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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28448 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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I'm probably going to be corrected by some theology major (I don't care) but let me give my best explanation of Calvinism:

Before you're born, it's already predetermined whether you're going to heaven or hell.

"So why, pastor, should I be good and righteous"

"My son, when you sin, it reveals that you're wicked and going to hell. Best, therefore, to abstain from sin."

As a persuasive technique, this probably works just as good as anything. It's often difficult to tease out causality in noisy data. I point this out in the context of Scott's latest post. Look at the graphs here and tell me what you notice:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-polyamory

I notice that choosing to be monogamous or polygamous barely matters at all across many aspects of wellbeing. But there is one key difference: fertility. Polygamous people have many fewer children.

Does polygamy cause infertility or does infertility cause polygamy? Does it matter? It's extremely dysgenic and bound to go the way of the Shakers.

For a trait to go extinct due to natural selection not only requires that it be straightforwardly genetic in way that's easy selected over (which is far from certain here), it also requires many generations of constant selection pressure.

Basically no one was discussing polygamy as a valid lifestyle when I was 20. What the world will look like when I'm 60, I have no idea.

So far this relationship between polygamy and fertility has lasted for much less time than a single generation. Given how contextual and cultural it seems to be, I wouldn't make any sweeping predictions which require that contemporary relationship to stay unchanged for a hundred years.

I wonder if polygamists have fewer children because they aren’t very likeable? Many of my polygamist/polyamorist/swinger/ethical nonmonogamist/very enlightened friends routinely post online about how awkward they are and how they hate flirting and want to just get straight to the sex (le heckin’ sexy timerinos, natch).

This mentality, as well as the idea of explicitly rejecting the concept of pair bonding, seems like anti social cope to me.

To steal man it: polies recognize that a lot of what we consider normal human interaction isn’t very enjoyable to them, and they reject it. As long as they stay inside of their ingroups, they believe this will work out well for them.

As others have pointed out: it is definitely causing some /priors updating/ that anybody takes this data even remotely seriously. This would be like polling a bunch of redditors about religion and then reporting on it as if this was a meaningful sample.

Come and poll my church and see if the people who self report as cheating on their wives are more happy in their marriage or not.

I wonder if polygamists have fewer children because they aren’t very likeable?

Well, there's poly for the right reasons ("because I actually am a high-decoupler and am unironically capable of treating sex as a toy or tool"), and then there's poly for the wrong reasons ("because I'm not attracted to -> don't want to primarily pair-bond with my husband or wife, I just want to be able to have my cake and eat it too, and my partner doesn't have enough self-respect to call me out for doing it").

I think there are significantly more people who are poly for the wrong reasons- and people who are just trying to get out of doing the work they're supposed to be doing tend to be substandard partners. As for the people who are poly for the right reasons, their standards for a partner are going to be higher than normal, so they're going to pair up -> have kids less.

I mean, how many high decouplers are there really? Even among very intelligent people it’s rare, and some degree of significant intelligence is likely a prerequisite, so we’re talking about less than 1% of people.

Even among very intelligent people it’s rare, and some degree of significant intelligence is likely a prerequisite, so we’re talking about less than 1% of people.

They're also intelligent enough to keep quiet about it and are probably too busy enjoying the sex to post about it; you're more likely to hear it as "friends with benefits" from them... because they're usually also smart enough to know saying "poly" is a blunt instrument typically used by the people who are doing it for the bad reason I mentioned in the other comment.

(Same thing with every sexual expression that isn't "I'm straight and normal", really; the phrase to expose the other capabilities is probably more along the lines of "but if it's you, it's OK".)

What, specifically is "having my cake" and "eating it" referring to here?

In this case, "enjoying the stability (emotional, financial) of a husband/wife relationship" and "fucking whoever I want on the side".

In other words, the people for whom "poly/open relationship" means "cheating is bad only because it's not discussed up front; I don't like you enough to commit exclusively but I still want you to pay my bills". It's an attempt to actively exploit a power imbalance in the relationship and people who do that are generally bad people.

This is why "swinging" is generally viewed slightly more positively than "poly", since it can be a good-faith attempt to fix marital problems (age related and otherwise) and implies an already established track record of "turning my partner into their best selves"... whereas poly is [currently] the "cash up front" equivalent.

I think I understand. Someone having their cake and eating it too is someone who hypothetically would commit, or can commit, because they don't see sex as a toy. But they might try to abuse someone's infatuation to get sex without putting in commitment.

On the other hand, swingers view sex as a toy and keep that decoupled from their emotional attachment to their spouses or whatever.

What exactly is unethical about the first case though? It sounds like taken to it's logical conclusion, hookups and casual sex are unethical for normal monogamous non-swingers. Or is it only unethical when there's a "power imbalance" (which is really just an infatuation imbalance)? Clearly this cake-having cake-eater is capable of decoupling sex from commitment, because that's what hooking up is?

On the other hand, swingers view sex as a toy and keep that decoupled from their emotional attachment to their spouses or whatever.

Maybe I'd be more sympathetic to poly if both partners go to a bar and one partner is actively wingman-ing for the other depending on the day. Which to me is the key difference- swingers read to me as "I want you to get as much satisfying sex as you can because I am happy when you have sex you enjoy (but I'm not going to get locked out of what I want, and if it starts to grate on the relationship it's always up for discussion/give-and-take"), while poly reads "I want me to get as much satisfying sex as I can; what my partner does is simply not my concern, and if I'm not in the mood for them or if they aren't getting as much sex as I am they can just fucking deal with it".

Perhaps that's an abuse of the term(s), but swinger is not [claimed to be] an orientation, whereas poly is, and orientations have "they can just deal with it, I was #bornthisway" baked in by definition. Not that that's inherently a bad thing- straight people do that all the time, after all- but "fucking whoever I want whenever I want is my orientation" has the ability to destroy a relationship in a way no other orientation does (though "I'm not a [gender I was born as]" or "I'm not attracted to you" can do it for mostly-but-not-completely-unrelated reasons).

I don't want to say it's unethical to be poly, or inherently abusive even (and negotiating it up front is probably the best thing to do in that circumstance anyway)- but that most people that invoke "poly" as "inviolable/orientation" are only doing it when their interest in being exclusive to their partner runs out, and that is not the mark of someone you want to continue to trust. The people you do want to trust are those that have been committed for a long time and can actually take their partner saying "no" for an answer... which is why swinging is something they do, not someone they are.

Fuck around and not lose at least 50% of joint assets.

I'm just going to guess polyamorous people are less religious than monoamorous people, and religiousness tends to be the one thing in modern society that might lead to people having large families.

As others have pointed out: it is definitely causing some /priors updating/ that anybody takes this data even remotely seriously. This would be like polling a bunch of redditors about religion and then reporting on it as if this was a meaningful sample.

Right, that killed me. From Scott, emphasis mine:

I was surprised how certain people were that poly relationships were disasters that couldn’t work, compared to how little of a sign there was of that in the data. I like Aella’s explanation that most mono people’s experience of poly people is mono people “experimenting” with “opening up their relationship”, which is a natural danger zone. An alternative is that Aella got a bad sample (but her sample ought to be much more representative than mine), or that poly people lie / misremember / have a hard time answering surveys.

More representative, maybe, but still not even vaguely representative. "We only polled the people at the back of the church! How religious could they be??" I think Scott's ~asexuality just means he is typical minding really hard on these subjects.

As others have pointed out: it is definitely causing some /priors updating/ that anybody takes this data even remotely seriously. This would be like polling a bunch of redditors about religion and then reporting on it as if this was a meaningful sample.

I can't remember if it was here or back when we were still on plebbit but someone posted one of Aella's polls about sexual satisfaction in marriage and the number of people here defending it with all sorts of weird rationales ("Of course representative, sexually well adjusted men follow prostitutes on Twitter and participate in their polls!") was baffling to say the least, and made me lower my already low estimation of much of the rationalist movement.

"My son, when you sin, it reveals that you're wicked and going to hell. Best, therefore, to abstain from sin."

And my response to this is: "So what? If I'm destined for eternal hell in 80 years I want to have an absolute blast before I die and being around people just like me will help with that." Signalling that I'm the kind of person going to hell is a good way for us hellbound to recognise each other and get together so that we can turn our lives into one continual orgistic rave of pleasure that we couldn't if we were all separated from each other. It far beats living a life of austerity and then ending up in hell anyways.

If you can’t comprehend that 80 years is an instant compared to eternity 🤷🏼‍♂️

The point of predestination is that God, being timeless, already knows whether you're going to turn out to be a good person or a bad person. It's not as though you get a Hell mark on your forehead which dooms you no matter how many good things you do. It brings up awkward theological questions but from the point of view of the patient, trying to be a good person still has worth.

Saying, 'I'm obviously the sort of person who will go to hell so better sin as much as I can beforehand,' is silly and self-fulfilling.

So being a virtuous Calvinist is like one-boxing in the Newcomb's problem?

I understood every word in that sentence but not the sentence itself :P Could you explain, please?

Newcomb's problem is a thought experiment where a mysterious entity, who's known to be very good at predicting people's behavior, presents to you two boxes: one is transparent and contains a 1000$ and the other is opaque and might contain either nothing or one million dollars. You're given the choice of either taking only the opaque box (which is what I call one-boxing) or of taking both boxes. The entity tells you that it decided whether to put the money in the opaque box by predicting which option you will choose. If it predicted that you'll take both boxes, the opaque box is empty. If it predicted that you'll only take the opaque box, it put the million inside. What do?

If that was too muddled of an explanation, then have a Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_paradox

Or alternatively, have a link to the explanation by everybody's favorite bombastic rationality guru: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ddcsdA2c2XpNpE5x/newcomb-s-problem-and-regret-of-rationality

That sounds about right. But I don’t see why you would ever take both boxes. The wikipedia page seems to suggest that it’s because you don’t trust the entity to predict correctly. I suppose it you really need $1000 that’s sensible but otherwise it looks like being a case of ‘so sharp you’ll cut yourself’.

Causal decision theory implies you should—after all, the money's either in the box or not, so there's no harm in taking it at this point; it's not like the money is somehow going to disappear.

I think it's wrong in this unusual case, but it is a thing it would advocate.

That's a good comparison:

In both, it's already known what the outcome will be (at least, to God/Omega). In both, what actions you take is tied up in it.

But you can't try to exploit the outcome being fixed, because it's dependent upon the intermediate steps—if you took the other option, you would find that it was that option that was fixed instead. So it makes sense to choose the better option.

There's a little more causation in Calvinism, but yeah, that's a good comparison. (Note, this analysis only requires knowledge: any system that has an omniscient God, which is to say most, will end up with the same result.)

I assume this is also the way that compatibilism works in general, including to atheists.

Yep. Only instead of a correct-so-far predictive alien, it’s the literally omniscient unfoolable inventor of human brains.

And instead of a thousand bucks or a million, one box holds a hundred years of short-sightedness and uncaring utility of others’ suffering. The other holds an eternity with billions of caring, noble people who would never betray you and a loving God even more amazing; in a body not subject to entropy and a mind not capable of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, or any mental illness; freed from the Dunbar Number of friends you can make and able to explore universes of new places and thoughts.

Here's my guess as someone who knows literally nothing about Calvinism:

It's analogous to googling for symptoms of a disease in an effort to self-diagnose, particularly for something incurable and terminal like ALS. Your knowledge of the outcome has no effect on the outcome, but a certain anxious personality type will want to know the outcome anyway, for the peace of mind.

Exercising your willpower and moral judgement is the best method you have of gathering evidence. If you're able to abstain from sin, it's taken as evidence that you're predestined for salvation. If not, you're in trouble.

And since abstinence from sin is a human impossibility, God provided an escape hatch: tell Him you don’t want to be that way, accept Jesus’ sacrifice as payment, and have certainty that you now have the good end firmly in grasp. Thereafter, expect to see your choices change as the Holy Spirit sanctifies (cleans) your choicemaker.

Your being destined to heaven/hell is not disconnected from your life—God's providence involves both, and the former depends on the latter.

So your suggestion's a bad move.

While God may know your fate you, as a mortal, do not. By sinning as much as possible, you've merely proven that you are not one of the chosen. There is no chance that, having lived a life of sin, you will join the elect anyway.

This persuasive technique can be effective. It's famously employed by American sports coaches who say:

"Adversity doesn't build character, it reveals it".

Well, there is in the sense that God does convert sinners, but yes. Those who die godless are damned.

Dude, TDT. If you sin, then you are the kind of person God would have condemned to hell in the first place. If you don't, you are the kind of person who would be saved.

