile, on a meta level, the documentary is pulling the same fucking thing on us, the audience, with it's gaslighting about the explosion of trans youth. We just weren't assigned the further task of completing homework about how nothing we saw in the documentary about a trans cult applies to the other trans cult we see sitting right in front of us.
I assume you’re talking about the Netflix Escaping Twin Flames, rather than the slightly older Amazon Escaping Twin Flames Universe. Kind of weird that they were produced so closely; I doubt they have much difference in content or messaging.
With that out of the way.
Congratulations! You’ve successfully invoked the Worst Argument in the World, and now I feel obligated to defend the motte’s favorite punching bag. First: I do not think child transition is a good thing. I do not support people or charities endorsing it, implementing it, or making it school policy. Same goes for drag queen story hour, which gives me the same uncomfortable feeling as most Americans. The broader umbrella of “gender-affirming care” is something that I think is oversold, even a fad, but I would not deny it to consenting adults. I understand that you think the whole edifice is literally fake and gay. That’s no excuse for the Worst Argument.
The best of your comparisons between transgender advocacy and Twin Flames is the final ritual/medical practice. I have some objections there, mostly due to selection bias, but let’s call it a good comparison. Sure, pushing someone to undertake surgery is an extremely suspect way to shore up one’s own power.
Everything else gets shakier. Where’s the equivalent to cult control of income? To struggle sessions? Hey, sometimes people get therapy, which is kind of like being convinced to be doing something, which is kind of like what a cult would do. Or worse—sometimes they imitate their friends. Clearly, that must be further evidence of cult behavior.
One of the signature features of cults, one you mention yourself, is control of information. I agree that kids in public schools are relatively controlled. The cult of George Washington has held power for too long, and our kids are indoctrinated that lying about cherry trees is bad. Yes, schools teach things to children. Your legitimate objections to what they’re teaching is not evidence of a cult.
It’s almost a moot point, given that the youngest generation has more access to information than any before. They can go on their smartphones and find traditional gender roles. Why don’t they? How did teachers suddenly gain mythical powers of narrative control for this one subject?
The common thread, here, is that there is more than one explanation for what you’re noticing. Kids do copy their friends and take adults at their word, just as they do for everything else. Adults in positions of power are using this to promote politics or aesthetics, just as they do for everything else. You might have seen such phenomena in a cult documentary, or you might have seen it in a chess club, on a BBS, in a small 1800s town. It’s not unique to cults.
But the key piece, the one most conspicuous in its absence, is the leader. Cui bono? Who is the Jeff Divine, the Marshall Applewhite, the Jim Jones? That’s not to say a cult has to have a charismatic leader. It’s just the first thing people think about. The central example, as it were. Hence my accusations of Worst Argument.
You have one interesting piece of evidence: both this cult and these people pushed members towards invasive, extreme surgery. You have a smattering of weak evidence: trans advocates do a bunch of stuff which sort of, if you squint, looks like cult behavior instead of regular social dynamics. And you ignore any missing pieces because you’ve already made up your mind. Trans bad, cultists bad, therefore trans cultists.
And everyone clapped.
Have you seen the reaction to Contra points saying she doesn't like being asked about pronouns? Have you ever seen how they treat detransitioners?
Websites like transgendermap.com, and apps like Shinigami Eyes tell you which sources of information are good, and which are bad, so you know who to avoid as a good practicing member, and who your friends will know to dismiss if you bring them up.
If this is they key than the case falls flat on it's face. I straight up disagree a cult needs to have a leader.
Why is it bad to give people more information to make a decision? That seems like the opposite of controlling information!
I was referring to their profiles on critics of transgender medicine.
How did you miss the part where I said "tell you which sources of information are good, and which are bad, so you know who to avoid as a good practicing member, and who your friends will know to dismiss if you bring them up"? You quoted the text!
Well the way you phrased your comment made it sound like transgendermap or Shinigami Eyes were themselves the problem, rather than the way people use them.
They are themselves the problem. Shinigami Eyes is literally an app for marking social media accounts as TERFs so you can dismiss them (at best). Likewise the problem with the profiles written by transgendermap.com isn't the people who read them, it's the people who write them. Their entire purpose is to demonize the critics of gender medicine.
This still sounds like an objection of the way people use the tools. The demonization or dismissal are the issue. There is nothing that forces someone to dismiss (or take seriously) a person or website on the basis of Shinigami Eye's evaluation. Similarly there's nothing that forces people to demonize those profiled on transgender map.
This do not seem to be true, to me. The profile you linked identifies specific beliefs O'Malley has that the website considers anti-trans. Specific groups she's affiliated with that the website believes oppose trans writes. It links to outside resources as citations for these claims and even links directly to a number of social media and other websites operated by O'Malley herself so people can do their own evaluation.
At this point I have to ask you, how do you think cults do control of information?
...dismiss her, and all the groups she's involved in, without ever engaging with them directly.
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You're all for the app that marks social media accounts as Jewish then, presumably?
What do you imagine my objection to this app would be?
That's interesting - I'd personally find it distasteful at best but can't but into a short sentence why. Let me think on it
It breaks the gentlemen's agreement that a pseudonym you encounter for the first time online is a blank slate.
Outside of 4chan and a handful of other places, that gentleman's agreement disappeared 10+ years ago when mass adoption of smartphones enabled normies to use the internet easily.
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I can. It's coordinating meanness against people who don't deserve it. That's always a bad thing.
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Are we talking about the jew finder or the TERF finder? For starters, being ethnically jewish isn't a choice.
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I suspect this is tongue in cheek, but one wonders about the gish-gallop style of rebuttal that takes place here in contrast to debate on the substantive issues.
I'm lost, who's doing "Gish gallop debunking"?
Im over generalising and it's not the right term probably. I mean picking at the margins, like the 'well that doesn't sound exactly like a cult to me', when the OP was making parallels. Or, pointing out how rare it is, when the argument is not about volume.
It's not arguing the substantive points but rather deflecting in a manner that can be defended as being a legitimate argument, this hiding the true motive.
I may be projecting however...
Oh, that's fair enough as a criticism, but yeah "gish gallop" usually refers to spamming with sources in hopes of their sheer volume leaving your opponent unable to respond.
Yes, it's not the right term, I agree.
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Naming your app after the ability to see people's names so you can murder them with your grim reaper notebook certainly isn't great optics, eh?
It's anime and the target userbase is autists that live online. It goes with the territory.
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My mental model of a cult is just "religion, but less popular," so I probably have a lot to learn about how cults work, but this comment and the one to which you are responding made me think about how cults and religions have to adapt to new environments. With respect to the information environment, obviously the 21st century is vastly different from - and more liberal than - anything that came before, which means information control is very difficult and thus will have to look very different from cults in the past in order to achieve similar things. The stuff you point to seem like decent analogues to past censorious technologies; they can't outright control what you have access to, so they manipulate which sources that you actually choose to access.
