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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   25692 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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I've got the analysis from the political survey up. Thanks to everyone who participated!

The political map: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/what-they-didnt-tell-you-about-political

Personality correlates: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-conservatives

Although I didn't carry out the survey specifically to look for this, overall The Motte scored

  • on the Left, and
  • politically Realist,

which is the same as my username - maybe no surprise that this is the only political board I visit anymore, even if it's only to get pictures of tiny rodents with even tinier balloons.

Something that might concern you a bit more is the demographic homogeneity around here: The Motte is overwhelmingly Millennial. If you're interested in diverse perspectives, you might try particularly for more oldsters.

Millennials are oldsters now. The youngest one are nearing 30, the oldest are in their 40s

Nevertheless, average age in western society is afaik ~45, so Millenials are still on the younger side.

Yeah weirdly the idea of what age is old has itself been changing; 45 used to be nearing retirement. Nowadays 45 is when Emily turns to Chris and says "Maybe we might think about having our first kid? You think?"

(No wait who am I kidding, she sends him a text)

Right/libertarian GenXer here. I never saw the post for the surveys, FYI.

Shame; the rarity of Gen X online has made me appreciate them when I come across them, like seeing a rainbow or an eclipse. Maybe I'll run another one survey year and you can represent your peeps then!

Thanks for running this survey!

As I read the first half, I was thinking “but you can have more than two factors…” Lo and behold, you covered that. It’s probably for the best that you chose purple and green to represent the auth/lib dimension; I wouldn’t have been able to resist making an illegible 3D cloud of a graph.

How many of those 301 responses were from the Motte? And where else did you run the survey? I ask because there is a giant selection effect, one probably large enough to explain any age skew. You don’t find a lot of boomers on niche political Internet sites. Zoomers either, apparently, though I find that a little surprising. Those kids have had their chance to get into college and discover contrarianism.

Speaking of which—I don’t know how you’d design a survey to test this, but I would expect a very strong “contrarian” axis to political positions. Our unparalleled wealth and access to information, plus the balkanization of social circles, makes countersignaling very appealing. Especially for positions further from daily life (geopolitics) or the Overton window (eugenics). Were there any that clustered strongly with describing oneself as “Other”?

Some of the positions on your chart really fit the “idealist” label, but others merit a raised eyebrow. Is pro-choice, as understood in US discourse, a pragmatic, empirical stance? What about skepticism towards democracy? And how are old-fashioned values decoupled from any sort of idealism? There’s also that cluster of libertarian-adjacent concepts which are hovering around the conservative axis. It is very strange to see gun rights, a topic almost always grounded in appeals to natural rights, traditions, and the Platonic ideal of a struggle against tyranny, on the pragmatic side. The phrase “principled libertarian” describes a real phenomenon!

Finally, I want to comment on Ukraine. Clustering does not imply general approval, right? Imagine you had a very unpopular idea such that only one person approved. Then its placement on the quadrants would depend entirely on that person’s other answers. In other words, I’d want to know what proportion of respondents actually endorsed the idea before I used it to assert ideal-lib excess.

Perhaps it’s a moot point, because I’ll bite the bullet. Accepting a risk of nuclear war is realist as hell. It’s outright refusing to consider nukes that suggests idealism. Compare the fight over effective altruism and existential risk. Who is more idealistic: the researcher who shut up, multipled, and concluded AI risk outweighed short-term suffering? Or the one who dismisses such analysis on the same principle he’d use to avoid Pascal’s Mugging?

There are idealists at all levels, especially when you are asking survey questions without skin in the game. I keep trying to think of other labels for the axis, but I’ve had a tough time. Institutional trust, risk tolerance—these might describe the bottom-left/top-right trend, but not the vertical axis. You might be able to get a hypothetical/axiomatic division, based on epistemic certainty, but it’s better suited to a top-left/bottom-right split.

Appealing to—and accepting appeals from—statistics and measurement remains a meaningful category. “Realism” or “materialism” captures this, but “idealism” does not fit the opposite, since anyone and everyone will cite an ideal at some point. I’d go with something like “abstraction,” making it clear that the ideal can be hidden by, even incompatible with empirical measurements. Moving up the chart no longer implies that the ideals disappear—just that they’re more closely anchored to material examples.

Again, good work, and thank you for sharing your results.

I appreciate your thoughtful response! So much here I really want to respond to - I'll try to give a quick answer to everything I can.

First off, my other work has found a fourth factor of openmindedness vs skepticism, but I didn't have the survey space to include questions that would load on it - I deliberately excluded anything that might have loaded on it.

How many of those 301 responses were from the Motte?

About half, and yes the sample was unusual - extremely introverted, extremely realist. All you need is variation to uncover the space, though, and the results were exactly in line with my findings from ten years ago.

Speaking of which—I don’t know how you’d design a survey to test this, but I would expect a very strong “contrarian” axis to political positions... Were there any that clustered strongly with describing oneself as “Other”?

I didn't look at this. I'm in a time crunch lately, but I'll just say this is a good idea, and I'll poke around to see what's there with "other" affiliation.

Some of the positions on your chart really fit the “idealist” label, but others merit a raised eyebrow.

That's a point well taken, and you can see I really spent a lot of time vacillating on what to call this axis! But I'd say overall that killing the fetus, being cynical about Democracy, and arming yourself are "realistic." Ideally every fetus is a planned and wanted fetus, ideally the Right to Vote results in the best outcome, and ideally nobody needs a gun. But IDK, come up with a better name?

Finally, I want to comment on Ukraine. Clustering does not imply general approval, right?

Right, and since you mentioned it, maybe I should give some info on proportion of respondents supporting each proposition. (That isn't much a problem with the Ukraine one, but Flat Earth was so universally disliked that it could very well have swung in some weird direction if I'd been unlucky.)

Perhaps it’s a moot point, because I’ll bite the bullet. Accepting a risk of nuclear war is realist as hell.

Granted (although the Ukraine one wasn't even that idealist). Other people have pointed out that I may not have reacted very sensibly to people's answers on the Ukraine item. Obviously I have values of my own which will affect my interpretation!

I’d go with something like “abstraction,”

Mmm... I don't think it works. Rationalists are up-and-left, and they love abstraction. Empiricists like me are also up-and-left, and I also love abstraction. I admit to being somewhat idealistic, but generally my objection to anything at the lower end of that map is that it's all too idealistic, idealistic in a way that doesn't correspond to anything outside of a Disney cartoon. Similarly, I'm guessing that people at the bottom would admit to being somewhat realistic, but are seriously disturbed by the evident lack of idealism higher up. "What, we're just going to kill all the babies and accept the inherent racism in society? Don't we care about anything at all?"

(Yes. Yes we do care. We care about surveys. Also: making political maps)

The Motte is overwhelmingly Millennial. If you're interested in diverse perspectives, you might try particularly for more oldsters.

Or youngsters!

Millennials are 40 now, well into the age our parents were when we were complaining about how out of touch and old-fashioned they were.

There was a fair amount of Generation Z; extremely few Gen X or earlier. It doesn't necessarily matter, but the divide between Millennial and Zoomer isn't that great - Gen X remembers a time before computers infused everything, when you rode bikes, hopped fences, and threw horseshoes for fun.

In some ways, this likely just makes us slow to grasp what's going on. Definitely when I talk to X, Boomer, and Silent I feel like they don't even have the vocabulary to grasp current events. But in other ways having seen the Before Time was very grounding. I work with the locals face-to-face a lot, and there's been a clear change; it isn't just research finding surging levels of Neuroticism, younger generations feel babyish, over-anxious, and untethered from reality. (What would you do if the electricity went out for a month? Does anyone under 40 even know?)

Ross Douthat on South Korea's abysmal fertility rates.

It's a direct warning to the United Sates; Douthat concludes with "So the current trend in South Korea is more than just a grim surprise. It’s a warning about what’s possible for us." I think it's worth separating and then reintegrating a few of the items that Douthat brings up in the context of some recent Motte threads on both immigration and the sexual revolution. I'll add some of my own new comments on religion.

First, on the sexual revolution specific to the South Korean context. South Korean women enjoyed the same kind of personal "liberation" that women did and the pill, as it did everywhere, removed the very real possibility of pregnancy from sex. The conservative traditions of the South Korean monoculture, however, remained mostly in place so there was no summer of love and significantly less tolerance, even today, for loud-and-proud promiscuity. As Douthat writes, pregnancy outside of wedlock in South Korea is extremely rare. Alright, so South Koreans aren't orgy-ing it up, but they still get married and start families?

No, they don't. (Note: this article goes into more depth on everything that Douthat's op-ed covers).

In short, being married in South Korea seems like it sucks. There's such an emphasis on child success (in the purely credentialist sense; grades, prestigious school attendance etc.) paired with a brutal "work hard for the sake of working hard" career culture that South Korea parents, apparently, never have time to have fun or relax. What's more, they aren't really raising their children in any sort of tailored or individual way - there's a signal success criteria, and the mission is push the kid as far as they can go within that criteria. Child are a prestige project. Even worse, the filial culture also means that children are expected to be utterly obedient to their parents without question. It would seem that a very likely scenario playing out in many South Korean homes is parents ordering their children to do homework that they (the children) have no interest in while the parents would rather do something fun with the kids, and neither party can actually admit to that mutual preference, so they both continue with the drudgery. It's a weird backwards Prisoners Dilemma where both prisoners admit to a crime they both didn't commit and explicitly ask for the maximum sentence.

All of this has lead, unsurprisingly, to a fertility crisis that could be demographically more damaging than the Black Death (caveat: with straight line projections and no intervention or policy shifts. See Douthat article). The obvious option of throwing open the floodgates to immigrants is an utter non-starter in the context of South Korean monoculture and, with the live fire exercise mass immigration into Europe, probably also unlikely to receive support from "pragmatic" policy makers.

As the linked articles describe, the Government is trying to match-make its own citizens and in the South Korean culture wars you have extremist MGTOW style groups for both women and men. Oh, and the North Koreans are still a credible invasion threat and the SK military may run out of men. Super.

Douthat's article gives it only one sentence of attention, but I think a big item of importance here is that South Korea isn't a "religious" society in the Western sense. Its social and cultural mores are most heavily influenced by filial devotion and family-ethno-cultural tradition in a secular context. I wonder if that is part of the root cause of the problem.

Raising children has always been difficult. When you exist with a personal belief that having children is an order from God for most (but not all) people, you can get through much of the difficulties of child rearing, perhaps multiple times. I'm reminded of a recent interview with Jensen Huang, co-founder of nVIDIA, where he stated that, knowing what he does now, he probably wouldn't start a start-up again. This is because it's just too damn taxing. He went on to say that one of the major advantages of first time founders is that they don't know how insanely hard it's all going to be and they often operate with an insanely highly level of personal belief in their success and a lack of knowledge of the difficulty reality. I think anyone who's been around first time parents (before birth) sees a similar hyper-optimism.

That South Korean's culturally lack a transcendental, faith based backing for having children seems, to me, to be a deeper and distinctive cause of the fertility crisis there. (Distinctive in that there are also conditions present in SK that obviously correlate to low fertility, but those conditions are present in other societies with low fertility as well, not least of which is rapid economic growth and very high levels of basic education and standard of living). If you don't have "Master of the Universe says so" pressure mixed with "but Master of the Universe will help me out!" optimism, I don't see gaggles of South Korea children streaming through the streets.

Phrased differently, it seems to me South Korean's may be too realist and grounded in their evaluations of things. Again, having children is hard. If you analyze all of the realities of child rearing, you are going to find thousands of reason not to do it. Without a faith-level "Yeah, but fuck it!" decision making mechanism, it makes sense that a highly educated and highly rational community would not see many kids.

I'll conclude by asking the Motte to chime in on anything about the above, of course. More specifically, however - To what extent are the Judeo-Christian roots of the United States responsible for cultural attitudes of "hyper optimistic belief" around things like child rearing, entrepreneurship, scientific frontier-ism (space travel, moon landing, AI). I worry that on the Right, Judeo-Christian ethics are mostly touted as ways to keep social order and cohesion and, on the Left, they're derided for a lack of acceptance and as an inhibitor to full self-expression. That's one axis, sure, but I don't think it's the entire problem space. Moreover, is much of the rising Western trouble with pervasive anxiety, sexlessness, poor family formation, etc. partially due to a loss of a quasi-faith belief structure.

Birthrates only matter if you have mass immigration (or some domestic to-the-end demographic competition, as in Israel between Arabs and Jews). I guess it’s fun to speculate about whether America will be ruled by 500 million Amish in a thousand years, but it’s very questionable whether they can sustain themselves beyond a certain population size.

If South Korea goes from 50 million to 20 million people, so what? Mass automation will make most jobs redundant in the near future, and AI and robotics will replace soldiers for defensive purposes. Their country will still be populated by Koreans who are descendants of the current inhabitants, and there will still be enough of them to preserve their culture and traditions. Over time, the most fecund minority (possibly some Christian groups, idk?) will reproduce more, and fertility rates will slowly start to rise again.

But South Korea will still be South Korea. Can the same be said about Germany, France, or Canada? The Black Death is a great example, because if you have a homogenous country and 60% of the inhabitants die and the rest survive, the character of the nation hasn’t permanently changed. If you replace the population, on the other hand, you replace the country.

If you’re okay living in a society of pets who sway docilely in whatever geopolitical winds come their way until some energetic bully shows up and displaces everyone, fine. I wouldn’t want to live in a society like that, and neither will most of the talented and ambitious young people. This creates a vicious cycle where your society becomes full of old people and spiritually sedentary young people. Sclerotic societies aren’t healthy for most people except for the most sclerotic, and you don’t want to live in a society full of them.

It’s not like people in such a society seem extremely happy, or satisfied. They’re stressed, corralled into a narrow path to social respect, and low-fertility aside, are sexless. Westerners who visit Korea or Japan find it charming and cozy af. But people who live and work there have very different impressions. My Korean immigrant wife came to America when she was 12 and is a scientist in America doing cutting edge basic research. Prior to that she wasn’t very good in following the narrow Korean mold of success and best case would’ve been stuck in some bugman office job at a giant conglomerate.

Also, the assumption that robots will save all the old people from having any young people to look after them is also pretty heroic, and kinda sad.

My Korean immigrant wife came to America when she was 12

Have you both seen Past Lives by any chance?

If you’re okay living in a society of pets who sway docilely in whatever geopolitical winds come their way until some energetic bully shows up and displaces everyone, fine.

Who exactly is this "energetic bully" that's capable of wiping away a heavily automated industrialized nation with plenty of money and resources to spare for the purposes of running their automated defenses?

How exactly did they avoid the same fate, while having a comparable military base, when almost every developed country is succumbing to demographic aging?

Also, the assumption that robots will save all the old people from having any young people to look after them is also pretty heroic, and kinda sad.

That's all irrelevant, it's the only solution* to the problem given the failure of most natalist policies, at least until the advent of something that works, which will almost certainly be after automation makes it moot. And that's leaving aside the potential for real senolytic drugs or therapies that just make the old young again.

*Leaving aside all of us dying before this has time to happen

Who exactly is this "energetic bully" that's capable of wiping away a heavily automated industrialized nation with plenty of money and resources to spare for the purposes of running their automated defenses?

I assume this references Korea's history of being a subject of foreign powers like China and Japan. It's understandable though, China is so much bigger than Korea, resistance is uneconomical. And look at their geography! A peninsula that can easily be cut off by the Chinese navy, their whole country well within range of short-range ballistic missiles.

If that's the relevant comparison, then how exactly will China remain or become "energetic" when they suffer from the same demographic decline as Korea does? If they managed to retain that, somehow, why didn't Korea?

As in geopolitics, game theory makes what might otherwise be irrational, rational. Korea is a turn-key nuclear power, if they can credibly commit to nuclear retaliation no matter how costly, they're largely safe from war.

Mass automation

Has been a boogeyman since the 1970s. Automation is only replacing jobs with low consequences of failure. Planes fly themselves already, yet pilots are still paid to sit in front.

AI and robotics will replace soldiers for defensive purposes

No they will not. The military could be much more automated than it already is, but refuses to allow computer programs to control its most expensive assets.

AI is only replacing paralegals and code monkeys.

Humans dreamed of heavier-than-air flight since the Neolithic if it's commonality in dreams is anything to go by. Didn't stop the invention of airplanes and rockets.

Automation is only replacing jobs with low consequences of failure. Planes fly themselves already, yet pilots are still paid to sit in front.

Pilots are a tiny fraction of the cost of operating an airplane. Most airlines buy models that were developed years or decades before they reach the hand of consumers. Refits and validation of existing control systems are expensive.

We've got self-driving cars in commercial use now, available for the common prole to hire, I can only chuckle ruefully at anyone who finds that less significant, when the set of drivers of motor vehicles so grossly outweighs the number of pilots.

No they will not. The military could be much more automated than it already is, but refuses to allow computer programs to control its most expensive assets.

That may or may not be true, until race dynamics develop and they have no choice but to hand control over to their AI, initially with rubberstamping that will only get more minimal and eventually non-existent. The alternative is being rolled by opponents who do, with the only saving grace being the possession of nuclear weapons as a fuck-you button. Notice how drones are utterly dominating modern conflicts?

AI is only replacing paralegals and code monkeys.

Line, meet the blank space to the right and top of you.

Well, you've saved me the trouble of saying the same.

There are a few places in the world, like South Korea, China and Japan, that are so far into demographic decline that they'll potentially experience tangible and severe hardships and decreased QOL from it, but most of the West or the rest of the world will largely not notice anything but business as usual till the current robust association between youth, a large population and economic productivity becomes uncoupled.

I suspect a major contribution to reduced TFR is that children used to be a boon (after a certain age); they are now a burden until they reach adulthood and often beyond. It sounds like this is even more true in South Korea than the US.

Coincidentally, Randal O'Toole just published an article on the same topic. He thinks the lack of low-density housing is a contributing factor.

South Korea’s high-rise housing and low birthrates are closely related. People don’t have children if they don’t have room for them. High rises are expensive to build so living space is at a premium. Birth rates are declining throughout the developed world, but they have declined the most in countries like South Korea, Russia, and China that have tried to house most of their people in high rises.

South Korea became a high rise country when it rapidly industrialized after the end of the Korean War. People moving from rural areas to the cities to get jobs created a housing crisis, and then-current urban planning theories held that high-rise housing was the best way to house people. Remember that, even though South Korea was the “good guys” in the Korean war, the country was still a dictatorship until about 1990, which meant the leadership could direct the country into one style of housing even if residents might have preferred otherwise.

High rises are cheap though, relatively speaking. Endless suburbs are not. We cannot return to our agrarian, rural past.

Lots of US economic issues could be improved by way more high rises in places like San Francisco, NYC, and the urban core of basically every metro.

Density may have negative effects on birth rates, but if you have strong birth rates you gotta build up.

High rises are cheap though, relatively speaking. Endless suburbs are not.

O'Toole says the opposite.

People like single-family homes because of privacy, yards, and other amenities, but these are reinforced by another factor: cost. Density advocates often portray multifamily housing as affordable housing, but it is only affordable because the housing units are so much smaller than single-family housing.

According to Zillow, as of March 31, 2022, the typical single-family home in the United States was worth $338,000, while the typical condominium was worth $332,000. In places that use growth boundaries or similar policies to restrict development at the urban fringe, the differences are much greater: single-family homes in the San Francisco metro area are 57 percent more expensive than condos, while in Seattle they are 63 percent more expensive.

Condos may be less expensive, but that’s because they are smaller. Zillow once published costs per square foot of single-family homes and condominiums, but no longer does so. However, data I downloaded from 2016 indicate that the average price per square foot of condominiums was 33 percent greater than the average for single-family homes.

According to California developer Nicholas Arenson, the higher cost is due to multi-story construction, which requires elevators and more concrete and structural steel. Two-story multifamily housing costs about the same, per square foot, as single-family homes. But a third story adds 30 to 50 percent, a fourth story doubles per-square-foot costs, and five or more stories are even more expensive. Since urban planners favor four- to six-story mid-rises, units have to be very small to be priced lower than single-family homes.

And:

Beyer [a promoter of densification] cited “costs of sprawl” research by Rutgers University’s Robert Burchell and Sahan Mukherji that found that “conventional development” imposed greater costs on urban service providers than “managed development.” This research was largely hypothetical and compared the costs of low-density development vs. high-density development on vacant lands.

They found that low-density development would cost $13,000 more per housing unit than high-density development. That’s a small amount compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars added to the costs of housing when urban-growth boundaries are in place.

Beyer and density-loving planners, however, aren’t talking about building dense developments on vacant lands. Instead, they want to rebuild low-density neighborhoods to higher densities. Improving the infrastructure needed to support those higher densities will be much more costly than simply building on vacant land.

A webcast audience member asked whether “low-density housing bankrupts communities through higher infrastructure, service, and transportation costs.” I know of no communities that have gone bankrupt due to low-density housing costs. I do know of cities that have defaulted on bonds they sold to support the high-density housing for which there was supposed to be a pent-up demand, but that demand didn’t materialize.

Claims that development doesn’t pay for itself simply aren’t supported by history. This nation has been developing for hundreds of years. Who paid for the urban services if not the residents and businesses that used those services? At the local level, most deficit spending and default risk today is due to generous public employee pension and health-care plans, not to the infrastructure needed to support new development.

The mistake you are making is not differentiating the value of a sq ft of housing from a sq ft of land. You have to compare apples to apples and mind the counterfactuals of supply and demand, with consideration of land use policy constraints.

The price of housing is a function of supply and demand, and dense/vertical construction is the only way to increase supply in most cases, where empty land is gone and artificial land isn’t an option. So dense housing is cheaper than the alternative of lower supply in that high-demand area.

When land is valuable and in short supply, building vertically becomes economical. Arbitrarily building skyscrapers is not typically a good idea. Generally, developers and investors work really hard to figure out where it makes sense to build however high, and when they’re lucky the zoning lets them actually build the best thing feasible.

Manhattan real estate is so valuable in large part because it is so dense and it is so dense because it is so valuable, in proximity to employment and amenities creating high demand. San Francisco is so much less dense than NYC because SF zoning laws and planning decisions prohibit density increases to match what the market would call for, given the high demand.

An empty lot or a house in say North Dakota or rural Texas is way cheaper. Until perhaps oil is discovered nearby, and then demand surges.

If you average out those high- and low- demand areas nationwide then, yeah, you’re going to get to nonsensical conclusions like “dense housing isn’t cheaper.”

Cities mismanaging land use policy and infrastructure spending (and pensions) is a tale as old as … the last 60 years or so in the US.

South Korea, Russia, and China that have tried to house most of their people in high rises.

Ignoring one child policy in China and blaming it all on highrises seems to be weird and disqualifying it.

O'Toole is close to the mark in surmising that the low birthrate is housing related, but Korean houses haven't gotten smaller in the past 30 years, so the declining birthrate doesn't come from "feeling cramped".

Instead, buying a flat (usually a condo in a high-rise) is the cultural norm in Korea upon marriage, and to marry without a flat lined up is to be subject to a lot of awkward questions. Imagine trying to avoid answering 200 variations on "so where are you going to live?" Anecdotally, the price/availability of housing has delayed every Korean marriage I am aware of. People really don't marry unless they can afford the property or win a housing lottery.

So the question O'Toole should be asking is not "why small houses?" but instead "why expensive houses now?" Part of that price could be the dependence on high-rises, but it doesn't quite have explanatory power: High-rises are more expensive to build per unit floorspace, but they are less expensive per family unit than detatched single-family homes. Construction costs cannot explain why the average sale price of a condo in Seoul is now more than one million dollars, in a country where the median income is around 50,000 dollars. The cost of housing is instead set by two other factors:

  1. Everyone wants to live in Seoul, because of the metropolis network effects: there are more jobs, more services, better infrastructure, more retail/entertainment options, better hospitals, and better schools in Seoul. Consequently, moving to Seoul is high-status: "마소의 새끼는 시골로, 사람의 새끼는 서울로." - "Send your kids to Seoul, and your foals and calves to the countryside."

  2. The housing market is dominated by speculation. For the past 15 years hodling Seoul apartments has been more lucrative than any other investment. People who have cash have been putting it into housing, people who don't have enough cash to buy flats outright have been putting it into housing "stocks" and taking out mortgages which release money if they win a government-run housing lottery (protip: for an edge in the lottery, get your disabled relative to apply, quietly buy the flat from them after a few years have passed, then flip the flat for profit). Due to a change in policy around 2020, even the mortgage route has recently became infeasible for the middle class:

Korean housing policy has been a disaster. The long and short of the linked article is that the last administration attempted to control housing prices by increasing property taxes and making it harder to get a mortgage, but this priced the middle class out of the market in Seoul and Incheon, and speculators who have cash have continued buying, with the price of condos doubling from 2018 to 2021.

My read on this is that the government is either dominated by or beholden to the speculator class. What remains to be seen is why the people seem resigned to the situation, instead of seeking alternatives. In a sane world, housing prices increasing beyond measure would incentivize more construction and more people seeking alternate housing arrangements to raise their families. To a certain extent, more construction is happening, with Seoul set to increase the limit on high-rise height and developing new satellite cities. But until then, few people seem willing to take the prestige, economic, or stability hit of moving to the countryside, trying to raise children in rental flats, or trying to raise kids in their parents' homes. Instead, young people of middling means have been moving abroad to have kids.

What’s Israeli housing policy look like? They’re the only conventional developed country above replacement, seems like we should compare.

I'm under the impression that the bulk of the above average fertility comes from conservative Jews, who are willing to endure financial hardships and the more secular Israeli society's begrudging tolerance.

Less-orthodox Jews do well too, and even secular ones are way better than anywhere else in the modernized world.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/danielle-kubes-the-truth-behind-israels-curiously-high-fertility-rate/wcm/72a8dfda-a442-47d8-8a23-76faac276fa9/amp/

Thanks for the additional information!

From what I've learned, there's nothing unusual beyond settlements.