Think of it this way. There are two instances of you; one in the real world, and another one that God is simulating to decide whether to predestine you to heaven or hell. They are both sufficiently similar that they cannot logically choose different actions. If you sin, then you live in a universe where the copy God is simulating sinned as well, and you are going to end up in hell. Conversely, if you are virtuous, you live in a universe where God's copy of you was virtuous, and you are going to heaven.

I would guess that a possibly important outlier for polygamous people is the "roving seducer" type of guy who fathers large numbers of children because he moves on after impregnating each woman. It's just that this kind of person isn't usually considered polygamous in the modern rationalist community sense of "polyamory".

Playing typology with these things beyond self-identification makes it mush in seconds, when we talk about Monogamy vs. Polyamory we are asking people which relationship style they ideologically affirm, not which one they practice. If we're doing practice, it's a mess. We'd have to equally distinguish between varieties of monogamist. If we really wanted to drill down I would propose a spectrum of practice running something like:

  1. "First kiss at the Altar" monogamists, who have never had significant romantic entanglements with anyone prior to marriage. The most ideologically committed monogamists.

  2. Virgins at marriage monogamists. What it says on the tin. May have had romantic, but not sexual entanglements prior to marriage with other partners.

  3. Widows/Widowers who remarried, along with extreme cases of divorce "victims." Last exit in traditional religion.

  4. Serial monogamists. Have had multiple romantic/sexual partners that did not result in marriage, prior to marriage or after a failed marriage, but had some form of "commitment" and exclusivity with each, never had more than one partner within the same time period.

  5. Serial monogamists with exceptions. Trended toward monogamy as a goal, but with occasional periods of hook-ups or hiccups in between. Probably also the right place to put people from 1-4 who cheat. The last of the ideological monogamists.

  6. Hookers up. People who have had multiple partners they are not committed to. They may not have actually had multiple partners within the same time period, but the relationships did not formally preclude that possibility as a condition to the relationship. Drift towards a 5.5 where they have monogamous partners, drift towards 6.5 where they are committed to the bit.

  7. Limited Polyamorists. People who have multiple partners within a ruleset with a primary partner that inherently limits the number and nature of those relationships. The first "real" poly category. Restrictions on Gender, location, care, etc. are common. Typically a requirement of being added to the "circle" is that one is equally ideologically committed to polyamory on this model, so that ie Cheaters are frowned upon.

  8. Equal Polyamorists. People who have multiple partners who are all equally able to draw on time, attention, resources. No primary/secondary distinction within the group. Extremely rare in the wild.

  9. Fully Open Relationships. A relationship structure within which everyone is free to pursue sex with whoever they please, at any time they please. No restrictions are placed on anyone. Typically the strongest believers in the value of "free love" etc.

1-4 are definitely Monogamists, 7-9 are definitely Polyamorists. 5-6 are a little mushy, one can label them either way. If you profess Monogamy but fuck around are you really monogamous? If you fuck around but don't get into the all the emotional and ideological stuff, are you really Polyamorous?

Then you get into the problem of lifetimes. Lots of people I know started out aspiring to 1 or 2, dropped into 4-6 for their twenties or even play at a 7 or 8, and have since rounded down to 4 in their middle age. Where do they fall? Some people get married as a 1 or a 2, then cheat or get divorced and land at a 4 or a 5.

But I hope what's obvious is that trying to poll that precisely is going to be useless, but at the same time trying to conflate categories is going to be useless. A 4 and a 1 are both "monogamous, but I would bet on them having very different TFRs. Ditto 9 and 7 with polyamory.

"First kiss at the Altar" monogamists, who have never had significant religious entanglements with anyone prior to marriage. The most ideologically committed monogamists.

Religious entanglements?

Doh good call

Then you get into the problem of lifetimes.

Until I got here, this is where I was going to object. Among educated, high-income groups that aren't in the Bay Area or rationalsphere sorts of tastes, I would say that (4) and (5) are modal life arrangements, but with the capper being a completely monogamous and normal marriage sometime in their late 20s or 30s. Thinking about people I'm close to, this isn't just modal, it's the almost exclusive pattern. Mess around a bit as a teenager, go to college and date a few people with varying levels of commitment and varying levels of intermittent hookups, then start dating seriously after college, then after a couple relationships settle down. It's entirely possible that I'm in even more of a bubble than I realize, but it seems like not doing that is basically looked down upon among the upper middle-class.

Exactly normal, but also distinctly different from having a partner count of 1.

This kind of guy was never considered polygamous since polygamy always referred to marriage, and even now amongst Bay Area types refers to some kind of ‘open’ (in the sense that it is not secret) relationship. Similarly, having a secret second family with your secretary/mistress isn’t polygamy because your wife and (original) family don’t know about it.

I'm probably going to be corrected by some theology major (I don't care) but let me give my best explanation of Calvinism:

Then... what was the point of the pretend summary?

To be fair, it was more or less accurate

I’m preregistering my skepticism that a long, hypercorrect definition of Calvinism will be better than the one I gave.

It's not quite correct, in that your actions are also predestined. There is more of a direct motive—it's not like your choice doesn't matter, because the predestining itself is bound up in the choice. You can be directly motivated, not just by the evidence it gives.

I get that that's causally tricky to parse. It applies just as thoroughly to a world where God is only omniscient, even if not foreordaining, which is many people's alternative—he knows what's going to happen, which produces the same tricky-to-think-through-but-not-actually-weird-in-practice results.

It's also not quite correct in the sense that all that is not unique to those following Calvin, but it is what people colloquially refer to as Calvinism, but that's pretty irrelevant.

Calvinist predestination (which is the only truly contentious point out of the five in Calvinism) is basically Schrödinger's cat: the only way to know where one is predestined is to die, and there is a single truth value in the future which cannot be directly known from the past.

However true it may be, though, it is also possibly the single stupidest way to approach Christianity, faith, free will, and eternity.

Jesus has guaranteed that whoever turns from wickedness and asks Him for forgiveness will have eternal life in the presence of overwhelming love; the kind of love which cares for all victims of others’ misdeeds, and seeks that none should be wicked. If you ask, then, what God finds wicked, He asks you what you find wicked when others do it and asks you to shun it from your choices, now and forever.

Calvinists affirm that all those who have faith in Christ will be saved.

Calvinist predestination (which is the only truly contentious point out of the five in Calvinism) is basically Schrödinger's cat: the only way to know where one is predestined is to die, and there is a single truth value in the future which cannot be directly known from the past.

If you consistently do really shitty things as a devout Calvinist, can you kind of deduce you’re going to hell?

It's Bayesian evidence in that direction, but God can and does save sinners, which we all were. (See Paul!)

No. Because you don't know what's around the corner. You might have such an experience of grace next week that you're saved on the spot. You might do something even better, you might go from Saul to Paul.

IIRC(not a Calvinist) that the answer for a doctrinaire Calvinist is no, it is not, the reprobate have no knowledge of their fate but the elect do.

Of course there are not so many doctrinaire Calvinists these days and lots of them are in cults so you can’t ask them.

I always thought predestination was a really bad way of dealing with theological fatalism.

The Orthodox style of biting the bullet and telling you that mystery doesn't have to logically make sense is probably the solution I respect the most, but even if you're a westerner that has to find a logical trick, there's a plethora of compatibilist arguments that are all much better.

Predestination just seems poised to generate either quasi-nihilist fatalism or a belief in universal salvation that renders Christian morality moot. At least in this world.

It is nobility for the non nobles. Effectively, middle class people wanted to give themselves a noble title as elect without having the responsibilities of being a noble. They didn't actually want to fight in a war or take responsibility for society, they wanted to be special individuals with no real obligation to the people and rest of society. There isn't really chivalry, there is just being special by being born special.

I have read a fair bit of Calvinist theology from John Calvin himself up to contemporary stuff and I've never had a sense that there was some sort of class struggle going on behind it. Where did you get this idea?

What do you mean by predestination?

Calvinists are generally compatiblists. We're neither nihilists, fatalists (in the Oedipean sense), nor universalists.

There is an undeniable tension between (God's) omniscience and (the gift of) free will, I call this tension theological fatalism.

Christians have varying ways of resolving this problem, and my understanding of the Calvinist solution (predestination) is that it essentially negates the impact of free will in this world. It has already been ordained whether you'll be saved and there is no act on your part that can change that. Your only way to find out is to die.

I see religion at least in part as a tool to shepherd humanity in this world, so I find this problematic for similar reasons I find strict Thomism to be flawed. It makes little sense to me that God that sacrificed himself for us wouldn't be trying to guide our actions even here. Or that he would gift us with free will if free will didn't allow us to prevent evil.

Now I suppose strictly speaking predestination is a sort of compatibilism. But compared to other compatibilisms it seems nominal at best. If one can't prevent their damnation, how free are they really?

There's some ambiguity in your comment, but I'll try to answer it.

It has already been ordained whether you'll be saved and there is no act on your part that can change that. Your only way to find out is to die.

There might be some readings of this where this is technically correct, but that's a pretty bad way to look at things, at least. Calvinists, as Protestants, think that our salvation is dependent upon our having faith. This is both necessary and sufficient for our salvation. Your lives are relevant to your salvation/damnation: you're damned for your sins, and saved due to faith in Christ.

But this is part of God's plan; in fact, the turning of people to him is itself his work.

It makes little sense to me that God that sacrificed himself for us wouldn't be trying to guide our actions even here.

You seem to be saying that God doesn't care about how we live our lives, and that this somehow follows from predestination. This is not true. For one thing, he told us things, in the commandments. For another, he actively works in us, giving us a new heart. Predestination isn't something laying out some separate path of salvation that has nothing to do with this life. Rather, those who were predestined and will ultimately be saved in the meantime go through thiselife, and, by the work of God, are brought to faith in Christ, are sanctified unto improvement in the Christian life and good works, etc.

Or that he would gift us with free will if free will didn't allow us to prevent evil.

We just don't want to.

Sorry, but libertarian-style free will is always really bizarre to me—you dislike the idea of any of it being determined, but then you end up with everything being arbitrary, which is plainly worse. My actions are based on things—whatever I like more/think is better/whatever other motivations shape my choices and ultimately result in whatever I choose, and it's weird to me that people would prefer that they didn't have reasons for choosing things.

If one can't prevent their damnation, how free are they really?

Given that you brought up Thomism, I assume you're catholic. Looks like Trent disagrees:

The holy Synod declares first, that, for the correct and sound understanding of the doctrine of Justification, it is necessary that each one recognise and confess, that, whereas all men had lost their innocence in the prevarication of Adam-having become unclean, and, as the apostle says, by nature children of wrath, as (this Synod) has set forth in the decree on original sin,-they were so far the servants of sin, and under the power of the devil and of death, that not the Gentiles only by the force of nature, but not even the Jews by the very letter itself of the law of Moses, were able to be liberated, or to arise, therefrom; although free will, attenuated as it was in its powers, and bent down, was by no means extinguished in them.

But I don't especially care whether we call our wills free or not; it suffices that we recognize that people are the sources of their actions and morally culpable for the choices they make. I am perfectly willing to affirm that people are unable to will themselves out of damnation. Eph 2:1.

I am perfectly willing to affirm that people are unable to will themselves out of damnation.

I guess this is where our disagreement truly lies, on what this means. It's evident that Calvinists still preach that one should live a godly life, but their doing so ultimately only successfully to the elect, while logically consistent, doesn't sit right with the essential meaning of salvation in my opinion.

I understand the position is that salvation is solely due to grace, but I believe synergism, whether Catholic or Orthodox makes a lot more sense as a solution. Regeneration preceding faith seems to sap the miraculous nature of grace and to obviate the need to preach the wicked.

Regeneration preceding faith seems to sap the miraculous nature of grace and to obviate the need to preach the wicked.

The opposite, rather. Regeneration preceding faith (logically, not temporally) makes our salvation a miraculous work of God. Preaching to the wicked is essential because God works through means, and we don't know who will be saved, (and, of course, he told us to).

What's your theological background?

we don't know who will be saved

I expected this answer, and it's the most coherent with the premise. But preaching the wicked simply being going through the motions of humility seems to undersell our purpose.

What's your theological background?

It's complicated. I think the best approximation for the current standpoint I study religion from at this time is the same sort of theistic rationalism as Thomas Jefferson. I'm most familiar with Catholic and Sunni theology but I'm always curious of the minutiae of any successful credo since it must contain at least in part a measure of eternal wisdom. That said, so far I have not found a unique philosophy that provides a comprehensive solution to Mystery.