And this connects to my own observation from about a decade ago when I began to recognize the social justice movement of which I had been a part as a modern incarnation of religion. In this modern world of science, the traditional notions of faith are much more difficult to keep popular, and so religions that rely on that suffer, and religions that find other ways to get people to believe things prosper. The beauty of social justice (aka Critical Race Theory, aka "wokeness," aka "it's just basic human decency," aka "empathy") is that it allows people to enjoy all the beliefs of faith while eschewing most of the leap that's usually required. You still have to leap, but now you have a whole structure built to reassure you that this leap is totally justified because of historical reasons and very smart scholars who have done the Work and published in their peer reviewed journals to prove that simply listening and believing (the Right People) is the correct way. So if you're (like me at the time - whether that has changed now is something I honestly couldn't answer) someone who thinks of himself as non-religious and, in fact, better than those deluded religious people who cling to their faith, this is the perfect religion to latch onto.
However, I've also heard people call social justice a cult, and I would agree with that to the extent that a cult is just a less popular religion. But I also recognize that a cult is often more than just that, because being less popular comes with it many of its own complications, such as the whole recruitment process that can require much more brainwashing and thus much more control than a typical religion. I wonder what other cult-specific patterns we will see 21st century versions of, which route around the additional difficulties of the new environment. Obviously cutting one off from one's friends and family is a big one, but that seems to be just following the standard playbook as best as I can tell.
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I agree that other groups count as cults, too.
OP’s choice of comparisons had clear examples of financial and informational control, emotional abuse, and personal gain/leadership. I felt it was appropriate to argue that trans activism lacks some of those.
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I didn't see it necessarily as trans ideology meeting every aspect of a cult just that there are obvious parallels.
The cult dynamics are most apparent perhaps in social media groups, where there is love-bombing, sanctioning and social games to influence vulnerable new members by the group and older figures, moderators acting as the cult leaders. These are places where teenage angst will be helpfully interpreted as a sign you're probably trans, and doubt about transitioning framed as internalised transphobia, or a need to stop listening to others or going to other places on the internet and just stay on 'trans-friendly sites'.
I think the current ideology has cult like manifestation but that it's better described as a culture-bound syndrome, or egregore, though that's a more nebulous concept.
There are several ways in which trans communities can resemble cults. These are also ways that other groups often resemble cults. Niche nerd hobbies are a good example.
Conversely, when I look at things that are very cult-specific, like the type of leadership, I find that trans spaces don’t have them. This may be oversight on my part—responses are certainly eager to give me anecdotes for the opposite!
The people I know who transitioned did dive into trans-friendly communities, divest from mainstream circles at the slightest hint of transphobia, and surround themselves with like-minded people. As far as I can tell, it wasn’t coercive at all. Instead, there was something missing or distressing in their lives, and the social apparatus of transgender spaces offered an alternative. I think this is a lot closer to your culture-bound label than it is to OP’s choice of cults.
I don't think a typical hobby group credibly meets the threshold of cult-like, although some would have their own characteristics, you must like X thing and not Y etc.
Agreed, the second part of what you talk about is what I am referring to by a culture bound syndrome, but there's also explicit manifestations that if not exactly characteristic of cults, are cult like. It's a modern social construction/transhuman cult perhaps. Religious belief is another relevant paradigm. I feel like we're arguing in the margins.
Have you read The Ballad of MsScribe?
Ah ha, yes perhaps my comment needs a few caveats, great link :) To be fair I was thinking real life woodworking clubs or walking groups, not internet fan-fiction clubs but on reflection I can see all sorts of human behaviour would be out there regardless.
I think cults are probably on a spectrum, where different degree ultimately separates into different kinds.
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I agree with your post here. I think the word cult is mostly just being used as a snarl word to advertise to everyone how much the speaker doesn't like transpeople. That's not to say that the trans community is flawless and does nothing wrong - I think there are serious issues with how they present themselves and act, but using cult to describe them is just incorrect.
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Trans communities encourage trans people to cut loved ones out of their lives entirely if the loved one in question doesn't uncritically affirm the trans person's gender identity, push for legislation which would ban any forms of therapy which don't uncritically affirm a trans person's gender identity (on the grounds that a failure to affirm it is tantamount to "conversion therapy") and push for legislation which would make a parent's failure to affirm their child's professed gender identity a factor in determining custody in divorce cases. The idea that this only resembles Scientology's suppressive persons doctrine "if you squint" is absurd.
The phrase "death before detransition" returns 600k results on Google. Jehovah's Witnesses have a policy of shunning former members who leave the faith. I really don't think it's a reach to notice the parallels here.
I know Scientology was founded by L. Ron Hubbard, but I don't know who its current charismatic leader is, is or if it even has one. I still have zero qualms about calling it a cult.
And even if gender ideology lacks a charismatic leader, there are still many people who bono from it: mediocre male athletes who'd never win anything if they weren't allowed to compete in women's sporting events, convicted perverts who'd rather serve their sentences in a women's prison, and pharmaceutical and medical professionals making a killing in the provision of "gender-affirming care" (surgeries in the US alone were valued at $2.1 billion, while hormones are worth $1.6 billion). I'm not going to go quite so far as to claim that "gender ideology is a conspiracy by Big Pharma to sell more T", but I do find it weird what a huge blind spot so many leftists seem to have: critics of capitalism who correctly recognise that pharmaceutical companies have a financial incentive to encourage pathologisation and medicalisation of as many conditions as possible, but surely they'd never stoop so low as to persuade teens and young children to believe that they're really members of the opposite sex, perish the thought.
I don’t believe that most trans communities come close to the coordinated, authoritarian shunning practiced by the central examples of cults.
An athlete or prisoner exploiting gender categories is not the same as a leader exploiting his follower’s social dependencies. There is a difference in agency, in blame.
Labeling trans activism a cult is about eliding those differences. It’s about taking the same no-bad-wrong reaction we reflexively apply to Jim Jones, and applying it to anyone who’s sufficiently pro-trans. Sure, a doctor who gets invited to certain conferences has social and financial reasons to stay the course. Does that mean we can expect him to break out the Flavor-Aid?
In light of the fact that at least one study found that gender reassignment surgery dramatically increased the risk of suicide among trans people (compared to a control group of trans people who didn't undergo gender reassignment surgery), the analogy may be more apt than you strictly intended.
For what it's worth, I didn't interpret the OP's post as arguing "trans is a cult" (although maybe that's how they intended it, I dunno). I have a great deal of compassion for people dealing with gender dysphoria, fully support the rights of adults to do with their bodies as they wish (admittedly perhaps not on the taxpayer's dime), and think that medical transition is the right choice for some trans people.