Israel has a very natalist culture, which I think is mostly explained by their national trauma. Israel also has a very low power distance index (only Austria is lower among the developed countries, but I haven't experienced this in practice), which means you can't lose any status by having more children, living in a more cramped house and having less stuff, because you can't gain any status by having a bigger house, a bigger car and vacationing on Bali.

If the population starts really falling (and the same is true in China) even in Seoul then house prices collapse by default. I’ve seen all kinds of speculation as to why this might not be the case but I can’t see it, you can’t prop up a rental market with a huge number of empty units, especially if any landlords have mortgages or want to release equity in some other way. All you need is a few years of property heading the other way and its psychological value as a speculative asset is punctured indefinitely.

If it really is house price related then the problem is going to solve itself in short order.

That's all true, and housing prices have leveled off in some neighborhoods, so the end of the bubble may be nigh. The next step is that housing speculators push for increased immigration and increased social atomization to boost housing prices and to cover the domestic labor shortage caused by boomers retiring and millenials refusing to do blue-collar work. This will boost the anti-immigration party, which is on the left in Korea.

I wish so very much that the US right/conservative movement was not so clearly dominated by the religious types. Even many socially conservative beliefs can be defended quite well on entirely secular grounds. (And there’s the irony that the best family structures these days are in left-leaning college-educated marriages.)

Libertarians tend to be more secular, but also more outnumbered and without institutional/political power.

As America becomes more secular, something needs to give. I think this is one more reason why Trace’s post from last week is happening. Anyone born in the last few decades associates the GOP with the Religious Right, Bush and his failures, and Trump. Even if you hate progressives, you’re not likely to want to move to the right, as things are.

Of course, the trad/conservative culture in SK obviously has some problems having nothing to do with theology.

How sad how many Americans and others died to save SK so that it could become a major success story, only to face dying of old age. I guess many of our ancestors would take the same view of modern society overall.

It's a weird backwards Prisoners Dilemma where both prisoners admit to a crime they both didn't commit and explicitly ask for the maximum sentence.

In game theory, this can be a case of pluralistic ignorance, where people's preferences aren't successfully articulated and people end up agreeing to a suboptimal outcome:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance

Thank you for this. Learning has occurred.

I feel like game theory is almost like the German language in its ability to constantly create useful and concise labels for complex/abstract ideas.

I've heard German described as many things, but concise? That's a first! It might well be accurate, I don't speak it myself.

It is rather unpleasant on the ears, in my humble opinion, I'm forced to use a VPN for certain purposes, and believe me that when it defaults to a German server, the ads that precede the prurient content make my ears bleed. I don't know how the poor bastards pull off dirty talk.

Really? You find modern-day German unpleasant-sounding? I agree that old German accents were pretty harsh-sounding, but almost all of the Germans I’ve known have been so soft-spoken that their language sounded downright pretty.

French, on the other hand, is hideous. I don’t understand how it ever became “the language of love.”

The elevated status of the French language’s phonetics among Anglophones has got to be some sort of psyop, or maybe a holdover from the age in which French was the universal language of European aristocracy.

With regard to German, I imagine that the popular conception of the language as a harsh and angry one is largely mediated by a certain 20th-century art student’s use of it. Mark Twain, for instance, writes the following in 1880:

I think that a description of any loud, stirring, tumultuous episode must be tamer in German than in English. Our descriptive words of this character have such a deep, strong, resonant sound, while their German equivalents do seem so thin and mild and energyless. […] Would any man want to die in a battle which was called by so tame a term as a SCHLACHT? Or would not a comsumptive feel too much bundled up, who was about to go out, in a shirt-collar and a seal-ring, into a storm which the bird-song word GEWITTER was employed to describe? And observe the strongest of the several German equivalents for explosion--AUSBRUCH. Our word Toothbrush is more powerful than that.

How things change.

SCHLACHT is great, it’s closely related to slaughter, schlacht-en, schlacht-hof. Even phonetically it sounds like a man drowning in his own blood. BATTLE is wobbly and inconsequential.

Definitely. I spent many years not appreciating GT, despite a strong interest in other parts of economics.

There are a few hypotheses here:

  1. Judeo-Christian ethics cause people to choose more children, compared to other ethical systems.
  2. A realistic evaluation of things causes people to choose fewer children.

In 2, there's an assumption smuggled in, which is that absent a "religious" belief system, viewing life realistically means that children are a net negative. But this all depends on what one values. I'd basically interpret a belief system that concludes, after looking realistically at things, that children are a net negative as self-centered hedonism. It's the self-centered hedonism that is the problem, not looking at things realistically. One can certainly value children in themselves while being consequentialist atheist materialist rationalist.

What's needed is a value system that takes a longer view while accepting reality (insert diatribe about blank-slateism causing everything wrong in the world). Basically, future people matter, happier, smarter, better future people matter, and the best thing one can do with their life is make an infinite tree of such people by having kids. It might be that what I'm describing basically is Judeo-Christian ethics, but I think removing the supernatural takes us so far from what the original religions are about that it doesn't make sense to call it that.

I'd basically interpret a belief system that concludes, after looking realistically at things, that children are a net negative as self-centered hedonism.

Not necessarily; there's the pessimistic anti-humanism of more philosophical antinatalism, wherein children are also a net negative to themselves.

One can certainly value children in themselves while being consequentialist atheist materialist rationalist.

That's certainly true for me. I want 3 kids, ideally, but regardless of the financial hardship it might cause me, it's 2 or bust.

The future belongs to those who show up, and I can't imagine there are many people who are more likely to be similar to me than my own flesh and blood, yet.

I've sometimes said that once you encounter a family with more than three kids, you don't really need to ask whether they go to the church but which church they go to.

Within my friends group, the two families with 4 kids are both Orthodox (my daughter's godmother's family and my brother's family), and from time to time I encounter the owner of a small firm that cleans our apartment once a month, a Pentecostal lady with 8 kids. Our Orthodox parish is bustling with young parents.

OTOH probably half of my secular friends are childless (generally by choice, sometimes due to mental issues or lack or partners), and the ones with kids typically have one or two, some being single parents of one child who want more but being a single parent of course makes dating considerably more difficult.

The problem regarding public policy is that there's really no easy to way to bolster actual religiousness by state policy. At most you get cultural Christianity (like in Poland and Russia due to conservative pro-religious policies there) that tends to decay to a stale shell in quick time and has had no major impact on fertility rates. The only policy that would seem like something that produces results would be implicitly subsidizing high-fertility religious minorities, but even Christian high-fertiliy religious minorities (ie. Laestadians in Finland) tend to be notably cliquish and standoffish regarding the people not in their minority, and few people would really want to rely on a policy that might mean an explosion of influence among such groups.

personal belief in their success and a lack of knowledge of the difficulty reality. I think anyone who's been around first time parents (before birth) sees a similar hyper-optimism.

The average parent succeeds though, contrary to the average startup. Wiping a baby's ass and feeding it is very doable, and so is the rest. It's not always fun, but even the least gifted parents mostly manage not to kill their children.

That South Korean's culturally lack a transcendental, faith based backing for having children seems, to me, to be a deeper and distinctive cause of the fertility crisis there. (Distinctive in that there are also conditions present in SK that obviously correlate to low fertility, but those conditions are present in other societies with low fertility as well, not least of which is rapid economic growth and very high levels of basic education and standard of living). If you don't have "Master of the Universe says so" pressure mixed with "but Master of the Universe will help me out!" optimism.

This sounds like BS to me. In Europe, the Czech republic is the most atheistic country, and they have nearly 0.5 babies per woman more than very catholic Poland. AFAIK neither of those has huge numbers of immigrants that could skew statistics. In Western Europe, France has a rather high birthrate, also in the native population - once again, a highly post-christian nation.

In France, the issue seems to be that it's normal to have children, nobody expects women to drop out of the workforce for several years, and it's normal for men to spend time with their very young children. And you can find a nanny or a creche rather easily, so living far away from your parents or in-laws is not something that would stop you. Having children isn't seen as a life changing and life defining event - it's just something you do, and mostly not a big deal. I get the impression that countries like Germany (and maybe Korea) just lost that attitude, and the pressure of getting that huge and consequential thing right makes people simply question their ability - and avoid children altogether.

It seems clear to me that the incentives for having children aren't the same in religious and areligious societies, but the infrastructure for child friendly areligious societies can be built.

The closest commonly collected statistic which captures what I think you are talking about, is Female Workforce Participation. According to World Bank FWP and TFR are (including only OECD countries):

Australia 62 1.2

Austria 56 1.7

Belgium 51 1.6

Canada 61 1.4

Chile 49 1.5

Columbia 51 1.7

CostaRica 50 1.5

Czechia 52 1.8

Denmark 59 1.7

Estonia 60 1.6

Finland 57 1.5

France 53 1.8

Germany 56 1.6

Greece 45 1.4

Hungary 53 1.6

Iceland 71 1.8

Ireland 60 1.7

Israel 60 3.0

Italy 41 1.3

Japan 54 1.3

Latvia 55 1.6

Lithuania 59 1.3

Luxembourg 58 1.4

Mexico 46 1.8

Netherlands 61 1.6

NewZealand 67 1.6

Norway 64 1.6

Poland 51 1.3

Portugal 55 1.4

Slovakia 56 1.6

Slovenia 55 1.6

SouthKorea 55 .8

Spain 53 1.2

Sweden 62 1.7

Switzerland 62 1.5

Turkey 34 1.9

UK 59 1.6

USA 56 1.7

SouthKorea, Australia, Spain, Italy, Lithuania, Japan, Poland are bottom 7 with regards to TFR, with their FWP in order being: 55, 62, 53, 41, 59, 54, 51. Not particularly low, Italy not withstanding.

The above data plotted, for whatever that's worth.

So no correlation. If you really really want to squint, there's a slightly positive correlation (which I did not expect).

It's basically zero correlation, take out the Israel outlier and the sign of the beta will flip.

Phrased differently, it seems to me South Korean's may be too realist and grounded in their evaluations of things. Again, having children is hard. If you analyze all of the realities of child rearing, you are going to find thousands of reason not to do it. Without a faith-level "Yeah, but fuck it!" decision making mechanism, it makes sense that a highly educated and highly rational community would not see many kids.

I'll conclude by asking the Motte to chime in on anything about the above, of course. More specifically, however - To what extent are the Judeo-Christian roots of the United States responsible for cultural attitudes of "hyper optimistic belief" around things like child rearing, entrepreneurship, scientific frontier-ism (space travel, moon landing, AI). I worry that on the Right, Judeo-Christian ethics are mostly touted as ways to keep social order and cohesion and, on the Left, they're derided for a lack of acceptance and as an inhibitor to full self-expression. That's one axis, sure, but I don't think it's the entire problem space. Moreover, is much of the rising Western trouble with pervasive anxiety, sexlessness, poor family formation, etc. partially due to a loss of a quasi-faith belief structure.

I’ve said this before, but birthrates in the post-contraceptive world depend on whether people expect to enjoy raising kids. South Korean childhood seems legitimately awful for everyone involved; of course a realistic thinker opts out of doing it a second time!

If you look at groups with the pill that have above replacement fertility rates, by contrast, you see people who want to have kids. Rednecks really look forwards to going to their kids’ sporting events and taking them fishing and teaching them to work on cars, and have an entire genre of very popular music about how wanting to be a mother turns otherwise plain-looking women phenomenally beautiful.

And it’s not necessarily that one is clear eyed and the other is hopelessly romanticized; South Korean childhood is legitimately much more unpleasant than redneck childhood, for both parties. But you don’t have to go to South Korea to see the impact of attitudes towards Natality; blue tribe fertility is on the lower end of average for the developed world and blue tribe culture is full of fretting about how awful motherhood is. You contrast that to red tribe culture and it’s obvious.

People want kids when they expect to enjoy parenting. I’m not saying there aren’t economic or structural issues going on. But remember the study of teenaged girls who had to take care of a baby doll like a real baby, discovered they liked it, and then went and got pregnant? Wanting kids is a pretty big factor and people on the motte underrate it significantly.

Its social and cultural mores are most heavily influenced by filial devotion and family-ethno-cultural tradition in a secular context.

I think that's it. My impression is that if you're a South Korean woman (or East Asian in general), you're expected to both be successful in a career (to uphold your family's investment in you and make your parents proud) and to get married, and be respectful to your husband's family, and produce kids while combining that with a career. It's the "you can't have it all dilemma" turned up to eleven, because at least in the West women are not expected in the same way to be at the beck and call of the mother-in-law and husband's family.

So if you're a young Korean couple, why would you want to get married? Or start having kids? Too much crushing expectation from all sides both from your families and the surrounding culture.

Every society has their "golden path": study, employment, marry, have kids, retire, die. In Korea, the golden path is very well-established: study, get into a university, graduate, get a white-collar job, get engaged, buy a condo, marry, move into the condo upon returning from the honeymoon, and have kids 9 months later. Note two things: first, marriage is scheduled shortly after the couple buys a condo, and second, that most of the people who deviate from this golden path (traditionally) will have been low-status, low-class, or of lower impulse-control. Deviations from the path result in a loss of social status, a lot of awkward conversations with friends and relatives, and sometimes even the loss of legally-mandated benefits (which benefits are rather small to start out with).

So the failure to have kids is tied up in a cultural resistance to deviate from the path, as well as with inability to buy flats.

The average price of a flat in Seoul doubled from 2018 to 2021.

There isn't much more to be said. Any dual-income, median-wage-earning, responsible millenial couples (1) who were saving up to get married discovered mid-pandemic that the prices on flats were rising at roughly 5x the rate at which they could put away money. (2) Half the young professionals I know were hodling their savings into cryptocurrency and stonks, because nothing else had a high enough rate of return to keep up with housing (and then Tether blew up).

The government is unlikely to do anything about housing prices: popping the housing bubble would devastate the economy, stop a bunch of construction projects needed for increasing housing supply, devastate the wealth of the political class, and wipe out the wealth of retirees who were putting their money into housing funds and are very politically active. Much easier to shrug shoulders about subsidies for kids are not working and there is nothing that can be done.

(1) Young white collar couples will not earn median income in Korean society. Millenials in their 30s might, but in their 20s they are working overtime gratis for a chance at getting promoted.

(2) This oversimplifies, omitting the interest rates on jeonsae mortgages, which are a whole 'nother level of fucked up: the tenant takes out a mortgage to put down a deposit for a two-year housing lease, where the deposit is capped at 80~90% of the value of the property. The landlord keeps any interest made when investing the deposit, and when the two-year lease is over may renegotiate and increase the deposit amount. So the tenant needs to save up the money for an upcoming increase in the deposit while also paying back for the interest on the deposit to the bank. At some point around 2021 jeonsae increases of $100,000 were not uncommon.

Thanks for providing some of these extra specifics. The raw economics on the ground often get lost in the "reporting" (because journalists are scared of math)

The “social expectations” pressure theory just doesn’t make sense. If South Koreans are such slaves to social pressure, how is it that they feel so easily able to shirk it all and avoid marriage and kids entirely (which is surely even more shameful)?

I agree but probably from a different angle. This article (linked in the OP), is a must read. Something is seriously wrong in the water in SK, there just seems to be a much higher base rate of the (almost universal and new) gender animosity in SK. Hell they have a womens version of MGTOW that seems to be just as radical as the male version and they elected an "incel" president (says so on the article).

My gut feeling is that "to fix the birthrate, you must first fix the fuck rate". I would like to see some data on male-female attractiveness differentials and gender animosity and birth rates, broken down by country. I think the conversatives despite being the only ones to talk about the fuck-rate aspect of it all are still putting the cart before the horse. Something is severly broken in modern (m|d)ating, and I think it gets given less credence in these conversations than it should be. Yes, I'm bringing practically 0- evidence, but it's a very latent gut feeling I have.

I think Korea is just a country that naturally takes things to extremes. Like when Buddhism was introduced they got super into Buddhism, and then more recently they took to Christianity hardcore. Online gaming, Go/baduk, and boy/girl pop groups. SK is super capitalist while NK is super communist. And not just big things but silly little fads like eating streams or Taiwanese cakes (the failed business of the family in Parasite) seem to take the whole country by storm one day, then disappear the next. So it makes sense to me that they would also push feminism and MRA to their most toxic extremes.

It’s socially easier to say ‘I haven’t found the right girl/guy’ than to have a bunch of kids and refuse to provide the expected massive parental investment.

Rushton’s pet peeve was to rank blacks > whites > asians on every scale, and r/K was a big one, it fits with the observed fertility.

But the fertility results have been decreasing for blacks, whites and Asians, especially in industrialized countries. In US the black fertility rate is only marginally higher than white fertility rate, and when compared to the 7-8 child families from over a century ago, the Asian rate is not that different, either. I've never understood how the "r/K fertility strategy" thing is supposed to fit with the current data.

Still fits (ok, hispanics should be lower, but they’ve had less time to be culturally acclimated). I don’t mean it’s strongly genetically predetermined, obviously culture plays a large role. r/K provides an explanation why supposedly pro-children cultural beliefs (that they should be supported) are effectively anti-children. The west is facing a tradeoff between a few supremely coddled and educated children, and enough of them.

The legal and cultural responsibilities of parenthood should be massively curtailed. Safe haven laws should be expanded to the first 18 years of the child’s life (obviously the other parent should get first dibs). I don’t mean people should walk away from their responsibilities, just that they should be free to. It would lessen the pressure on those who don’t, encouraging them to have more. Right now the decision to have a child is the equivalent of signing an irreversible, decades long legal servitude contract.

Given the apparently dire fertility situation (and attendant pension problems etc), it’s even doubtful that aborting/not having kids is worse for society than filling orphanages with the children of unfit mothers and cads. I would certainly prefer to grow up in an orphanage than not exist at all. Seen that way, the ‘best interest of the child’ doctrine works against the best interest of the child.

the ‘best interest of the neurotic safetyist not having to read about child deaths on the news’ doctrine works against the best interest of the child.

I resolutely agree with you that this is the case; it's offensive to human dignity of all people that a child's mother should be arrested for the crime of letting their nearly-biologically-adult-aged child walk down the street seemingly-unsupervised.

Yes, explicitly encouraging kids to exercise the freedom they used to have back before we went off the deep end is going to result in some chaos, but actually allowing them to grow for once might have positive consequences 30 years down the line when they start judging having kids as worthwhile now that the shadow of Karen (enforced by the State) isn't looming over them.

and then Tether blew up

Tether never blew up, are you thinking of Luna?

UST & USDT easy to get mixed up. Terra, potentially?

Yeah, I was thinking of Terra. Not really into crypto.

Judeo-Christian

Sorry to hijack, but why not just "Christian?" This term has always just seemed to me a politician's hedge against being called a "Christian supremacist" or something. I don't think the ethics of Judaism had much impact on U.S. history.

Apologies if this gets pattern-matched to the incessant JQ-posting/trolling we get here. But I really don't know why people use this word outside of political speeches or discussions of 1st century religious history.

Based on what I know about South Korea, which isn’t much, here’s what I imagine goes on: if you’re a middle-class or lower-middle-class couple (I can’t even tell if they actually use such terminology there) and have only one child, let’s say a boy, there’s a slim but still somewhat reasonable chance that he’ll get into one of the top universities and get some moderately cushy job at Samsung after all those cram school classes, private tutoring and other endless drudgery. However, if you have a second or even a third child, it’ll mean that you won’t have the resources to pay for their cram school classes, private tutors etc. as well, which will condemn them later to the existential horror of having to live outside Seoul, not attending one of the top 5 unis, not working for Samsung etc. In other words, having more than one child will result in you being ostracized from normie polite society as a careless, unconcerned prole. Am I right?

That just about matches with my mental model of the social dynamics, and although I would blame housing prices for the Covid-era drop in birthrates, it is likely that the longer-term drop is more about education prices.

The expressions they use would be literally translated as "gold spoon," "silver spoon," "bronze spoon," "iron spoon" for upper, middle-upper, and middle, and lower class, respectively, although this take on wealth has been memed to include diamond, wood, plastic, and dirt.

That sort of makes sense, although I don't quite understand why, say, entering vocational training and becoming a skilled worker is seemingly considered such a lowly lot in these societies. I thought they had a significant manufacturing sector, plus fisheries etc., and that the quality of vocational training available is pretty good.

In last week’s thread, @greyenlightenment made the following observation regarding the evergreen subject of the sex recession:

It's interesting how some on the right has shifted from decrying how there is too much promiscuity (pre-2021 or so), to now from a trad-perspective decrying how young people are not having enough sex and lowered fertility rates.

As far as I can tell, this almost counts as a recurring theme among online leftists (not that I consider @greyenlightenment to be one in particular), one that serves as an ideological cudgel and also as a short cautionary tale with a “careful what you wish for” message. But I certainly don’t think it’s baseless, which is the other reason I think it merits more discussion here.

I happen to have vague memories of various conservative arguments I encountered after discovering Townhall and other similar right-wing sites in the early 2000s, and one thing they definitely liked to address regarding sexual mores was the embarrassingly high teenage pregnancy rate in the US. Well, I’m no sociologist but I suspect this statistical anomaly was and is(?) largely explained by the presence of large African-American and Latino ethnic minorities, plus the presence of large numbers of Scots-Irish with low impulse control, but of course mainstream conservatives were not going to point that out, opting instead to use this as a lame argument against encroaching sexual licentiousness or something.

Other than this, I’d not say it was too much promiscuity as such that conservatives decried, to the extent they even bothered, but the apparent push to normalize and sanitize female promiscuity in pop culture. I specifically remember the 2004 romantic comedy The Girl Next Door, for example, because multiple conservative commentators pointed out that its depiction of a supposedly average porn actress living the dream without suffering any social or psychological consequences of her career choice is misleading at best. There was also Sex in the City as well, obviously.

Anyway, this was all a long time ago, and I only brought up these two off the top of my head to encourage others here to bring up similar memories of their own.

On a different note, I don’t think it’s difficult to see how and why poking fun at old conservative fogeys this way is rather dishonest. After all, yes, surely they are happy to see teenage pregnancy rates and STD rates falling, for example, but they also surely never wanted any of this to happen as a consequence of social atomization and the overall atrophy of socializing itself, which is something that clearly contradicts conservative ideals.

Also, let’s not forget that teenage delinquency in general was generally seen as a big problem back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and not just by conservatives. Back then it was obviously very difficult to foresee a future where average parents actually wished that their teenage children went outside and hanged out at the park, the mall or the arcade.

In the dissident circles I travel in, I've seen the phrase "sex positive traditionalist" as an alternative to both progressive sexual attitudes and to sex-negative conservative attitudes. The sex-positive-traditionalist would rather men and women not be promiscuous, we would rather see people only have sex in marriage and to have children. However, this view differs from the "purity culture" conservatives of the 00's. That culture -- especially the more wordly moderately conservative Christians and the more worldy Catholics -- told teens to wait until marriage but then put their kids on the college->grad school->career track at the expense of the marriage track. They would also encourage very long engagements. Following such a plan forced adherents to either be very sex negative, they would have to wait for a long time to get married and have sex, or, more likely, the kids would get tired of waiting and drop the religion. Whereas a "sex positive traditionalist" would prioritize early marriage over going to college.

Specifically in terms of Catholic pastoral care, "sex positive traditionalism" would mean giving long-dating or cohabitating couples a shotgun marriage and telling them to go forth and make babies, rather than telling them to move out of the same apartment and live chastely for a year as they go through a lengthy "pre-cana" process.

The sex-positive-traditionalist is also very pro sex within marriage, believing in that there is moral an obligation to perform the "marital act", even when one spouse perhaps has not been feeling it for a few days. Whereas the contemporary progressive is horrified at the idea that a married woman be pressured into sex or have some obligation to give sex.

sex positive traditionalist

This is more or less how I hope to raise my own children. It'd be nice if there was a catchier name though.

So either it ended up being very sex negative, adherents would have to wait for a long time to get married and have sex, or, more likely, the kids would get tired of waiting and drop the religion

And, moreover, it meant that conservative Christians had to regard their sexuality (not just sex, but also masturbation, thinking about sex, being attracted to someone etc.) as dangerous for a large chunk of their lives - in the case of Catholic priests or monks/nuns, their whole lives. That naturally attracts people who tend to be frightened, ashamed, or otherwise maladjusted with their sexuality. They won't be all of the community, but they'll be a big chunk of it.

This reached an extreme in some cases (I have a gay ex-Catholic monk friend and he said that being in the Catholic clergy was a never-ending banquet of repressed or de facto open lovers for him; it was very hard for him to come across a straight monk) but it's an issue even in Christian youth groups, unless they go heavily down the early marriage route to provide an outlet for divinely approved sexual urges. The well-adjusted evangelicals/devout Catholics that I knew growing up were all married by the time that they left university at 22, even if they didn't have children until later.

it was very hard for him to come across a straight monk

I should hope so!

I laughed out loud on the train platform, thanks.

Glad to see that someone got the innuendo!

I just want to point out that long engagements, and overly long periods of dating, are not seen positively within catholic moral doctrine. ‘Sex negative traditionalism’ wasn’t rooted in the religion.

Don’t forget, the primary decrying was of unwed teenage mothers, “girls who got knocked up” with no intention of “tying the knot”. Teenagers (read: high school minors) shouldn’t be having sex, goes the thinking, but if they do, it should be after a youthful marriage on their honeymoon, or for the conservative liberals of the time, at least in the context of a serious relationship, not just a casual form of recreation.

In pro-life communities, then to abort the proof of extramarital sex would compound the sin with a worse one; have the grandparents raise it as a miracle baby in their old age if the father won’t do the responsible thing. This was an era when divorce was still seen as an epidemic rather than the norm it has become, and a child’s birthday less than nine months from their parents’ wedding was still scandalous. Nowadays, with sex and marriage almost entirely decoupled (pardon the pun), it’s hard to remember the sociopolitical nuances from when they were intimately intwined.

plus the presence of large numbers of Scots-Irish with low impulse control

IIRC the teen pregnancies among rural southern whites tend to be intentional because teenage girls who think they’re in love make considered but still quite bad decisions, and shotgun weddings are accepted practice. This is ‘teenaged decision making skills combining with local cultural practices to create foreseen consequences ’, not an impulse control issue.