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For what it's worth, historically Reformed theologians did resort to something more like compatibilist arguments. I know this claim sounds unlikely in a world where Calvinists proudly adhere to determinist views and claim there is no free will and so forth, so let me provide a source for it. Unfortunately, it turns out that through liberal theology on the one hand and anti-intellectual fundamentalism on the other modern Protestantism has jettisoned quite a bit of its theological tradition.

Whether there's free will is in part a semantic issue. Luther famously wrote "The Bondage of the Will". What he's talking about there is about free will but primarily through a moral lens: you are not free to do good. I'm pretty sure some have affirmed free will, but not in a compatibilist libertarian sense. People fight over the meaning of the term.

I'd be interested in hearing more about the book—at least, a summary of where it gestures to in those authors. My impression was definitely that determinism was mainstream; that's what I've picked up from my own reading of old authors.

Those authors were later, not first or second generation reformers. (The earliest is the third generation Zanchi, I think.)

Not expecting to see Gomarus on there, since I thought he was a supralapsarian (and maybe Voetius as well)?

EDIT: Made the comment better. Also, this review seems relevant, if you can access it.

EDIT 2: Compatibilist->Libertarian. I misspoke terribly.

I cannot access the review unfortunately.

To put it briefly, the view described by @urquan is pretty much the view that the theologians described in the book have. There are a lot more details about things like different types of necessity, how free choice functions before the Fall, after the Fall, after regeneration and after glorification, etc. but the overall view is pretty much what urquan described. Also, the book deals mostly with free will specifically, not with all the doctrines of elections. So the text provided for e.g. Gomarus deals with all sorts of philosophical ideas about how free will works, but he does not go into supralapsarianism or anything like that.

However, you are also correct about Luther and Calvin not having that view! The authors of ‘Reformed Thought on Freedom’ actually acknowledge that explicitly in the conclusion of their book when discussing possible objections. I know that it sounds implausible that Calvin and Luther had anti free choice views whereas pretty much all their successors the next couple of centuries did try to retain a notion of free choice. However, based on what I’ve read in the book, I am inclined to believe that. The later theologians all using a scholastic philosophical apparatus are very careful to retain free choice, despite affirming a very high view of God’s sovereignty. For what it’s worth, Calvin at least does hint at a little bit of nuance in his views at some point in the Institutes. I’d have to take some time to find the passage again, but I remember that somewhere in the Institutes Calvin says that fallen humans sin ‘necessarily’ but aren’t ‘coerced’ to sin. So they can’t not sin, they sin freely in some sense. This seems to hint at something more like the view that Urquan described and which later Reformed theologians also defended, albeit without the careful technical scholastic language used by later Reformed theologians and there are other places where Calvin does not seem to show this nuance.

Note that I am here specifically claiming the Reformed tradition as Reformed Orthodoxy developed retained a notion of free choice, not that they didn’t believe God foreordained everything. How there can be an omnipotent and omniscient God, who knows and allows and in some sense causes everything that is, while also somehow not being the author of evil and allowing for human freedom, remains a tricky question. There is a long tradition from the Church Fathers, through the Middle Ages and into Modernity of theologians grappling with that problem. I am not even claiming here that the Reformed scholastics were particularly successful in their approach to answer this question, just that mainstream Reformed theology from the sixteenth up to and including the eighteenth century, stands in the same line as the Medieval scholastics trying to reconcile Gods sovereignty with human freedom. In fact, somebody like Bernard of Clairvaux who made some distinctions between different types of necessity gets cited approvingly a bunch of times by different theologians discussed in the book. Some of the theologians seem to not like the standard Latin term for free will ‘liberum arbitrium’, although they all acknowledge that the Church Fathers used that term and so they also seem uncomfortable (unlike Calvin and Luther) with completely rejecting that term. However, when you read the treatises in the book, it becomes clear that they are accusing their Roman Catholic and Remonstrant interlocutors of something like what we would call a libertarian free will view, while they themselves argue for something more like what we would call compatibilism today.

You specifically mention Gomarus, so let me try to summarise the treatise on free will from Gomarus provided in the books. Gomarus first talks about what free choice is:

Free choice is the free power of a mind-gifted nature to choose from those [means] leading to a certain goal, one [means] proposed by reason above another, or to accept or reject one and the same [means].

He goes on to make a distinction between free choice (liberum arbitrium) and will (voluntas). The will is concerned with what we want, i.e. with goals, whereas the free choice is concerned with means, i.e. making a concrete choice between A or B. Let me give an example to try and explain this distinction. If somebody is thirsty and wants to drink a glass of water, the thirst and the goal of satiating that thirst, is the voluntas. Nobody thinks somebody made a conscious free choice to be thirsty and desire a glass of water, that’s not what people talk about when they say ‘free will’. The person in the example then has a choice to drink a glass of water or not. That’s the liberum arbitrium. Unless he has knowledge that the glass of water is poisoned or something he will more or less certainly choose to drink the glass of water, but he was completely able to choose not to drink the glass of water.

After a bunch of specific definitions and distinctions and technical terms and stuff as is common in scholastic theology, Gomarus goes on to describe free choice in four states, the state before the Fall, the state after the Fall, the state after regeneration and the state after glorification. As I understand it, the key here is this distinction between liberum arbitrium and voluntas. The potency to choose either A or B, i.e. liberum arbitrium, is affirmed by Gomarus in all those four states. What changes, is the voluntas. The fallen unregenerate man has a corrupted voluntas that is no longer oriented towards God, but towards sin. Therefore, though he is completely free in the choices that he makes, he will always use that freedom to sin, because that is now his goal:

Although the unregenerate are not able to do anything but sin, they do it freely, for they elicit the exercise (exercitium) of an act in such a way that they are able not to elicit it, and they are in a way masters of their own acts. However, with respect to the kind (species) of act, they are determined, since they are able to do nothing else but sin and have evil as their object, under the pretext of good. Besides, it is not otherwise for the good angels, who, confirmed in grace, are necessarily determined with regard to the kind of act, for they are able to do nothing else but good, even if [the exercise] to elicit an act here and now is totally free for them.

So Gomarus does not deviate from Reformed ideas about total depravity and such. What he argues is that man being fallen and in some sense not able to do anything but sin, is compatible with humans being free. They sin, not because of some sort of necessity, but because, their nature, being corrupted after the Fall, they want to. The argument Gomarus uses here about angels is also used a couple of times by other theologians in the book. Can good angels, glorified saints in heaven or even God sin? Christians typically believe it’s certain God is not going to sin, or that glorified saints in Heaven are not going to fall into sin again, but it would also be rather absurd to claim that God or glorified saints are not free. So this must mean it is possible for your will to be so strongly confirmed in good, that you will certainly always freely choose to do good. Likewise, for the unregenerate man, their will is corrupted to the extent that they will always freely choose to do sin.

I am not saying that this view is perfect or that the Reformed scholastics are able to answer all the questions this raises in a satisfactory way. But it is clear that somebody like Gomarus, who has a reputation of being a hardcore Calvinist, because he is the one who originally started the beef with Arminius himself, surprisingly actually confirms humans have liberum arbitrium, even in their fallen state, despite John Calvin and Luther rejecting that term.

See the second edit to the previous comment: I misspoke.

Anyway, to be clear, Luther and Calvin were able to talk about the will being free in a moral sense—your will is free when it's in alignment with God's will, rather than a slave to sin, etc. etc. They denied free will in fallen man, but not e.g. in glory.

This fits well with a compatibilist understanding (which I would affirm) but isn't quite talking about the same thing.

It looks like you're saying that people developed a broader understanding of free will afterwards, in a compatibilist sense, which makes complete sense. (Didn't Edwards, as well?)

It was arguing that they were misreading Turretin, mostly. I haven't read either the book or Turretin, and only skimmed the review, so I have no idea of the extent to which that is true. There seems to have since been more scholarly argumentation from people in response.

Thanks for the analysis of Gomarus. Much of this might be a terminological dispute, as they all believe in an exhaustive divine decree, and not in a Molinist sense either.

I don't think it's unreasonable to characterize Luther and Calvin as compatibilists, in the sense that they think that we are genuinely making meaningful choices, that they depend on us, that there's moral responsibility, etc. even though they think that they have qualms about the term free will. My impression was that something compatibilist-ish was just broadly mainstream within the Reformed world. But this is interesting, I wasn't really aware of these debates.

My understanding is that predestination wasn't originally interpreted by Calvinists as eliminating free will -- the argument for predestination wasn't total determinism, it was total depravity. So, the view was that people have free will (in a philosophical sense), their will is just totally entangled in sin such that it is impossible to choose the good without prevenient grace. Which, well, is essentially the Christian consensus since Augustine (at least in the West; the Orthodox are harder to pin down, though they would certainly insist that salvation is totally connected to cooperation with grace), but the unique proposition of Calvinism is that such grace is given only to the elect, and is irresistible.

This view is correct as far as I can gather from the book I linked to. Albeit with the caveat that John Calvin himself and Luther did reject the idea of free will. That being said, the book presents authors who for instance contributed to Reformed confessions and are all influential figures in the Reformed tradition, so I think it is reasonable to say that the Reformed tradition had a view similar to what you describe, even though Calvin himself did not.

I don't think there's much of a distance between the views.

It's worth noting, when you talk about people having free will, that that does not mean libertarian free will—it is fully compatible with determinism. (And yes, this fits with Augustine and others)

The Reformed theologians did affirm determinism, and had a notion of providence fully extensive over the world, such that nothing occurs without first being decreed by God. Nevertheless, @urquan is right that that is not what the word "predestination" usually referred to, it referring specifically to the choosing of people unto salvation.

To be clear, I agree that Luther and Calvin were more concerned with a moral sense of free will as you put it in another post. Actually in the conclusion of "Reformed Though on Freedom" the authors of the book touch on this topic as well:

We can distinguish between the religious intentions behind playing down free choice and working this out in an explicit ontology. Given the context of the Reformation, it is quite understandable that Luther and Calvin combated the idea that man is free to work out his own salvation, although with divine help. The moral and spiritual consequences of sin are at stake, and in this respect the Reformers rightly teach the total corruption of man.

So yeah, the view of the book which I think I agree with, isn't that Luther and Calvin were completely wrong and later generations of theologians fortunately completely rejected their view. Rather, Luther and Calvin correctly emphasized the corruption of fallen man over and against a more optimistic view of human nature that was common in the late Medieval/ early Modern period, but in doing so they made some statements that have unfortunate philosophical consequences. Later generations of theologians had more or less the same idea about the spiritual and moral consequences of sin, but were a little more careful and nuanced in working it out philosophically. While, to be clear, I don't think this should lead us to a negative view of Luther and Calvin at all, I don't think it is a completely theoretical point either. I know at least in the Netherlands, where I am from, there are some very conservative Reformed groups that fall into some sort of hyper Calvinism who would benefit greatly if they were told that contrary to popular belief, people like Gomarus and Voetius believed in free will.

Without using the words free will, what wrong beliefs do they end up having?

I guess I don't see what unfortunate philosophical consequences Luther/Calvin had.

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Total determinism is normal. See Calvin, Institutes book I, chapters 16-17, where he lays out an exhaustive model of providence.

This wasn't unique to Calvin, Luther also thought we were predestined, along with many Catholics (especially Dominicans/Thomists). You're right though, that's more explicitly talking about sin and salvation (as does Calvin later in the Institutes), but they also thought that all creation was predetermined, I believe.

Just on point: Christian priests were celibate until recently, but they were very influential through the last few hundred years. It's quite possible for polygamy to survive as the luxury tip of a society, provided the society is self-replicating on balance.

(Reader, it is not.)

Catholics also had large enough families that the occasional kid choosing the priesthood didn’t cause TFR to drop below replacement.

As a catechumen I have some trepidation about this with my own kids. I’m old enough that we’re simply not going to have a big family, we have one kid, hope for two, if we’re very lucky might have three.

If our one kid chooses the priesthood I’ll be proud of his piety but sad about my family line.

Wait, why does Scott trust Aella’s data? Aella is an internet propagandist for polygamy and promiscuity. Many happy monogamists who find polygamy disgusting would never subscribe to her or follow her. Her monogamist followers are preselected with being unsatisfied with monogamy, and her polygamy followers are preselected with finding polygamy satisfying (hence why they are following a promiscuous woman who talks about it all day). Her most die hard followers are the most likely to take the survey, even just because they see the link more often, and the followers are those who have found the most benefit regardless of how it affects the median polygamist. “Just in, atheists are unsatisfied with atheism, as proven by a survey of atheists who follow Bishop Robert Barron on Twitter.” Am I missing something?

Aella is an internet propagandist for polygamy and promiscuity.

You're making me like her even more than I already did. But yeah, I wouldn't necessarily trust her data unless it confirmed my pre-existing preferences, in which case fuck it.