All that being said, I believe that a lot of trans communities (subreddits and the like) are extremely creepy, and the similarities they exhibit with Jim Jones and co. are more than just unhappy accidents: strikingly similar patterns of indoctrination, isolation, encouraging hatred and distrust of heretics and apostates, explaining away of reasonable questions and cognitive dissonance. I don't think there's anything wrong with criticising this conduct, any more than we would when the Twin Flames people do it - if anything I think we have a social responsibility to do it (doubly so when so many people who get sucked into these communities are underage). The trans movement isn't reducible to these creepy subreddits (obviously, given that gender dysphoria predates the internet by decades). But I also don't think we're Chinese robbering the whole movement by pointing out a small handful of subreddits with subscribers in three digits. /r/egg_irl has 315k subscribers, which is an appreciable fraction of the entire trans population of the US. /r/FTM has 212k.
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David Miscavige does not inspire the same levels of personal loyalty and devotion as L. Ron Hubbard did, but he makes up for it by being every bit as dictatorially controlling.
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Scientology actually unquestionably has a leader, David Miscavige, who has also continued all the cult stuff that Hubbard did. He's not a charismatic leader, but he doesn't need to be: like in numerous cults and organizations, he can just always refer to the charismatic original founder's, who is still "at some level" regarded the leader, authority. Miscavige's identity is hardly secret either, it's among the first things one learns if one looks at Scientology at any level (and he featured in South Park's scientology episode etc.)
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This is tragically wrong, and wildly so. I'm not (that) old and in middle school buddies used to send me goatse, lemonparty, 2girls1cup, god only knows what else over the public school wifi without any thought of oversight or repercussion. I can't even come up with a joke for how much things have changed - it's so out of control and sad - clinical, sterile, and politically corrected.
Where are those promoted these days? Genuinely asking, because I'd like to be there
It wasn't magic, or a mystery. They openly refused to hire, fired, de-platformed, or otherwise silenced anyone who disagreed. Not just on 'this one subject' - but certainly on this one successfully. Vaccines also come to mind. Or masks. These people forced toddlers to wear masks, day after day, for a long time.
Anywhere but here it would seem extremely odd you were still shrugging like 'it's a moot point' and asserting they didn't 'suddenly gain mythical powers.' People have fought total wars for generations over whether or not the cracker was actually Christ. 'Men can be women, actually, even at 3'?
C'mon.
Middle schoolers still share weird shit with each other in private discord servers/dms. I'm not sure if the prevalence of that over the whole population has increased or decreased, but it's still there.
I had thought it was obvious that wasn't my point - my point was that once upon a time 'the youngest generation' genuinely did have more access to information than any before and that is not this 'youngest generation'. You used to be able to search for almost literally anything on youtube and watch full on independent documentaries about it. Now all the results are BBC or CNN or whatever.
It was the example you gave. I'm still not sure this is true though? I think it's directionally true - see how many subreddits are banned - but it's not that true. Even pre-elon, there were a lot of nazis on twitter. There were and are a lot of nazis on tiktok. Communists, too. Lots of weird fetish stuff too. Youtube is still mostly native creators, BBC and CNN are a very small fraction of the views.
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No, you haven't. If someone claims that everyone should be let out of jail, and you say "that means we'd let even murderers and rapists out of jail", they can't respond "that's the Worst Argument in the World, most prisoners in jail are in there for nonviolent crimes". You judge how bad the standard is by looking at the worst case, not at the average case.
While most transgendered people are not in cults, the left has no principled standards about how to distinguish between transgendered people in a cult, and everyone else. You're just not supposed to gatekeep at all, and the policy of not gatekeeping deserves to be judged by the worst cases that it enables, not the cases they would like you to think about.
Who’s arguing to let everyone out of jail in this analogy?
That’s a lot more cautious, and more defensible, than what the OP was going for.
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Ummm....
Maybe the way the cult will get you fired from your job if you get too heretical, or alternatively get you some sweet DIE points to help with a better job if you are one of the stunning and brave ones?
(I mean I don't necessarily disagree with your thrust here, but I'm not sure the line between 'regular social dynamics' and 'cult behaviour' is as bright as I'd like for literally anything these days. See "You know what nobody hates each other about yet?")
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According to stats I’ve found, something like 1390 adolescents went on puberty blockers in the US in 2021, out of a population of about 42 million total teenagers. 282 teenagers got a mastectomy. In comparison, 2,590 kids died from a gunshot in that same year.
With those numbers, you’re exceedingly unlikely to know anyone with kids going through those procedures. To me, this just seems like a moral panic amplified through the news in order to distract the masses from real issues - the housing crisis, corruption, school shootings, inflation, wealth inequality, social services being stripped away, the erosion of the middle class. Why do you care about this? Why do trans issues keep getting posted, over and over, when it’s a largely irrelevant issue to the vast majority of people?
You know what issue really affects children in the US? 1 in 4 kids are obese or overweight. Where is the medical establishment there? What about the 8.4% of kids on psych meds, some of whom are on them involuntarily?
Also maybe it’s because I don’t live in America, but in my modern Western country, transitioning isn’t a matter of waltzing into a clinic and getting your breasts chopped. Just getting evaluated by the gender service takes upward of 5 years, and you need to be vetted by a series of psychologists. Getting any kind of surgery requires an official gender identity disorder diagnosis and a letter from 2 separate professionals (and good luck getting those). Sure, you can go private - have you got ten thousand pounds in cash? You have to be incredibly dedicated, child or adult, to go through this system.
And as far as I know, America doesn’t have much public healthcare, so these kids getting surgeries while they’re underage have got to be the beneficiaries of rich parents who can afford to foot the bill. You can get all sorts of crazy ridiculous procedures, even as a minor, if you have more money then sense. Is it not absolutely disproportionate to have so much air time occupied to whatever most likely very low % of those few hundred kids from privileged backgrounds that might regret it later?
Yeah, and yet I do. You know, this actually reminds me of the discussion downthread, about some author misrepresenting/misunderstanding stats to try to show that a greater proportion of whites are illiterate than blacks in CA.
When you posted the site with those stats before, I wanted to push back then, but got distracted. But your own source pointed out it was likely undercounting, because it was only capturing a very narrow statistical category of trans youth. Namely, youth with a formal diagnosis and formal prescription for gender dysphoria.
Meanwhile, using older stats, there are at ~150,000 transgender youth from age 13-17 in the united states. So something here isn't adding up by several orders of magnitude.
This is weak. You can’t just associate a statistic you cannot debunk to one that has been. If trans researcher lie, I think it’s much more likely that they lie on the positive effects of transition rather than on raw numbers like these.