I don’t think it’s difficult to see how and why poking fun at old conservative fogeys this way is rather dishonest.

The old conservative fogey model is the song Wouldn't It Be Nice by the Beach Boys: Young people should want to have sex and not do it, which encourages marriage. A world in which teenagers can have sex and don't want to is as gross a perversion of nature as supposedly switching genders, removing the focused drive that has inspired art and other achievements for millenia.

A world in which men can fuck boys and don’t want to is such a perversion, too. Which is to say not at all. Pederasty and teen sex drive are far from the “focused drive” you’re lionizing.

  • -10

A world in which men can fuck boys and don’t want to is such a perversion, too. Which is to say not at all. Pederasty and teen sex drive are far from the “focused drive” you’re lionizing.

I think somewhere deep down in the human subconscious M/F sex is understood as the most essentially (pro-)creative act, mirroring in kind other forms of great human achievement. Any other kind of sex (that carries no risk of impregnation) is anti-creative or a nullification of creativity (sort of like the black nothingness in The Neverending Story).

I don’t buy it.

There are so, so many examples of non-procreative sex lionized in the manner you describe. Ancient Greek practices are the first that come to mind. Conversely, rape does not usually get the same treatment, and rightly so. Do you think that an opportunistic rapist cares about the artistic, generative achievement of his conquest? Or is he more invested in the base stimulus?

I suspect this statistical anomaly was and is(?) largely explained by the presence of large African-American and Latino ethnic minorities, plus the presence of large numbers of Scots-Irish with low impulse control

Not…exactly?

Black White Hispanic Total
1991 118 43 105 62
2002 68 29 84 43
2016 29 14 32 20
2021 22 9 21 14

Data from here.

Everyone’s numbers went down, and at inconsistent rates. I don’t think you can point to any one population. These stats are 15-19, which is probably dominated by young married couples, but I’m tired of formatting markdown tables. Suffice to say that the Hispanic 15-17 pregnancy rate probably changes the least, but it’s still going down 30% between the 90s and 00s.

Notice also that the overall US birth rate climbs until the 2008 crash. The teen trend just keeps going down, but older, more competent groups have an inflection point.

For what it’s worth, my experience in the very white, very Christian Midwest was that bored teenagers in small towns were absolutely getting hitched based on their first or second teenage relationship. And there are a lot of them. So I don’t have a hard time believing that there were a bunch of kids born to these couples.

I'm assuming the numbers are birth rates per 1000 people

Doesn't the data provide some evidence for Botond's point though? Black and Hispanic teen birth rates were raising the average to 30-50% above the white birth rate. It also doesn't break down the white population any further, so while his hunch about the "presence of large numbers of Scots-Irish with low impulse control" isn't proven, it isn't disproven either.

We'd have to consider what would have been an acceptable rate for the birth rate to not be an "embarrassingly high" number for the early 2000s. Birth rates for teens have been on the overall decline since 1955 except for a bump from 1986 to 1991 and minor bump from 2005 to 2007. (The source for their data is the same source you linked). I don't know exactly what the early 2000s conservatives were arguing regarding the birth rate being too high for teens, since it has been declining. My guess is they were considering mostly the black and Hispanic population, considering it's 2-3x the white teen birth rate. Their numbers in 1991 seem to put them close to the national average rate in 1955, and the numbers from 2002 to 1965. Since the overall rate has been declining for decades, the rate would be only embarrassingly high if it was much higher compared to other modern first-world nations, or if they were talking about a specific group. We'd also have to consider if they were thinking about specific areas of the United States, like cities versus rural areas or specific states.

These stats are 15-19, which is probably dominated by young married couples

What Botond didn't mention but probably meant was that the concern in the early 2000s was more about out-of-wedlock teenage pregnancy than just teenage pregnancy. If you look at the source I linked earlier it shows that by the early 2000s, more than 75% of births for teenagers were to unmarried mothers, and that the percentage is even higher the younger the age of the mother. That number has only gone up since then. That being said, the total number of births to unmarried mothers has declined even if the percentage of births that are to unmarried mothers has increased.

Could be. I guess I was parsing “largely explained” as referring to totals, because the rates are definitely concentrated in black and Hispanic populations.

I'm going to repeat my question from the last thread: Who has actually switched? From my perspective it looks like one group of people (including me) wants less promiscuity while another group (not including me) is worried about the "sex recession". "The right" is far too broad a brush, big coalitions will inherently contain contradictions (see also: US Muslims and US Jews both supporting Democrats).

I think the phenomenon is fundamentally real, but I'd rephrase it as such:

20-40 years ago, average middle-aged people of conservative temperament were concerned that teenagers were hanging out together too much, drinking, playing in arcades, hanging out in malls and parks, being up to no good, getting tempted into casual sex by raunchy stuff they see on the TV.

Today, those same people, now elderly, plus currently middle-aged people of the same basic conservative temperament, are concerned that teenagers aren't getting outside enough, don't hang out together, don't hit on each other, don't form romantic relationships, don't even party and generally spend way too much time online.

Humans are fickle like that.

Who's one person who was contained in both groups? Like, I'm not discounting that some people might have shifted, but I honestly can't think of even one.

Or they want something in the middle? They want young people to date, get married, and start a family. They don't want them to have unprotected sex with tons of strangers, or to be isolated at home with no contact. That seems pretty reasonable...

Pretty much, yes.

Also, let’s not forget that teenage delinquency in general was generally seen as a big problem back in the ‘80s and ‘90s

That's just because there were way more of them than there are today. Teens in the '80s and '90s were on the falling edge of the mid-century TFR peak of 3.0, so that would have been about the time the older population was starting to get tired of them and decided to just ban them from everything... because that's what you're allowed to do to people that aren't actually human beings yet, right?

It was certainly a course-correction, to be sure, but one fraught with moral hazard. Which is kind of the inherent problem with dehumanization in the first place; as KulakRevolt once put it, a world not dominated by the laughter of obnoxious young boys is one dominated by the hatred of angry old people, and only one of those outlooks has any future.

I'm sure that explains part of it, but not all of it. Social change also reached a point where casual sex and drug use became largely normalized, there was a crack cocaine epidemic, video arcades and MTV appeared, parental supervision in general decreased.

I'm under the impression that parental (or in loco parents) supervision of children has been more or less steadily increasing since at least the 1930s, hence why kids are driven everywhere, parents get arrested for letting their teenage kids play in the park I'm unsupervised and "free range parenting" hads emerged as an effort to counter this insanity.

At what point do you think supervision decreased?

At what point do you think supervision decreased?

At the point, I assume, when it became normal to leave children to pacify themselves by watching TV, playing video games, hanging out in arcades and attending house parties. Them being driven everywhere, as I'm certain you'll agree, is largely a consequence of suburban white flight, and hardly a case of parental supervision.

Just yesterday, I mentioned that a variety of more rural Canadians that I met on my last visit to the area all expressed some form of concern about their "culture changing" with respect to significant immigration. I didn't have great examples, because I'm still mostly an outsider to them.

This morning, my wife shared this with me. The Moncton city hall has, for the last twenty years, displayed a large menorah around Hanukkah. That tradition ends this year. The city cited "separation of church and state" as the driver of their change of course, as if something in the legal landscape has changed in the last twenty years concerning public displays of religious symbols. Spoiler: nothing in the legal landscape concerning separation of church and state has changed in Canada in the last twenty years concerning public displays of religious symbols. The city is getting mostly derided in social media, and a common talking point is that they're putting out this claim while, at the very same moment, prominently displaying all sorts of Christmas decorations.

So what has changed? Here is where I have a little bit of insider exposure. I don't have public sources for this, and so I'm not actually even sure of how accurate it is, but it's the story "on the street". Basically, there's not that many Jews in the area, anyway, maybe a couple few hundred, but they've been there for a long time. Part of the community. Part of the culture. On the other hand, the sense was that circa ten years ago, there was almost no Muslim presence whatsoever. I was told that ten years ago, the only mosque in the area was really just a small house that had been repurposed. Since then, massive amounts of immigration from Francophone North Africa. They've come with a predominant religion and, well, different cultural understandings. This is what seems to have changed.

Obviously, the cherry on top of what's changed is October 7. It's tempting to think that that is the only thing that's changed, and even if they didn't have all the immigration in the past several years, the city of Moncton would have made the same choice. However, I can't help but be reminded of the old quote about how you go broke two ways: first, slowly, then second, all at once. It's hard to detangle the two.

EDIT: I realized after posting that I wanted to mention something else that was in my mind, but never figured out how to include it. It's that, culturally, they're bloody Canadians! Their culture is obscenely polite and accepting of others, other cultures, and multiculturalism generally. They're more than happy to let people do all sorts of their own cultural things, and general tolerance skews quite high. They're really of the "we can all get along" mindset. This is one of those things that seems to be cracking as they struggle with new situations that they find themselves in, and seems to me to be one of the reasons why they're so confused about these changes occurring in their own midst.

I realized after posting that I wanted to mention something else that was in my mind, but never figured out how to include it. It's that, culturally, they're bloody Canadians! Their culture is obscenely polite and accepting of others, other cultures, and multiculturalism generally. They're more than happy to let people do all sorts of their own cultural things, and general tolerance skews quite high. They're really of the "we can all get along" mindset. This is one of those things that seems to be cracking as they struggle with new situations that they find themselves in, and seems to me to be one of the reasons why they're so confused about these changes occurring in their own midst.

Something I can speak of when I talk to friends and family about their shifting opinions on immigration is that there's a widespread sentiment that people feel their tolerance and generosity has been abused. Not necessarily by immigrants alone (or more accurately, not by immigrants who aren't international students), but also by federal and provincial governments. Most people I know are small-l liberals and up until a year or two ago were broadly supportive of immigration. Now people are much more skeptical, and think they might have been naïve about the intentions of government/business as well as the attitude of prospective immigrants. The change in opinions has been very rapid and has not necessarily come from people I would have expected. I think the Liberals might have killed the golden goose here by going too hard, too fast.

With respect to francophone immigrants from North Africa, in Canada there's been somewhat of a friction historically between them and middle Eastern Muslims. Maghrebien Canadians tend to be much more hostile to the hijab and other things they view as signs of Arabic cultural dominance within the Muslim world. Maghrebien immigrants broadly supported the Québec's government banning of public employees wearing "religious symbols" (which was effectively targeted specifically at the hijab).

The Jewish insistence to insert their Menorahs on public lands, regardless of how few Jews live in some municipality, has always been Culture War. And unlike the traditional Christmas displays which genuinely are now fully secularized, these Menorah displays are deeply religious in nature. The rationalization is that these Menorahs are symbols of "religious tolerance", but they are not, they are sacred symbols of the Jewish religion and everything it represents, including Zionism.

It is ironic to now see Jews complaining about "selective interpretation" of the law, given that they've enjoyed a state of affairs where Christian holy symbols- crosses and Nativity, are banned on public lands and the Jewish holy symbol is revered on the same. Really, they are complaining about an equalization of the law where only secular symbols are allowed. Yes, that includes the Christmas tree and excludes the Menorah.

The Menorah is a minor religious symbol and does not hold the same status in Judaism as the cross does in Christianity. The Torah is probably about as important to Jews as the cross is to Christians, and the Torah is not regularly displayed in public spaces.

It's true that Menorahs on public grounds have always been culture war, but I think everything else in your post is gross exaggeration.

The menorah is a more ancient symbol of Judaism than the Star of David. It's the symbol of the Mossad... Saying it is "a minor religious symbol" is not only untrue but doesn't even challenge the point I'm making. It is a religious symbol of Judaism (can you name any symbols more important than the menorah? You say "the Torah" which is a book and not even a symbol per se...) so it doesn't belong on public lands if our laws were fairly interpreted.

I'm trying to challenge your statement:

And unlike the traditional Christmas displays which genuinely are now fully secularized, these Menorah displays are deeply religious in nature.

I don't see how you can argue that a "traditional Christmas display" (such as the angels/trumpets linked in the OP, or the still common nativity scenes) is "fully secularized" while a Menorah is not. My point is that the Menorah has no more significance in Judaism than these symbols have in Christianity, and I'd even argue it is much more minor than something like the nativity.

Christmas is fully integrated as part of the general Civic Religion. Every atheist I know celebrates Christmas with a Christmas tree etc. I agree angels are more debatable, sure ban them too. But a Christmas tree is a symbol of a civic ritual, Christianity will decline but Christmas will continue to grow bigger than ever.

My point is that the Menorah has no more significance in Judaism than these symbols have in Christianity

A Menorah has far more religious symbolism than a Christmas tree, which is clearly inspired from Pagan rituals and has no symbolic relation to Christianity at all.

A Christmas tree is genuinely a secular symbol, a menorah is not a secular symbol. The menorah is literally the centerpiece of the official emblem of the State of Israel, it is not secular at all.

Oh, so it’s a state symbol. Problem solved.

Really, the easiest route here is just to get atheists placing menorahs. Then it will have the “fully integrated” status.

It's a religious symbol embraced as being emblematic, literally, of the Jewish state which is currently engaged in an ethnic cleansing of occupied land. It's not secular. A Christmas tree is secular.

Christmas trees came about in the 1500s in the Baltics and are decidedly Lutheran in origin. The notion that Christmas is merely a rebranded pagan holiday (Yule or Saturnalia) is anti-Christian propaganda.

Other than Santa Claus*, Reindeer, and Snowflakes, all major Christmas symbols are directly Christian (decorated Christmas trees, Angels, Star of Bethlehem)

*(and even then Saint Nicholas, is obviously, a link to Christianity)

I don't think Christmas is a rebranded pagan holiday that is now Christian, it's a rebranded Christian holiday that is now pagan. The mythos around Santa Claus and Christmas, very little of it has anything to do with Christianity. A Christmas tree holds no religious significance, it marks participation in the dyonisian winter festivities that have always featured in Indo-European civilization with many commonalities. The entire Christmas aesthetic is fundamentally pagan and hyperborean, with the Nativity as the exception. The rest of it is absolutely secular.

Santa Claus is not a saint, he's an immortal pagan god, and a goofy god at that.

I get my mother a Santa Claus figurine each year.

I will be shopping for the "IMMORTAL PAGAN GOD" version this year. Thank you.

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Christmas trees came about in the 1500s in the Baltics and are decidedly Lutheran in origin. The notion that Christmas is merely a rebranded pagan holiday (Yule or Saturnalia) is anti-Christian propaganda.

I think this is bullshit. I've read the arguments, I know what historians think about this and I'm still convinced their arguments are weak.

There is no logical reason you would decorate an evergreen tree to celebrate the birth of the son of god, which happened in a cave and involved no trees at all. The christmas log is an even better example, somehow there's local customs, spread from the uk to turkey relating to a magical chunk of wood. Where does that come from? Turns out, nowhere. It just starts getting mentioned out of nowhere. Same thing with the christmas tree, at some point it just starts existing for no logical reason.

I think there are two explanations, one is that they are pre-christian traditions that survived underground until they re-emerged at some point (it doesn't even have to be that much underground, it just needs to be a topic that wasn't recorded in writing). Or they are new traditions that don't have anything to do with christianity, a sort of repaganization of europe.

It's hard to tell which is the case because the christian middle ages didn't bother keeping a record of pagan european tradition.

Mossad has a menorah on their logo because Israel has a menorah on their emblem/coat of arms.

The real question is, what does the seven branch menorah have to do with Hanukkah?

I wouldn't kick up about menorahs, it's at least an attempt to find a compatible religious festival for the same time. I more dislike the very secular versions to replace Christmas, but I've learned to tolerate them (at least round where I am, where there isn't really the effort to dislodge Christmas as "it's a religious festival and so offensive!")

Lot better than the stupid Satanist crap. At least the Book of Maccabees has war elephants, which are always cool.

(The Satanists are indeed entitled to put up stupid crap for holidays, like anyone else. But this doesn't even pretend to be anything but a sneer at Christians; it's not even trying to celebrate Sol Invictus or anything similar. I'll take a third-rate but genuine religious memorial over 'ha ha ain't we so clever?' stunts any day).

Nativity scenes aren’t banned on public land, anyways.

It basically is, there are legal standards that determine when the context is allowed or not allowed. Those standards are explicitly looser for Menorahs. I am saying Menorahs should be held to the same standards as the Nativity or Cross.

Maybe the motive was bad, but the removal of Hanukkah from public celebration makes sense. It’s a minor Jewish holiday, not one of the six mandated festivals in the Torah or one of the high holy days. It commemorates a small middle eastern nation defeating their enemy in war. There’s nothing morally or culturally interesting about it, either for humanity entirely or for Canadians specifically.

On the other hand, Christmas celebrates the birth of a new religion and ethical system, which was so important that it restarted our calendars and indirectly inspired developments like global abolition and the Magna Carta. All of the important founding Canadians were Christian afaik, which means they believed Christmas to be the most important day in human history. It’s poetically and symbolically beautiful even if you think it’s just a fable, and it was a mainstay of Western art and music for 1500+ years.

The reason this particular Jewish holiday is by the Christian majority elevated, is that happens during the Christmass season. When a decorated conifer is put up by the state, a litigous Atheist could sue claiming it is a religous symbol, but if Mennorah is placed beside it, neutrality is preserved.

Even in celebrating a Jewish holiday, non-Jewish motives play a role.

Growing up in the '90s, at my primary school we learned roughly equal amounts about Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa come December - despite Hanukkah being at best the third most important Jewish holiday and Kwanzaa not really being an actual thing. In my year we had no Jewish or black kids.

Ironically we did have two Zoroastrians but we never got to learn about their cool religion.

Same deal here. Someone really wanted Kwanzaa to take off.

My Kwanzaa related education in Southern California consisted of "Kwanzaa is a holiday that happens close to when Christmas does... it celebrates African culture." And that was about it.

Our local library still does this, despite everyone in the area being Catholic, Protestant, or irreligious. Also, the "Christmas" part of things was super generic, just reindeer and trees, while Hanukkah and Kwanzaa were more specific. I don't think I'll be taking the kids this year, last year they found the only person in town who celebrates Kwanzaa, and she spent a long time talking rather quietly, until the kids were so restless I had to leave. For Hanukkah, they played a dreidel game to win chocolate coins, so that some kids got a ton more treats than others, like they were trying to emphasize things people were most likely to make fun of Jews for.

I would much prefer to do something for Christmas in December, Passover in Spring, and Ramadan/Eid as an interesting roving holiday. Passover is way more interesting, and told by multiple religious traditions. Lacking that, I would rather just have Festivus decorations than fake representation (this is basically what my school district does, with lots of elf stuff, and I'm not really into it, but it does basically make sense as a December religious truce).

Passover in Spring

Easter is a pretty big deal in Christianity, as in the biggest feast ever to religious christians.

I know. And they're related. If it were up to me, we would celebrate that too. Pascha is the best holiday. But if the library is going to celebrate a Jewish holiday for equity reasons, I would rather it be a good one. Sukkah also seems pretty neat.

DEI isn't about reflecting what's meaningful in other cultures. I'm pretty sure that's cultural appropriation. DEI is about making a token acknowledgement of other cultures while you do something for the mainstream. Hannukah is a perfect example of that; it's not actually a very big deal in Judaism, but it's pretty hard to mistake it for being Christian.

Agree that Hanukkah probably isn’t that big a holiday in Kiryas Joel, but I’m of the understanding that mainstream westernized Jews treat it as a very big deal.

Kiryas Joel,

also notably the poorest county in the US

Nominally. They were/are actually wealthy as far as quality of life is concerned (highest birth rate in country; their own private security; their own maternity clinic; governors speaking specifically in their town)

All of the important founding Canadians were Christian afaik, which means they believed Christmas to be the most important day in human history.

Christmas is not the most important holiday from a religious Christian perspective. Easter is. Jesus' birth matters primarily because it allows for his eventual execution and resurrection.

All of the important founding Canadians were Christian afaik, which means they believed Christmas to be the most important day in human history.

In addition to AshLael’s correction about Easter, I’ll note that any early Puritan or Presbyterian Canadian settlers would have been decidedly anti-Christmas. I don’t know enough about Canadian history to say how much of an influence they might have had, but I know at least one of the American colonies (Massachusetts) made it illegal to celebrate Christmas at all.

Canada did not have many British colonists until the mid 18th century, long after the time of the Puritans, though many of their descendants came during this period from the United States. It did have a lot of Presbyterians as there were a lot of immigrants from Scotland and Northern Ireland.

It's worth pointing out that Canada doesn't have separation of church and state. The constitution recognizes the supremacy of God and the head of state is also the head of the established church. It also guarantees the funding of demoninational schools. We even had a law against blasphemy until 2018.

Major NYT opinion piece dropped this week. At the time of my clicking on it, it was under the headline "Born This Way? Born Which Way?" It is a tour de force of Current Thinking on all things sex and gender, covering trans issues as well as sexuality. Given that the title is so evocative concering the topic of my recent AAQC, I feel like I can't help but comment on the current state of affairs. Let's start with the history of thinking on sexuality, since that's the closest link.

For gays and lesbians, social acceptance and legal protection came as Americans learned to see sexual orientation as an innate and immutable characteristic. When Gallup first polled on the topic in 1977, just 13 percent of Americans thought gay and lesbian people were born that way. Now roughly half do, and in many ways it hardly seems to matter anymore. The frenzied search for a “gay gene,” a very 1990s preoccupation, has petered out. Believing gay people had no choice but to be gay was a critical way station on the road to accepting homosexuality as just another way of being in the world, and no one talks much about it anymore.

And later:

...like many queer people, I had many different romantic entanglements in my youth, and had I not met my wife in college it is not impossible to imagine that I might have ended up on another path. I certainly did not experience myself as being born any particular way.

Among people of my generation and younger, it isn’t all that uncommon for women who were once married to men to later in life end up in partnerships with women, and I certainly have known men in gay relationships who wound up in straight ones and vice versa. These people seldom describe themselves as having “lived a lie” in their previous relationships. I think most of us know intuitively that sexual orientation is not binary, and is subject to change over the course of our lives.

Finally:

We ended up with the born-this-way model because of the tension between the seeking of rights for an embattled minority and the broader search for liberation. But this tension is ultimately dialectical — it contains the seeds of its own destruction.

She words it differently, but the conclusion is basically the same as what I had said - it was importantcritical to force people to believe in Dogmatic Position so that political victories could be won, but in the Year of Our Lord 2023, basically no one even bothers defending it anymore; they don't have to! The political victories have already been enshrined.

Unfortunately, that's about all that the article really says about the "born this way" narrative and the political history around it. Fortunately, it hits on quite a few other notes that are highly related to things I've thought about and said for a while. The article opens:

When I was in sixth grade, I made a decision that changed the course of my life. I decided not to try out for the middle school swim team. I know that might not sound like a big deal, but it was. As a grade schooler I was a standout swimmer — strong shoulders and back, and well-muscled legs that powered me through the water with ease and speed. I was disciplined, obsessive. My form was excellent. My coach saw potential.

Had I stuck with it, my life might have turned out pretty different. I might have been a popular jock rather than a lonely weirdo. I might have become a varsity athlete who won admission to a top college rather than a barely graduated teenager who had to take remedial math at a community college to scrape my way into a not-very-competitive school.

And soon after hits the high note:

We allow children to make irreversible decisions about their lives all the time, ideally with the guidance and support of the communities that care for them. Sometimes they regret those decisions. The stakes vary, but they are real. So what are we saying, really, when we worry that a child will regret this particular decision, the decision to transition? And how is it different, really, from the decision I made to quit competitive swimming? To many people — I am guessing most — this question is absurd. How could you possibly compare something as fundamental and consequential to one’s life as gender to something that seems comparatively trivial, competitive sport?

Man, I can't even blockquote it without thinking about how many domains this thinking touches on. I'm sure it's been remarked on here, and I feel like there was an SSC/ACT post or some other significant post here where people ruminated on life choices, regret, and the human condition of our walk through a garden of forking paths, where every choice we make closes off an infinity of alternate possible realities. Like, this is so core to the the human condition that it's hard to imagine subjects that it doesn't touch on. Nevertheless, I can't help but think about the hot button ones - abortion, consent, child sex, and economics.

Abortion

Commonly, in discussions of abortion, a divide appears concerning what sex is about, how important it is, whether it's sacred or whatever, etc. I feel like a common perspective that is expressed by pro-choice folks is that it is wayyy less important/sacred than they think their opponents think it is. This opinion piece talks of competitive swimming, but I recall people saying that sex is like a tennis game. It's just a fun recreational activity that a couple of people show up to do together; they both consent to playing tennis; they just have some amount of fun; then nothing particularly interesting happens. In the era of ubiquitous birth control, they think that sex is totally just like this.

This is used to argue that abortion should be totally fine, and the only people who disagree are some crazy folks who still think sex has some meaning or implies some responsibilities/consequences and apparently want to punish women for basically playing a game of tennis.

Consent to sexual relations

We start to see some cracks in the full-on sex-is-tennis position already when it comes to consent to sexual relations. Imagine your boss really loves tennis and decides that he wants to have some team-building out on the court. There's plenty of perceived pressure to play. Maybe you don't particularly like it, but you feel like you should just suck it up and play. It's not that bad. Maybe you could even learn to kinda like it. Besides, you likely have other parts of you job that you like even less (friggin' TPS reports are the worst). Lots of people might think this is kind of a stupid thing to be part of a job, perhaps somewhat unprofessional. Who knows? I hear that some people feel like they have to play golf to make that sale, and they don't seem to think it's terribly unprofessional.

Regardless of how annoying/stupid/unprofessional you think it is, basically no one would argue that it should be criminal. But we absolutely would if it was sex! It seems to be significantly different.