If there are things that are less likely to vary differentially with "how likely am I to see/respond to Aella's poll" then you can trust them more. Not sure how best to evaluate that, though.

Wait, why does Scott trust Aella’s data?

If it's Worth Doing, It's Worth Doing with Made-Up Statistics.

I'm... skeptical, for a variety of reasons, but the underlying concept isn't obviously wrong. Bad data is still data if it's coming from an honest actor, and for the sort of really clear effects we should care about even a dishonest actor becomes a lot more obvious if they're just completely making things up.

I don't really think that article is applicable here. In Scott's case he's arguing about using made up numbers in the absence of data, not in favor of using whatever data was available. It's easy to imagine ways that data biased in ways you may not know can lead you away from the truth.

Her monogamist followers are preselected with being unsatisfied

i don't think this is a given, i'm repulsed by the idea of poly relationships and i follow anybody crazy enough to be entertaining on twitter (and the girl who showers once a month yet has time to bang 3 different guys a week is a goddamn spectacle). I could definitely imagine there being some selection bias in the data seeing as she reports polling in Fetlife and some un named "friend’s personality testing website" being about a quarter of the data.

The bigger issue is that it's self reported polling data collected in a somewhat conspicuous way. Anybody with any agenda about how many partners a person should have can add their 2 cents , and polyamorous people aren't going to say "yeah poly prettymuch sucks" on a poll they know people are going to gawk at on twitter.

That’s probably because you’re interested in diverse ideologies as a personality trait, which themotte userbase is generally selected for. I’m fairly certain that the median social media experience consists of people following accounts they agree with and which propagate their sense of identity. Consider also that in many healthy straight relationships, a person would be reasonably upset with their partner following a prostitute / pro-promiscuity egirl. If this is true, then I do think a whole class of people in healthy monogamous relationships with rules are much less likely to see the poll link, let alone participate in the poll.

Consider also that in many healthy straight relationships, a person would be reasonably upset with their partner following a prostitute / pro-promiscuity egirl

I think following on Twitter is a little different to following on OnlyFans, here.

A lot different but a husband would probably still have some explaining to to if a conservative wife fully understood what Aella is. Even more so if the first exposure was one of Alele's thirst posts. You're not getting a divorce over it but it's not going to be a fun conversation.

In practice, "preselected with being unsatisfied" isn't going to mean "every single one is unsatisfied", it just means "being unsatisfied is disproportionately likely". You may be personally satisfied despite this being true.

...polyamorous people aren't going to say "yeah poly prettymuch sucks" on a poll they know people are going to gawk at on twitter.

My impression is that this can be generalized across quite a few life decisions. People that have a huge amount invested in uncommon decisions that many people told them are bad ideas probably aren't going to regularly proclaim that they should have just listened to the crowd. Some will, of course, but many people will insist that their weird choice is actually excellent and superior to the normies.

To say it doesn’t matter whether it’s causal… and then to immediately make the causal claim that polyamory is dysgenic is baffling. Clearly it does matter to you that the effect is causal!

It’s annoying when people are crying “correlation doesn’t imply causation” when the causal claim seems intuitively true to you. That doesn’t mean those criticisms of your argument aren’t valid (regardless of the truthfulness of your conclusions).

Neither. Polygamy is generally hyper-fertile, but polygamy as practiced in the Bay Area by socially awkward screen addicts seems not to be.

Probably more about the selection effect and less about the polygamy.

Is the polyamorous tfr actually the same as the Bay Area as a whole?

I do agree with your point, though, polyamory is not the same thing as trad polygamy.

Polygamy (as opposed to polyamory) is obviously universally hyperfertile for the male, since multiple pregnancies are possible simultaneously and the fact of the polygamy means he’s usually wealthy enough to provide for many children. That it’s hyperfertile for the women depends typically on the fact that only the most trad and/or impoverished women in the modern world will agree to polygamous marriage, and both traits are strongly predictive of fertility rate.

Among polygamous ultra-rich Saudis post-2000 or so, my impression is that the women often have a much more modest number of kids, which I think suggests that tfr (which is of course calculated per woman) is not necessarily elevated by classical polygamy in and of itself.

That is a good point. The social status of having more children levels off pretty fast with living standards, I seem to recall. I'm guessing for hyperfertility to survive the middle class income trap, it needs both above average income and ideological commitment, probably religious. Mormons, Amish, Quiverfulls, etc.

Except that virtually every current polygamist was born to a monogamist, just as virtually every homosexual was born from sex between two heterosexuals and every transwoman came out of a biological vagina. Polygamists aren't an insular ethnic tribe whose fertility matters, they're a meme, they can spread even without having children.

In Elizabethan England, London was a population sink, without a constant flow of people from the countryside London would have emptied. By your logic therefore, London was Dysgenic and bound to die out (as were European cities in general at the time). Between the fertile countryside and London, which was more influential on the future?

By your logic

This is usually a thought-terminating phrase and should probably be avoided here. Arguing that because someone thinks X about Y, they might also think A about B, and since you disagree with A and B, they should reject X and Y has several problems.

  1. There are lots of other confounding variables (In this case London in the 16th century and Polygamy in Portland) that make the comparison meaningless
  2. We don't know anyone's beliefs of A and B, so framing the discussion is just your opinion
  3. People don't reflexively have consistent opinions
  4. The phrase itself connotes a negative stereotype of an annoying twitter or forum arguer.
  5. It's easy to dismiss your parable example and is therefore unlikely to be productive (Yes, London would've been a population sink if not for factor η)

Ok cool you've attacked my turn of phrase, any thoughts on the question of genetic vs memetic spread of culture?

"By your logic" isn't a claim about what the other person thinks or believes, it's a claim about what the structure of their argument logically implies. If polygamy is bound to die out because its practitioners fail to reproduce, then the same reasoning should generalize to other analogous situations. If it doesn't generalize, that implies the claim being made is either wrong or insufficiently precise.

Surely you believe it's based around what the logic of the argument implies, not the structure of the argument. A structure is just how it's organized. Anyways, the comparison between London's population flows 500 years ago and the individual mating practices of the people in Scott Alexander's blog are obviously not bounded by the same arguments or logic. It's totally meaningless.

"Structure" as in logical structure. If you argue "Polygamy's practitioners reproduce at a low rate, therefore polygamy is bound to die out," then you've made an argument with the following logical structure: "[Thing]'s practitioners reproduce at a low rate, therefore [thing] is bound to die out." If someone can find a value of [thing] that falsifies the claim, it implies that there is something wrong (incorrect or incomplete) about the logical structure of the argument presented.

So you agree that additional information is needed beyond effects on population growth. Which was the entire purpose of the analogy.

By your logic

This is usually a thought-terminating phrase

Where I come from we call it "proof by contradiction" and it's a fundamental tool of logic.

I don't think that's an accurate characterization of how it was used here or how it's typically used (Which is often the inverse, e.g. 'Oh republicans want to save unborn babies? then by their logic they should also support free universal healthcare for everyone ;) ') At the very least the total population of London vs the surrounding countryside is not an apt comparison to the portion number of people in LA or Portland or wherever that practice a certain lifestyle, and is certainly not a demonstration a formal logic syllogism.

Mike Lindell has been ordered to pay up for his challenge to disprove some election interference evidence.

It’s a remarkable situation. Evidence of election interference should be investigated by law enforcement agencies, with no need for a bounty to disprove the validity.

The great thing is that the man who met the challenge voted for Trump twice. (I wonder if he will a third time.)

If Lindell didn’t trust government authorities to properly investigate election interference claims, he should have also known not to trust the courts to fairly (from his perspective) enforce an arbitration issue about it.

Had Lindell set the bounty to prove the veracity of the evidence (beyond a reasonable doubt), he’d still have his money.

This is like the inverse of the Balaji Srinivasan bet on inflation and Bitcoin. I think it’s great when the wealthy put their money where their mouth is. We need more bets taxing bullshit.

If Lindell didn’t trust government authorities to properly investigate election interference claims, he should have also known not to trust the courts to fairly (from his perspective) enforce an arbitration issue about it.

I realize that I’m skirting close to the ‘if pro-lifers really believed abortion was murder, surely they’d…’ argument, but there is a case to be made that this kind of applies to Trump himself. Like, if the deep state stole the election from him once, why would he have any faith they wouldn’t do it again, especially now “they” have the presidency and thus surely even more power and less oversight?

I don’t think Trump is the kind of guy who does something unless he believes he has at least a chance of winning, and I think he does believe he has a chance of winning this year.

That leaves two possibilities. Firstly, that the deep state is too weak or his margin of victory will be too great to cheat him of the presidency again or, secondly, that he never really believed he won the first (well, second) time, but was just using the claim of interference as a political tool (both to rally his supporters and maybe as some kind of gambit to stay in office).

As I pointed out a few times earlier, if Trump honestly believed the 2016 election was rigged against him with millions of fraudulent votes (they just barely didn’t have enough to quite win the electoral college…), then his first order of business should have been a major investigation such that it couldn’t happen again.

Actually, even if he didn’t believe it and was merely saying it for propaganda purposes, it would have been a classic political maneuver to use a pretense for a major corruption investigation to defeat enemies and ensure ongoing political power.

Trump has the right instincts to be a strongman, just not the heart to follow though. Same thing goes for the meddling in the 2020 election outcome and that whole bit where Pence was supposed to play along, but instead there was a March on the Capitol to threaten his decapitation. It’s like a LARP of a would-be autocrat (along with threatening to imprison Hillary, bombing various countries, etc.). Trump has plausible deniability in the minds of many due to the half-hearted and bumbling attempts. I’ve had arguments with Trump supporters/defenders where one will say “of course he doesn’t mean it” and another will say “I’m excited for Trump to expose the corruption and jail the pedophiles.” A lot of MAGA takes him seriously and literally.

While I think plenty of Trump’s most vocal critics have cried wolf more than once (I define “TDS” as anyone who is more critical of Trump than I am), it does amaze me that people I formerly respected as “constitutional conservatives” don’t seem too concerned about Trump’s antics in terms of their present effect, or the potential effects down the road. I’d be a lot more concerned if Trump was 55, but his lasting effect on the GOP might still be pretty bad after he is out of the picture.

Hopefully we regress to a more sane political climate mean instead of pursuing a downward spiral.

was rigged against him with millions of fraudulent votes (they just barely didn’t have enough to quite win the electoral college…), then his first order of business should have been a major investigation such that it couldn’t happen again.

Trump tried to do this but Barr basically refused to take it seriously.

(This user has me blocked, but this is worth pointing out anyways.)

My personal but totally evidence free belief is that Trump, circa 2020, wanted to be bought out. It makes perfect sense from a real estate development perspective: if you have a claim, even a weak claim, you hold onto it until someone pays you. A weak claim might not be worth a ton, but it'll be worth something to get you to shut up.

It's extremely common in complex real estate transactions. "I have a letter of intent from two years ago, that pre empts your deal!" "Actually the estate was never closed and THIS brother claims a share in ownership!" "According to organization by laws we did not have a quorom at the meeting where I was removed so I'm still in charge and my successor had no power to sign those documents!"

Trump didn't think he won, and he didn't think he'd win. But he thought he had enough that the Democrats would buy him out, would offer him a deal to step down. It would have been the rational thing to do, give Trump something to make him go away. But the Dems were never going to do that, they're not equipped to do that.

What kind of deal are you proposing as hypothetically possible here?

Trump didn't think he won, and he didn't think he'd win

You did say "evidence free" so I don't want to slam you in an unfriendly way or anything. But Trump absolutely believed he was going to win 2020, and nothing has ever come out to indicate he pushed election fraud claims for cynical reasons.

Sorry, that wasn't clear, I meant that I don't believe Trump ever actually thought (past maybe December 1 2020) he was going to succeed in retaining the presidency by procedural games. His actions throughout the process make far more sense if seen in the light of trying to solidify a weak claim, rather than in light of an attempted coup d'etat (justified or unjustified).

I appreciate the kid gloves for my shit post.

I don’t think that tracks. To this day he’s acting as if he believes the election was stolen. He never gave any indication that he believed otherwise. He did back down from other beliefs. At first he took COVID seriously enough to send a hospital ship to New York, and to go along with the CDC on lockdowns. He changed his mind later, and his statements back that up. But he’s absolutely firm on the stolen election claim. He’s never changed his story, even when he should stand to benefit from at least backing down from the claim.

I don't see where he'd benefit from backing down, what would that look like?

I think the fact that 4 years later he’s still talking about the stolen election probably hurts him in the polls among mainstream voters who don’t think the election was stolen.

It would have been the rational thing to do, give Trump something to make him go away.