I don’t think it’s a narrow category. The adolescents, and the parents who go along with it, think it's What The Science Says. They're not out there getting gonzo surgeries on their own initiative. If you want to play up scary numbers, it seems that the number of kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria rose from 25k to 42k from 2020 to 2021, and the mean age for the diagnostic is decreasing. It could be that there’s tens of thousands of kids in the pipeline for such surgeries, they just didn't have the time to get to the previous ones in large numbers before they matured.
There has to be a way to push back against suspicious statistics. The information is not public so common people can't verify them, so a "you can't deboonk this" approach leaves others with the ability to make numbers up, and get away with it for years.
They were lying about hormones and surgeries being done children at all. So even with these stats it has to be conceded they lie about the numbers.
But just pointing to a completely different false statistic + your intimate conviction is not the way. What is the rule being applied here? All statistics are false if I feel like it?
Your ‘deboonking’ quip is invalid, it’s supposed to make fun of people’s tendency to falsely claim they have debunked their opponent’s statistics. But on the literacy numbers, it would be hard to find a halfway reasonable ‘antiracist progressive’ who would still support the original claim after the debunking. Ergo, it’s a true debunking, not a ‘deboonking’.
Who is ‘they’? To make the “282 teenage mastectomies” claim false here, one researcher has to lie, and then all the other researchers have to support it by not publishing any contradictory evidence (since you haven’t found it). And that group includes a lot of people who think it’s a very good thing that those surgeries are being performed, so the dubious claim can be attacked both from a pro-trans and anti-trans perspective. The ‘they’ obscures the difference between a few liars within a broadly sympathetic group and an extremely well-coordinated conspiracy, requiring all to act as one.
I'm not invested in any particular form of pushback, just in there being some response available, when people do the equivalent of newspapers publishing bullshit on the frontpage, and a correction notice in tiny print, on page 19.
More like: just because it's a officially published statistic, doesn't mean it's true. If you expect people to change their mind based on the statistic you're citing, but it turns out to be false, you should be willing to suffer reputational damage if it turns out to be false, going forward people should have a right to be skeptical of any statistics posted in favor of the idea you're arguing for.
"They" is people arguing in favor of transgender care. It was an extremely popular at the time, including from researchers albeit not ex-cathedra. It was based on the assumption that the WPATH standards of care were being followed to the letter, and anyone disputing the assumption had the burden of proof shifted onto them.
This is dishonest. I have not not found it, I have not gone looking for it. I don't think anyone should have to go looking for a refutation of any numbers, unless the person making the original claim vouches with their reputation for the statistics used to that back it.
No. All the other researchers have to do, is need a few years to try an replicate the original finding.
People who think it's a good thing those surgeries are being performed are still aware of their political environment, and the backlash that will come if the awareness of high numbers spreads to the public.
Ok, so someone does a study estimating the number of gender-affirming surgery in the US, but they aggregate the youngest age group into 12-18 year olds, so you don't actually know how many have been done on minors, and when a journalist asks them "hey can you sand me the raw disaggregated data", they answer with "all of the analysis we did was based on the age groups that we specified, we haven’t done analyses with other age groups", and refuse to send the data. Nothing comes out of it in the months that follow, is that an "extremely well-coordinated conspiracy"?
Do you need an official “I vouch for those numbers on my children’s children lives” ? Rae and I will suffer some reputational damage for defending those numbers if you find contradicting ones, and that is usually enough of a motivation for others.
I did find them suspiciously low myself, did a quick search, saw no contradicting statistic. This is the point where your priors should move somewhat (since, as in the literacy numbers, there is an alternate universe where they are easily debunked by the quick search), not where you double down on your intuition. And please don’t call me dishonest lightly. Whether you went looking for them or not, you haven’t found them. I am not trying to deceive anyone.
Then why haven’t they lied on the 42k diagnoses ?
The study said “3678 (7.7%) were aged 12 to 18 years“ (gender-affirming surgeries over 4 years). That’s in the same ballpark as “282 mastectomies per year on minors”, no matter how they choose to massage the disaggregated data.
I don't actually think you should suffer reputational damage since you're just trying to get to the real numbers, rather than throwing a wet blanket on the conversation. So from Rae I'll either need an official statement, or a rephrasing of their post in a way that doesn't imply my loicence to care will be taken away if I don't prove the number of surgeries exceed a certain threshold (which, I will notice, is not even specified).
I don't know if I agree. Like I said, for some time I have been frustrated at the "posting bullshit on the front page - posting a retraction on page 19" dynamic, and I'm not in the mood to keep letting it happen. I did move my priors somewhat, back when people were posting WPATH guidelines to tell me surgeries on minors don't happen at all. My reward for that is people telling me to stop caring, because even though surgeries on minors absolutely are happening, it's not a lot. If I am to give this argument any credence, it needs to come with pre-declared costs to the people putting it forward, if the statistics they're using turn out to be wrong. Either that or I feel entitled to reject the argument in it's entirety.
The implication seems to have been (and apparently still is) that since I was unable to provide any contradicting numbers, I should move my priors as you said. That would be a good argument, but I think there's a massive difference between "unable" and "haven't even attempted", and it's not right to conflate the two in this type of argument.
A diagnosis says nothing about the interventions that will take place, you can always say keep repeating the old "reversible interventions only" line that used be popular. We also don't know whether these are undercounted or not.
I haven't posted this study as an example of contradicting numbers, I've posted this study as an example of how they can hide inconvenient data without an "extremely well-coordinated conspiracy" (alternatively, as proof that one exists), so I'm rather miffed this is precisely the point you chose to not answer.
If you want to know why I'm so skeptical of the numbers, one of the reasons is that Kaiser Permanente was doing 40-50 mastectomies on minors per year by 2020 (it being the year of COVID the numbers actually went down somewhat). Now sure, it's a big clinic, it's a progressive state, so probably they'll be doing more of them than the national average, but there's a couple hundred pediatric gender clinics in the US. Maybe they don't all have surgeons, or there are none around to refer to, but it just doesn't pass the sniff test at first glance. Then, even if the mastectomies are in the right ballpark, is opening a new clinic worth it for an average of 5-ish or so blocker prescriptions? I only know of one American whistleblower from a clinic so far, but she reported it being overwhelmed.
Maybe my various inferences about the numbers are wrong, and maybe Rae's numbers do pan out, but given how the goalposts have shifted in the broader debate, I feel entitled to strong skepticism unless overwhelming evidence is provided.
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...Yeah, most trans teens don't get any medical treatment yet.