Child sex

When it comes to the question of whether children can consent to sexual relations, the dominant position is that it is just trivial that they cannot. I mean, sure, they can consent to playing tennis just fine, but sex is completely and totally different. Why? I've steeped myself in the academic philosophy literature on this topic, and while it's a thousand times better than the responses you'll get from regular Joe, it still comes in seriously lacking in my mind.

Westen doesn't take a super strong position on the topic, but likely grounds it in what he calls the 'knowledge prong' of what counts as valid consent. A person needs to have sufficient knowledge of... something... related to what sex is, what it means, what the consequences could be, the cultural context... I'm not exactly sure what. I don't think he did the best job of really digging in to details here. This is perhaps the most fruitful line of inquiry for future academic work for those who want to salvage a consent-only sexual ethic, but right now it's seriously lacking. Any work will definitely need to distinguish from tennis, because I see kids out learning tennis at our local courts somewhat regularly, and they can hardly be said to understand the risks/cultural context/etc. of tennis any more than could be said for sex.

Wertheimer, on the other hand, doesn't even attempt a theoretical explanation for why children cannot consent. Instead, he views it as simply an empirical question of whether, in a particular society, children tend to be, on net, harmed by sex. The opinion piece writes:

[A]s categories, we experience [race and gender identity] in large part through the perceptions that others have of us, based largely on our outward appearances.

A disciple of Wertheimer might say that a large part of how children perceive sex, and whether they perceive it as harmful or not, may depend on the perceptions others have of it.

Of course, either of these approaches opens up all sorts of cultural engineering possibilities. If we team up the "sex is like tennis" folks with the "comprehensive sex education as early as possible" folks, it's easy to imagine how society could change to one where children learn the requisite knowledge and are not, on net, harmed by the sex that they do consent to. Some folks might cheer on this result, saying that society would be immeasurably improved to the point that it unlocks this new world of possible good things... but the "it is trivially true that children cannot possibly consent to sex" crowd would certainly disagree.

Economics

I don't have a better subtitle for this section, but my thoughts here are background shaded by the free market, Marginal Revolution style economics, which emphasizes that it's important to let people make choices, even ones that they end up deeply regretting. "Capitalism is not a profit system; it's a profit and loss system," they say. You have to let people choose to try things that may succeed and make them a boatload of money... but which may also fail and lose them a boadload of money. This is often justified by placing a possible governing agent in a position of ignorance - you just don't know ahead of time which choices are going to be spectacular failures and which are going to be spectacular successes. Pushing in an even more libertarian direction, many folks want to say that we should just let people do the most harmful of drugs, even though we can be 99.99% sure that it is destined to end in pain and hardship. The article wants to have a sense of this for individual gender choices. 'You know what? Even if they regret it, we need to let them choose, because we're in a position of ignorance.' The article begins concluding with:

I understand the impulse to protect children from regret. The fantasy of limitless possibility is alluring — who wouldn’t want that for their child? To forestall, for as long as possible, throwing the switches that will determine your destination in life, is tempting. But a life without choosing is not a human life.

Hits a bit different after a section on child sex, though.

Closing Thoughts

I don't have a nice tidy bow to put on this package. I have my personal beliefs1, but I don't have a nice clean way to just directly put together a story connecting these things in a way that will please any particular reader with their own inclinations on the various questions involved. Mostly, it just really stands out to me that lots of people have completely contradictory opinions, at their conceptual core, when we try to apply them to all of the above problem domains. I don't think it's "just the outgroup", either. I think we need careful work and reflection across problem sets to help people understand where their positions are sounding hypocritical and why there are serious, huge problems here that are fundamental to the human condition. Reductive slogans aren't going to work. "Shut up and mouth these politically-acceptable words or you're an X-ophobe," isn't going to work.

1 - If you must know, I think the transgender ideology is near incoherent philosophically and anti-science biologically; I think abortion is wrong regardless of whether sex is like tennis; I don't subscribe to a consent-only sexual ethic and therefore don't think the question is of all that much import for whether children should be able to have sex; I generally lean pro-profit-and-loss capitalism and less drugs.

Hmm.

Hits a bit different after a section on child sex, though.

I’d be much more alarmed if such a section was actually in the opinion, rather than in the commentary. And I don’t get the impression Polgreen is dancing around the topic, or that she’s blocking out the obvious cognitive dissonance. This tension disappears if one doesn’t believe that sex and sexuality are like tennis.

Notice that Polgreen emphasizes the probable safety or reversibility of treatments. She has to insist that this regret won’t cross the line to sterility, because that’s intuitively no longer tennis. Once reproduction is implicated, the sexuality taboo applies, and she can’t endorse it for children. But so long as it remains on the “gender” side of the line, it’s fair game.

I believe this is downstream of an older strain of feminist, and more broadly liberal, egalitarianism. One is supposed to treat people the same, via rational assessment, after ignoring those petty intuitions which scream “other!” Sex-blindness fit right in to the same milieu that endorsed race- and class-blindness. Note that age-blindness never made it to the mainstream, and for good reason! Utopians assumed away illness, poverty and inequity, but the disparity of experience will remain.

Today’s lines of post-egalitarian argument shy away from blindness. I do find it interesting that Polgreen says “Maybe we should all learn to wear our genders, indeed, all of our identities, a bit more lightly.” A old-school sentiment, and one which runs counter to the modern partisan’s beliefs. Perhaps this is privilege speaking, but I’d have expected more caution from someone who makes her living off taking gender seriously.

I don't see a lot of emphasis on safety/reversibility. Like, there's one line in a parenthetical toward that end on one particular, but there's also:

The possibility that children might make irreversible decisions on this particular question that they later regret is, for many people, simply intolerable. Transition, to borrow a phrase, should be safe, legal and rare.

We allow children to make irreversible decisions about their lives all the time, ideally with the guidance and support of the communities that care for them. Sometimes they regret those decisions. The stakes vary, but they are real. So what are we saying, really, when we worry that a child will regret this particular decision, the decision to transition? And how is it different, really, from the decision I made to quit competitive swimming? To many people — I am guessing most — this question is absurd. How could you possibly compare something as fundamental and consequential to one’s life as gender to something that seems comparatively trivial, competitive sport?

and

According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, in 2020, more than 44,000 people between the ages of 13 and 19 got a rhinoplasty, the most common surgical cosmetic procedure performed on teenagers. Thousands of kids went under the knife for chest surgery — 3,200 girls got breast augmentations and 1,800 girls got breast reductions, while 2,800 boys had surgery to remove breast tissue from their chests, presumably to help them conform better to their gender identities. Indeed, many if not most of these often irreversible interventions on children’s bodies are designed, in one way or another, to help children feel better about their appearances in a way that is inescapably bound up with gender.

Maybe not so much in this piece, but generally the "puberty blockers are safe and reversible" belief fills the same role as "gays are born that way" did - it's the factual belief that needs to be true for the social change to be accepted. So there's a huge amount of effort poured into insisting that it is true regardless of how strongly the evidence supports it.

Commonly, in discussions of abortion, a divide appears concerning what sex is about, how important it is, whether it's sacred or whatever, etc. I feel like a common perspective that is expressed by pro-choice folks is that it is wayyy less important/sacred than they think their opponents think it is. This opinion piece talks of competitive swimming, but I recall people saying that sex is like a tennis game. It's just a fun recreational activity that a couple of people show up to do together; they both consent to playing tennis; they just have some amount of fun; then nothing particularly interesting happens. In the era of ubiquitous birth control, they think that sex is totally just like this.

I don't know how many people agree with me on this but I do believe that Sexual Revolution didn't go far enough, sex is just a physical activity similar to tennis and the only reason it is not treated the same way is because prudes still have their way. More over puritan factions won in both the right and the left in spite of proclaimed commitment to the principle of sexual freedom in the latter one. Technology did solve issues that come with unrestricted love-making, we just need to wait for the culture to catch up(just in time for some other tech to disrupt it again). Some niche cultures are already there and make polyamory work quite well.

sex is just a physical activity similar to tennis and the only reason it is not treated the same way is because prudes still have their way

If you lose a tennis match, you don't end up with a life-threatening disease.

This comment has me imagining a situation where every sex act has a winner and a loser, and the loser gets the STD.

Isn't that how it works in reality? Like the websites where women having affairs with married men are all crying over "so the guy who was lying to his wife and cheating on her and deceiving his entire family is now cheating on me/doesn't want to get married/is not, in fact, getting a divorce like he promised me for five years he was getting".

Well, duh, girl, what did you expect from a proven liar, cheater, and deceiver? Fire burns, water is wet, and he just wanted some fun on the side.

I feel the urge to nitpick(although mostly because I've met people who insisted that their tamed raccoons and bobcats make excellent pets. I recall these animals giving no evidence to the contrary, although I didn't interact with them extensively. Well, except for one of the bobcats. It was a while ago) before getting to my substantive contribution. I'll clearly mark where the nitpicking ends so you can skip there if you so desire.

The most comparable datapoint to domesticating raccoons is the Russian fox domestication experiment, which was able to produce individual domesticated foxes much faster than fifty generations-

The least domesticated foxes, those that flee from experimenters or bite when stroked or handled, are assigned to Class III. Foxes in Class II let themselves be petted and handled but show no emotionally friendly response to experimenters. Foxes in Class I are friendly toward experimenters, wagging their tails and whining. In the sixth generation bred for tameness we had to add an even higher-scoring category. Members of Class IE, the "domesticated elite", are eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs. They start displaying this kind of behavior before they are one month old. By the tenth generation, 18 percent of fox pups were elite; by the 20th, the figure had reached 35 percent. Today elite foxes make up 70 to 80 percent of our experimentally selected population.[1]:{{{3}}}

And

No game of tennis ever resulted in a helpless human being squalling in my arms.

I think his point about technology was talking mostly about this part. Obviously birth control isn't perfectly effective, but high conscientiousness adults(which you'll notice is not a universal category) can get it pretty close.

Nitpicking ends here

You're totally correct about hardware/software- I almost suspect you've derived natural law from first principles. And obviously you can't selectively breed humans to not have the emotional consequences from sex; the need to pair bond is extremely strong and I'm wondering how that case of selective breeding would even work(just take the children of single mothers for generations?) assuming you can get it past an ethics committee. One does not have to look very hard to find people emotionally damaged by attempting to have casual sex, and acting out in terrible ways because of it. I think @BurdensomeCount, who certainly does not have an overly religious-influenced morality, has a lengthy effortpost somewhere about how most people should not be having casual sex because all they do is hurt people, in the first place themselves. And certainly as a society we shouldn't be setting norms about sexual behavior based on maximum freedom for a small minority of the population, but rather based on the good for the much larger majority. This is because norms, by definition, are not the actions of an atomized individual, they're aiming at setting the behavior for an entire society.

And, although I obviously can't prove this, I suspect that the norm of casual sex is poisonous for honest attempts to bond; it makes women paranoid and reactive, dispirits men and makes them think they need to constantly escalate, and at the end of the day, everyone's worse off. Zoomers are, to use your term, dabbling- fiddling with themselves and trying to bond with a screen, desperately unhappy at how hard it is to find a partner, reflexively raising expectations to cope with the obvious possibility for disappointment.

Multi-coloured coat patterns, floppy ears, heterochromia, generally puppy-like bahavoir... similar to what's seen in dogs and cats. And the same genetic expressions in humans is williams syndrome, which also has a tell-tale physical appearance and neoteny(alongside some other things).

I'll caveat that the Russian Fox domestication is somewhat controversial when it comes to exact numbers -- there's a plausible argument that the source stock had been partially domestically, if under weaker and unintentional pressures, since they were previously used for furs, and some of the traits showed up before the official domestication project -- though my gut check's that it's probably closer to real than not.

I think the historical (and... Certain Current Subculture) case for an unavoidable 'natural law' pair-bonding behavior is less clear than people would expect, though my personal and closely observed experience tends to be more in the M/M spaces such that I'm a little hesitant to generalize. But even for the hets, that (for almost the last hundred years) almost all of your visible population will also spend an unrivaled amount of time with their sexual partners is a big confounder.

Sorry, I mean 'unavoidable' in the sense that whatever level of bonding triggers pops as soon as one or more people involved penetrate or orgasm, rather than in the strength of that bonding.

Both modern gay culture and some classical periods among hets had a lot of both casual sex (in the conventional form and prostitution, respectively) without a lot of the romantic love, sexual jealousy, and long-term attachment, and separately have relationships with the romantic love, sexual jealousy, and long-term attachment. It might still not be controllable, or universally available -- enough people do trigger this bonding based, as evidenced by the people who 'bond' with particular sex toys, some 'johns' developed fixations on particular prostitutes.

It might not even be good to the extent it is possible: people talk a lot about parasocial relationships in general, but I think there's gonna be a rude awakening when the stuff driving that gets redirected to one-on-one encounters on massive scales. But it does happen, today.

I don't believe this at all, and I don't believe you believe this, either. To illustrate, I'll simply take my favorite argument against sex-work-is-work: suppose you have a close family member of the opposite sex who starts a business. I would want to support my family, and so I would make a point to patronize the business, at least once if not regularly. However, if the business was prostitution or sexual photography, I wouldn't think that my patronage would be welcome, and I wouldn't dream of trying.

So I ask you, if you had a family member who started a business, would you support them? If it was a bakery would you buy a cake or loaf of bread? If it was a vineyard would you buy a case of wine? If it was a landscape business, would you get your weeds pulled? And if that business was prostitution, would you become a client?

It very quickly becomes clear to me that sex work is not work, and that sex is not like tennis.

"If you wouldn't have sex with a family member you don't think sex work is work" is one hell of a take.

There's no starker way that I know of to show the differences between work and sex work. Yes, if you wouldn't subscribe to your daughters onlyfans, then it's because you too understand the distinction I'm making.

Care to engage with it at all?

I think there are many industries my family members might engage in where I would not become a client. I don't subscribe to anyone's OnlyFans currently, for example. Am I obliged to subscribe to a family member's OnlyFans so I think it's "real work"? More generally, what if they start a company in an industry I don't ordinarily patronize? We all use bakeries, but we may not all use whatever industry our family members start their own business in.

There's a line that judges sometimes use in oral arguments where they admonish counsel for "fighting the hypothetical". That is, the judge is interested in knowing whether a distinction applies in a certain situation, and they dislike it when the response is to avoid answering and to argue that that's not the situation we're dealing with.

It's a hypothetical. Fighting the hypothetical is a dodge.

Ok, so you don't normally hire prostitutes. Great. But let's say you did for some reason - after all, sex is just like tennis, right? I'm sure you don't normally pay people to play tennis with you either, but let's say you had a reason to do so on this occasion. Maybe you're training for a big match and you want to get some training in so you can perform well. Or whatever circumstance you need to make the hypothetical work.

Do you hire your sister the tennis pro to show you some moves?

I do not think anyone engaging in adult consensual incest does anything ethically objectionable, if that's what you're asking.

It's also not a fair hypothetical unless you think there's no difference between incest and sex. There's not a different name for playing tennis when you do it with your family.

The indirect hypothetical has more to it but I also wouldn't hire any of my family as a doctor, a contractor, to clean my house, be my personal trainer, but I also think this also works from the other way around. A lot of people who are of certain professions wouldn't want to have to do it for a family member either and wouldn't want their family to participate in helping them financially, and it's probably very much related to shame but mixing personal life and work is just innately uncomfortable for some people.

It's a wide net though to catch shame and discomfort or government compulsion. If the idea is that it's fake in the sense that being a model, actor, streamer, artist, athlete, is fake either because it's something that people would do for fun or it's not particularly hard, then I get that angle a lot more but then I'm not sure what the validity is for. I'm sure a lot of people are ashamed of their relatives for playing videogames on twitch and wouldn't tell anyone about it or watch them do it, but a lot of people wouldn't read their novel written by a family member if they thought it was too prurient or violent or was just something they were culturally opposed to. I'm sure there are many people ashamed of family members being janitors. garbage men, house cleaners and wouldn't hire them or recommend them to friends.

Anyway, I think if the original hypothetical is as ridiculous as saying tennis and sex are the same it's not really helpful to just up the hypothetical up a notch and say that incest and sex are the same.

I mean, that's the point though, isn't it? The reason why it's fine to play tennis with your sister and not fine to have sex with your sister is the same reason why "sex work" is not just like any other job - Sex is Different.

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Yes, if you wouldn't subscribe to your daughters onlyfans

Okay, first example that comes to mind, a middle-aged couple grappling with secondary infertility in the woman who already has an 18 year old daughter who is an ovum donor.

Do you think their refusal to buy her egg for the purposes of IVF makes that illegitimate? Or if she's offering to donate for free.

It's a ridiculous criteria, so no surprise nobody cares to accept it. The obvious answer is that most people are against incest, or at the very least have no interest in it barring maybe looking appreciatively at the tits of a cousin.

In what part of your scenario is anyone going to work? I wouldn't call selling eggs work any more than I would selling a kidney.

And I don't think, "being willing to take your father or mother, sister or brother, on as a client," is a bad first pass at what I'm getting at. Sure it lacks nuance, but it hits the gut check squarely.

You seem to be arguing against the position 'sew work isn't sex', which isn't an argument anyone is making.

Yes, sex work is still sex, with all the attendant facts and context about sex. All your attempts to point out how sex work is like sex are kind of pointless; yes, it sex work is sex, hence the name.

The claim being made here is that it's work. Not that it isn't sex.

Make it indirect.

"Hey, my sister just hung out her shingle as a prostitute. If you go sleep with her and use my name, you get a 10% discount"

Sure, on the internet it's very easy to say "Well, if my sister made that choice, I would happily support her!" But it's a little different when your friend Dave "the Keg" is asking for coupons for family member fellatio.

This relies on an assumption of legitimacy of my intuitions which, in this context, I may reject. Might I intuit that it is gross that someone I know is hiring a family member as a sex worker? Should I feel that way? I may feel a "yes" to the first question and a "no" to the second. There are many things in life I have intuited as bad that I have later changed my mind about due to reason and reflection. Maybe this should be such a case!

This isn't meant to be argumentative. Because of the constant use of hypothetical statements, conditionals, and equivocation, I'm not sure what your point or position is.

I think sex work is work but would not have sex with a family member just because they were in the sex work business.

If your intuition is wrong then it's wrong in the same way as the vast majority of the human race past and present. It seems unlikely to me that so many people in so many times and places would be wrong in the same way.

Frankly, I don't put a lot of stock in historical people's moral intuitions given the conclusions those intuitions led to.

I have it on very good authority that people in Kazakhstan feel pretty much that way about family prostitution. See time 2:49 in this video for the proof: https://youtube.com/watch?v=YG7SHcVEJqI

My mom is a psychologist and I would not want her to take any of my friends as patients (and I believe professional ethics would preclude it).

Lots of jobs are like this.

This seems like picking the criterion to suit the conclusion. Was there some prior general rule that "work" was something you'd support if your family did it? So if a family member sold medical equipment or industrial mining equipment, you'd buy it?

It simply comes from asking myself what I would consider work, and how I would make the distinction.

And yes, I'd buy mining equipment from my family member, if I needed it. There's a bit of a difference between machinery that costs tens of not hundreds of thousands of dollars and a $5/month onlyfans subscription or $10 or bread from a bakery. But given I'm willing to buy the product from anyone, I'd prefer to buy from a family member.

My favorite argument is similar, but it focuses on the government instead of the family and therefore avoids your criticism: If sex work is Real Work™, then the government can use all of its regular powers to compel you to do it.

Prisoners can be compelled to do work; some clean up ditches, some fight wildfires, some stamp licence plates, and some perform Real Work™. Maintaining your unemployment benefits requires a reasonably active job search and accepting good offers of employment, which obviously includes Real Work™ for a significant subset of the population. Appearance/ethnicity is a bona fide occupational qualification for Real Work™, so obviously foreign workers will be qualified to fill the niches that locals can't.

If you want to go wild, they could even restrict who gets to do Real Work™ (even as an unpaid hobby) much like they restrict the practice of medicine, engineering, or law.

There are countless other ways that something would be changed by becoming "work", but those are the most obvious and objectionable IMO.

Yes, if sex work were Work Like Any Other Work, then the comfort girls in WWII would be no more victims than the conscripts.

I can't speak for "most people", but I would happily accept that equivalency. If I had the choice of renting out my bussy or being shot at, I'm getting the lube out. For obvious reasons, I'd prefer neither be the case.

It depends on the precise risks involved as well as the conditions. Presumably I'm not being asked to be a conscript or Comfort Woman from 1939 but their modern equivalents, who tend to have far more in the way of comforts and conveniences.

I'm certainly not going to become infertile from being fucked in the ass, nor by getting repeated abortions. And even women these days don't face those problems, we have better condoms, antibiotics and birth control today.

As for the risk of dying in battle, it depends on which nation you were conscripted for. Soviet conscript? I'd rather have anal Intercourse with a bayonet.

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Sorry, wait, sorry, is your impression that 'comfort women' were salaried government employees with due process rights and retirement packages and etc.?

Military conscription is bad but it's still qualitatively different from slavery in important ways.

The closest military analogy to comfort women would be something like child soldiers in Africa, which yes we do also strenuously object to.

then the comfort girls in WWII would be no more victims than the conscripts.

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You know that Japanese conscripts were treated pretty terribly and considered so disposable they were referred to by a term based on the price of postage on government mail, right?

So, listen: either you specify a type and context of conscription in which is is so exploitative and evil and that it is analogous to what happened to comfort women, in which case it is also an evil practice that should never be allowed, and once again the two things are not distinguished from each other.

Or you specify a type and context of conscription that's reasonable and ok in ways that make it unlikely what happened to comfort women, in which case it's a bad analogy that doesn't tell us anything.

We can play context games as much as we want, it doesn't change anything because the argument is fundamentally flawed. It's using the affective associations of the crimes and horrors committed against comfort women and trying to apply those to the notion of sex in general, which is a version of the Worst Argument in the World.

This is a very interesting argument, but I don't think "if it's acceptable for people to voluntarily perform an action for money, then it must be acceptable to force them at gunpoint to perform that action in the most dangerous possible conditions with no compensation" would be considered compelling for any line of work.

If sex work is Real Work™, then the government can use all of its regular powers to compel you to do it.

What if I reject the premise that government can compel people to work? I think both military conscription and prison slavery are morally unjustifiable.

Maybe that should be your first priority, then. The fact of the matter is that the government can compel you to work, morals be damned.

Fortunately I can care about, and make progress on, multiple political issues at the same time.

Unfortunately, making uneven progress on multiple political issues can create perverse situations like the one I've outlined above. Going from the status quo -> the government can't compel work -> can't compel + prostitution-is-work is fine. Going from the status quo -> prostitution-is-work -> can't compel + prostitution-is-work has a bit of a rough patch in the middle, to put it mildly.

I was being literal when I said it should be your first priority, and didn't mean to imply that it should be your only priority or your ultimate goal.

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I think you are reaching here. In general governments can't compel you to do any work, save for a few exceptions. The european declaration of human rights for example carves out 4 exceptions: prison labour, military service, emergency service and normal civic obligations.

For prison labour you would have to make the argument that prostitution is a necessary part of the rehabilitation process, which seems far fetched. Also most countries already ban prison labour for non-violent offenders (the US is basically the only western exception) and prostitution with a murderer seems a dicey proposition (I would want a prison guard supervising it, at least).

For military service I think the prostitution would have to be limited to other members of the military to count. You couldn't make the argument that prostitution to the general public is military activity, for example. However you could make prostitution one of the civil service options for conscentious objectors. I'm not sure if you could make it the only option. Also most countries have already abolished the draft so most governments could only do this during war.

An interesting case is emergency services, actually. In Iverson v. Norway it was determined that Norway could compel dentists to perform dentistry (for appropriate remuneration). You could use this to redistribute prostitutes (which tend to cluster in big cities) across your nation's entire territory. You could also make the argument that incels represent a national emergency that needs to be solved. But what principle would you use to compel incels to have sex with prostitutes? Probably something about involuntary treatments.

Normal civic obligations is probably your best bet. The case law on this is pretty nebulous, it's unclear what counts and you could make it like jury duty. I suspect it would get shot down, though.

Prisoners can be compelled to do work;

Yes, we call that slavery and are also very actively against it.

The Venn diagram of sex-worker rights advocates and prison abolitionists is not quite a circle, but it's pretty close.

If you want to go wild, they could even restrict who gets to do Real Work™ (even as an unpaid hobby) much like they restrict the practice of medicine, engineering, or law.

Ok, sure? Prostitution licensing seems unnecessary, but maybe it would help get everyone in the system enough to fight pimping/disease/violence/etc. And maybe people could audit the classes at the trade school and pick up some useful skills.

Yes, we call that slavery and are also very actively against it.

As I said downthread, it matters what order you do your goals in. If you succeed in prostitution-is-work before you succeed in prison abolition (etc.) then the scenario I outlined becomes possible.

Also, knocking off one example still leaves my other two, as well as the countless others I skipped over.

Ok, sure? Prostitution licensing seems unnecessary...

That's not wild. What would be wild is defining a Scope of Practice that excludes non-licensed people from undertaking the listed actions, regardless of whether they are paid or not.

If you succeed in prostitution-is-work before you succeed in prison abolition (etc.) then the scenario I outlined becomes possible.

Perhaps, but that's just tactics.

My understanding of your original comment was that it was arguing that sex work is not work through the argument of 'We're ok with making prisoners do work, we are not ok with making prisoners have sex, QED sex is not work.'

If that was the point of the comment, my response of 'we not ok making prisoners do work' does dissolve the argument.

I agree there's tactics involved in avoiding the bad outcome you hint at as a practical matter, although realistically I don't expect it to ever some up no matter how we go about things because politics is ultimately governed by vibes more than logical formulations, and you whole point is about how those vibes are atrocious and unacceptable.

That's a whole different issue, though.

What would be wild is defining a Scope of Practice that excludes non-licensed people from undertaking the listed actions, regardless of whether they are paid or not.

Yup, it sure would be wild if we did that for chefs! Or writers! Or drivers! Or dishwashers! Or babysitters!