Once you pay the Dane-geld, you'll never be rid of the Dane.

What did the Dems have to offer him? Not prosecute him?

I don’t think that has any value to Trump. It’s why voters vote for him because he legitimately won’t back down. Now I think Trump mostly just cares about Trump and wants the crown for his own ego.

Not prosecuting him is step one, but there's lots of other things to offer. Public Acknowledgement. An appointment to a powerful and important position. One or more Trumpian policies publicly enacted, with full credit given to Trump. One or more of his children, or Kushner, appointed to important positions.

Ok so you know there was zero chance the Dems are every giving him a high ranking position?

I mean yes, we know that. But why is it true? Why couldn't they do that? Trump, of course, would have to play along, which is the most major impossibility. But Kamala called Biden a racist just before campaigning on his ticket, Dems are perfectly capable of flipping the narrative when necessary.

Certainly Ivanka or Kushner could have been given a plum job, and if Trump in turn conceded and mildly endorsed Biden it would have been a win-win.

Trump was also friends with people like the Clintons before he ran against them. He created chants of "lock her up" and then did nothing to precipitate that. I just don't think Trump sees political acrimony as a permanent, fixed thing. He thinks they're just being theatrical and playing the game, as he is.

Exactly. Trump could accept it. But he'd need to behave and color inside the lines to be successfully co opted.

I think just agreeing to enhanced election security measures for future elections would have assuaged Trump's ego.

If he wins the popular vote there are basically two possibilities:

  1. He wins
  2. The deep state has to interfere in a big and obvious way to make him lose

Either way he wins so long as he gets enough popular support, right? Not too different from a normal election.

If he wins the popular vote

Even if he wins he is surely unlikely to win the popular vote, given historically unpopular Hillary had 3 million votes on him in 2016.

If he does win the popular vote, I agree given Republican electoral dynamics that means he’s won comfortably and undeniably, but it’s unlikely.

I don’t think Trump is the kind of guy who does something unless he believes he has at least a chance of winning, and I think he does believe he has a chance of winning this year.

It's possible Trump believes it is rigged, but sitting it out is 100% chance of loss, vs a rigged election and some chance nonetheless.

On the third hand though what other choice is there? Make your own America? You fight until you are no longer physically capable of fighting, even if the odds are stacked against you. You will surely have a better chance of ousting the deep state as a president, even a hated one, than as a rich civilian.

Like, if the deep state stole the election from him once, why would he have any faith they wouldn’t do it again, especially now “they” have the presidency and thus surely even more power and less oversight?

The argument is that in 2020 urban political machines used mail-in ballot rules to harvest ballots. This isn't an infinity-vote generator, it's a powerful-but-limited tool. So, the argument develops like this:

  • The pandemic is over and so the same playbook of last-minute changes to election rules will not be in effect.

  • Trump and his ilk now plan to build their own ballot harvesting machine instead of trying to deny the Democrats theirs.

  • Trump is performing better now than he did in 2020, so the amount of necessary fraud to steal the election goes up.

  • Biden is performing worse than he did in 2020, and key parts of the Democratic constituency may not be mobilized like they were before.

that he never really believed he won the first (well, second) time, but was just using the claim of interference as a political tool

People like to say this, but nobody has ever produced any evidence that Trump doesn't believe what he's saying. Indeed, all the leaks from the Trump White House (infamously, they are legion) indicate that sometimes, Trump was the only one who believed in election interference.

The argument is that in 2020 urban political machines used mail-in ballot rules to harvest ballots.

No, that's not the argument Trump advanced. He claimed that the election was stolen via fraud, and asked Bill Barr to have the Justice Department investigate. Specific claims advanced at the time include over 3000 people in Nevada voting after moving to another state, or that Pennsylvania postal employees conspired to backdate late ballots.

These claims were all, of course, false.

Ballot harvesting in States where it is illegal to deliver someone else's ballot is fraud.

By "fraud" I mean something that causes invalid votes to be counted, or valid votes to not be counted, or coerces, bribes or disenfranchises voters. I'm not sure if any jurisdiction considers ballot harvesting in the absence of these other activities to be fraud. Texas, for example, explicitly defines "vote harvesting" as separate from "electoral fraud", although engaging in fraud as part of a vote harvesting organization can result in enhanced penalties.

Trump was warning about mail-in ballots since before the votes were counted. ("Complaining about," if you prefer.)

Otherwise, I'm not sure what point you're making. Some fraud accusations are weaker than others, and we should only discuss the ones you find weakest? The version I have expounded is extremely reasonable, answering OP's idea that "the deep state stole the election," why-wouldn't-they-do-it-again.

Trump was warning about mail-in ballots since before the votes were counted. ("Complaining about," if you prefer.)

Yes, he was complaining that they were more susceptible to fraudulent voting ("millions of counterfeit ballots").

Some fraud accusations are weaker than others, and we should only discuss the ones you find weakest?

This thread is about Trump's state of mind: why would he bother running again if his claims of election fraud were made in good faith? In that context, it's relevant that he did not invoke the reasonable scenario you presented, but rather a wide-ranging conspiracy where millions of votes can be fabricated.

I think this is a bad argument made in service of an ultimately correct position.

Even if Trump did believe the election was entirely stolen ... I mean, what would you do, if you imagine you're have the beliefs of a genuine conspiracy MAGAboomer? Just give in and say "yeah, the libs own the country now because they're more willing to commit crime with us"? No, it's a sufficiently important issue that you'd keep fighting.

I know right wingers who believe the election was stolen and as such are essentially checked out of electoral politics. It's an internally consistent position. There's no point fighting if you literally can't win.

I honestly don't know what Trump really thinks about 2020, but I do know he would be better off if he just admitted he lost because people were angry about COVID, but "we'll get them next time". He essentially blackpilled portions of his base by claiming Democrats are capable of large-scale election conspiracies.

Here's my reference: in 1948, Lyndon Johnson created and harvested hundreds of thousands of ballots for his election to Senate. Robert Caro has documented this extensively in the second volume of his LBJ biography, "The Means of Ascent". It took decades for the people involved to come forward and talk to Caro, and only a few of them were really required. If you scale that up from one state to a dozen, millions of votes are not an implausible idea. And millions of votes were not even needed given the final tallies in a few swing states.

Now, there's a very obvious mechanism here: mail-in ballots can come from anywhere, and once they're mixed up with regular ballots it becomes impossible to prove which votes are "real". It's hard to prove what has happened. And everyone has motive. This does not need to be a "wide-ranging" conspiracy.

Trump has said many things about the election. I've never heard him say, as above, "the deep state stole the election". I've never heard him say, "there was a wide-ranging conspiracy". I have beard him say that mail-in ballots are not secure.

The idea here is really plain: the election wasn't stolen by some unalterable cabal that runs the world in secret. There is not a central committee that decided 2020 was not Trump, so that now we have to answer why bother with 2024 at all. Election fraud is boring and quotidian stuff. It can be greater or lesser depending on lots of contingent factors. And Trump can think he has a better show this time, while still also thinking 2020 was stolen.

If Lindell didn’t trust government authorities to properly investigate election interference claims, he should have also known not to trust the courts to fairly (from his perspective) enforce an arbitration issue about it.

As I understand AAA rules, both parties picked arbiters and those two arbiters picked a third.

And then they voted unanimously against Lindell.

Before that Mike Lindell has been deplatformed and one of the target of the ire of the left wing establishment which includes plenty more rich people collectively working together than what Mike Lindel represents. Where their behavior is not held accountable.

There is no reason to consider this as an example of a bet taxing bullshit. That perspective would only merit entertaining if we see courts forcing liberal establishment figures, including in powerful corporations and NGOs having to pay large fines, or getting them to pay relating to technicality, including prove me wrong bets, to the extend there is some parity there.

Even this hitpiece article against him shows how Lindell has been targeted for his political opinions although they have a celebration paralalax line. https://www.newsweek.com/rise-fall-mike-lindell-1830372 and he has been banned from social media platforms and had other interference with his affairs https://www.axios.com/2023/09/22/mike-lindell-cellphone-seizure-court-constitutional

The message being given is that if you oppose us or support Trump, we are going to get you. And then throw a line of weak deniability. But it would be about your political opinions.

Moreover, the collective media hitpieces on this guy is just utterly horrible behavior. It seems that a culture of liberal voyeristic sadistic glee has developed where certain figures especially, and their general opponents become the afixed target. But especially there is a focus on particular individuals as a tactic to isolate the opposition. This culture definitely leads to increasing injustice and indifference to injustice, because the priority is "getting them" whether Trump, Lindell becomes a value that replaces actual moral principles.

This culture of feeling pleasure over the misfortune of the hated Lindell promoted by such media and such echochambers might be influencing your happiness at his misfortune.

Another issue to ponder, is what would happen if everyone who made claims about russiagate, election interference, supported riots, made destructive false partisan claims, not just politically incorect but including all political correct false narratives, etc, were targeted. Not to mention controversial issues that aren't cared about like supporting warcrimes, aggressive wars, and more. Who would be left of the political establishment?

“A bet is a tax on bullshit” is not meant to say “government fines are a good thing.” The guy who wrote that article is not really a fan of government power being used to decide such things.

Lindell choosing to place a bet is a good thing. He just made a bad one for himself. His “misfortune” on this particular issue is all self-imposed by him, it just took a judge to force him to comply with his own promise.

Lindell is not being punished such as he is for supporting Trump. One can, theoretically at least, support Trump and not engage in blatant lies and other violations that will attract the ire of social media platforms.

The super ironic thing is that Lindell lost his phone due to an FBI investigation over election tampering at the county level. Contrary to what a lot of posters here believe, the US government takes election issues quite seriously and Lindell trying to doing vigilante election security backfired on him a bit. Somehow I doubt if that Mesa County official ends up convicted it will change anyone’s mind, because the case hasn’t made enough of a dent in people thinking it’s not too hard to screw with county election results.

Not that it proves you wrong, but it’s hard to take your complaints seriously based on how say Hillary got treated. Both sides of the aisle do a lot of shit that is indecent.

ends up convicted it will change anyone’s mind, because the case hasn’t made enough of a dent in people thinking it’s not too hard to screw with county election results.

Not that it proves you wrong, but it’s hard to take your complaints seriously based on how say Hillary got treated.

How was Hillary treated? There is an extremely high likelihood that she directly ordered her staff to break serious laws in serious ways, with serious consequences, then ordered them to cover it up, and both she and her staff were given a pass.

By “break serious laws” do you mean the email server? Or are we talking the theories out there about darker stuff?

If we’re talking about the email server, then I’d say the level of drama was way overblown relative to the actual significance. And, well, Trump has her beat with his personal presidential library he had going.

If you mean something more serious than the email server, then we are going to be in a disagreement about the evidence for those claims.

(If you bring up claims of general corruption related to the Clinton Foundation then I’m going to laugh at you, for reasons that should be obvious.)

  • -16

As I understand it, the significance of the email server was that it was carefully set up to allow Clinton to evade scrutiny of her communications, whilst also exposing very sensitive information to any halfway-competent hacker. It's bad on security grounds and its existence suggests further wrongdoing. A little like Nicola Sturgeon deleting all of her WhatsApp message rather than allow them to be examined by an enquiry.

Meanwhile, Trump and Biden both seem to be guilty of nothing more than having taken paperwork home and not giving it back. Trump is Trump, and also tried to deny wrongdoing in an obviously false manner, so he got dinged while Biden didn't, but there's not really any suggestion of anything untoward and the risk is much more limited.

Your theory is self-contradicting.

If you’re going to set up your own server to evade scrutiny, then you should probably also invest in making it highly secure.

Government IT tends to suck, which Clinton knew, and so she stupidly tried to avoid that by just using what she already had. It should not been allowed and certainly won’t be ever again.

Clinton turned over many thousands of emails to the State Department. The FBI managed to find even more. But at the end of the day there was no bombshell and it’s wishful thinking by her opponents to believe she successfully covered up all the really nefarious stuff. (Anyone with half a brain would do the nefarious stuff separately anyway.)

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/hillary-clinton-deleted-33000-emails-secretary-state/story?id=42389308

You’re just immensely wrong about how you characterize the Trump case. You have to significantly downplay the dozens of boxes of very sensitive documents he purposely took, and then the refusal to comply on top. It’s par for the course to have a situation like Biden’s and many other senior officials and presidents have. Trump is on his own golf course here with a totally unprecedented effort to keep classified material.

Some of the Trump documents were sufficiently sensitive that the classification itself is classified, due to belonging to special programs, and has to be partially redacted in court documents.