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I recently made a comment linking an article that gives the same numbers rae did, which might be the article you're thinking of: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-data/ . That article's total number of teens diagnosed with gender dysphoria agrees with yours (the years/ages don't line up so the numbers aren't directly comparable):
So, according to that article it is orders of magnitude more common for a teen to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria than for any medical intervention to be taken. That seems like exactly what you'd expect: we think medical interventions are a major step that should be carefully considered, and especially should be avoided for people under 18 because we think they are too young to make that decision. Although I don't know the ratio of adults diagnosed with gender dysphoria to those undergoing some sort of medical intervention to compare.
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I reject this because I know of someone prepubescent who was put on puberty blockers in like 2008. And it has exploded since then. My life is interesting, but not so much that I'd be part of the initial cadre in-the-know if the numbers of adolescents were still so low.
Depending on what particular social circles you ran in in 2008, it is entirely possible that your life is sufficiently interesting for you to be in the top 0.1% of people in terms of likelihood to run into this in your social circles (e.g. if you lived in a coastal state and knew this person from a state-level robotics or performing arts event).
1390 out of 42 million is way less than .1%
And 1390 is supposed to be number for today, not 2008.
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You know more than 1 person, and you know of a lot more people than you know personally. A typical American knows something on the order of 500 people, and knows of probably 20x that many. If there was exactly one person on puberty blockers out of 300 million Americans, you'd expect ~10k / 300M or 0.0033% of Americans to know of them. To get to "0.1% of people know of someone on puberty blockers" you'd only have to have 30 such people in the entire country.
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Welcome to the culture wars in America. This trend dates to the early 90s, in which a few suicides possibly due to lyrics was the most pressing thing in America at the time. 'Big issues' are understood to be hard to fix and out of anyone's control. Smaller-stakes culture war battles get more mileage. Trans issues are seen as being symptomatic of broader-scale problems...the canary in a coal mine.
This line of thinking is why I sometimes think that the Culture War is best described as bike shedding at the scale of governance: we fight hardest about the things we think we understand most, even if they are, at the end of the day, mostly inconsequential.
I agree we should focus on economic issues and intergenerational disparities but gender ideology is ubiquitous - in the sense of scale it's huge, an attempted takeover of a prior social consensus. Just because a lot of people ignore it, doesn't mean it's not consequential.
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This analogy is so uncomfortably accurate that my knee-jerk reaction was to downvote. Instead I'm nominating it as an AAQC. It was a real life "they hated him because he spoke the truth" moment.
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Yeah, when people go ‘why do you care about this’ I always wonder if they’ve ever, like, spoken to a parent before.
You are of course correct that trans people(especially when you exclude teenage girls who would desist without intervention) are a very small minority, and that it sucks that their identity is now a political football. But to the extent that trans activists represent the trans community they brought this upon themselves; as you note above parents are going to react to what their kids are being taught in school, especially as it relates to social contagia which can be very dangerous to those kids, and that trans ideology fails an input-output sanity check with the response from it's supporters being "don't think about it or you're an evil bigot". To the extent that there are legitimate, actual trans people, remaining a punchline would have been better for them, and it sure wasn't Chris Rufo who brought them out of sex comedies.
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I tire of this style of dismissal. It's posted continuously because intelligent people disagree and the most uncomfortable feeling in the world is knowing that people you otherwise respect disagree on something that seems so obvious with no explanation you can imagine an intelligent person believing readily available. No intelligent people really disagree about the problem of obesity, there are some disagreements on what should be done about it and those are talked about consistently but they often terminate in an agreement that more information is needed or a few reasonable theories to be investigated.
I guess it’s another victim of the toxoplasma of rage? Important issues that no one disagrees with are largely ignored, whereas less important ones will get talked about if you can create a debate over them.
This happens on a micro scale as well in trans issues; the trans people that will attract the most attention will naturally be the most divisive, e.g. Dylan Mulvaney. Fewer people care about say, Rebekah Bruesehoff, the trans girl activist who plays field hockey and just looks like your typical boring blonde American girl; but everybody knows Lia Thomas because leftists look virtuous defending a male looking 6’1 broad shouldered trans woman, and most importantly, they can have a flaming debate with conservatives online about it.
Sure, but especially on a debate forum this doesn't even seem like a failure mode. If you want to say the republicans focusing on it as a point in the last mid terms lead to bad outcomes for them then I'd agree with you.
Put another way, if you come in here and claim to be able to see out of the back of your head and also think that we should focus on increasing fiber rather than decreasing sugar in American school lunches the claim that objectively impacts more people is absolutely not the claim I'm more likely to want to discuss. To many of us that claim that there is an internal feeling of gender is more like the former than the latter.
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Then I guess I'm exceedingly unlucky to have a cousin who went on puberty blockers then HRT. I lived with another person who began HRT at 16, no puberty blockers. Given that a quarter of the teenagers I've been close with have undergone some sort of medical transition, it does seem relevant to me.
But I also suspect that your source is a huge undercount, and also many of the people medically transitioning do not go on puberty blockers because they don't identify as Trans* until they are 14 or older. And even the people who do not medically transition might face health issues from chest binding and other encouraged practices.
…why would someone go on blockers if not for trans-adjacent reasons?
I know they’re used for certain medical situations, but I wouldn’t expect those to be very common at all.
Precocious puberty was the original reason before the trans thing came along.
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Trans issues are ideal for generating toxoplasma of rage. They affect a vanishingly small number of people, but touch on core fundamental attitudes that everyone has strong opinions on: you can take whichever side you want without ever having to interact with real people who care about it in a deeply personal sense. Regardless of whether someone is Right or Left, if someone lists trans war stuff as a top ten issue affecting the world, I think it's a safe assumption that they're full of shit (unless they identify as trans, in which case I give some leeway).
That's not to say it's irrelevant: different public policy around trans issues can affect O(1M) people, and there are pros and cons for both sides. But education, tax policy, foreign relations (as well as other things) are far more important and seemingly get a tenth the media attention that trans stuff does.
There's an additional wrinkle on social media (and Reddit in particular) where egregiously heavy handed moderation of anything that can be construed as even vaguely anti-locomotive drives a strong oppositional reaction. But it's silly for people to let that drive them to centering their worldview on it to the point of hysteria.
What kind of Big O notation is that?
An egregious abuse, I recognize.
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I think part of it is that highly vocal trans activists and their writings are disproportionately represented online compared to the how few actual trans people there are in the world. For example, if you based your idea of America just on reading Reddit, you might think that something like 10% of Americans were trans. And I also think, based on the kind of slang they use and the fact that they regularly write thousands of words about politics, that probably most people on The Motte are also highly online. So from a Motte commenter's perspective, trans people might seem to be everywhere.
I know a few elementary school teachers and it's apparently normal now that there are a few trans kids in each class. I assume they aren't on hormone blockers at that age but they picked a new name and they dress and act like the opposite sex. I think the rates of this stuff in young kids are just absolutely exploding.