It would definitely be crazy if Scope of Practice laws were used to do crazy things for no reason. But that has nothing to do with sex work. Scope of Practice laws aren't used that way because, again, voters wouldn't like it.

My understanding of your original comment was that it was arguing...

I was trying to make an argument about policy, not fact. e.g. "A whale is a fish because you can catch it with a boat".

From a fact-based position, prostitution is a job, gang membership is employment, and hitmen are contract workers. From a policy-based perspective, that's irrelevant.

I don't expect it to ever some up no matter how we go about things because politics is ultimately governed by vibes...those vibes are atrocious and unacceptable.

For now. Aren't you trying to change the vibes?

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Empirically, Americans in general are not:

You cited a paragraph saying that courts have upheld it; courts have upheld various thing Americans in general are against, this is a non sequitur.

If sex work is work like any other work, can female inmates be compelled to perform it?

Depends what you mean by 'can' I guess.

Will it empirically happen? Nah, most Americans would be squicked out and there's literally no one pushing for it, do there's no way laws would get passed to allow it. Every politician who voted for that would be saying goodbye to their career and personal life. So no, it 'can't' happen by that metric.

Is it morally permissible? No, I just said that making inmates work is not morally permissible, that's the comment you're responding to.

Can someone on an internet forum invent a formalization which focuses on specific features of a situation and meanings of words such that they can draw some type of logical parallel between it and other things that happen such that they are framed as similar enough to maybe suggest they are equally 'allowed'? Sure, you are doing that right now, but big whoop. That's the type of rhetoric that's easy to construct for pretty much anything, and generally has very little influence on what happens in reality.

most Americans would be squicked out and there's literally no one pushing for it...Every politician who voted for that would be saying goodbye to their career and personal life.

Why? Every argument I can think of comes down to "because they don't believe sex work is real work", and the same arguments that would convince the Department of Labor and the Department of Justice would convince the Department of Corrections (and/or the voters upstream of those organizations).

I'm aware that the previous paragraph sounds like "without God, Atheists have nothing stopping them from murdering everyone!!!", but I literally don't see the limiting principle (assuming there is one).

Is writing work?

Is writing erotica work?

Is writing erotica prostitution?

Can you force a prisoner to write erotica?

That’s nepotism. If she’s driven to succeed in her chosen industry, any self-respecting mother would wish to stand on her own four limbs without having to rely on her son’s patronage.

Is being a gynecologist not work because a mother would refuse to let their daughter do a pelvic exam on them? Or if you require opposite sex if a father refuses to let their daughter do a physical/prostate exam/colonoscopy?

And if that business was prostitution, would you become a client?

I wouldn't buy weed from a relative either but it seems pretty clear being a drug dealer is work of some sort. They aren't selling sex, they are selling sex with them. And if you don't want sex with them (for incest reasons or because you don't find them attractive/they are the wrong sex), but others do and pay for it, then it pretty reasonably has to be considered work.

Now I don't think it's like tennis, but exchanging sexual services for money does I think fall under work.

Ok, let's isolate some variables here then, to remove the "incest" aspect. Imagine you are a father (sorry if you are, what follows might be upsetting to imagine), and your daughter just started a prostitution business; one day one of your coworkers says something like "whew, I've been horny these days, I wish I could get a little action tonight", do you enthusiastically direct him to your daughter, the same way you would if he said he was hungry and she was selling cupcakes?

Nope, but that doesn't mean it isn't work. If my daughter were an assassin and my co-worker wanted to hire someone to kill his wife, I also wouldn't give him my daughter's card. because I think murdering people for money is wrong. But if you are exchanging money for a service, whether that service is murder, sex, or making eggrolls, then it is work. It is just that some work can be illegal and/or immoral.

The reason I would be against my daughter being a sex worker is not because it isn't work, it's because I think it is a bad idea.

I was thinking more, and came to an uncomfortable conclusion that if my brother were a pimp, it's much more likely that I'd patronize his business than if he were a prostitute, and there's orders of magnitude of difference between pimp and drug dealer, too.

I'll admit that I don't have the most fully explained rubric, but my example reveals the difference I care about. Sex isn't tennis for the same reason we have a word for incest in the first place.

If my sister were an assassin, I wouldn't employ her because I think killing people for money is wrong, but if she is getting paid by the Mob to give snitches concrete overcoats it is pretty clear she is working for them. Some work can be immoral or illegal. Sex work is clearly work, even if you think it would be wrong for you to have sex with your sister paid or otherwise.

I'm perfectly happy to include obviously illicit "work" such as assassination or extortion as similarly not work just like prostitution.

It's still work though. Just because we don't like it, doesn't mean it isn't. Even the Nazis running Death camps were working. There isn't a moral valence to the word. If we need to specify we can say illegal work or immoral work. Or indeed as we currently do the more specific sex-work in this specific instance, then people can impute their own moral intuitions onto it as they see fit.

But trying to say it's not work is just flat incorrect I think. You can work as a prostitute, as a porn star, as an assassin, as a CIA agent, as a pirate, or a privateer.

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What if your mom/sibling/dad was a therapist? Is therapy not work?

I suppose you could go in the other direction and say it is not. It's a paid friendship or something of the sort.

Therapy also has more emotional significance than tennis or any other physical activity.

When it comes to the question of whether children can consent to sexual relations, the dominant position is that it is just trivial that they cannot. I mean, sure, they can consent to playing tennis just fine, but sex is completely and totally different. Why? I've steeped myself in the academic philosophy literature on this topic, and while it's a thousand times better than the responses you'll get from regular Joe, it still comes in seriously lacking in my mind.

You can’t explain why they can’t consent to sex without reference to natural law, but even a tiny bit of natural law renders it trivial.

Go find a pair of eight year olds of the appropriate genders and explain sex to them in graphic detail(please do not actually do this), then ask if they want to have some. The reaction will be shock and disgust. And it should be disgust, an eight year old who wants to have sex is mostly because there’s something wrong with him to begin with. It’s simply contrary to the nature of a little kid. The logic of the German cannibalism case would seem to apply if you take even a tiny bit of natural law into account.

I had my first boner at the ripe old age of 5 after watching a Bollywood dance number on TV. It certainly confused the fuck out of me, but soon enough I was humping my pillow because it felt good. I found out what sex was and fervently desired it well before I was at the legal age to have it.

At any rate, appeals to "natural law" would also rule out homosexuality, since the only thing worse than kissing girls to most young boys at that age would be kissing boys. Some might consider this a feature, not a bug, but I'm not one of them.

at the ripe old age of 5

Show off!

I found out what sex was and fervently desired it well before I was at the legal age to have it.

Did you, though? In America, we have this weird legal duality wherein sex isn't illegal so long as you and the partner are both below the age of majority or both above. Normal caveats about state by state variation and allowances for 17/18 or 365 days age difference limits.

I'm not sure I can think of another activity like this. What is something else that's legal to do with other minors, but not when crossing the minor-age of majority threshold?

To be CRYSTAL clear: I am totally in favor of maintaining these age of majority laws and am zero percent consent-only in sexual ethics. The Trans movement, beyond its anti-scientific stance, has insane flirtations with the "minor attracted persons" predators.

Show off!

I did show it off to my parents, as I was gravely concerned by the new turpidity of an organ I'd only ever used for pissing. Sadly I can't recall their reaction, heh.

Did you, though?

In India? Absolutely:

According to the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 (POCSO Act), any sexual activity with or without the consent of a person below 18 years of age is considered as rape and punishable by law1. The POCSO Act does not have a close-in-age exemption, which means that even if both the partners are below 18 years of age and consent to the sexual activity, they can still be prosecuted for statutory rape2. The POCSO Act is gender-neutral, which means that it applies to both boys and girls who are below 18 years of age2

This isn't really enforced all that often, usually, it's a threat applied by the parents of two horny teens to stop them from engaging in such non-sanskari* activities when they should be studying for the all important NEET exams 🙏. If the cops do get involved, unless one of the parties has some serious political pull, the degree of enforcement involves raking the boy over the coals for a bit, maybe a bit of slapping. I've never heard of a girl be prosecuted for this, regardless of what the law says. In more rural areas, getting married before the age of 18 is common enough, and nobody gives a shit.

But, according to the letter of the law, my pining for the hot MILFs I saw outside my school when I was what, 12? constitutes an urge to commit rape. Wouldn't have been me dragging them to court, if they'd been so kind as to oblige.

*roughly translatable to something that offends social sensibilities or cultural orthodoxy.

I did not know that about Indian law.

Continue fighting for freedom boners, brother.

Don't take Indian law too seriously, we Indians certainly don't!

Continue fighting for freedom boners, brother.

I'll fly the flag at full mast, in every sense of the term ;)

I did show it off to my parents, as I was gravely concerned by the new turpidity of an organ I'd only ever used for pissing. Sadly I can't recall their reaction, heh.

Oh God, that reminds me of the first time I got an inconvenient erection. I was 8 or 9 and my brother was 11 or 12 and I was getting dressed because our family was hosting a barbecue. I'd just finished putting my shoes on when my brother came into my room sporting a pants teepee and a look of confusion. It was something he'd just learned about in school - "a totally natural thing called an erection, and your penis does it so you can have sex with a lady." Since I read encyclopaedias for fun, he figured I would know what to do about it. He was mistaken.

"Is there a lady you are going to have sex with?" I asked, although I already knew the answer. I started thinking more intently about it, when suddenly our problems multiplied - now my pants were tenting too! Like all good farce it didn't stop there though - my mum's voice sang out down the hallway, our guests had arrived! We both froze for a second before I realised what to do - the teacher said it was totally natural right? So it's only a big deal to us because we've never seen it before!

We did absolutely nothing, and walked out into the crowd of guests both sporting massive erections, and didn't even notice how everyone gawped at us with eyes like dinner plates and desperately leaned away from us when we tried to hug them. Our dad, for reasons known only to him, waited until we'd made everyone present uncomfortable before taking us aside and explaining a few things.

That's some grade A Wagyu levels of cringe! If it's any consolation, I'm sure it hurt the onlookers far more than it did you haha.

Our dad, for reasons known only to him, waited until we'd made everyone present uncomfortable before taking us aside and explaining a few things.

I'd attribute this to the still insufficiently explored neurological process seen after paternity that makes dads suddenly far more fond of groan-inducing jokes, bad puns*, and gives them a keen sense of schadenfreude where they can reasonably expect the momentary discomfort won't actually harm their offspring.

*I can only pray that I haven't ever knocked up an ex who then hid it from me, because the former two are already well established.

I recall finding erections very annoying and wondering how to prevent them when changing out of my pullup into cartoon print undies at a young enough age to not really be aware of what 'age' was. I'm well aware that that system works at very young ages and that eliciting a sexual response is possible well before puberty. And I'm also well aware that boys start having sexual urges well before adulthood, but desiring sex before puberty is generally a sign of sexual abuse/grooming.

Yes, natural law rules out little boys having sex with males as well as with females. I'm not sure how that's a strike against it. You can make a natural law argument against adult homosexuality, and that is the one that's generally made, but I haven't made it in this case.

but desiring sex before puberty is generally a sign of sexual abuse/grooming.

Since my head is crammed full of minutiae for upcoming exams, I happen to know that the average age of puberty for boys in the UK is 12, but the threshold for which puberty is "normal" is 9 years there.

I doubt you had that latter value in mind, but it's still true.

For what it's worth, I think giving much credence to "natural law" for its own sake is incredibly stupid, and even those who appeal to it when convenient shy away from endorsing all that it implies, generalizing to the principle that the conditions and norms which were nigh universal throughout human history are thus inherently desirable. You don't see them advocating for 50% infant mortality rates.

At any rate, appeals to "natural law" would also rule out homosexuality

This is increasingly looking like a feature, not a bug. Homosexuality's very low heritability has disturbing implications.

Why the hell would anyone expect homosexuality to be particularly inheritable???

I'm hard-pressed to think of anything that could be less inheritable, maybe a spontaneous point mutation or chromosomal abnormality that kills embryos when they're a week old, or at least something that makes you sterile.

I expect, historically, that most gay men (and almost all lesbian women) sucked it up and coupled with the opposite gender and spat out a few kids, assuming their imagination could override their penises. Even then, it's almost certainly going to have a negative impact on fertility, especially for the men.

The "gay uncle" hypothesis is rather dubious, and not particularly supported last time I checked.

Bisexuality could potentially be adaptive, in terms of reducing intra-sexual tensions and bonding. But overwhelming preferences for the same sex? Very unlikely.

You can call this post-hoc if it pleases you, but I wasn't even around in the early 90s when people were fervently looking for (and failing to find) a "gay gene".

I'm too tired to do a proper crawl, and this is a topic where Wiki can be less reliable than you'd like but:

The American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association, and National Association of Social Workers stated in 2006:

Currently, there is no scientific consensus about the specific factors that cause an individual to become heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual—including possible biological, psychological, or social effects of the parents' sexual orientation. However, the available evidence indicates that the vast majority of lesbian and gay adults were raised by heterosexual parents and the vast majority of children raised by lesbian and gay parents eventually grow up to be heterosexual.

The last portion makes me dismiss what I assume are the terrible implications you're hinting at.

Not that I particularly care why people are gay, I find "Natural Law" to be a worthless concoction of mistaking commonality for objectivity (or at least "objectively good"), "applicable only when convenient to me" and the naturalistic fallacy.

I think the intersection between the set of people who adopt natural law and the set of people who adopt a consent-only sexual ethic is possibly the empty set.

As I've said before, consent-only sexual ethics are so wholly inadequate that in practice nearly everyone who tries to adopt one winds up inventing a convoluted justification for why some aspect or other of natural law is actually about consent.

++ Wherever consent based sexual questions get hard, the consent paradigm breaks down.

We can of course also already anticipate the classic: "Regret actually is a big deal and here are 7 reasons why it is a good thing". Hint: it can move forward our political cause.

I'm not sure Polgreen should be taken any more seriously than David Brooks or other op-ed authors, even in the limited sense of being a finger on the pulse off the LGBT movements/taxi drivers. I realize that there's a tendency for that sorta claim to be a No True Scotsman, but I'll point to this, not just that it's a weird focus (though it is) or that it's badly written (ditto), but just that it's more about Polgreen's psychology that anyone else's, even and I'd argue especially when those broader focuses would be more persuasive. People on her side aren't going to particularly dunk on those asides just because a) soccons already did, and b) the original subhead was so much more dunkable, but very much framed in the sort of way she could choose to retreat to vagueries about nonbinaries and bisexuals if/when challenged.

The flip side to 'she said her movement was lying for political power then' is that this only tells us that she was lying at least once. There's a hard question about how much movements in general are or even can be guided by principles rather than will-to-power, but there are at least some individuals where they're pretty clearly just-in-time rationalization.

That said, the deeper underlying questions are significant and important. The broader question of what, if anything, it is reasonable to prohibit, is actually a hard question in libertarian thought! It's easy for matters like third-party harm or the knowledge problem to turn on rationalization rather than impact, or for clearly coercive behaviors to be kept carefully out-of-frame for discussions. And while it can be tempting to exclude such temptations when discussing matters at positions of theory, the resulting policy combinations near-universally come out philosophically incoherent and politically impossible.

((That said, you can go even further that direction. There's an even-more-cynical position than Wertheimer's, where before considering the theoretical question of free choice, or even before the empirical question of harm, you just look at the pragmatic question of physical requirements. Mainstream liberalism isn't going to result in a lot of children having unsupervised time and privacy.))

I keep meaning to make a post about the dichotomy between what I think of as "private reasons" (the reasons that convince some individual of some position) and "public reasons" (the reasons that might convince some group of some position) but this post will have to do for now.

For my part: I am probably about as SJW/Woke/whatever as they come in regards to LGBT issues in both a public policy and cultural norm sense. Separately I think it is exceedingly unlikely that either gender identity or sexual orientation are fixed from birth and have no connection to cultural factors. For clarity's sake I don't believe LGBT people can will themselves otherwise any more than I think non-LGBT people can will themselves LGBT but I do think there are cultural factors that influence where on that spectrum one ends up. I suspect where I depart from many people who believe the prior statements is that I don't think of people being trans or gay as being strictly worse than cis or straight such that society or government ought to be oriented around the minimization of such people. That is, my "private reasons" for supporting LGBT people legally and socially aren't conditional on the immutability of the traits in question, from a cultural context perspective.

I suspect the reason immutability features so heavily in modern discourse is because it was a rhetorical convenience in the United States. At the time the gay rights movement was gaining steam the United States was in the midst of several other civil rights movements more closely tied to immutable characteristics (black americans and feminism). I believe there was a widespread perception (probably correct) that those traits apparent immutability was key to the eventual success of their movements. Tying LGBT rights to a similar notion of immutability was, therefore, a convenient rhetorical move (a compelling "public reason") to get people on board with LGBT rights in a similar way.

I think this dichotomy between "public" and "private" reasons explains a great deal of perceived motte-and-bailey/hypocrisy in our political discourse.

Thank you for your honesty. I have to ask, though, do you worry at all about any future backlash? That if people realize that the whole thing was a lie, an intentional one, purely for convenience sake to win a political battle, and that they were the dupes who fell for it... they might get angry and start not believing the other things you say in the public discourse?

Surely there is a potential for burning credibility depending on how directly one tells a lie.

The best kinds of public reasons are ones where you don't lie about factual information but rather construct an argument that follows from your interlocutors or audiences ethical premises to the conclusions you prefer. I think the potential for backlash in this kind of situation is low. You (hopefully) really did convince them their beliefs entailed your preferred outcome, even if it's not the argument that convinces you personally.

Being deceptive about facts is trickier. On the one hand you can blatantly and obviously lie and then you probably do not even succeed at getting them to endorse your preferred conclusion. On the other hand maybe you overstate certainty in some facts you are less certain about. The potential for backlash on credibility depends on how conclusively the falseness of the factual premise can be demonstrated. If I wanted to salvage the argument above, for example, I might argue that one's inability to change one's orientation or gender identity by will is sufficiently similar to race or sex that they ought be treated similarly, even if they are not as literally biologically unchangeable.

Being deceptive about facts is trickier.

This was pretty clearly presented as a factual question with a claimed factual answer. You were anti-science if you even thought that maybe it wasn't an obviously true brute fact about the world. This is why I think the potential for backlash is much higher and potentially more damaging to the already-abysmal state of our discourse. It's a meme at this point that when the left wants a political victory, they are not opposed to just making up facts, stamping them with the label PravdaScience (TM), and anyone who disagrees is just too stupid to read a book. It poisons society's truth-seeking mechanisms and does, in fact, lead people to just throwing up their hands and thinking that if Science (TM) is this bloody wrong all the time, they might as well just never listen to it. The even more recent, tangible example was the "masks don't work" noble lie. It took almost no time at all for everyone to realize that it was a straight factual lie, and the discourse never recovered. People simply turned their back on the whole concept that we could make factual conclusions based on solid evidence and that they could guide our decisions. Once you realize you've been duped, rational or not (depending on your definition of rationality), an extremely common game-theoretic response is to simply raise a middle finger to anything and everything the lying liars ever say again and simply reject the validity of their claimed methods outright.

If I wanted to salvage the argument above, for example, I might argue that one's inability to change one's orientation or gender identity by will

This wasn't really the argument, though, because it probably wouldn't have led them to the same political victory. Everyone knew that this was never the standard and wasn't going to be the standard going forward, because there are all sorts of desires/beliefs/what-have-you that people have that they can't seem to just change by will that we don't sacredly protect via pseudo-Constitutional magic. They had to enough of the bald factual lie out there in people's minds... this was "critical", the article says... in order to force through what they had so desired.

This is why I think the potential for backlash is much higher and potentially more damaging to the already-abysmal state of our discourse.

Does any of this expected backlash ever happen? The reason we have these bold backlash-tempting movements given prominent placement is that since the left controls culture and counter-culture and the media and basically all of the artificial incentive systems, there can be no backlash except directly from reality. And we're rich enough that we're well-insulated from that at least in the short and medium terms.

I don't know, but I don't think @Gillitrut's response will be, "I'm not worried about it, because my team controls everything."

Child vaccination rates are falling since the rollout of the Covid vaccines. Here are a few sources: CNN SciAm NYT

Funnily enough in the SciAm piece they mention that polio was nearly eradicated except for Pakistan and Afghanistan. What they don't mention is that in those places confidence in public health was harmed by the CIA using vaccination sites to try to track down bin Laden via family DNA. Public health types are happy to point the finger in this instance though. Public health institutions aren't implicated, after all.

The NYT piece mentions a stunning 43% child vaccination rate in the Philippines, and partially attributes it to a dengue vaccine that turned out to cause more harm than benefit.

None of those pieces even hint at pushing the Covid vaccine for kids as a source of general mistrust of all vaccination. I can't find any mainstream media source that even tries to compare costs and benefits of this vaccine for kids, not even one that stacks the deck in favor.

Virus, or to be more precise, the response to the virus, really did a number on many areas in which human well being was improving. Today PISA, a standardized test organized by OECD, scores for 2022 were released. In reeding and maths they show a general decline in achievement of fifteen year olds. Finnish government says this is "unprecedented".

Not the person you're asking, but, I don't think normal people think that way in general, and especially not when the facts are so nebulous to begin with. Leaked tapes and memos about lying to the American people about casus belli are one thing, but here, who's to say that people weren't just sincerely mistaken? After all, that will be the fallback position for those who bought what they were selling, and it's much psychologically easier to write the whole thing off as an honest mistake, since for the followers it was, rather than admitting that anyone was fleeced. No one wants to believe that about themselves and we will go to great lengths to invent and propagate narratives which do not paint ourselves as dupes.

Nah, lying in politics rarely creates backlash, it's too common and the public's attention span is too short.

Remember when we had those websites with rolling tickers of every lie Trump was telling with citations, and everyone just rolled their eyes and ignored them until constantly lying became part of his 'charm'? You could have made a ticker like that for most people and groups in politics, people care about results a lot more than they care about strict honesty.

If anything, it's telling the truth that most commonly leads to backlash, because it leaves you vulnerable and under-optimized.

I don't think of people being trans or gay as being strictly worse than cis or straight such that society or government ought to be oriented around the minimization of such people.

To me, this is nearly a complete non sequitur. Why the sudden spike of people identifying as trans? Society is more accepting now for sure, but gay people have always been with us. Trans is something new, and certainly in these numbers. I personally believe there is a strong biological cause. I’ll place my bet on ingesting microwaved plastic daily. Actually looking for the reason would imply that there is something wrong with trans people and that they can be fixed or even prevented so I’m not holding my breath.

I think being trans is about as morally wrong as being deaf. I’d expect the federal government to do something in the case of an unparalleled epidemic of deafness.

The comparison with the deaf community is interesting because my impression is there are absolutely members who would object to government interventions to reduce the number of deaf people, depending on the means. Maybe I ought to caveat my statement similarly.

That is my understanding as well. I really enjoyed learning sign language but I wouldn’t think twice about curing deafness in all newborns.

there are absolutely members who would object to government interventions to reduce the number of deaf people

And they would be wrong to do so.

And they would be wrong to do so.

Doesn't that depend on the method of reduction?

It would be obviously wrong to murder deaf people to reduce their numbers, but would it be obviously wrong to reduce the deaf population by curing them?

I would agree that it would be wrong to cure deaf people against their will, but what if 30% wanted curing? Would it be wrong to reduce deafness by 30% in that scenario? What if more wanted curing but were pressured by the deaf community to reject the cure?

What if, in a world where deafness was reduced to an even smaller fraction of its current presence, librarians and teachers started encouraging hearing children to explore deafness as a potential identity so that it does not go extinct? Would that be noble and something parents needn't worry about?

I can see the scenario where hard-of-hearing children were previously beaten down on, presumed to be slow and inattentive while they're actually just worse at perceiving speech than others. Indeed, that appears to be the experience of at least 1 person I've read about. In that world, I think it would be better if teachers tried to identify children who might be hard of hearing and encourage them to explore "deafness identity" such as sign language, hearing aids and potential cochlear implants in the future. Not to "prevent deafness from going extinct", but to help those children live in society. If parents started to block this and insist their child is perfectly normal without any medical examination to confirm it, I would assume it's the common instinct of trying to look normal which is harmful when you're actually not normal.

I trust you have quotes, at least, from teachers who claim they encourage children to explore transness for the sake of it not going extinct?

I trust you have quotes, at least, from teachers who claim they encourage children to explore transness for the sake of it not going extinct?

No. It was a hypothetical starting with "What if..."

Don't you think that the liberal fetishization of minorities as ideals who are somehow superior to the normies is a real phenomenon?

I think you misunderstood me- deaf activists who object to curing deafness are wrong to do so.

I think you misunderstood me- deaf activists who object to curing deafness are wrong to do so.

Yes, I did. I read it as "government interventions to reduce the number of deaf people..." "...would be wrong to so"

Why the sudden spike of people identifying as trans?

Why the sudden spike in people identifying as something that wasn't an identity in the past? Because it's an identity now.

There were very few authors before the invention of written language. There were very few basketball players before we started playing basketball.

It's not 'more' people identifying as trans, it's 'any', as it was not a thing you could identify as until very recently.

There have been various analogues in different cultures at different times, and we have zero accurate records on how common any of those were in their own times and places.

I agree with most of what you say, though I doubt that you could have a genetic cause for a trait and have it increase at the rates we’re talking about. Absent a bottleneck, the rates of most genetic traits stay fairly constant throughout time and across populations.

I suspect we might be dealing with both social contagioun and environmental chemicals.

We have a lot of chemicals from industrial processes that end up in our food, in our water, and in the air. To the degree that these chemicals disrupt natural hormones and thus thus would change the development of a fetus, that’s going to likely affect gender and sexuality. At some point during fetal development, a male challis brain is flooded with hormones to make the brain masculine. But if you have something that either prevents this from happening or blocks the hormones, or blocks them in certain regions of the brain, it’s entirely plausible to have a male body and a female, or partially female brain. Exposure to chemicals that mimic this process might well create a female with a masculine brain (or partially masculine). Thus you’d have a baby with a brain-body mismatch that isn’t genetic, but is inborn.