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-are-the-classified-documents-in-the-trump-indictment

So all of the “but her emails” crowd who thought Clinton was terrible for exposing sensitive information that should have been classified in the course of her official duties as SecState, if their true concern is the responsible handling of classified information, ought to be utterly outraged at Trump for simply wishing to possess and share very classified documents for his own personal benefit.

Ok pretend I'm an idiot, it shouldn't be hard, what reasons that should be obvious are there for laughing at the Clinton Foundation? Because the insane amount of corporatist and nepotistic graft and influence peddling that flows through that place seems obvious. As does the fact that Clinton Foundation affiliates recycled Build Back Better from Haiti to the USA.

It's because the sclerotic voting system has ceded significant power to the establishment of each party through the presence of safe seats and the internal selection process. Influence is worth serious bucks, and special interests and lobbyists have significant influence within the local body politic. Nancy Pelosi for instance, is an institution herself within the Democrat party. The same goes for Joe Biden, but Bushes are no better either, nor Kennedys. The business of politics is the biggest business around, with the government wielding a massive budget. At a time when voters themselves have less impact than ever, they are presented with hand-picked options that will change fundamentally nothing about how politics itself will be run.

I’d laugh in this context because the Clintons at least waited until leaving office to start their grifting, whereas Trump was still actively involved in running his company, despite the million different opportunities for conflicts of interest and other obvious ethical issues that should have been unthinkable to permit.

If we’re talking about the email server, then I’d say the level of drama was way overblown relative to the actual significance. And, well, Trump has her beat with his personal presidential library he had going.

Given the complete lack of security on Clinton's email server (during her first two months as Secretary of State she connected to it over an unencrypted connection) Trump's "presidential library" would have to be of the lending variety to be anywhere near as egregious.

You’re wrong for at least four reasons.

First, Hillary as SecState was found to have some emails that should have been classified. State Dept lives in between classified and unclassified worlds and so these things are going to happen. So clearly dumb and bad, but not to the level meriting prosecution.

Second, Trump is known to have shared the classified information for his personal interest.

Third, Trump took some really classified stuff.

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-are-the-classified-documents-in-the-trump-indictment

Fourth, he refused to comply, necessitating a formal effort to seize the documents.

If we’re talking about the email server, then I’d say the level of drama was way overblown relative to the actual significance.

She destroyed the evidence with BleachBit. To then claim there is no evidence of "darker stuff", is to abandon adverse inference.

Well the FBI disagrees with your sentiments and you do not seem to be accurately representing how events transpired.

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/hillary-clinton-deleted-33000-emails-secretary-state/story?id=42389308

Furthermore, using a tool to mass delete data, particularly that contains PII, is a standard practice.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/11/trump-fbi-search-hillary-clinton/

She was an idiot for mixing personal and business emails, but she would have been an even bigger idiot to have used it for whatever it is you mean by “darker stuff”.

I think like the documents case affecting Trump, the situation depends quite a lot on two questions: what did the person actually have, and how much security did they have in place to protect it.

If the emails contained nothing of consequence, then it’s a crime certainly, but the damage done to the country by them being hacked is pretty minimal. If all Trump took from the WH were secret recipes for really good steaks, it really isn’t going to hurt anyone. Within any office environment are papers with varying degrees of security and even within that there are things that are controlled that really aren’t that important or useful to other companies. New products in development are important to guard. Proprietary processes and technologies are important to guard. There might be other things like marketing plans that are less important. Not that they can be leaked with impunity, but there wouldn’t be nearly as much harm actually done by them getting out. In the realm of statecraft, things like the names and locations of spies, military intelligence, military technology, strategic planning, etc. are extremely important to keep secret. Dirt on heads of state, including our own might be embarrassing, but unlikely to be fatal.

The other question would be the security of those offsite storage facilities. How hard is it to crack Hillary’s server? How hard is it to get into the closet Trump had documents in? If the security was lax, it seems like such a thing should be treated like a leak. Not because we can prove it actually happened, but because the security was so light that anyone with the slightest understanding of security would know that the server or closet was almost certain to be breeched at some point. My understanding of the server was that it was basically an off the shelf Outlook server protected with a password. Trump had the documents in closets and empty rooms a Mar-a-Lago which is a facility with lots of staff and probably multiple keys to every room in the place and few other security features to keep people out of those rooms. In either case, I think it fair to treat that type of security as no security at all.

You should also consider that Hillary was doing what she did in the course of her duties as SecState and was permitted (stupidly) to have the server. She complied with the investigation.

Trump took very sensitive documents because he wanted to own them. He did not comply with the investigation.

Trump is being prosecuted because there was no way to let this level of violation slide.

It’s mostly about two things:

  1. The sensitivity of the info.
  2. How badly/brazenly/irresponsibly rules were broken.

The Hillary server was known to the State Department and others in government because she used it for her job. It was a bad idea and poorly executed, but clearly de facto permitted. The emails were not classified, but upon investigation some of them had content should have been.

This last bit is not a result of the server; it’s a result of the State Department constantly straddling classified and unclassified worlds. I have no idea if Hillary and her close associates were more or less irresponsible than average people in her position because we don’t have investigation results to compare. I do know that the classification business is a pain in the ass and can involve judgement calls that are easier in hindsight.

Trump, on the other hand, absconded with dozens of boxes of highly classified documents, as if he wanted a personal collection. We know he talked about them and shared them, and not for official US government business. And when the US government asked for them back, he put up a fight. If he had just given them back the chance it would have gone any further was very low.

The remarkable bit is that the president is the absolute classification authority and Trump (falsely) claims he had declassified them. Now, if he had gone the formal declassification route then that would have been a scandal (declassifying sensitive things because you want them in your collection is not a good luck), but he wouldn’t have broken the law. (At least, I’m pretty sure there is no legal restraint on a president declassifying things because it’s an executive branch program; the reason congress is so cavalier with classified data is because they can’t be prosecuted for breaking those rules.)

Hillary made mistakes. Trump (almost certainly) committed a crime.

This culture of feeling pleasure over the misfortune of the hated Lindell promoted by such media and such echochambers might be influencing your happiness at his misfortune.

it is hard to frame him as a victim, imho. Mike profits from pillow sales by generating media attention. Likewise, the mainstream profits from ad revenue despite also being wrong a lot. The incentives encourage lies and sensationalism on both sides. There is no downside for the media being wrong. They book the ad revenue profit, issue retraction after the damage has been done and ad revenue realized, and move on and people forget.

I don't understand how this is possibly the court's fault. I haven't heard of this challenge before, so maybe the article you linked about it is misleading somehow, but it sounds like the sequence of events was:

  1. Lindell proposes a challenge claiming he has evidence related to cheating on the 2020 election, offers a $5 million prize to the first person to prove him wrong to the satisfaction of him or an arbitrator he chose.
  2. Someone in fact convinces the arbitrator they have fulfilled the requirements of the prize; Lindell doesn't pay out.
  3. Just now, a court confirmed that, yes, the arbitrator really was convinced and that means Lindell has to pay out.

The court very explicitly did not look at the election claims; they only said "this was the terms of the bet; they were fulfilled, so you have to pay out".

It’s a remarkable situation. Evidence of election interference should be investigated by law enforcement agencies, with no need for a bounty to disprove the validity.

I'm really not sure why you think evidence of election interference isn't investigated by government authorities (reworded because I'm not sure if law enforcement or the secretary of state's office / election board is the appropriate authority, probably depends on the exact case). It sounds like Lindell didn't have any evidence and just threw together some unrelated obfuscated numbers and didn't expect anyone to call him out on it.

Assuming you didn’t accidentally respond to me vs. another commenter, I’ll take this as a compliment that I presented the facts in a way that someone could think I actually think Lindell has been wronged.

On a technical point, the court had to agree that the terms of the challenge were fulfilled, which means they believe the evidence provided by Lindell was in fact demonstrably false. So fans of Deep State theory can stay believers if they want to. “The rot runs even deeper than we thought.” (No one ever seems to explain how the Deep State tried so hard to defeat Trump in 2016 but failed so narrowly.)

If you look at my comment history, you’ll find we violently agree about Lindell and general claims of election fraud.

The most charitable I can be about someone like Lindell or Sidney Powell (or Trump) is that they are mentally ill, and not just straight out con(wo)men. I can’t use that for say a Giuliani or a Michael Flynn, given their past careers, and Dinesh D'Souza is a longstanding grifter.

AUTISTS: THE LAST OPPRESSED CLASS

(For the purposes of this post, I am defining an autistic person as someone who has been diagnosed with an autism spectrum condition, or could qualify for an autism spectrum condition diagnosis should they given access to the correct services. The disaster spiral trainwreck that is the self diagnosis movement and the widening of the definition of autism to be completely meaningless, I might write about at another time.)

The modern anglospheric society operates off the belief that there are oppressed groups and oppressor groups. It is stated that oppressor groups have high rates of economic and social success, while the reverse is true for oppressed groups. This is often referred to as the progressive stack, with some oppressed groups being more oppressed than others. To alleviate this disparity, oppressed groups are allowed to seek reparations from their oppressor and demean their oppressor in public spheres, while the reverse is not tolerated. There are many examples of these groups: Women are oppressed by Men, Non-white People are oppressed by White People, Gay people are oppressed by Straight people, Non-english speakers are oppressed by English speakers, and so on. However, there is one group to whom this opressed definition might apply, but receive no recognition, appreciation or restitution from society bottom text.

Autistic people have utterly awful life outcomes. They have very poor employment rates, with many being unemployed or undermployed, even if they are level 1 autists in possession of college degrees. The suicide rate is abysmal, with rates being 9 times in excess of neurotypicals and over half of autistic people having considered suicide throughout their lives. Autistic people also experience heightened rates of social and even sexual abuse.

Despite this very strong case for a place on the progressive stack autists have no place whatsoever on it, or indeed recognition that they even exist in wider society. I do not recall the last time there was a front page article on my country's news outlet about anyone with my condition. I do not recall there being any support or preferential treatment for autists in regards to accquiring economic and social capital during the time when I was seeking employment, in comparison to programs that fast track and support women and ethnic minorities, for example. Support for autistic people is very limited, and only meaningfully exists in the early stages of childhood. This support is not provided to allow the child to feel comfortable in their skin, but to minimise friction both with neurotypicals and with the school and work systems. Even behaviours that are not directly harmful to the autistic person themselves or to neurotypicals, such as stimming, are heavily discouraged.

For most opressed groups, the responsibility for the easing the disparity is put upon the oppressor group. For example, men are expected to validate the fear that women feel due to the difference in physical strength in situations such as being in an elevator, or walking alone at night, and adjust their behaviour accordingly. It may depress an individual man to feel that he is and can only ever be a threat, but this feeling is not validated and he is told to Get Over It. In comparison, the autist is expected to adapt to social norms and behaviours that they do not innately pick up and instead learn manually, in the same way that Sideshow Bob learned that there was a rake there by walking into it except this time the rakes are invisible. It is the autist that has to mask, the autist that has to conceal their interests, the autist that has to pretend to be someone other than who they are.

Obviously, this is terrible. How then, are autists to get onto the progressive stack and get the sweet government funding necessary to improve these awful outcomes? The first task is to create an original sin for neurotypicals that devalues their accomplishments whilst providing avenues to redistribute their social and economic capital to autistic people. White privilege, male privilege and so on are all forms of this and it would not be difficult to create a similar privilege checklist for neurotypicals, but to get into a position to enforce this belief on the rest of society would be far more difficult. Autists, estimated, make up roughly only 2% of the global population against a neurotypical 98%, compared to the 13% of African Americans vs White Americans and the roughly 50%/50% sex split among men and women. Moreover, autists are not naturally grouped or forcibly segregated into one place in a way that men, women and ethnic groups are, so they cannot easily band together and overcome oppression they face.

If we were able to overcome both of these issues, there is another large problem: NTs innately do not like autists, finding them to be offputting and thus wishing to interact with them less based on thin slice judgements. You can argue that there are similar innate dislikes against other oppressed groups, however these groups usually have something that endears them to their perceived oppressor in some form, whether these are biological urges or moral spooks about kindness and human unity, or contributions to society in the form of food or entertainment and so on. There are no moral spooks that encourage being nice to the weird asshole in the corner, even if they haven't done you any real harm. Obligations to do the neurotypical social dance run much deeper than any other aspect a human being is othered by.

Lastly, autism is still seen as a male coded thing, and oppressor/oppressed heirarchy is the strongest where it relates to men and women. There are some autistic people who are able to hyperfocus on useful things, and thus can channel their abilities into a lucrative career. However, these careers are usually in something like software developement, research or other high value STEM careers due to their innate rigidity, which are currently the target for cooption by various diversity movements due to their high status and outsized influence on the world we live in. These positions are likely the only place that a neurotypical will not only encounter an autistic person, but an autistic person in their element who may not be masking (and I suspect this lack of masking is one of the reasons that autists in these roles are being targeted.)