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Would you stake your reputation on these numbers? I'm willing to put a bet on "no way is this true". Combined with "minors don't get hormones or surgeries, they only get blockers" argument we heard a few years, it really looks like we're hitting every step on the road from "it's not happening" to "it's a good thing that it is".
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That number is likely an undercount -- even the most comprehensive data provider, Komodo, acknowledges this in their reporting-- and regardless why is the number important, or why is the fact that some people are particularly exercised by it an issue? Also your comparison is off, at least the way youve worded it -- you need to compare the number of adolescents who are already receiving puberty blockers with their baseline population, not just the annual figure of those who start puberty blockers.
Moral panic? The reality is numbers of dysphoric adolescents and those receiving blockers and hormones is rising exponentially. When something changes rapidly, some people are curious why -- there is an inherent urgency implied in understanding rapid change. And the sphere of influence, and age of influence of these ideas has gotten wider and younger, so depending on where you live and whether legislative changes occur, it will likely continue to grow. Unless individuals act to do something.
Some people have children (autistic children even) who are entering an education system where they will learn that they don't have a sex until they decide what it is, so they have actual skin in the game. We're also talking a legal, and progressive campaign to change society wholesale fundamentally, with people effective being compelled to accept unproven ideas around gender in the workplace, in medical clinics, in education. Factually inconsistent and wrong ideas about sex are spreading through medical institutions and acadme. I agree that this is just one manifestation of problems in science, academia, medicine and psychology, but it is a flagshap example and to paraphrase Blake, one where you can see the whole world-- progressive attempts at social engineering, post-modernist queerying of categories and truth, transhumanism, philosophical relativism and nihilism leading to bad ideas. Plenty of people are witness to transitioning children and adolescents and a growing number of parents are grieving there children and dealing with dissonance of being in a completely unemphatetic environment to their plight, all while kindness and inclusivity are preached.
Relative to drug addiction, gun and road deaths, yes it's small but rareness doesn't exonerate wrongness, and it's possible to care to varying degrees, or at least have an informed opinion about, many different issues at once.
This is a canary in the coalmine as part of woke progressive social engineering (along with anti-whiteness etc), so a lot of people have an interest. I would argue it's an important manifestation of where we are at as liberal societies with rising mental health issues for children and youth and a pervasive lack of meaning broadly.
Also, you're always interested in responding, so it's a funny charge to make when you are just as focused on the issue.
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I'm just going to assume your numbers are true. I agree, in the grand scheme of things, the kids being trans issue is not as important as compared to many issues you've identified in terms of scale and impact on our personal lives.
It's also not as small as you present it to be. First five sources I found had higher amounts. Here's one for example:
There are also estimates that 300,000 of youths aged 13-17 identify as trans (Data up to 2020, the number is probably higher today). It's an issue because the numbers are growing.
You also bring up school shootings, which according to your numbers is nearly as small as the trans issue. Anyone can get shot? Well anyone can have kids and their kids might go on puberty blockers, which there seems to more and more evidence that these things are not fully reversible and may have permanent effects.
The trans issue seems to be pushed more and more into my face these days, from both an anti and pro trans perspective. There are examples that the trans issue is impacting our daily lives. For example, does your company enforce or encourage people to put pronouns on their email/profile? Why do we need to do that? For 99.99% of people it should be obvious what your gender is. I work with a lot of different companies due to my industry and more and more companies are implementing pronouns into their HR systems.
We're also seeing trans ideas showing up in our culture through movies, books, video games, tv shows, etc. And I'll be honest, more of then than not, the experience is ruined by the inclusion of a trans person, because it's usually forced into for the sake of diversity and inclusion rather than for the sake of telling an interesting story. The Japanese seem to do better job of exploring these ideas. Inside Mari is a manga I read many years ago that explores the idea of a man waking up in a woman's body. It displays the experience of dysphoria quite well, so a story that explores trans issues can still be interesting. But so many modern entertainment just want to push it into my face now, and it's executed horribly.
Do you care about women's rights/issues? The common example is the trans in women's athletic competitions. I don't know how anyone who claims to support women's right can also support having trans people in women's athletic competitions. We're seeing trans athletes dominate the space, taking away opportunities for women. There's a reason we have a women's only league/competition in so many different sports.
It's also impacting language and the way we speak. I know it's a bit of a meme, but there are people who can't even define what is a woman anymore. I'm pretty sure the attempt to remove gender from gendered languages e.g. saying latinx instead of latino/latina is related to the trans movement. It's no longer pregnant women, it's pregnant people, because now a man can get pregnant. If trans people are such a small percentage of the population, why are so many people trying to reshape our language and the way we speak to be inclusive of such a small percentage of the population?
And if you ever engage in a discussion about trans issues and say anything that could be anti trans, so many people seem to get offended and will even make attempts to dox you, get you fired, yell at you, scream in your face, call you Nazi scum, or any other myriad of rude and toxic behavior. And many of these people are activist types that try to change culture and society. The reason Jordan Peterson got famous in 2017 is because trans activist types recorded themselves confronting him about his views on Canada's Bill C-16. This is over 6 years ago, has the trans issue gotten better or worse since then? I remember reddit was fawning over this man around that time, now he's actively hated and despised. More and more young people support the idea that misgendering should be a crime. It seems to me that the trans issues have only become more prevalent in our lives.
I used to not care about trans issues. But when the trans issues start popping up over so many different areas of life, and many of the loudest proponents for the trans issues seem to be angry, anti-intellectual activist types, well it makes me want to be on the opposing side. Given the impact the trans movement has had on our modern culture and society, I'm not sure I can agree trans issues are no longer irrelevant in our lives anymore. It certainly doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.
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Aside from what others have mentioned about private insurers, there are 90 million people enrolled in Medicaid or CHIP, including 41 million children. People under 18 make up 21 pct of the 331 million people in the United States, so most children are covered by public healthcare.
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I'll put it the other way around - why are establishment bodies constantly pushing trans stuff when it's a largely irrelevant issue to the vast majority of people? In the US, there are 39 separate days in the calendar specifically for celebrating trans people (and an additional 77 days for celebrating trans people as a subset of LGBTQIA+), even though trans people represent about 0.4% of the population. (By contrast, black Americans represent 12% of the population, yet Black History Month famously takes up the shortest month in the Gregorian calendar.) Gender ideology is being actively promoted in schools throughout the Anglosphere. The modern pride flag (the new, horrendously overdesigned one with designated stripes specifically for trans people) is routinely flown for weeks at a time in cities throughout North America and Europe, often at the decree by civic bodies like city or county councils, including no less than the White House.
The trans rights movement can't enthusiastically push this shit and then turn around and go "why are you even talking about this, it doesn't affect you lol" whenever they get the slightest amount of pushback on it. You brought it up. When you stop pushing it (or at least dial back the aggression and penetration of the message), we'll stop pushing back against it.