On the social side, we have managed to give gayness the veneer of “cool”. Being gay is celebrated in liberal circles as brave, being true to yourself, and often celebrated in media and in public places. They’re given special status and what kids crave — attention and a feeling of special importance. If I’m a nerd, I get shoved into lockers. Low status. If I’m gay, I get protected from that, enforced by the teachers.

I suspect where I depart from many people who believe the prior statements is that I don't think of people being trans or gay as being strictly worse than cis or straight such that society or government ought to be oriented around the minimization of such people.

All things being equal, I don't think of being gay as strictly worse than being straight. According to some definitions of what "trans" is, it absolutely is worse than being cis, according to the very terms insisted upon by trans activists.

If one assumes that a prerequisite for being "trans" is suffering from gender dysphoria, it just seems obvious that not having gender dysphoria is preferable to having it. All other things being equal, I think pretty much everyone would rather feel happy with their bodies as they are, not experience a sense of profound distress when looking at their reflection in the mirror, and not feel any urge to hack bits of healthy tissue off their bodies.

Analogies with anorexia are no accident. Anorexia is a mental illness in which one experiences profound distress at the sight of one's body. It seems extremely susceptible to social contagion (particularly in female adolescents) and culture-bound (almost exclusively diagnosed in WEIRD countries). I want anorexic people to be treated with respect and compassion, and to get the best treatment available. I also think that being anorexic is obviously worse than not being anorexic in essentially every way, and it's irresponsible to promote or glamorise it.

You may be working off a definition of "trans" in which a diagnosis of gender dysphoria is not a prerequisite. This is long past the point at which the concept has completely collapsed into incoherence for me, so I can't really comment as to whether it's better, worse or indifferent to be trans (according to that definition) or cis. The "trans without gender dysphoria" cohort does seem to contain a disproportionate amount of vocal bad-faith actors, which is bound to colour my perspective.

I agree that everyone would rather not have gender dysphoria.

That's why we treat gender dysphoria with medical and social transition, so that it goes away.

There's pretty much no other treatment for any other major psychological condition that's anywhere near as effective.

I agree that everyone would rather not have gender dysphoria.

From which it logically follows that not having gender dysphoria (and by extension not being trans) is strictly preferable to having gender dysphoria, and that if social influences play any significant role in developing gender dysphoria, it's irresponsible to raise awareness of or glamorise it.

and that if social influences play any significant role in developing gender dysphoria, it's irresponsible to raise awareness of or glamorise it.

Not necessarily. If raising awareness and making it acceptable increases prevalence by Y% but also means that social stigma is decreased by X% (meaning people are treated better) and the chances of treatment are increased by Z% (as it seen as worthy of investment in treatment) then it could still be responsible to do so.

That entirely depends on the numbers for X, Y and Z of course (if X were very high it could still be irresponsible for example), but you do have to factor in the positive impacts as well as the negative in that scenario.

Right. I don't have comparable figures to hand for X and Z, but the Tavistock Centre (the UK and Ireland's only dedicated medical centre for treating gender dysphoria in children) saw a 5,337% increase in referrals for female children in less than ten years, which I'm largely attributing to social contagion/awareness-raising campaigns/glamorisation.

I'd be quite surprised if X and Z are 5,000% combined. "Social stigma against trans people fell by 2,500%" essentially amounts to every trans person in the UK being treated like some combination of royalty and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, which doesn't seem remotely realistic.

which I'm largely attributing to social contagion/awareness-raising campaigns/glamorisation.

That of course would have to be part of the calculation, how much of that is social contagion vs people being willing to come forward with issues they would already have had but wouldn't have been able to get help with because stigma levels were too high.

For example with sexuality, I would suggest that skyrocketing numbers of people coming out, was down to a lot of people being more comfortable in admitting they were sometimes attracted to the same sex, rather than social contagion making people bi. I think it's likely with trans issues, because as you pointed out, they aren't treated as royalty still. The exact magnitude of each effect is difficult if not impossible to determine.

I don't have time for the back and forth research game, but why the conviction?

How did major international reviews find the evidence to be inconclusive and low quality but you state the opposite as fact?

Some studies that have been held up as gold standard such as the early Dutch puberty blockers studies have been shown to have major methodological flaws such as not accounting for the fact that people would transition in the pre/post survey instrument, thus rendering some of the items equivocal/unreliable. Recent studies have shown that even on its own merits it is inconclusive on showing improvement.

I do agree that not having gender dysphoria is better than having gender dysphoria but I don't think having gender dysphoria is a prerequisite for being trans. Gender dysphoria is a common reason people are trans but probably not the only one.

And as I said, if "being trans" is wholly uncoupled from "experiencing gender dysphoria", then I'm not sure I even understand what it means to be trans. Maybe you're referring to "gender euphoria", which from context I can only infer is a euphemism for the sexual arousal that autogynephiliac males experience when performing femininity. All else being equal, I would likewise rather not be an autogynephiliac than be one.

I think of someone as being trans insofar as they have the requisite desire to change their sex. I'm agnostic on the ultimate source of that desire.

So in your view, is a person who "identifies as a member of the opposite sex/gender" but has no interest in medically transitioning a trans person?

I might need some more specification on what "identifies as" means but probably yes. I do not conceive of changing ones sex in the relevant way in purely physiological terms, maybe it would have been clearer if I had said gender.

We start to see some cracks in the full-on sex-is-tennis position already when it comes to consent to sexual relations. Imagine your boss really loves tennis and decides that he wants to have some team-building out on the court. There's plenty of perceived pressure to play. Maybe you don't particularly like it, but you feel like you should just suck it up and play. It's not that bad. Maybe you could even learn to kinda like it. Besides, you likely have other parts of you job that you like even less (friggin' TPS reports are the worst). Lots of people might think this is kind of a stupid thing to be part of a job, perhaps somewhat unprofessional. Who knows? I hear that some people feel like they have to play golf to make that sale, and they don't seem to think it's terribly unprofessional.

I think the resolution here is that sex simply has a greater range of possible 'significance' than most activities - which is to say that I don't think there a reason one could not argue that some consensual 'transactional' sex is not vastly different to a game of tennis, where in other contexts (be that positive or negative) it can carry greater meaning. A potential analogy here is alcohol consumption - my going to the pub carries almost no significance, but if an employer forced a Muslim employee to drink that would clearly be unacceptable in a manner far more serious than compulsory tennis - we all accept that in different contexts the activity can carry different weight.

You smuggled in the argument that "sex is sacred" and therefore not at all like tennis. But then tennis people should just say it: sex absolutely is like tennis and it should be okay for children to have sex with adults was it not for all those pesky people who wrongly think that sex is sacred. But don't worry, as soon as we work a little bit on that opposition we will gladly accept child sex as new normal and embrace groomer as proud moniker.

Maybe the argument is that they will obviously not do that for political and strategic reasons. Something the NYT article gloats about: haha, we lied about gays being born that way to fool conservatives into accepting new laws. Now when we have majority and conservatives are eating dust, we can finally say what we wanted all along. And by the way trust us, the sexual liberation will definitely stop before full acceptance of Minor Attracted Persons (wink, wink hahaha).

This hits close to this widely downvoted comment I made on the topic.

I want to see people in the camp of 'sex is just like tennis' and even actually 'sex is just like tennis and tennis is a game you can play with a ball or not, and perhaps a racket but maybe not' explain it.

Why is 'groomer' a bad word to them? If open nudity, open fornication, children performing alongside adults in sexualized situations are all to be celebrated... then why not just admit 'yes actually we want to screw your kids' or at the very least 'if somebody else did we're okay with it'?

What is the contemporary justification that this is not okay?

If a father can be shamed for opposing their child dating somebody who is too dark, too male/female, or for deciding that they were the other sex all along... If a child rejecting the father's strict heterosexual, ethnocentric norms is to be celebrated...

Then why should progressives not shame a father for opposing their child dating an older adult who opened their mind about the beauty of inter-generational sexual relationships etc?

The tennis people were honest about their view on child sex in 1977 and in 1979. This has only hurt them since.

To assent to this demand for honesty would be a mistake, politically speaking.

Why do you think pedophilia is bad?

Their honest answer is probably pretty close to your honest answer, if neither of you are trying to play rhetorical games at the time you give it.

I think pedophilia is bad because kids are not adults and adults should shield children from sin by showing them what is right and what is wrong and by keeping them away from situations in which they would not be able to make good decisions.

Adults are to gradually give more responsibility to children to teach them how to behave as good Christians.

Even if a progressive leader (teacher or other) was persuasive enough to convince one of my children that they want to use their body with an adult, I would try and get them away from that situation as that is not what God intends for us to teach our children. Depending on how quick the progressive gets to them, they may not even have been taught about the importance of chastity yet.

I would not necessarily put a hard limit at 18 years old, perhaps 16 years old if my daughter is mature enough and the prospective marriage partner is an amazing deal... I doubt my son could get married at 16 unless he already has his own business running or some other proof of being able to support a family that would secure a wife that I would approve of.

I will not approve of fornication even after 18, because I don't think sex is tennis.

I think pedophilia is bad because kids are not adults and adults should shield children from sin by showing them what is right and what is wrong and by keeping them away from situations in which they would not be able to make good decisions.

If God said that sex isn't actually sinful, that was a misunderstanding, or was obviated by the new covenant: Would you no longer have any objections to pedophilia, or would you still think it was bad for other reasons?

My guess is you would still have objections, those remaining objections are your real reason for being against it, and you share those reasons with the people you're interrogating.

But maybe I'm wrong, let me know.

(note, this goes back to Penn Jillette's line about atheism and morality - religious people ask him why, if he doesn't believe in God, he doesn't go around raping and murdering anyone he wants. His response is 'I've already raped and murdered as much as I want to, which is zero, and if the only thing holding you back from that is your belief in God then please stay away from my family.'

I don't think that is the only thing stopping religious people from doing horrible things, I think their rhetorical reason is God but their actual proximal reasons are more about preventing harm and respecting autonomy and being a good person and so forth, same as everyone else)

If God said that sex isn't actually sinful, that was a misunderstanding

God doesn't say sex is sinful, as long as it's in the right context.

Would you no longer have any objections to pedophilia, or would you still think it was bad for other reasons?

I think that there are people who argue that God says things like that, and I do not listen to these people. The scriptures and tradition I choose to believe in are the ones that are congruent with my vision of what is true and right.

His response is 'I've already raped and murdered as much as I want to, which is zero, and if the only thing holding you back from that is your belief in God then please stay away from my family.'

Does he count abortion as murder? Does murder by proxy count? Would voting for abortion (or say, bombing Gaza) count?

Would any woman be able to #MeToo him (does he follow the Pence rule?) or is he the only judge of what counts as rape or what doesn't?

What about sterilizing people? Is that something wrong in the eyes of Jillette? Progressives get a lot of people sterilized these days, and they claim that it's all consensual and good, but it seems debatable to some.

I think their rhetorical reason is God but their actual proximal reasons are more about preventing harm and respecting autonomy and being a good person and so forth, same as everyone else)

Well there are wild disagreements on whether killing an unborn baby is murder or not, or whether sterilizing teenagers or MAID are a good idea, etc. One could also argue that Christians also believe that spiritual life is more important than the world, so avoiding offending God is more important than avoiding physical harm (ie hypothetically dying of hunger is better than taking the only available job at the abortion clinic, or more commonly, refusing to engage in sinful urges is better than enthusiastically embracing your 'LGBT identity').

Why is 'groomer' a bad word to them?

Because it's opposition to the concept that they have the legitimate right to change how your kid thinks about gender relations, just like how they freak out when you cut off the transition pipeline for children of non-progressive parents simply because it limits their political power (whether that will work as well as non-progressives think it will is, of course, an open question).

Then why should progressives not shame a father for opposing their child dating an older adult who opened their mind about the beauty of inter-generational sexual relationships etc?

Well, progressives already intentionally conflate men having sex with 5 year old girls with men having sex with 25 year old women, so provided that child is female they already act functionally identically to conservatives in this regard. If the child is male, that's a different story entirely; any negative effects are going to fall on the gender they already actively discriminate against so revealed preferences are that they're perfectly fine with advocating for this (the highest-profile cases of "children celebrated for doing sexually-provocative things" are male).

And... that's kind of the thing, isn't it? People tend to trot out "but that German academic experiment in the '60s proves progressives are pro-pedophilia" but that's a dishonest view of that; what that actually was, if you read the reports, were a bunch of evil women handing over boys (that nobody would miss) with the explicit intention they be raped by other men so they "didn't grow up to be Nazis". Same gender dynamics at play today, same justifications (with the occasional case of this expanding into underclass girls when the rapists pass a paper-bag test i.e. Rotherham).

The liberal counter to this is something seemingly-obvious but nobody ever brings it up for some reason: sexual attraction's a two-way street. "When demands for sex are unilaterally imposed in some way that takes moderate to severe effort to escape, that hurts kids?" That hurts everyone subjected to it, regardless of age or gender for reasons I really shouldn't have to explain. It's worse in this age category, since the number of group-unaffiliated people a kid will ever know is actually really limited, so the overwhelming majority of cases have the degrading "you should sleep with me because if you don't this will make things awkward with your folks/they aren't going to stop me from trying so I'll just constantly badger you about it until you give in" character that women rightfully complain about when it happens to them at work or other social gatherings.

The scenario where little Dan Savage successfully propositions his crossing guard crush, where tweenage self_made_human gets his milf, or any other scenario meaningfully-prefaceable by the words "Dear Penthouse," is arguably not on balance harmful specifically because disengaging from that if things go sideways is costless (which is the underlying assertion classical liberals are making when they claim casual sex is not actually bad, the room temperature for '70s sexual mores, why that view depends on birth control and no incurable STDs, why the double-standard exists between early male and female sexual activity, and why critics of this generally have nothing better than "but casual sex exposes society to dangerous [se]X-rays" as a rebuttal).

This is, as one other poster puts it, "tennis at a kid level", sex as a toy. Most people who manage it at that age, provided they're not lying on the Internet, seem to explain it similarly. No major cost-benefit analyses required, just yes or no. Sex-positive people, most of whom are men, tend to operate this way by default; their goal is to drive the price of sex so low as to inherently make all sex the kind of sex kids already manage with each other. Newlywed couples that are going to be long-term successful generally have this outlook on sex for at least the first couple of years, too.

What I am concerned about is that same kid whose parents intentionally deliver them into the hands of people who will sexually harass them (which was the justification for the original '80s panic about daycare workers, and part of why some people avoid public schools today), tell them they have a duty to give into the [revealed] sexual demands of their caregivers/family friends/family members (including and up to outright rape- usually associated with "Mom's boyfriends" and older stepbrothers), or whose parent tells them it's "stunning and brave" to be doing sexual things with people they'd rather not be in the first place, because that gets right back to the progressive genesis of "you should accept being fucked by people you don't want to be fucked by because man bad muh Nazis".

This is "tennis at an adult level", SaaS sex as a service. This is primarily cost-benefit (if the sex is pleasant is less relevant), be that for money, social status, social justice, retaining a significant other, friend, or other relationship, not being beaten, sleeping out in the rain tonight, or killed; or all of the above at the same time. Sex-negative people, most of whom are women, tend to operate this way by default; because they believe all sex is adult sex, their goal is to drive the price of sex so high that selling it once to a single man will set them up for life (this also squares with their assertions that women sleeping around doesn't devalue the sex they eventually plan to sell in this way, but most women aren't taking this to its logical conclusion).

(Which also properly explains how the feminist claim of "all sex is rape" is motte-and-bailey: the motte is that all sex is inherently of this type, and the bailey is that it's abusive that tops men don't just give bottoms women whatever resources they want for free. The claim of "sex work is real work" is the mirror image of this.)

But the modes of thought about this are important if any non-progressive actually wants to coherently unpack why what progressives are doing- which is the crime of imposing adult outlooks and an undue importance on sex onto people that genuinely shouldn't have to deal with that- is abuse. For the liberals, yes, you do have to accept the entire argument about sexual liberation; the traditionalists should probably keep in mind that this is why Biblical gender dynamics are the way that they are in the first place and re-emphasize that the entire point of getting married in the first place is that that is the best chance of having a relationship for which these dynamics no longer apply (even though they still do, it's a slower burn, at least).

Well, progressives already intentionally conflate men having sex with 5 year old girls with men having sex with 25 year old women

Sorry, what? If you’re talking about people demonizing age gaps among consenting adults, I think 1) that receives orders of magnitude less opprobrium than child molestation, and 2) it’s not particularly progressive-coded. High confidence on 1), but I’m not so sure about 2). I tried to look for sources, but quickly ran into a minefield of creepy subreddits.

If you’re not talking about age gaps, then I have no idea what you mean.

Anyway, I think you’re on to something regarding the unilateral demands. Adult-adult relationships usually come with exit rights that are missing from adult-child relationships. Given that we actively close off some of those exits by keeping kids with their parents, etc., we have an obligation to close off some of the avenues of abuse.

I wonder if there’s ever been a study comparing marital protections societies with and without divorce. That’s the elephant in the room for adult exit rights. I think marital rape laws have become less prevalent over time, which doesn’t really fit my theory…

then why not just admit 'yes actually we want to screw your kids' or at the very least 'if somebody else did we're okay with it'?

Loaded question, they don't.

Anti-progressives keep acting as if "adults having sex with children is okay" must follow from "adults providing children with info about sex is okay" even as all trends point to high-and-increasing discomfort with the former idea among the modal progressive. It's motivated thinking. Meanwhile the most conservative societies on Earth generally appear to be very comfortable with adults fucking minors (child marriage in the open, child prostitution on the down low).

Loaded question, they don't.

You're missing the point, which is: why? If "sex is just like tennis" what exactly is the issue? If I accuse you of liking to play tennis with children, even if you don't, are you going to get outraged, and ask me how dare I make the insinuation?

Anti-progressives keep acting as if "adults having sex with children is okay" must follow from "adults providing children with info about sex is okay"

It's not that it must follow, but surely you can understand people's suspicions when the "info about sex" includes all sorts of kinks and fetishes.

even as all trends point to high-and-increasing discomfort with the former idea among the modal progressive. It's motivated thinking. Meanwhile the most conservative societies on Earth generally appear to be very comfortable with adults fucking minors (child marriage in the open, child prostitution on the down low).

Oh please, and this isn't motivated reasoning? I can also cherry-pick things like the Taliban's reaction to Bacha Bazi and contrast it with various child sexualization initiatives of the progressives.

If "sex is just like tennis"

That's an uncharitable summary that OP made of one section of one article taken out of context, not a universally agreed-upon progressive maxim.

There are people who believe that, some of them are even in the thread. If you disagree with the idea just say it, rather than accusing him off loading the question.

We have been answering your question.

Your question for several iterations has been 'If progressives believe what OP says they believe, then they should also be fine with pedophilia, so why don't they just say they're fine with pedophilia?'

And the answer is, they don't believe what OP says they believe, so nothing following from that premise is material.

That's not dodging your question ,that's directly answering it.

You're the only person that answered me that doesn't seem to believe that sex is like a game if tennis. Cool, we agree. I'm interested in talking with people who don't.

I think what Arjin is getting at is that a lot of people believe something like "if two people want to have sex, they should. it's fun, they'll enjoy it, get some powerful emotional experience and deep human connection, that's what life's about, it's not your place to judge them". A conservative might believe something like "sex is sacred, it serves an important role in building families and having children, treating it casually undermines that and harms the people involved and society". The former is "like tennis", it's fun, you do it whenever you want. The latter isn't. My guess is you support the former and not the latter view, and maybe could continue the conversation by defending that view? I think people often get stuck arguing by throwing clever quips / weak-men / reductio ad absurdums / unexplained references to internally held beliefs at each other and never make contact with their actual disagreements.

To defend my level of charitability, I didn't actually present it as a summary of any section of the article. I said that I had commonly heard other people use an argument that treated sex like tennis in other arguments and that this setup reminded me of those arguments. The author of this article seems to think that transitioning is a very significant decision, often irreversible, and generally much more grave of a choice than deciding to quit competitive swimming. However, she does liken the two in one feature - both choices forever close off vast swaths of alternate possible worlds. And on that ground, she argues that we should let people make the choice.

I'm remarking separately that how seriously we consider things like sex are is often highly variable and unfortunately seems to vary within particular individuals depending on what type of argument they're wanting to make. We have no indication from this article concerning how serious the author thinks sex is in any of the settings I discussed. Nevertheless, all those areas still have in common the feature of making choices which shut out a variety of alternate possible worlds. I think the point I was kind of trying to grasp at is that we do need to think long and hard about the seriousness of the choice in question and a variety of other theoretical characteristics to come up with any sort of consistent rules for how far we can get just by observing that making choices shuts off alternate possible worlds.

However, she does liken the two in one feature - both choices forever close off vast swaths of alternate possible worlds. And on that ground, she argues that we should let people make the choice.

Well, perhaps I should have added a meta-layer where people are recharacterizing you characterization.

People are using you characterization of the belief to make arguments of the form 'if you would play tennis with your sister, why wouldn't you have sex with your sister?!?!' which does not logically follow from the limited formulation you offer here about them being 'alike in one way, but seems to be where most of the conversation has gone now.

Again, I would just point out that 'closing off possible worlds' isn't the only factor used in moral reasoning, there are lots of other reasons to oppose something.

And it's not charitable to say (which I'm not quite accusing you of, but it's where the overall conversation is trending) that if someone wrote an article about a single moral consideration and didn't talk about any other ones, and that singular moral consideration on its own has nothing to say about pedophilia, that the author must be in favor of pedophilia/is being hypocritical if they denounce pedophilia.

That's just a weird place to go to, and the movement seems more related to culture war rhetoric than anything it would be normal to conclude form the article itself.

If someone said that tax evasion was bad because it violates Social Contract theory, responding with 'Well, Social Construct Theory on it's own doesn't tell us why pedophilia is bad, so why don't you just admit that you approve of pedophilia?' I think we would all recognize that as an improper argument.

If someone said that tax evasion was bad because it violates Social Contract theory, responding with 'Well, Social Construct Theory on it's own doesn't tell us why pedophilia is bad, so why don't you just admit that you approve of pedophilia?' I think we would all recognize that as an improper argument.

Yeah, I didn't do that sort of thing, and I don't think anyone here is doing that, either. (I haven't thoroughly followed all of the discussion that has followed.) In your example, there seems to hardly be any conceptual link whatsoever between the two items. I attempted to construct a core conceptual link between several topics of discussion, which is ruminating on how seriously we take various activities/identities in different contexts and how that affects our willingness to simply let others make choices on those issues. I think it is that link that is sorely missing from your attempted analogy to Social Contract Theory/pedophilia. (Though if someone could come up with an interesting conceptual link between the two, I would be interested to hear it, not knowing yet whether I would ultimately view the link as compelling.)

You're missing the point, which is: why? If "sex is just like tennis" what exactly is the issue? If I accuse you of liking to play tennis with children, even if you don't, are you going to get outraged, and ask me how dare I make the insinuation?

Again, you may not have boiled it down to such a simplistic analogy, but the people I'm responding to did.

But:

Wertheimer, on the other hand, doesn't even attempt a theoretical explanation for why children cannot consent. Instead, he views it as simply an empirical question of whether, in a particular society, children tend to be, on net, harmed by sex.

You are acknowledging that, while Wertheimer isn't putting forward a coherent narrative on why children can't consent to sex, they are still strictly against pedophilia based on harm-reduction principles.

Other people ran with your statement to say 'since progressives don't have a coherent account of why pedophilia violates consent, they must be in favor of pedophilia and should just admit it'.

This latter stance is akin to my analogy, where they are looking at the lack of a consent-based (Contract-Theory based) reason to reject pedophilia and failing to find it, but not bothering to look at all the other reasons against it (harm).

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You're missing the point, which is: why? If "sex is just like tennis" what exactly is the issue? If I accuse you of liking to play tennis with children, even if you don't, are you going to get outraged, and ask me how dare I make the insinuation?

This is a bad-faith gotcha.

To use the tennis analogy, you would probably find something at the very least off if Serena Williams casually challenged a middle-school aged boy who was curious about tennis but had no real awareness of it beyond theoreticals of how to play, then proceeded to destroy him because she's that much more experienced. Something about that would strike most people as fundamentally different and possibly bullying, since the absolute destruction he faces might turn him off from the idea altogether and leave him upset. But if the same boy played someone only slightly more experienced, that would not necessarily come off as problematic.

Likewise, sex between children amongst themselves might not be a pro-social thing, but it's not wrong because it's unlikely either is that much more cognizant of what they are doing than the other. Ditto on predation, both are probably just fumbling and curious without any intent to exploit the other.

On the other hand, if Serena Williams taught a middle-school aged boy how to play tennis by playing with him, I would find that wholesome. I would think the same if whoever hell is the male best player did the same with a girl. By contrast I can't concoct a scenario when anyone would teach a child about sex, by having sex with them, without the whole thing being predatory.

It is not a gotcha, it is not bad faith. It is a valid analogy/question.

Why can't there be a teacher, acting in good faith, showing a child/teenager how to use a condom or what a birth control pill looks like? Maybe even outright demonstrating sex to show how this looks in practice.

Put another way, the suspicion on any adult talking sex to a child seems like a practical line drawn to make the best of an imperfect reality. I think if we had a surefire way of knowing a person's intent, we would absolutely not have a problem with some people getting to depict graphic sex to children on the basis of teaching them what it's actually like.

Why can't there be a teacher, acting in good faith, showing a child/teenager how to use a condom or what a birth control pill looks like?

Because it violates the terms of the analogy. That's like teaching tennis by explaining the theory, demonstrating proper forms with videos and mannekins, or whatever. It can be a lot of things, but what it is not, is teaching tennis by playing with them.

Sure. What is fundamentally predatory about adult-child or adult-teenager sex which couldn't be negated if neither party is sexually interested in the other?