Meanwhile, female autists are more heavily socialised into following neurotypical norms and thus present in a neurotypical manner, so they do not register as being autistic. Hence autists are either invisible or irritating to the oppressed/oppressor sensibility and general notions of social status, and must be removed. Where NTs have not met neurotypicals, their perception of the condition is usually influenced by piece of shit media like Rain Main or the Big Bang Theory, where most depictions in the vein of "Guy who punches himself in the head" or Sheldon Cooper."

We live in a neurotypical society.

You don't want to be on the progressive stack. Being on the stack means being treated like a child, it means that your wins can always be questioned, and it means the worst representatives of your "group" become the loudest and most influential.

You want to pick yourself up by your own bootstraps and fix whatever is making you miserable as long as you have consciousness and basic analytic abilities. I think this starts by learning what is actually abnormal. To some extent, "stimming" and "masking" are things everyone does. Everyone "learns" social cues, some just are naturally better at it. Everyone acts differently among different people and everyone has certain aspects of themselves that they hide from others. It's just a matter of degree for these things, even if the degree can be quite high and even though a lot of this stuff starts with outside factors that we don't control.

But I think the dislike "NTs" have towards autistic people is very similar to the dislike towards depressives, because I think (I suppose controversially) that people with both conditions can work on themselves to basically be normal, but both people of both groups often resent the idea that they can. For autistic people, I think they should just record themselves on their phone, and just try to analyze how they are talking and how others are talking in conversation. They should find NTs they trust and ask them to itemize everything they do differently than they are supposed to.

What will the result be? Probably shame. Being told how you are wrong or different naturally results in a lot of shame. And this is where I think a lot of the pushback comes from autists, from depressives, from minority groups, etc. But that is the point where you can say, I'm a grownup, I can deal with shame and move forward.

You don't want to be on the progressive stack.

They don't pick it.

They 're born with it and stuck with it. That's why it works.

That's the beauty of it. Leninism stopped working around the time working class men saw they could get a decent lifestyle under capitalism.

You don't want to be on the progressive stack. Being on the stack means being treated like a child, it means that your wins can always be questioned, and it means the worst representatives of your "group" become the loudest and most influential.

"Never be on the stack, unless you can be a rep" sounds like a lucrative if somewhat spiritually impoverishing position.

You don't want to be on the progressive stack. Being on the stack means being treated like a child, it means that your wins can always be questioned, and it means the worst representatives of your "group" become the loudest and most influential.

This has the vibe of “women and non-Asian minorities have always been the primary victims of identity politics that transfer income and opportunities to them from white and Asian men.”

I'd more than happily be treated as a child, have my wins questioned behind closed doors by wrong-thinkers, and have the "worst" representatives of my group being the loudest and most influential (as their loudness and influence only result in more benefits for me) if it means I, my relatives, my descendants get to enjoy preferences to the tune of +280 or +230 points on the SAT or the equivalent in education, employment, promotions.

I mean it's a sham, and it's leading to a less liberal society, and if you embrace it you're part of why it's worse. If you don't believe in personal responsibility or you get brainwashed, or don't think to much then you can live with that comfortably. If you're striving to be the best version of yourself, it's a hindrance. And I think the material benefits in return are ultimately not that consequential.

If you don't believe in personal responsibility

From the perspective of some, in both Blue and Red Tribes, plenty of powerful people seem to have abdicated personal responsibility and pawned off consequences onto others. Autists bootstrapping themselves, by themselves, probably aren't going to produce more apologetic politicians or CEOs who slash their own pay when times get tough.

I disagree. Quite strongly infact. For the most part autistic people are largely treated like children due to misconceptions about what it actually is, unless they mask to a near perfect neurotypical standard. When you mention to people that you are autistic, people automatically assume that you are some screaming, severely obese manchild who punches himself in the head and rubs his own shit on the walls, and whatever wins they make are done under fake self. Getting onto the stack can only an upgrade at this point.

Masking actively hurts autistic people. It is not the case that you learn to mask enough and you manage to permanently graduate into being an NT, with all the privileges that come thereof. It is an exhausting, miserable slog where you are constantly watching everything you say and do, where you are perfectly aware that no one around you likes you for who you are and if you make one misstep all your signifiers of success will desert you. What is the point of enduring a ceaseless uphill struggle for such people? I have only ever felt happy and liked around my autist friends.

The "best version of yourself" seems to be what is of most utility and least discomfort to neurotypicals, not what would allow someone like me to live a happy, fulfilling life.

Let's say there are three ways people can generally react to you: Disgust, pity, and respect. I believe that there is a world where as a group autistic people are generally treated with respect. Going on the stack means trading that for pity. Either is better than disgust. But I think the respect is worth aiming for, and I think it's where we are trending anyway. I certainly don't think of autistic people the way you describe, and don't know anyone that openly does. I work with autistic and non-autistic people and everyone is respectful to everyone, no one is making fun of anyone behind their back etc. I think things like this would be way worse like 20 years ago.

But looking at that study, which was a survey, it basically confirms my beliefs. You have this broadly shared set of behaviors in regards to masking across autistic and non-autistic, with some extras only exhibited by autistic. But then you have the shame response coming from the autistic group that hates it, that feels suicidal etc. What I believe, and I accept you may disagree, is that there is a shame element here, that is making the masking feel worse than it really is.

Lastly I'd just say that the fact that you have been able to find people you are happy and liked around is a profoundly good thing, and should be enough once you've found it in a stable place. At that point, you can weather the storms, because you have your people. And you can still fight for social change and respect etc. but you don't need the sham that is the progressive stack to do what it does, which I think is vampiric and ultimately soul-destroying, but that's just my personal opinion. Cheers.

The majority of autists who are high enough functioning to (successfully) do what you’re suggesting already do so. That’s what “masking” is.

The ones who don’t mask are typically the ones who are more autistic. They’re both worse at understanding what’s wrong with how they act and care far less on an emotional level what others think of them in the first place.

The primary reason autists complain about masking (be it the ones who mask 24/7 or those who refuse to) isn’t shame; it’s that it’s a massive pain in the arse. This is to be expected; everyone bitches and moans about the annoyances in their life. The only difference is most people don’t empathise with their complaints because they find unmasked autists annoying.

Well to be frank, I've met plenty of high functioning autistic people who I think could do a way better job at masking, and I doubt many people are really doing all the things I suggest, I think most people just find a rut they're comfortable in and see how far it takes them. If autistic people want to show the receipts, and really lay down a whole list of things they do every day on the normie grind to impress me, I'm all ears, but it better be significantly more onerous than what say, a NP person with some social anxiety has to do.

But that said the question of how much sympathy people get for how much trouble they go through is basically a worthless train of thought. Most of the sympathy going around is false, virtue signalling, or confused. Each human being is lucky if they find a few who really understand them, are there for them, and able to listen reciprocally. If you haven't found that person, you're no different than an able white guy with no friends. You're two sad sacks looking for people who understand them. There is literally no difference in that respect, because for each person there are other people who understand, or who are willing to listen, and you only need a few. If that isn't filling then something deeper is wrong.

This is often referred to as the progressive stack,

By whom? The people I’ve seen insist on this term are not progressives, but critics interested in scoring rhetorical points.

Say I argued that Christians rely on a “religious stack.” I could probably come up with a half-decent ordering. Surely Christians tend to prefer Judaism to Islam, or insular Amish sects to rival missionaries, or spirituality to atheism. But it would be foolish to use a placement on this list—which I had just created—as an argument for Christians to do something differently. The model might be descriptive, but it is very much not prescriptive.

If progressives don’t pick their causes according to a stack, your strategy is dead on arrival. You will never gain mainstream support by fitting yourself into a model which the mainstream doesn’t use.

The people I’ve seen insist on this term are not progressives, but critics interested in scoring rhetorical points.

Here ya go, babe. And that's just three seconds on Google. First time I ever heard the term was, as described in another comment, in relation to the Occupy protests from one of the social media posts in their favour.

First time I ever heard the term was, as described in another comment, in relation to the Occupy protests from one of the social media posts in their favour.

This was my experience as well. The term "Progressive Stack" became popular IIRC during the Occupy Wall Street protests, being pushed* as the correct way to create a hierarchy in whose voices got heard first in these intentionally structure-less organizations. I had never heard the notion that this was actually a term of denigration by critics, but perhaps it's not too surprising, since that criticism tends to get leveled at many terms that some progressives choose to label themselves when other people start associating those labels with the underlying characteristics of the actual thing that the label is pointing at (obvious examples being "woke" and "social justice warrior").

* There's a very common conspiracy theory among leftists that Occupy Wall Street and/or aspects of it were intentionally sabotaged by progressives inserting their identity politics into it, as a way to sow division among people of different demographics within the working class. The fact that some seem to believe that the very term "Progressive Stack" is a term of denigration that critics imposed on the people pushing it makes this conspiracy theory funnier to me.

There's a very common conspiracy theory among leftists that Occupy Wall Street and/or aspects of it were intentionally sabotaged by progressives inserting their identity politics into it, as a way to sow division among people of different demographics within the working class.

I've heard a somewhat different version of this, in that it was deliberate, it was done to "gatekeep" out portions of the working class, and that it was done knowing it could prevent the movement from attaining its goals, but that such "sabotage" was not the intended goal, merely a possible — and acceptable — price to attain the actual goal: to keep out Fascists. Because anyone whose position on the economic political axis would put them on board with Occupy Wall Street's goals, but whose position on the social/cultural political axis would cause them to oppose things like the "Progressive Stack" enough to be "turned away" (as opposed to at least holding their nose and putting up with it) is thus in the Fascist Quadrant of said political plane.

but that such "sabotage" was not the intended goal, merely a possible — and acceptable — price to attain the actual goal: to keep out Fascists.

It was 2008, not 2016, no one was hyperventilating about "fascists" back then.

It was 2008, not 2016, no one was hyperventilating about "fascists" back then.

I remember left wing folks going on about the threat of "fascists" in America when I was attending college in Southern California in 2000-2005. The person who described this theory to me was a left-winger who did so approvingly, arguing that the failure of OWS due to the Progressive Stack was a good thing for the left, as compared to the alternative.

I remember left wing folks going on about the threat of "fascists" in America when I was attending college in Southern California in 2000-2005.

I suppose these people didn't show up out of nowhere...

The person who described this theory to me was a left-winger who did so approvingly, arguing that the failure of OWS due to the Progressive Stack was a good thing for the left, as compared to the alternative.

But did they do so post- or pre-Trump?

Pre-Trump — IIRC, in 2014. This same person held that Bush II's "compassionate conservatism" made him a Fascist, because it too is "economically 'left-wing' but socially 'right-wing.'"

I left the united states for years, plural, because I believed Bush was going to declare himself dictator for life. I acquired that belief from a steady diet of blue-tribe media.

Neutral question: Has it occurred to you that, with the sides changed, you are still overreacting now as you were back then?

The thought does occur. On the other hand, I can go back and read my posts back to 2015, when I was quite the reasonable moderate, and observe a process, not simply a straight swing from one extreme to the other.

Damn... I was as permanently online back then as I'm now, and as blue-tribe as I am anti-blue now, and somehow never got the impression this sort of talk was anything beyond run of the mill bitching at politicians.

I don't know about intentional sabotage, they seemed to manage that pretty well on their own. Though I have no doubt that there was entryism by much more radical left groups hoping to steer what at the time seemed like it might blossom into a popular movement in the 'correct' direction. But given that they allowed obvious grifters, petty criminals, and the crazies off the street to wander around and demand stuff, and the frazzled volunteers who started out all starry-eyed about community direct action by The People got a hard lesson in being taken for a ride, I don't imagine it needed too much of a push to knock the blocks over.

But yes, "well I never heard it and none of my friends ever used it, so it must be the horrid right-wingers are to blame!" is funny 😁

What 07 failed to mention is that the conspiracy theory goes that the radical entryists were given an opportunity to do so by Big Business, who were scared of how loud OWS's megaphone proved to be.

The original term comes from the activist playbook deployed at Occupy protests and designed by intersectional academics. The idea being that the more oppressed someone is (the more oppressed group markers they possess), the earlier their voices should be heard. There's plenty of video and articles that describe the process and show it operating at the time.

The second life of the term is as a description of the underlying philosophy of intersectionality by its opponents, who critique it for essentially creating a privilege hierarchy in the name of abolishing privilege hierarchies.