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I've expressed my contempt for the "fat acceptance" movement plenty of times in this space (in addition to routinely beating the drum on how obesity is the single biggest risk factor for death from Covid among young people), so I, for one, don't think I can reasonably be accused of monomaniacal fixation on the trans thing at the expense of all other important social issues.
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On the other hand, referrals to the UK's Gender Identity Development Service increased by 1,460% for boys and 5,337% for girls, in less than ten years. I think people are perfectly entitled to look at a graph like this and feel a certain amount of alarm about where it might end up if the trend continues unabated. A 50% increase in gun deaths among children in the US over a two-year period was considered a shocking jump by the Pew Research Centre, and you're asking us to look at a 5,000% increase in referrals for gender issues with "ho-hum, nothing to see here, pass the butter".
Out of interest, how many children/teens have to receive "gender-affirming care" in a calendar year before you consider it a topic worthy of discussion? If the figures you quoted were tenfold higher? Fifty-fold? A hundredfold?
Also, it's generally good form to cite your sources.
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If even 139 adolescents of the 2,590 kids gunned down every year were all targeted by followers of the same ideology who were all following a standard playbook on best practices to gun down adolescents and members of that ideology were openly teaching it in public schools with support from public institutions, that would absolutely be a controversial issue that people talk about all the time. Heck, I'm pretty sure that'd apply even if it were just 14 adolescents a year. Salem Witch trials killed what, 19 people like 300 years ago? It's not a culture war issue, but it's still brought up a bunch to this day, in a large part because it was a case of our religious and governmental institutions all being complicit in, if not actively participating in, the unjust killing of those people.
And that's the missing piece from all these things like the housing crisis, corruption, school shootings, etc. At best you can say that social services being stripped away is largely from conservative/Republican ideology, but the rest, there's no particular ideologically aligned group of people actively pushing for this stuff with support from powerful institutions at every level of society. These are mostly just standard-issue societal problems which often do have culture war implications but which lacks any powerful institutions who are full-throatedly yelling to the skies that this is a Good Thing. The amount of people who say they love corruption and want more of it and will shout down anyone who tries to convince others that corruption is a bad thing is too small to matter. Even the Trumps of the world will frame their corruption as actually not-corrupt or a correction to a deeper corruption. In contrast to youths going through medical transition where you do see plenty of people doing those very things, all following a similar playbook from the same ideology which has massive institutional support.
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Inseparable from the issue of medical care for trans children is the entire 'gender ideology' that some worry threatens to permeate every aspect of public life in a way school shootings don't, by definition. Obesity probably inches closer to that, what with the fat acceptance movement and the glamorization of unhealthy celebrities. But it's hard for anybody to take the fat man seriously for complaining he's being charged two tickets for filling two seats on a flight. Gender affirming care and the ideological umbrella it operates under is one of the few things where criticising or doubting it from any angle, in any context, to any degree can risk severe professional and often personal disadvantage in a way other political or social topics don't despite their polarization. The only other subject matter I can think of that prompts this 'zero-tolerance' treatment is race. By contrast, I don't think my employer really cares that much about how I feel about climate change, even if it annoys them. I'm not risking a lawsuit if I think the science is 'fake and gay'.
Given that, I don't think it's too surprising that trans issues will get more fuel because it's something we've found will raise its head anywhere and everywhere in due course. I haven't been to a high school or been a teenager for decades. Meanwhile, 'gender crap' is something I have to endure on multiple fronts both public, personal, and professional. And it can be this way even if a trans person only physically enters my orbit once a year.
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Do you happen to also have stats on HRT? My impression is that that's more common than either puberty blockers or surgery, but I have no particular knowledge of whether "more common" is "2x" or "200x".
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Just because we don't have public healthcare doesn't mean it's a free for all. Every single state has an Insurance Commissioner who is charged with regulating insurance in the state. Through this type of regulation, states have required any health insurance plan offered to include coverage for hormone supplementation and cosmetic surgery. Of course, this is not exactly the same from state to state, but in many, many places the only kinds of plans you are allowed to offer are required to pay for this, so every single different employer-offered health insurance plan is going to pay for your child to be sterilized as a teenager.
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This part actually jumped out at me:
This seems unexpected because if there were any social group that had a gender imbalance of that degree, AND all the women in question were self-described as looking for love, you'd think this would lead to men joining up to exploit the imbalance until it was wittled down some.
I notice I am confused. Even accounting for women in general being more drawn to weird spiritualist remedies.
Sure the premise that you're looking for one specific person kind of limits the playing field, but that rarely stops motivated males.
Also, the basic description of the group made it seem less cult-like than the central example of cults, but upon looking at some of their background beliefs and their youtube channel yeah, this is definitely a classic-style cult with some slick presentation.
Like, I'm actually willing to tolerate psychic matchmakers because they basically take all the standard tactics and tricks to finding a mate for someone and dress it up in some woo language to make it more palatable.
But the harms being done in the Twin Flames Universe seem pretty obvious even before the coerced transition, and most of the other hallmarks are there.
Well, there is always the verboten topic of the "meme sex". Probably going to get modded again for even uttering the words.
Big five personality traits agreeableness and neuroticism are a helluva drug. And, specific to this cult, more or less every single former member they interviewed said they found the cult by googling "twin flame", a woo woo spiritual concept they'd heard about before, after having an intense personal connection with someone. Twin Flame Universe is apparently the most search engine optimized result for that query, and off to the cult they go. The struggle sessions prey on their neuroticism and the intense social conditioning preys on their agreeableness.
Just seems like they shouldn't have had any trouble recruiting males once the word got out that there were eligible females seeking companions to be found. That's how most social groups end up working. Attract the ladies and then expect the men to follow (and spend money)
Maybe the word never got out.
Or maybe the women were conventionally unattractive or just overly picky, both of which are overstated but extant problems that women sometimes have.
Many of the women in the documentary were definitely on the chubbier side, and were encouraged to get fatter from the cult leader's diet plan.
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Meme sex? What does that mean? That one sex is more susceptible to cultural programming?
Thats my plain read of it, yes. Not unlike "cultural marxism" however, plenty of people will insist the plain reading is wrong, and the true meaning involves literally every evil that lurks under the bed of a neoliberal at night.
I have never - in my entire life - changed a man's mind with a single but especially clever response.
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Are you confused about why most cult leaders are charismatic men?
I presume some of the gender imbalance is linked to intentional recruitment practises by such a cult, especially since I think that most cult leaders (being overwhelmingly male) certainly enjoy having more submissive women around for their sexual enjoyment, and this only ceases to apply when a cult gains some degree of legitimacy or a large amount of growth, where the dude in charge has reached saturation for the number of women he can fuck, and doesn't particularly care who they rope in next. Or they might pass away and hand the torch to other followers, who I suspect are more likely to be "True Believers" and less internally motivated by such.