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Anti-progressives keep acting as if "adults having sex with children is okay" must follow from "adults providing children with info about sex is okay" even as all trends point to high-and-increasing discomfort with the former idea among the modal progressive.

It's more "adults who feel entitled to provide kids with information about sex that their parents would be opposed to them having (and, even worse, feel entitled to hide it from parents)" is a good description of how actual groomers work.

The insistence on doing this despite vociferous opposition from parents also doesn't help. Also a groomer thing - it's actually more understandable that they'd take the risk, frankly.

Conservatives know that most of these people aren't going to actually fuck their kids but they've decided to behave like zebras; through their complicity they weaken child safeguarding norms and allow actual sexual groomers to hide in their midst. While also basically admitting they want to push kids towards a certain political orientation that suits them.

Combine it all and you get "groomers". Probably not kosher in any sort of formal debate but it's not one and I'm not particularly sympathetic.

they don't.

Why not?

What is the difference between

  • A - a middle-school teacher giving a few lectures 'perhaps you look like a boy/girl but you're actually a girl/boy' and then asking every pupil if they want the class to start referring to them as the new sex (opposite to the one their parents put down on their enrollment form)...
  • B - a middle-school teacher giving a few lectures 'sex feels great, maybe we should all have some' and then asking every pupil if they want to sign up for an orgy instead of PE this afternoon...

It's all consensual, if a pupil feels uncomfortable about A or B, then they don't have to sign up. Parents don't have to know because they could be transphobic or anti-sex-liberated-kids.

If you have an objection with B because orgies are totally different in degree than the soft 'social transition' that progressive schools are facilitating all over the country, how about dirty talk?

If you sign up for B' then adults at the school are going to tell you how cute your butt looks or some other sexualized comments, and encourage (or even force) other kids to do so as well.

If you have no issue with option A, do you have any issue with option B (or B'), and if so, why?

Why is 'groomer' a bad word to them?

It's historically been an effective weapon against advocacy for gay people. Activist PTSD?

So it’s got a bad denotation, worse connotations, a history of being deployed as a smear, and everyone currently using it is open about their disgust and their philosophical opposition to the targets.

Rounding that off to lingering bitterness feels a bit disingenuous.

Well this made me try and find out why exactly the LGB(T) organizations decided to distance themselves from NAMBLA & co, and from this single source, I don't really see a reason.

If anybody knows why in the 80s-90s, suddenly LGBT activists decided that kiddie-diddlers were not part of the coalition anymore, please let me know.

Here are 2 quotes from it:

In San Francisco in 1987, the Eureka Theatre Company—the institution that would later premiere Tony Kushner's play Angels in America—was positioned to march directly in front of NAMBLA. One bullhorn-toting Eurekan took the opportunity to periodically yell "We're not proud of you!" and "You're disgusting!" at the chicken-hawk contingent behind them. In New York, according to the Seattle Stranger, a sadomasochist group issued a press release condemning NAMBLA's "disgusting, illegal sex which brings shame to our community."

Both of these are pretty bewildering to me.

One argument that this article makes is that in some cases LGBT activists ended up on the same side as the diddlers because anti-LGBT laws were based on age of consent, ie age of consent for homosexual acts were higher than heterosexual age of consent, so lowering the age of consent was a way to bring about 'equality'.

Another argument is that making homosexual lifestyle illegal / disapproved of encourages adults to take advantage of teenagers in poor situations, and is less likely in a more tolerant society, so supporting people engaged in that lifestyle is not as important to the community.

it wasn't extremely unusual for a gay man's personal story back then to include a part like this: When I was 15, my parents kicked me out for being homosexual, so I hitched a ride to Castro Street, found a more welcoming community—and had sex with some of them. Precisely because gay relationships are more accepted now, that sort of background is much rarer; queer kids are more likely to stay home and happily, openly date people their own age.

In California, specifically, the law did (and still does) have a strict age of consent at 18, with the close-in-age exception only reducing the offense to a misdemeanor, dating back to the 1913. It was even gender-neutral, by text! But in practice, police and prosecutors overlooked the typical teenagers boinking; prosecutors focused on late-20s or 30-year-olds knocking up 14-year-olds, particularly severe embarassments of the upper class, and places where other sexual offenses would be complicated to demonstrate or taboo to discuss. Some of the limited tolerance for diddler-adjacent arguments in the 60s and 70s reflected the ability to deflect onto those less-controversial matters -- two sixteen year-olds giving handies may or may not be moral, but it was nowhere near the same class of bad behavior as the Breendoggle.

And a lot of the early US LGBT movement was from or downstream of California, so it had an outsized impact.

((There's a small remnant of this disagreement when people bring up underaged sexting, same-age relationships, and sometimes the libertarian ephibophilia paradox. But for wildly obvious reasons all but the dumbest of these groups now very clearly demarcate their positions.))

That said, the bigger cause was just that a lot of the modern understanding of child sexual abuse as damaging in itself, not 'just' gross or immoral or something done along with conventional physical harm, is a result of surprisingly recent research. Abuse before the 1970s could sometimes be further demonstrated by physical harm, usually in around a stereotype of a violent stranger kidnapping and dumping a victim, but especially outside of such extreme (and extremely rare) versions most of the focus remained on reputational harm or moral standards, because that was enough. Even in those cases, the victims were expected to not understand or even remember what was done to them. Corruption of a minor was at most understood as making these immoral acts tempting to the victims(!).

(This wasn't helped by the most visible groups for academic being the then-newly contacted non-Western cultures with ‘ritual’ abuse, which charitably investigators weren't always familiar enough with the language and close enough to the victims to hear about dislike, and less charitably associated a lot of less-immediate harm with other cultural practices/race.)

It wasn't until the 1960s that gathering serious information about the prevalence of child abuse really happened at an academic level (yes, arguably, Kinsey did it in the late-1950s, but he wasn't very believed and his methods and reporting were garbage), and the 1970s for a national standard to be set. This made studies of sexual abuse victims possible: rather than searching for extremely rare survivors of stranger rape, psychologists could argue that one-in-four women were subject to such abuse, and they could use standard study recruitment methodology.

When they did, they discovered what Reason euphemistically quotes a once-NAMBLA-supporter as calling "developmental issues" in tremendous quantities. This seems obvious in retrospect -- they were being attacked in some of the worst possible ways by trusted figures, early in their emotional and social development, often for lengthy periods of time! -- but it absolutely flipped the board. This is why you see even opponents of Breen during the Breendoggle focusing on character or mental health of the perpetrator with occasional mentions of physical risks, in a sense that is absolutely alien and repulsive to look at today.

From a more... cynical perspective, the growth of divorce in the 1970s also presented a very large number of extremely uncontroversial targets: perpetrators (almost all men) whose ex-spouses could now report crimes after having legally separated and achieved a level of independence, while those perpetrators could have potentially been awarded some level of custody during divorce hearings.

Thank you for the explanation. I suppose the issue with pedophiles is that they constantly need to get new recruits.

I feel like some of the 'harm' arguments could be leveled against MSM as well, but that's a different problem I suppose.

"Groomer" implies that the person is doing it for base selfish motivation (of future sexual gratification), when the people you call that believe they are doing it for the sake of the children and society at large. This is bound to be insulting to activists who come from a (sub)culture that denigrates selfishness and have built their internal narrative of purpose around doing what they are doing.

Surely some of these activists are acting on selfish motivations 'I shouldn't get arrested for selling hormones online to teenagers'.

'Huge moneymaker' gushed one doctor involved in sex-reassignment surgeries at Vanderbilt in 2018.

Is that doctor representative/typical of, or even represented among, those who loudly protest being called groomers? The vast majority of progressive activists do not operate clinics or hormone-selling businesses.

"Groomer" implies that the person is doing it for base selfish motivation (of future sexual gratification), when the people you call that believe they are doing it for the sake of the children and society at large.

"Groomer" has never been limited to sexual motives, and has always been used to describe manipulation/social engineering of the vulnerable for one's personal benefit.

Warm fuzzy virtue feelings are a personal benefit.

Warm fuzzy virtue feelings are a personal benefit.

That I think proves too much.

It's certainly possible for someone to do X so they feel good about it but I think that is stretching the personal benefit clause to breaking point. Otherwise any teacher at a Christian school who genuinely feels good about bringing kids into the flock of believers is also a groomer by your definition. It can't be anything to do with the fact they also actually believe the child will be better off as a Christian, or that they want the child's soul to be saved through Christ AND also feel good about it? In fact any teacher teaching anything who feels good about imparting knowledge is now a groomer? A patriotic teacher who feels good about teaching kids the national anthem and the history of standing up to colonial overlords?

At which point once more we have stretched the definition of grooming to nigh uselessness because feeling good about doing things you think are good is a pro-social human adaption. Most people feel good about doing (what they perceive to be) good even if they have other reasons for doing so (moral intuition, commandments from God, legal instructions to follow etc.)

It also suggests as long as we employ teachers who don't feel good about it, but do so because they are instructed to do so, would be A-OK? That seems a counter-intuitive take on the whole situation. "It's ok, we picked a bunch of teachers to teach the Gay/Trans/Sex Ed curriculum who really don't care about it at all, and in fact would rather teach something else, and thus will get no personal benefit whatsoever and therefore definitionally cannot be groomers" doesn't seem like it would be accepted as a counter-argument.

Otherwise any teacher at a Christian school who genuinely feels good about bringing kids into the flock of believers is also a groomer by your definition.

Any teacher at a Christian school who genuinely feels good about bringing kids to the flock of believers does not fit my definition. Neither does a teacher at a secular school who's real enthusiastic about teaching evolution. Enthusiastic teaching does not fit my understanding of "manipulation/social engineering of the vulnerable". It does not involve personal relationships outside the scope of the teacher's actual job, or encouraging the vulnerable party to keep elements of that relationship secret from those who care for and about them. Grooming for gangs, cults, and emotional abuse all center on such behavior.

Grooming is about establishing oneself as a secret authority figure over vulnerable individuals, outside the channels of one's official duties, thus guiding the vulnerable individual into forming and maintaining a double life insulated from normal mechanisms of accountability, about compromising the normal protections and safeguards we put in place to protect the vulnerable from abusive behavior. There is no excuse for such behavior on the part of public school teachers, no possible circumstance where such an action is reasonable or acceptable. Arguably, this holds true for all public servants. That is why so much of the controversy has centered around schools making it a policy to lie to parents.

At which point once more we have stretched the definition of grooming to nigh uselessness because feeling good about doing things you think are good is a pro-social human adaption.

Certainly it is true that when we ignore significant parts of the definition, what remains is less than useful.

It also suggests as long as we employ teachers who don't feel good about it, but do so because they are instructed to do so, would be A-OK?

Professionalizing fundamentally abusive behavior does not make it less objectionable. Personal benefit is attached to the definition because that is generally the only reason one would ever engage in such behavior, not because encouraging children to lie to their parents stops being objectionable when one does not enjoy it. The closest analogue would probably be a "handler", in the espionage sense, which goes to show how far afield one must go to find comparisons to this incredibly bizarre and objectionable behavior. I do concede that this would be a different behavior, requiring a different solution; in such a case, the problem is not the teachers, but the people giving them orders.

"Personal Benefit" is objectionable for the same reason a math teacher ditching their lesson and reading kids' fortunes for five bucks a pop would be objectionable: They're being paid to do a job, they're not doing the job, and instead they're doing their own thing to acquire additional value. They're double-dipping, in short, and the fact that the activity they're double-dipping into is egregiously objectionable just makes it worse. Deriving great satisfaction from doing your job is not objectionable. Deriving great satisfaction from not doing your job is extremely objectionable, and should result in the immediate loss of your job, and when one is a public servant, probably prosecution.

In any case, that is clearly not the situation we are presently faced with, since these policies appear to be a grass-roots effort by the teachers themselves, not any sort of carefully-planned or -deliberated policy promulgated through the usual legislative channels.

Do you think teachers should form personal relationships with their students, lie to their parents about the existence and details of these relationships, and encourage the children to likewise lie to their parents about such details?

A Christian teacher of an atheist child whose parents refuse to let them learn about religion, and who honestly believes both that the child would be better off being taught and that it would save their immortal soul has a good argument they should instruct the child secretly.

And even I as an atheist can accept that if they are doing so out of honest belief and faith, they aren't grooming the child. If they did so, instead so they could convert the child to some Opus Dei (?) style flagellation cult so they could derive pleasure from beating the child themselves, this would be another matter. But I wouldn't consider them a groomer, if they did the former but also got fuzzy warm feelings about helping save their immortal soul. And even if their conversion caused them to go to Church and be put in contact with an abusive priest, that is so far from what was intended that it can't logically be held against them.

I do also want to point out just because something isn't grooming doesn't mean it can't be harmful. If the Christian instructing the child is right, they have saved their soul (potentially), if they are wrong they will potentially have the child making choices that are not in its best interest and may have harmed the child's future prospects and damaged their relationship with their parents for nothing, but whether it is grooming is seperate from whether it is a good idea or not. I'm not saying what you are opposed to is necessarily directionally good, I am just saying it isn't grooming without specific direct nefarious intention of the teacher in question.

A teacher who honestly believes a particular child is trans and that their parents would be abusive if they found out, and so hides this and supports the child secretly, can in fact cause great harm if they turn out to be wrong, but I wouldn't call it grooming. Whether they are correct to do so or not entirely depends on the facts of the case. If the kid was trans, and their parents WOULD have beaten them and the kid would have commited suicide, then the teacher was quite correct to put the needs of the child over the parents right to knowledge. It's not always right and it's not always wrong.

Your point also leaves open that someone teaching your child within the scope of the school and not creating a relationship outside of the school one, if it is endorsed by the school, and is part of their official duties to keep it secret from parents, then it does not meet much of your criteria. If a school makes it a policy to lie to parents (as by your own example), then it is by definition part of the teachers official duties to do so. They are NOT operating outside their defined role in a personal context, they are operating within the accountability matrix of their school. You can certainly argue there should be some oversight process to this, where it is documented and perhaps the principal has to sign off on it, but they aren't operating personally. Now, can that be taken advantage of by the nefarious? Absolutely and that should be accounted for, but the idea that all of them are groomers is just a rhetorical weapon (albeit a good one!).

To put it bluntly, our kids are not only our own. Societal indoctrination and engineering is part of the purpose of schooling, whether that is into civic nationalism, Christian nationalism, Progressive ethics or whatever else. And that means teachers have a relationship with kids where they may be teaching them things we do not agree with, and must consider the impact of what that information being disclosed to parents will mean. Whether they are correct in any given case, depends on the facts in those cases, not some blanket rule. Sometimes the right thing to do will be to disclose, sometimes the right thing to do will not. If a group of hardcore Muslim parents are complaining that their kids are being taught that it's ok to be gay in a secular school, then I consider it completely appropriate for them to be told to keep their noses out, and if necessary outright misled, if that is the civic secular position. That's how you work on their kids assimilating towards the taught culture for the next generation.

Public servants are not servants of any particular member of the public, but to society as a whole, that means they can (and arguably should) lie to and mislead some members of the public in furtherance of the needs of overall society. Police can lie to members of the public, politicians can lie, spies can lie, all in furtherance to the public good. Teachers are no exception. Whether they SHOULD lie or not is dependant on the situation. But the fact there will be some situations where they should is I think definite.

To be clear, I am not saying they should always lie either, I think hiding things from parents should be thought through carefully, and there should be specific mechanisms for that decision to be checked at the very least at a school level and it may well be true that the dangers in this scenario are overblown. But I also think the criticisms of it are also overblown. Supporting a child that you think is trans or gay, and hiding it from the parents if you think it will be harmful, particularly as part of your official school policy is not grooming. Which doesn't, to repeat myself, mean that it is good. If the teacher is wrong, their decision may well be harmful itself.

A Christian teacher of an atheist child whose parents refuse to let them learn about religion, and who honestly believes both that the child would be better off being taught and that it would save their immortal soul has a good argument they should instruct the child secretly.

No, they don't. Saving souls doesn't work that way. Further, I defy you to show me an example of a Christian doing this, and our society accepting and enabling it as official policy, and then attacking anyone who objects. I do not believe for a single moment that you or any of the other progressive posters here would ever accept a public school teacher organizing secret bible studies for their students during their working hours, explaining to the kids that they will go to hell unless they repent and are baptized and become Christians, and that they should lie to their parents about all this, and justifying their actions as saving children from hell. Were such a thing ever done, the response would be immediate firing and quite possibly prosecution. If actual, serious harm befell children roped into such a scheme, the response would be apocalyptic.

And even I as an atheist can accept that if they are doing so out of honest belief and faith, they aren't grooming the child.

And even I as a Christian accept that they are, in fact, grooming the child.

I can show that my definition is commonly used for a wide variety of end-goals, including explicitly ideological ones, not merely for enabling pedophilia. I have described how the specifics of the act itself is innately and deeply objectionable, regardless of motives. The Progressive insistence that "grooming" is only used for sexual abuse is entirely specious, and it has reached its current level of fixation because Progressives would find it very convinient were it were true, have a sufficient megaphone to drown out objections, and have little compunction about lying early and often. I am not compelled to play along with the charade here, and so I decline to do so.

I'm not saying what you are opposed to is necessarily directionally good, I am just saying it isn't grooming without specific direct nefarious intention of the teacher in question.

Cult leaders can genuinely believe that their cult is in their followers best interests. We still call it grooming. Emotional and physical (as distinct from sexual, but them as well) abusers can genuinely believe that their abuse is in their victims' best interests. We still call it grooming. That the groomer's moral compass no longer functions does not make what they're doing not grooming. It doesn't stop being grooming if you think it's a really, really good idea: forming secret relationships with the vulnerable, secretly inculcating dependency, insulating the victim from others who care about and have a responsibility to them, these actions are part of a well-known and well-studied pattern, and they are unacceptable in all cases. The act is done with intention, and the act itself is nefarious.

Your point also leaves open that someone teaching your child within the scope of the school and not creating a relationship outside of the school one, if it is endorsed by the school, and is part of their official duties to keep it secret from parents, then it does not meet much of your criteria.

To the extent that this is made official policy through official channels, with all the legal procedures followed, the problem simply kicks up a step. The school system exists to serve parents. If the school system decides to treat the parents as adversaries, it should be promptly destroyed and all participants punished to the maximum extent of the law. To the extent that the law cannot accomplish this, then the law has failed, and it is time for more stringent measures.

You can certainly argue there should be some oversight process to this, where it is documented and perhaps the principal has to sign off on it, but they aren't operating personally.

It should not be legal for school employees to lie to parents about their children. To the extent that this is not actually legal, I would imagine it would be because no one ever dreamed that such a law would be necessary. Obviously we underestimated the nature of Blues, and should remember this lesson in the future as we work to patch up the walls of civilization.

To put it bluntly, our kids are not only our own. Societal indoctrination and engineering is part of the purpose of schooling, whether that is into civic nationalism, Christian nationalism, Progressive ethics or whatever else.

Indeed. To the extent that they are not my own, they are my family's, and beyond that my Tribe's. They are not the school's, and they are in no way yours.

We created the school system on the assumption that we shared a common understanding of the values to be indoctrinated and engineered. Clearly that was a terrible mistake, and it must be corrected immediately. Since indoctrination and engineering are a core part of the mission, and since the idea of strict neutrality in our purportedly shared institutions is clearly a pipe dream, either it must be my tribe's values being inculcated, or the indoctrination machine must be destroyed. Blues cannot be trusted with control of shared institutions; those institutions must be either captured or destroyed. Certainly it is not reasonable for my tribe to finance with our taxes an institution that treats us as an enemy to be defeated.

If a group of hardcore Muslim parents are complaining that their kids are being taught that it's ok to be gay in a secular school, then I consider it completely appropriate for them to be told to keep their noses out, and if necessary outright misled, if that is the civic secular position.

No, it isn't. The School exists to serve the parents. It has no interests beyond those of the parents. To the extent that parents' interests cannot be reconciled, the school should limit itself to those interests all parents, or at least the vast majority of parents, have in common. If this requirement cannot be satisfied, if the school cannot be prevented from picking favorites in deeply contested controversies, it should not exist.

If the school thinks the parents are doing something illegal, it should call the cops. If the parents are not doing something illegal, the school has no valid role beyond assisting in their parenting, according to their values. The school has no valid perspective, no room for values of its own, no principles, no point of view.

And again, if I am wrong, then the school's perspective, values, principles and point of view should obviously be mine, not yours.

And again, if I am wrong, then the school's perspective, values, principles and point of view should obviously be mine, not yours.

Absolutely! You'll notice I am not arguing that you shouldn't be voting for, or otherwise trying to influence what is taught, and why I point out you absolutely should use "groomer" because it does have rhetorical traction, even if i don't think its really accurate. Were I still a political consultant and working fir the Republican party, I would be hammering that hard in many places (while downplaying abortion probably). That's entirely normal! I am talking about the tactics here which can be used in service to whatever ideology. Indeed I think one of the reasons the US has a fracture in culture is because it hasn't been effectively mandating the same thing in every school in every state. Your whole set up is basically designed to not create a single shared culture/tribe, because Texas gets to mandate different things to New England or Oregon and vice versa. Your ideas about only teaching what all parents agree on would be even worse in that regard. You need cohesion.

I will disagree that schools are for parents though. They are for the whole of society. Thats the whole point. What I want from a selfish parents point of view is for my kids to get the most attention, to get the most resources, to go to the best schools regardless of anything else.

Society is the answer to a distributed coordination problem, that if we all attempt to horde the most resources, to ensure our values are the ones taught, that means you cannot have a cohesive polity. Its a hedge against our (entirely understandable!) selfishness.

And the deal is we are on average better off with the coordination even if some individuals and blocs do not get their preferences met. Instead our selfishness is channeled into a struggle for the control of the culture and institutions.

Your preferences are currently losing. But they won't always be. It's the nature of movements to push too far and then lose support. Thats how the more conservative bloc lost control to the current more progressive one in the first place. But they too will push too far and lose support, quite possibly over the very issue we are discussing.

The answer is not to flip the board (so to speak), it's to realise these mechanisms evolved for a reason and that in the long run we are all better off on average. My kids are adults now, and they were educated in many ways with values I think are incorrect. And that's ok! I still got my chance to put forward my values as well. They were still better off with a stable system, even if it wasn't my preference of stable system.

Biden has historically low ratings and it is quite possible (perhaps even likely at this point), you'll have a Republican president, probably Trump. If they back off some of the abortion stuff you have a good shot at holding the Presidency, Senate, House and Supreme Court all at once.

At State level places like Texas and Florida are pushing back against what you dislike in education, alobgside with electoral success. The feedback mechanisms exist to change the things you dislike and there is evidence, they are being used AND support for your positions (or at least some of them) is growing.

If you burn down the things doing what you dislike rather than fighting to control them, then your kids grow up in flames. I think you are absolutely entitled to fight for what you want (figuratively speaking) but if you aim to burn down everything, you harm everyone. To the extent your opponents are trying to do the same, they are also wrong. But mostly they are and have been trying to control the culture and institutions not destroy them. And that is business as normal.

Sorry, I've not addressed all your points, I've focussed on those I find most interesting, which has moved us away from the groomer thing. Though I'm not sure there is much more there to learn about our respective positions there in any case!

At which point once more we have stretched the definition of grooming to nigh uselessness

No, we have seen people mutilate definitions and concepts to deflect criticism of teachers "hatching little eggs," because it's a bridge too far to justify grooming kids on the merits. You can tell that's the strategy being used because the response to "why is this teacher showing my kid porn and telling him he'd look sexy in a dress" is "woah, how is that any different than promoting patriotism, tu quoque!"

The only conclusion I can see is that it's a tactical argument to hide actual support for the grooming.

You can tell that's the strategy being used because the response to "why is this teacher showing my kids porn and telling him he'd look sexy in a dress" is "woah, how is that any different than promoting patriotism, tu quoque!"

Yes, and that is why using groomer as an attack is effective and I have no issue with it. If I still worked in politics and worked for the Republican party I would certainly be encouraging its use. It is rhetorically impactful.

However here, we are supposed to try and pull back the curtain on the culture war and discuss it, rather than wage it. I am certain some people are defending actions that are wrong, just due to ingroup bias and tribal thinking. But that doesn't mean the vast majority of teachers who are trying to (as they see it) protect vulnerable kids from abusive parents are groomers.

No, I'm saying that you are using the tactic of confusing definitions into uselessness, in order to deflect criticism of indefensible behavior by teachers who get off on "hatching little eggs."

And I disagree, and say that the other side is confusing definitions into uselessness by using it as an attack against teachers with perfectly defensible behaviours.

Now what?

No, we have seen people mutilate definitions and concepts to deflect criticism of teachers "hatching little eggs

This mostly doesn't happen. There hundreds of millions of people so i'm sure it's happened, but >95% of 'trans kids' realize they're trans on the internet.

why is this teacher showing my kid porn and telling him he'd look sexy in a dress" is "woah, how is that any different than promoting patriotism, tu quoque

This is like saying Catholicism is a fundamentally Pedophilic religion because look how they cover it up!! Except actual generic pedophilia is 1000x more common (among both catholic priests and teachers) than teachers showing kids porn with intent to trans them.

Every time this issue comes up you excuse the teachers by saying it's mostly creepy discord moderators and tumblr influencers doing most of the grooming, but you don't ever talk about them except to dismiss criticism of the teachers.

And my criticism of SSCreader is that he is using the catholic priest coverup tactics while claiming to just be "(trying to) pull back the curtain on the culture war and discuss it, rather than wage it."
Why is he doing that?

Because I like arguing on the internet, and I think the position I am arguing against is incorrect, and here is one of the places we can argue very different things civilly. If I wanted to actually influence the world I wouldn't have quit politics.

Every time this issue comes up you excuse the teachers by saying it's mostly creepy discord moderators and tumblr influencers doing most of the grooming, but you don't ever talk about them except to dismiss criticism of the teachers.

This is assuming 'arguments are soldiers'. Am I wrong, at all?