I also believe that women are naturally more inclined to fall for cultish practises/woo, not that it's exclusive to them. How many men do you see unironically espousing astrology or healing crystals?
I joked with my wife in the first episode "How long until the cult leader just starts fucking all the women?"
Surprisingly, it hadn't gotten that far yet. Although the final episode talks about him buying several hundred acres in the middle of nowhere, and wanting his cult members to move out there. He wants his "harmonious couples" to start having "golden children" that are already ascended. However, since most of them are sterilized women pretending to be men, he will be picking who the biological fathers will be.
Pretty sure you only need one guess how that's going to end up.
Ah.
Yeah this just sounds like the Branch Davidians with extra steps.
Heaven's Gate sterilized many of its members before their more famous mass suicide.
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I’ve long suspected that such a dynamic actually is what drives recruiting. A group of men cannot attract women to join for the purposes of sexual access. Women can. In fact, in most cases it’s the woman who looks after the spiritual side of things. If she’s devout, then the children and the husband will be in church. If she doesn’t care, then odds are that the family won’t be observant. Even in dating, men are far more likely to play act religion even if they don’t believe it if they think they’ll have access to a woman they want.
Children are more likely to stay in the religion if their father practices than if the mother practices. It isn't obvious to me why
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Nah.
But as to the rest of your comment, was there any evidence that the leader of the group was getting laid by the female members?
Seems like the whole premise of the group is "there's one (1) singular person out there for you, I'm here to help you find them" which seems less likely to lead to drug-fueled orgies than claiming "I am Jesus born again, bang me to secure your place in heaven" or whatever.
And that's why you would think, as word spread, that men might join the group and play the game for a chance to become a given woman's "twin flame".
I guess the question is why did men's innate horniness drive more of them to the group?
Not much, but you get the weird gymbro/tradbro sort of thing like perineum tanning and whatever the Liver King advocates. And of course there are those who accuse Andrew Tate of being a cult leader.
Anyhoo, my last thought is that as we've seen a large rise in the share of single adults, I bet more cult-like groups that promise to help find love rise to prominence in the near future.
I think that's a fair assumption to make in the case of most modern cults, even if it's not necessarily applicable in this one.
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There are some women who are more or less genuinely unfuckable, and I don't mean because they're ugly, old, or crazy. Knowing nothing about this particular cult and therefore not in any way commenting on it, many of the cultists at Jonestown were mentally incompetent, morbidly obese, etc
Difficult to cite or summarize beyond what I've already said - that many of the cultists were mentally incompetent, morbidly obese, etc
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Most men don’t actually optimize their lives around attracting women.
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I'm going to assume most of the women recruited were so eager to join specifically because they'd failed to find love through conventional means and were becoming increasingly desperate as they could feel their biological clocks ticking down.
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This rests on the assumption that the women are young and attractive. Not even MtFs bother trying to muscle in on middle aged women's book clubs and knitting circles.
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Why this skewed representation? Thinking about it: Most cult leaders I can think of are male, are conversely most followers women? Why is that? But how skews that the leader structure? I looked up Jonestown and two third who drank the cool-aid were female. Leader Jim Jones was of course male, but there is a documentary about his helping „all-female inner circle“.
Downvoted Reddit comment about the twin flames documentary:
I watched both documentaries, and IMO the vast majority of the cult members were unattractive, a few were exceptionally so (I'd rate at 2/10s). The only two attractive girls were redhead sisters, both of whom were very targeted by the cult probably for exactly that reason, with one ending up as CEO and the other as a poster child for relationship success.
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In pretty much every region and religion, more women identify as religious than men (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/03/22/the-gender-gap-in-religion-around-the-world/). In the U.S. that's something like 60% to 47% for women and men respectively, according to Pew. More women believe in things like healing crystals, astrology, soulmates, etc. Even ignoring things like specific personality traits, I'd expect women to be more common in cults than men.
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This was the first cult documentary I've watched. Are there any others you'd recommend?
There's an excellent podcast by Martyrtmade that goes really deep on Jim Jones called "God's Socialist: The Rise and Fall of the People's Temple." Includes lots of background info on the characters involved and actual audio from cult meetings.
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I just want to mention that the term “twin flame” existed before the object of this documentary and was probably co-opted by the group.
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Nice find! I sometimes fantasize about founding a museum about all this, once it's all over, this would be a nice piece for it.
They're entirely complicit. Whether it's because they have dollar signs in their eyes, or because of ideology, I'll leave for you to decide, but I heard an interview with an APA member that tried to get them to do a systemic review of the evidence for transgender care, and the tricks they pulled to bury the idea really were something else. But the good news is they recently announced they'll actually do one.
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This is utterly unsurprising. People want to belong more than they want to be right. People want to belong more than they want to be safe. People want to belong more than they want nice things, or sex, or space, or sanity, or health. Frankly the surprising part is that one member refused the feat of cognitive sodomy.
And I think trans is similar- like it or not, trans are provided belonging in a world that’s bereft of it. It’s the same thing behind munchausen or anorexia; you now belong to a community of other practitioners by virtue of doing something crazy and stupid, United against the rest of the world which can never do enough to cater to you and yours. Yes, trans is getting supported by big institutions that never supported anorexia or munchausens, but I think that’s tribal dynamics driven by polarization- remember that ‘people want to belong’ thing again? And as the US white population undergoes ethnogenesis where the blue and red tribes live in different worlds, I think you’re going to see more stupidity and craziness get declared sacrosanct because the wrong tribe opposed it, so you can declare yourself closer to the core of your tribe by declaring your support, damn the consequences.
Now obviously we should get people back to family, church, neighborhood associations, local sports leagues, etc. But those mostly aren’t coming back. We’re stuck with a cycle of pillarizarion into obvious craziness. Trans is the first expression(well, that hit the mainstream), it won’t be the last. And that’s a damn shame.
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Eliza Mondegreen Noticed™ the same parallels you did: https://unherd.com/thepost/netflixs-escaping-twin-flames-is-wrong-about-trans/
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The refusal to connect with the trans issue when it's staring you in the face is also something you see with research. Like this article looking at the rapid spread of psychiatric illnesses in teen girls on social media, that somehow fails to even mention trans.
https://www.madinamerica.com/2023/11/for-teen-girls-rare-psychiatric-disorders-spread-like-viruses-on-social-media/
Or the endless line graphs of rising mental illness that Jonathan Haidt and co produce, corresponding also with social media use, but not showing the one on gender dysphoria, which shows the same trend.
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I really thought this was headed somewhere else.
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