According to a list compiled by the conservative group Parents Defending Education, there are thousands of schools in the US where teachers hide social transition from parents.

Most people probably only know the policies of a couple schools so it's hard to tell but this seems to be a pretty general movement across the US.

This mostly doesn't happen.

Are you against it? Or is the Law of Merited Impossibility striking again?

Would you be against teachers putting in the same kind of effort but to help their students hatch the egg of 'I really want to have sex with grown-ups asap'?

If yes, why?

see here https://www.themotte.org/post/780/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/166814?context=8#context

As I have said multiple times over the past so many years, I do not think there is a single trans person who should, from their perspective, socially transition or medically transition. I think the entire thing is dumb. I don't see why that means I must support whatever decentralized oppression mirage conservatives claim that's directionally similar to my position!

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You seem to object to the technicality of 'grooming'.

But what if teachers did want to have sex with kids and did try to influence them to have sex with them?

They would proceed in the same manner that teachers are currently doing with the trans questions. They're finding the 'trans' kids and helping them come out to their actual identity that was hidden all along.

Except in this case they're finding the kids that just happen to really want to have sex with adults.

Not forcing any kids, just helping them find 'who they truly are' inside.

Would you be opposed to it, and on what ground?

But what if teachers did want to have sex with kids and did try to influence them to have sex with them?

Then that would be bad and then be grooming yes. Adults should not have sex with children, so I would oppose it on those grounds.

Adults should not have sex with children

Why not? What's your moral justification against it (and how does it not apply to puberty blockers)?

What about children with children? If the teachers were to have practical sex-ed organizing orgies between pupils? Perhaps filming for educational purposes as well.

Because I intuit that is wrong. If puberty blockers are a medical treatment for a medical condition then they are probably ok. But it would probably depend on the age of the child, the situation they were in and the opinion of medical professionals. I imagine sometimes they would be ok and sometimes not.

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This is sort of true, but in the context of 'trans kids teacher lgbt disney grooming' stuff it's a haze of nonspecific meanings that mostly means the 'base sexual gratification' thing as opposed to the other meaning.

The accusation is neither hazy nor nonspecific, nor novel to this case. It is the common name for a pattern of behavior used to compromise the vulnerable, whether for recruitment to gangs or cults, or to enable emotional or physical abuse, or for sexual abuse. In all of these cases, the objectionability of the "grooming" action itself is distinct from the bad things it facilitates. Numerous examples of such usage abound, and have never been limited specifically to grooming for pedophilia.

Forming a special, secret relationship with a vulnerable individual and encouraging them to lie to others about the details and nature of that relationship is a profound violation of trust regardless of the motives. To do this from a position of formal power, as an agent of the state, is a profound abuse of power as well.

Forming a special, secret relationship with a vulnerable individual and encouraging them to lie to others about the details and nature of that relationship is a profound violation of trust regardless of the motives

You are conflating two things here. One is: a student goes to a teacher and tells them they are trans, wants to use the female name in class, and doesn't want to tell their parents. The teacher says 'awww sure of course sweetie'. Maybe they talk for three minutes at the end of class every other week. I think this happens for <10% of trans kids, but still does happen sometimes. The teacher plays ~no role, either in terms of direct causation or in terms of being a 'prime mover', in causing the kid to be trans.

Two: A teacher spends an hour plus every week or two talking to the kid about trans issues, sex, or porn. The teacher, causally and/or by intent, plays a significant role in the child realizing they're trans or deciding to transition. The teacher tells the child to not tell their parents. Maybe they themselves are trans, and like the idea of having more kids be trans, or maybe they just believe it because it's the wholesome LGBTQ+ thing to believe. Maybe the teacher also does sexual acts with the child.

I think two happens with <1% of the frequency of one.

Forming a special, secret relationship with a vulnerable individual and encouraging them to lie to others about the details and nature of that relationship is a profound violation of trust regardless of the motives. To do this from a position of formal power, as an agent of the state, is a profound abuse of power as well.

You are imagining that most cases of one carry some of the characteristics of the second, enabled by your engagement with the topic being very 'alienated' from the details of the actual people and causation involved. You're also imagining that cases of one are more common among trans kids than they are. Neither are true! To whatever extent children transitioning is bad, this paints a false picture that just makes it impossible to prevent anything bad from happening.

Maybe the teacher also does sexual acts with the child.

Why include this? I have explicitly excluded actual pedophilia from my statements so far, as it is irrelevant to the subject at hand.

You are imagining that most cases of one carry some of the characteristics of the second, enabled by your engagement with the topic being very 'alienated' from the details of the actual people and causation involved.

I observe that Blue teachers and administrators have put large amounts of effort into policies that specifically protect and enable your scenario 2, excepting the last sentence. I observe that scenario 1 would require no policy at all, but simply teachers keeping their mouths shut about something they've been told. Instead, these teachers have explicitly demanded lessons on gender identity, have specifically demanded a policy of actively facilitating queer expression at school while lying to parents about their kids actions, and their interactions with those kids.

I do not think such efforts would be necessary for <1% of <10% of interactions with a small minority of students, but they are absolutely necessary for the grooming behavior many teachers have publicly announced that they engage in, and that many more teachers and administrators publicly support and are taking specific steps to facilitate. I suppose it's possible that all these teachers and administrators are simply lying about the things they do, the things they intend to do, and the actions they support, when all they actually want to do is completely innocent and unobjectionable things. If so, they are too foolish to be allowed to keep their jobs.

I observe that Blue teachers and administrators have put large amounts of effort into policies that specifically protect and enable your scenario 2, excepting the last sentence

Can you name something Blue teachers have done that enables 2 but not 1? Ignoring the sex part.

Instead, these teachers have explicitly demanded lessons on gender identity

As far as I know, this is, like, one or two lessons per year in a group setting. Which is at most 1.

have specifically demanded a policy of actively facilitating queer expression at school while lying to parents about their kids actions, and their interactions with those kids

Again, this seems to be 1 to me. "Maybe they talk for three minutes at the end of class every other week" as opposed to, like, half an hour once a week or so. I think you need the latter for any grooming (in the usual sense) to happen.

I suppose it's possible that all these teachers and administrators are simply lying about the things they do, the things they intend to do, and the actions they support, when all they actually want to do is completely innocent and unobjectionable things. If so, they are too foolish to be allowed to keep their jobs.

I don't think they're doing that.

Yeah, but OP managed to have a polite discussion without setting up a caricature first.

Why don’t progressives, believing X, endorse Y? The obvious answer is because X doesn’t imply Y. Consider some reasons age might be categorically different from race:

  • Children grow from young to old, but not from white to black. Judging based on the latter is less moral.
  • We already restrict the rights of children to engage in commerce and move freely. Imposing on another adult right is therefore acceptable.
  • Moral law, if one subscribes to any of the systems which proscribe pedophilia.
  • Without exception, adults were once children, but the reverse is not true, so there cannot be equality between adults and children.
  • The ever-popular power differential, which violates a consent-based ethics very popular among liberals.
  • It’s gross. You may not believe it, but your enemies are also capable of a disgust reflex.

Take your pick.

Consider some reasons age might be categorically different from race:

Race is not the elephant in the room, it's sex.

Children grow from young to old, but not from white to black. Judging based on the latter is less moral.

My point is that if schools, judges and the public can collectively go against parents for decisions their children take, why not regarding dating pedophiles. If boys can become women I don't see why white boys couldn't become black men if they so desired, or if Michael Jackson suddenly decided to identify as 'white', what the issue would be?

We already restrict the rights of children to engage in commerce and move freely. Imposing on another adult right is therefore acceptable.

Less and less in the area of sex change. There are progressives right now arguing that it's not parents' business if the kids want to see doctors and therapists, buy and take hormones, live in a safespace LGBT shelter etc...

Moral law, if one subscribes to any of the systems which proscribe pedophilia.

Which is my question, on which moral basis would a progressive proscribe the sexualization of children and pedophilia?

Without exception, adults were once children, but the reverse is not true, so there cannot be equality between adults and children.

What is the relevance in this case? Also progressives want us to believe that FTM transpeople are just as women as women that were ever only girls and women.

The ever-popular power differential, which violates a consent-based ethics very popular among liberals.

Then why is it okay for teachers and school administrators to tell kids that they can become girls/boys if they so wish? Isn't there a power differential there?

It’s gross. You may not believe it, but your enemies are also capable of a disgust reflex.

That was not a valid argument to prevent the legalization and acceptance of LGBT issues.

You asked why your enemies don’t do something. I provided a list of reasons. It only takes one for a progressive parent to stick with the status quo and say “fuck no, the kid diddlers won’t get my child.”

You might as well ask a Muslim how he can abstain from alcohol. Good Christians don’t drink to excess, of course, but how could a Godless heathen justify such restraint? He doesn’t even count 1 Corinthians as scripture!

Obviously, there is more than one way of coming to a similar answer. A Muslim has a long-standing, complicated tradition too, and it says no drinking. So, too, with progressives—and socialists, and fascists, and most modern Westerners—who have settled on one or another reason not to have sex with children. Removing your reason doesn’t leave us swinging in the wind.

I don't need somebody pretending to be ChatGPT to give me an hypothetical answer to a question when we have people here with the existing position to give us their actual answer.

You might as well ask a Muslim how he can abstain from alcohol. Good Christians don’t drink to excess, of course, but how could a Godless heathen justify such restraint? He doesn’t even count 1 Corinthians as scripture!

I understand that Muslims have rules similar to Christians and they follow these rules. They don't have to be identical to Christian rules' for me to understand where the Muslims are coming from. I can read a novel or watch a movie and disagree with a character's motivations and logic but still understand why they would undertake certain actions based on that character and motivations.

If we're discussing progressives, then we need to explain why they feel justified in saying certain type of gross behavior should be illegal when they've spent the last few decades telling us that people behaving in a gross manner should not be jailed or discriminated against.

So, too, with progressives—and socialists, and fascists, and most modern Westerners—who have settled on one or another reason not to have sex with children.

Well I'm curious to what that answer is, and if some kind of logic can be built upon if we want to understand the progressive's mind and where this ideology is taking us.

If we're discussing progressives, then we need to explain why they feel justified in saying certain type of gross behavior should be illegal when they've spent the last few decades telling us that people behaving in a gross manner should not be jailed or discriminated against.

Because in this case they see a reason other than grossness to make it illegal. It is certainly a progressive tenet, although one that many people who call themselves progressives often forgo, that one should not be punished only for behaving in a way that others find gross or distasteful. It does not follow that no behavior that others find gross or distasteful should ever be punished. AIUI (might be mistaken), the Bible forbids murder on the grounds that it offends God to destroy something that is created in His image. This rationale makes no sense if one does not believe in the divine creation of humans. Nevertheless, people who don't believe that still have reasons for wanting murder to be forbidden and prosecuted. It does little good to say "But you're fine with sinning against God's creation in this case [eating blood pudding], so why are you not fine with sinning against God's creation in this other one [mass shooting]?"

Then why should progressives not shame a father for opposing their child dating an older adult who opened their mind about the beauty of inter-generational sexual relationships etc?

They tried that already in the 70s, and you should never let them live it down.

Continuing the tennis analogy, I remember reading the story of some Dutch gymnast that ended up homeless after ending her career after an injury. She ended up doing survival sex work and she claims it was still miles better than the abuse she suffered in the gymnastics classes.

So I would argue that tennis (and other sports) with children, if you force them to play at the adult level is also bad. Yes, there's all kinds of ways you can stretch the analogy further (what is the child is really good at tennis and really enjoys it and thus isn't satisfied with playing with other children?) to make all kinds of inconvenient comparisons, but my point is that the original analogy kinda works, but it works in the opposite direction. We should be shielding children from more things, not less, because parents are either blind or willfully ignorant. My wife, even though she was and is built for it, was smart enough as a child to just sit down and refuse to go to the ballet school one day because she couldn't stand how the old hag would abuse other girls who just weren't as flexible.

Continuing the gymnastics analogy, Aella had recently an interview on trigonometry where she said she vastly prefers escorting and prostitution compared to factory work she used to do when very young, which made her drink too much. Where does the shielding end?

I agree with the OP that this is question of conceptual core beliefs and morality. I think that what we are going through a phase where we will see what are the real consequences of of shredding the old moral principles and replacing them with what we have now. What I find interesting is that between people like Rationalists, Sam Harris and even New Left the common theme seems to be pedestalization of maximizing utils, which means something like "minimizing suffering" as the new ultimate value. The methods may be different - rationalists prefer to think about themselves as professional surgeons who know how to not get emotions in their way. They know what is moral and they will do what is necessary to minimize suffering and maximize flourishing. The new left on the woke side pedestalizes compassion above everything else. They also want to maximize minimize suffering by means of compassionate justice.

I think this morality and aesthetics will bring us ruin, I do not think it is workable as a society-wide system. I agree with the OP that the whole theology is absolutely wrong, the focus on utils and compassion as the highest aim is not only wrong, but I think it is unstable as it was the result of the previous moral system.

Aella had recently an interview on trigonometry where she said she vastly prefers escorting and prostitution compared to factory work she used to do when very young, which made her drink too much. Where does the shielding end?

If 'shielding our children from future harm' is the excuse we need to bring back a strong labor movement and make factory work less stressful and soul-crushing, then it's a weird attack vector but I'm all for it.

Also: When you seriously write the words 'My opponents want to maximize suffering' is approximately the point where you should take step back from teh keyboard, look at yourself in the mirror, and ask whether you might possibly be stuck in a filter bubble that's giving you wildly uncharitable beliefs about other human beings.

I do think that my opponent's policies and behaviors cause more suffering than my side's policies and behaviors on average, but I would never say they want to maximize suffering! That's not even cartoon supervillain, it's literally cartoon Satan (because even the 'real' Satan is more nuanced than that!).

Nobody wants to literally maximize everyone's suffering, but plenty of people want to drastically increase the suffering of specific groups.

Looks like OP just made a typo and has edited it.

make factory work less stressful and soul-crushing

How exactly would you do this? To make it even more difficult, what steps would you take that don't just distill down to "work less"?

Not that person, but below are several steps that immediately come to mind. "Work less" is also a valid answer to avoid damaging people's bodies and minds.

Allowing chairs for all positions it is safe to do so in. There's a lingering boomer right stigma against letting people sit down while doing their jobs even when it is unnecessary for them to stand. Making folks stand for no reason other than elite aesthetic sensibilities is just a petty humiliation for being working class, wears people out quicker, is harder on older folks and those with flat feet and so on.

More rotation of roles, re-skilling rather than de-skilling, so you're not stuck performing the exact same repetitive motion all day every day for life, or so hyper specialized that if the factory closes you have no transferable skills. Maybe Monday it's machine x, Tuesday machine y and so on.

Letting people listen to music, podcasts, etc using work issued headsets that are interrupted by safety alarms and the like. Cuban cigar factories also had (have?) highly popular lectors that would read books and newspapers aloud to the workers so they weren't bored to death. You had completely illiterate people enjoying and discussing literary classics.

Having workers clock-in on arrival before performing long security checks, gearing up and so on rather than wasting time at work unpaid during preparations.

Good points! I was pushing back a little since there are limits to how fun and creative you can make factory work, but I've always loved watching videos of how they function.

There's obviously some low-hanging fruit at many of them. Even adequate/pleasant lighting is something it seems like many miss.

I dunno, I've never worked in a factory! Probably look at the website of any union of factory workers and they'll have a list of demands that make up a good start.

'Work less' is a perfectly fine answer, the division of profit between workers and capitalists is a variable ratio that's unusually high right now, every historical reason to expect that we could lower it by paying more money for less work without causing any problems.

But if you're rejecting that, there's still huge variance in how terrible a job is along other axes, things like how much autonomy and flexibility workers have, how they are treated by management, are they allowed to go to the bathroom, etc.

Again, see any factory worker's union demands, not my area.

They also want to maximize suffering by means of compassionate justice.

Care to explain?

I don’t think you could find a “new left”ist who would say compassionate justice is intended to make anyone suffer. You can surely find ones who’d say any increased suffering (by the outgroup) would be justified by reduced suffering among the ingroup—but then you’re back to an offshoot of normal moral reasoning.

Typo, I wanted to say they want to minimize suffering of course. Thanks.

Continuing the gymnastics analogy, Aella had recently an interview on trigonometry where she said she vastly prefers escorting and prostitution compared to factory work she used to do when very young, which made her drink too much. Where does the shielding end?

She seems like a very unusual person, and also I don't fully trust her. She seems exaggerate a lot for the sake of building up her rep.

This is something that will obviously vary a lot from person to person. But for what it's worth, I actually sorta got involved in a relationship with a prostitute last year. It didn't last long, but we're still friends, and I got to see how it affected her. Her normal sex drive was completely gone, she was good at faking it but she felt nothing. She was very happy to get away from anything like a "party" and just do normal stuff with me. She's since left that work and seems happier now just doing a low-wage regular job, even though it pays less.

We start to see some cracks in the full-on sex-is-tennis position already when it comes to consent to sexual relations. Imagine your boss really loves tennis and decides that he wants to have some team-building out on the court.

Painting someone's house is unmistakably a normal job, but if your boss demanded that you paint his house, that would be inappropriate.

The actual criterion is how much the boss personally benefits. It's true that the boss probably enjoys playing golf, so his benefit isn't precisely zero, but it's probably not that hard to find a golf partner and the main benefit is the socialization, not the fact that the boss really, really values golf.

I think the usual argument against such arrangements is not anything to do with the seriousness of sex or anything. Instead, it's about theft. Your boss is often also an employee of the company that is employing you. You're being paid to do work for the company, not for your boss. If he's getting you to do personal benefits purely for him, then some of your compensation (or hypothetical compensation that would need to go to your replacement in order to attract an employee into that position) would be misappropriated to his benefit rather than the corporation. Of course, principle-agent problems are everywhere, we can't always root out every de minimis misappropriation of benefits.

That said, we can widen the scope and even remove the personal benefit aspect without difficulty. Suppose the boss really wants to improve team cohesion for the team underneath him. He doesn't even think he needs to participate; maybe it would be better for the employees to build some camaraderie without any supervisory presence. So, he contracts a company to provide equipment and set up a little tennis "experience" that his team goes to, without him. There is still a lot of pressure for all the individual team members to go. Here, there's no misappropriation going to his personal benefit. I would again think that people might find this annoying or off-putting, but I can't imagine the response would be anything remotely like the outcry if he set up an event where the team (without him) went to a strip club... or an "orgy experience".

It is my impression that taking employees to a strip club was, if not common, not unknown either, before the women's movement complained.

I think there are two ways to proceed. Either we can tell the women's movement that their complaint is dumb, that sex is like tennis, and that we're going to reject their complaint and roll back to the world where sending employees to strip clubs is A-OK (and make this cohere conceptually with the rest of the project we're engaging in)... or we can accept the women's movement complaint, and, uh, figure out how to make it cohere conceptually with the rest of the project we're engaging in.

Regardless, I think you skipped right over the "orgy experience" hypo, and I don't think you're going to be able to minimize that hypo to the point of throwing it away completely by just casually saying that it's a dumb women's movement complaint.

I think this is only partially relevant. It explains that your boss making you paint their house or offering career advancement in exchange for being a tennis partner is bad, but not why the same situation but with sex would be even worse.

Painting someone's house is unmistakably a normal job, but if your boss demanded that you paint his house, that would be inappropriate.

Counterpoint: my maintenance man dad has done quite a bit of (paid) work on his boss's house. And, contra ControlsFreak's point about

Your boss is often also an employee of the company that is employing you. You're being paid to do work for the company, not for your boss.

my dad's boss is a small landlord — a guy who owns several buildings — and it's a "sole proprietorship"-type thing. His boss is the company. (Is there really that much of a difference, in this particular case, between "fix what needs fixing on this apartment building your boss owns," "fix what needs fixing on this house your boss owns and intends to 'flip' after it's fixed up," and "fix what needs fixing on this house your boss owns and happens to live in"?)

Mostly, it just really stands out to me that lots of people have completely contradictory opinions, at their conceptual core, when we try to apply them to all of the above problem domains.

It shouldn’t. People are not philosophers, and for much of history, people have not liked philosophers. While Aristophanes is much less famous than the ancient Greek criminal he sought to discredit, his most enduring criticism of philosophy remains woefully irrefutable by the modern secular intelligentsia: if you, O wise philosopher, are so far above the unenlightened masses and their uneducated taboos, then why don’t you simply fuck your mother when you’re horny (or your daughter, if you’d prefer someone younger, O wise philosopher).

People will tolerate challenging taboos to a point, but spend too long questioning why men shouldn’t just rape their daughters for pleasure, and you eventually drink hemlock. The Christians realized this and developed a philosophy with a mythology that catered to the sacred bonds of family, friendship, and romance. Thus they created a dominant culture that is, while surprisingly tolerant, ultimately incapable of challenging the primordial taboos: don’t be a hypocrite, and don’t betray the trust of those that care about you.

To put it more succinctly, you will never get a satisfying, rational justification for why you can’t have sex with your teenage daughter because one doesn’t exist. It is simply ingrained in us to be wrong, probably for the better, and we immediately cast aspersions on anyone that challenges these taboos too eagerly.

you will never get a satisfying, rational justification for why you can’t have sex with your teenage daughter because one doesn’t exist.

I disagree. But I agree that the problem of morals in general, including this one in particular, is an extremely steep challenge for rationalist atheists. Don't let them hear you say that too loud, though; they get super defensive 'round these parts.

I'm not 100% sure I know what set of beliefs you're referring to when you talk about rationalist atheists, but it seems completely plausible that the view that certain moral sensibilities are ingrained in (most) people as some sort of pro-social or pro-fitness evolutionary adaption would be under that umbrella. It seems rational to say that morality is based on vibes much more than logic, and the many attempts at applying logic to it can only be justified if you subscribe to the intellectual equivalent of the labor theory of value.

If you mean someone who believes morality should be a logical system that only presumes doing harm or causing suffering or whatever is evil, then I can see your point. I think the "in our society it's harmful" argument fits that framework, although of course that leaves open the possibility of it being ok in other societies.

Both the evolutionary and the milieu arguments are rational (as I understand the term) justifications for the daughter rape prohibition, they just don't rely on a from-first-principles approach to morality, which IMO is a good thing since such approaches are very stupid.

Sorry if this came off as a defensive rationalist atheist screed, I don't identify as a rationalist and have many issues with the movement. I just don't think it's fair to say that they can't defend a position that they largely don't hold. The rationalist position as I understand it is that there is no problem of morals, morality is subjective and it's largely pointless to debate it or point out inconsistencies in what the public feels icky about. That's also my position, so maybe I'm just projecting and your criticisms are valid.

The traditional philosophical inquiry is to simply ask whether what you're proposing actually satisfies what we mean when we use words like "morality" or "normativity". I don't think they do. Was slavery, owning other people as property, free to rape and do all sorts of other things to them, wrong? One usually wants to say, "Yes," and then must answer the question, "Why?" If we are restricted to saying, "Well, there could totally be other societies with different vibes where slavery is totally okay," it seems to not be very satisfying (besides still having to answer questions like, "How would we even determine the answer to such a question? Are we just looking at the state of affairs in the ruling class? Are we somehow constructing a measure that incorporates the opinions of the slaves? How would this project even work?"). Repeat with all sorts of slavery-adjacent things, torture, pedophilia, etc. If you want to say any of those things are wrong, rather than simply say that you personally feel like they give you bad vibes (due to whatever personal inclinations or formative experiences you might have had, which could easily be radically different in what others might describe as morally-abhorrent societies), then you need to at least attempt to answer, "Why?"

You seem to want to say these things are wrong in some objective sense, I don’t. The way you’re arguing this supports my view. You want to say some things are wrong, so you feel the need for an intellectual framework for saying so. Constructing an intellectual edifice so you feel justified in saying what you already believe is just the vibes approach with unnecessary casuistry.

I think we're in agreement. You don't think that one can say that slavery, torture, pedophilia, etc. is wrong with any normative effect.1 Most other people disagree, which is why they then go on to explain why they think that one can indeed say that these things are wrong, in a normative sense, rather than simply resting on their personal vibes.

1 - This leaves you in the unfortunate position that when you want to say that a pedophile shouldn't be allowed to diddle kids, you can pretty much only say, "I don't like it," without any rejoinder available to their response of, "So what? I do."

Yes, I’d just add that when other people try to give non-vibes reasoning, I see it as vibes with extra steps.

Apologies, a bit late to the thread, but I think this is missing an important aspect of the liberal POV.

I have multiple times seen essays* by people advocating for consent-based frameworks of acceptable behavior explicitly highlighting that consent and bodily autonomy isn't limited to just sex and that thinking that it is is missing the point. The examples given are using things like kids getting hugged or kissed by relatives should be allowed to say no to that physical contact and that kids should be able to opt-out of play-fighting at any time (I've seen multiple explicitly mention safe words for this purpose).

I think there's a very real chance that your ideological opponents when presented with your tennis hypothetical would think it was obvious that being forced into a non-work-essential tennis game with your boss would be unacceptable.

*Sorry, it's physically impossible to locate old Tumblr posts. I tried.

I think one fundamental core issue at the heart of the trans debate is who or whom ought to have the authority to define key cultural concepts such as gender and sex. Is it the experts who have taken the time to clearly delineate the particular issues or the visceral/emotional reactions of the people who have to live in and with the consequences of the expert's decisions?

I am in the 'born this way' camp. I cannot recall any bios of people in which bi or homosexuality manifests after the age of 20 or so. It's always early in life, suggesting innateness. Maybe, in time, the left will come around to other attributes of humanity also being innate, like IQ. I think society would be better and people would be happier if we all accepted that individuals are wired differently, whether it's physical or mental attributes or other things. Although I am opposed to this, as this is tiny relative to overall population so the stakes are not that big anyway, stop trying to prevent other kids from algebra algebra in the name of promoting equality. This has way higher stakes as poor math education hurts US competitiveness.


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