Like "woke" and basically any other descriptor for the ideological cluster intersectional feminism belongs to, it originated as a self descriptor and was discarded as soon at the opposition freezed it as a label (to borrow Alinsky's phrasing). This is of course a typical post-structuralist tactic, much like the redefinition of racism and other forms of linguistical warfare that attempt to manipulate the enemy's frame of understanding of the world by manipulating the language the enemy uses to describe the world.

Now if we turn to this term as analysis and descriptor of progressive ideology, I think it's fairly accurate. It predicted the formation of such internal interest groups as "BIPOC" and, ostracism of gay men and Jews as well as the underlying justification for all these. When you see Black feminists say that black men are the white people of black people, they are appealing to intersectional ideology and enacting the behavior described by this label.

But it predicted justification, not what would have to be justified.

So long as progressives truly believe in intersectionality, the progressive stack model will be accurate. Because the process it is named after was specifically created to manifest intersectional ideology into the world.

The question is then whether they actually believe in intersectionality and are moved by its ideological precepts, or are merely political agents using the ideology to organize and justify preexisting political interest regardless of contradiction. And it is my strong belief that almost every single political movement that has ever existed is the latter, and not the former.

If alliance with autists is politically advantageous, they are oppressed neurodivergents. If war with autists is preferable, they are incel nerdbro oppressors.

Well, I guess I learn something every day. I'll concede that actual protestors were using this actual term to describe their procedure.

I don't think we disagree that it was useless, even then, for an outsider. There was a post a while back about--I think it was "the cool kids don't have to ask." They've read the room and have a feel for the consensus. Then and only then can they refer to the stack.

I don't think we disagree that it was useless, even then, for an outsider.

Why? It's a very good descriptor of what their philsophy is about, especially for an outsider following more classical ideas of equality, and wondering why certain demands are being made of him.

We've been through this dance of pretending a term applied to this ideology is somehow not useful so many times, from Cultural Marxism, through Political Correctness, SJW, Woke, CRT, and now apparently Progressive Stack, regardless of whether the term was an ingroup, or outgroup designation, or how many citations you can pull to support it, that the only conclusion can be that the actual objection is there being a term at all. If you disagree Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand.

An outsider can not and could not have walked up and said “here, I am higher on this stack than you, so let me speak.” Progressives settled on a consensus for that stack before ever showing up to a protest. The OP’s approach wants to change that consensus, and it’s not going to work.

Well, I'm not sure about it being "useless", I did hear of a few successful attempts at fending off entryism by utilizing the stack, though you're probably right that adding new entries to it as an outsider is going to be too obvious, and won't work.

Autism has extremely high overlap within the LGBT community:

Current research indicates that autistic people have higher rates of LGBT identities and feelings than the general population.[1][2][3] A variety of explanations for this have been proposed, such as prenatal hormonal exposure, which has been linked with both sexual orientation, gender dysphoria and autism. Alternatively, autistic people may be less reliant on social norms and thus are more open about their orientation or gender identity. A narrative review published in 2016 stated that while various hypotheses have been proposed for an association between autism and gender dysphoria, they lack strong evidence.[4]

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_and_LGBT_identities

Given the extremely strong overlap between autism and the entirety of the QUILTBAG grouping, I would expect that autism would be the next on the list after or alongside late-stage transgender rights campaigning.

That is from Wikipedia which is by default unreliable on social topics (and the cited sources seem no better at first glance, though I don't have access to the full contents) so I can't help but wonder: how much of that apparent connection is just due to the fact that wokeists like to LARP as both LGBTQ+ and autistic?

Is there any study that doesn't just rely on self-identification, and explicitly acknowledges the difference between “I'm a male who has had penetrative sex with multiple other males” and “I identify as pansexual online because heterosexuals aren't cool anymore and to be fair I do occasionally jerk off to femboy porn though all my crushes are on girls”? And the difference between nonverbal autists and people who claim to have Aspergers after scoring 17/20 on a test they found on tumblr?

Overall I suspect that the most prominent members of the LGBTQ+ community are only mildly autistic at best, if for no other reason than that it's still a social community.

In any case, I think it's a mistake to assume that the woke are natural allies to autists. Look at how much criticism an organization like Autism Speaks gets from the woke left for (very sensibly imo) saying it would be nice if autism could be cured. To the woke, the idea that autistic people might struggle in social situations is an unfair prejudice that ”neurotypicals” hold about autistic people.

And I think this tendency towards self-identification as fashion among the woke leads to less understanding, because it creates a false impression of how debilitating these conditions can be.

You say it's unfair that the police arrest you because you didn't realize the woman you met on the bus was deeply uncomfortable while you were talking at length about your favorite anime? Well, that sounds like a load of crap. My friend Ayden is a transman who suffers from self-diagnosed autism, dyslexia and OCD, and yet shhe has never been arrested for something like that, so it sounds to me like you are using your autism as an excuse for your toxic male behavior.

As one of those people diagnosed with Asperger's before it was rolled into ASD, I will volunteer the suggestion that the baggage of autism just isn't politically-useful at the moment. At most, you'll get already-progressive people who identify as such without seeming to experience the very real deficiencies that come with the condition; this is different than it being a truly salient component of identity.

Lots of people aren't on the stack. People with fetal alcohol symptom, the ugly, the short, people in wheel chairs etc..

I highly recommend the essay Biological Leninism. Basically, the left is a coalition of people who naturally resent society and are in the bottom of it. The left finds people who will never be able to seize power and promote them to middle managers. The left's coalition is obese black women in a boardroom with Iqs of 100 when everyone else in the room has an Iq above 120. They would never be there in any other society and will therefore be loyal to the current system since they are entirely dependent on it. At the same time they won't actually take over the power structure.

Autists are either too autistic and therefore too incompetent or they are highly skilled autists and will not conform to social pressures and may even take over the power structure.

The disadvantaged groups that get on the 'stack' all have something in common: their qualities act as tribalistic signifiers, which in turn provides a basis for political coordination. This might just be an outgrowth of human evolutionary history, where apes gathered themselves into tribes and warred against rival tribes, mirroring our present political circumstances not by accident but because of the encoding of behavior into genes. We are witnessing the modern potential of ape-evolution.

Mental and psychological disabilities are not close enough to the tribal dynamic to serve as signifiers in this way, so they are not adequate, in the same way, as a basis for political organization. To the extent that policy is made to take these things into account I would say that it's probably driven by higher mental processes and philosophies than by instinctual ape-tribalism.

Nick Land discussed this in "The Dark Enlightenment":

When ‘statistical common sense’ or profiling is applied to the proponents of Human Bio-Diversity, however, another significant trait is rapidly exposed: a remarkably consistent deficit of agreeableness. Indeed, it is widely accepted within the accursed ‘community’ itself that most of those stubborn and awkward enough to educate themselves on the topic of human biological variation are significantly ‘socially retarded’, with low verbal inhibition, low empathy, and low social integration, resulting in chronic maladaptation to group expectations. The typical EQs of this group can be extracted as the approximate square-root of their IQs. Mild autism is typical, sufficient to approach their fellow beings in a spirit of detached, natural-scientific curiosity, but not so advanced as to compel total cosmic disengagement. These traits, which they themselves consider – on the basis of copious technical information — to be substantially heritable, have manifest social consequences, reducing employment opportunities, incomes, and even reproductive potential. Despite all the free therapeutic advice available in the progressive environment, this obnoxiousness shows no sign of diminishing, and might even be intensifying. As Jezebel shows so clearly, this can only possibly be a sign of structural oppression. Why can’t obnoxious people get a break?

Despite this very strong case for a place on the progressive stack autists have no place whatsoever on it,

Of course not, why would they? Autists don't have a place in it because the progressive stack isn't real. Leftists care about some minorities more than others, but not because they have an a priori commitment to "the stack" or any particular stack. They appear to care about "the stack" because its an effective weapon, both against the outgroup, and against the in group as a purity check.

They don't care about autists in the stack for the same reason you don't see the women's march boycotting Exxon for not having enough women on its roughneck crews. They don't care about the stack, they care about power. Adding autists to the stack doesn't gain them any power, so they don't care.

Further, leftists are not naturally aligned with autists. Leftists care first and foremost about eliminating distinctions, which requires absolute conformity of behavior. If that means insisting that men are literally women, you had better say so. Obviously, Autists are disinclined to play along, assuming they are even able to recognize the game in the first place. As James Damore found out, no one actually wanted serious, scientifically-backed suggestions for improving female participation at Google, even though he was specifically asked to provide such suggestions. They wanted everyone to practice parroting back the party line as part of the humiliation ritual they built into the promotion structure.

Also, I support @somethingsomething on this. Being a part of the stack is not desirable.

Edit: James Lindsay actually just released a piece on the leftist conception of ablism. The academic term for this is Disability Studies. They already consider being abled to be an original sin. They just don't care about autists.

Meanwhile, female autists are more heavily socialised into following neurotypical norms and thus present in a neurotypical manner, so they do not register as being autistic.

Autism = male may yet change. In academia, a lot of women I know have embraced autism as an identity (along with ADHD) and talk a lot about it, especially when explaining why they are falling short of being Hyper-Achieving Boss Bitches, and why they should have special accommodations. (Female) autism seems to be more acceptable as a public explanation of shortcomings than anxiety or depression, even though the latter are presumably more widespread. In contrast, I don't see male autistic academics talk about it at all in even semi-public forums e.g. Facebook.

Men don’t win points for having a disadvantage labeled.

Neurodiversity is all the rage these days, but there a giant penis-sized asymmetry for how such labels work out for women vs. men in being perceived.

“What a loser” vs. “oh you poor thing” is the default response, because biology is real and our instincts have us value men differently for showing weakness, even when it’s not fair.

Yeah, pretty much. The fact I am alive solely because of technological excess and slave morality is really quite unsettling to me.

I think you're right. I have a friend in academia who's been trying to convince me that I'm actually autistic rather than my previous diagnoses of anxiety and depression. And I'll admit that it would be nice to have that diagnosis instead, even though I don't think I'm autistic, and certainly don't fall far on the spectrum if I am. Autism just feels like a more tangible/acceptable disorder than simply saying depression/anxiety. Though my friend seems more into the idea of it being an identity for me than anything else.

Female autists seem to have a very... rosy view of what being an autistic man is actually like. It is widely stated in their spaces that we are not punished for our transgressions against NT norms, that we receive early intervention and support and generally live happier lives. Personally, I did not receive a diagnosis until I was 10 and received no help from any government institution until I was 23, and this help I received purely because I had crashed out of uni and entered a multi year NEET torpor, and the reason for this is that I spent all of my childhood and and teenagerhood being bantered to death because I wasn't even given the support I talked about in the OP.

If they expect any kind of help outside of an academic environment, they will be bitterly disappointed. Those male academics long ago learned to shut their pie hole.

Normies will never do a thing to help actual autists (as opposed to trendy "autists" that act quirky for internet clout). The single most sympathetic place on earth to autists is 4chan, the idea of actually caring about autists and their struggles is completely beyond the notice, let alone the concern, of any normie individuals and organizations that could do something about it.

And to channel Ayn Rand for a moment, the least powerful, most oppressed minority is the individual.

The single most sympathetic place on earth to autists is 4chan

Honestly doesn't feel like it (except for spammers). Genuine autistic posts online are much rarer than they used to be, and even on 4chan they get mocked. Being autistic is fine, but doing things like failing to read the room, writing awkward infodumps, having a weird emotion, etc. will get teased ruthlessly. I would bet most autists retreat to writing short, simple posts in public now if they write at all.

You might be able to find some sympathy if you posted on /r9k/ and framed your post correctly. In any case, I find 4chan's blunt, brutal honesty to be far more tolerable than Reddit's just world smarminess.

The members of the stack are chosen specifically because (1) they were discriminated in the past, and (2) attitudes toward them have changed. Politically they make an effective bludgeon because insulting them makes conservatives look terrible. There's definitely support in some circles for autists, like on college campuses and discord circles, and these are the same groups genuinely worrying about ageism, ableism, and so on. It has no utility in politics because conservatives lack a reputation for treating autists poorly (even though they do, like most people). It would be nice if universal equality was the actual driving force in progressive politics but it's really not.

Autism's a weird subject since the diagnosis gets thrown around super liberally for any sort of 'does not play nice with others' psychological diagnosis, and it's such a wide spectrum.

My mom used to work at a private school dedicated to let's say 5th-10th percentile intelligences. Not the absolute lowest rung, but the one above it. The vast majority of her students had diagnoses for Autism (along with whatever myriad difficulties they had) and were essentially incapable of functioning above a 4th-grade level. When that bloc is contributing to the statistics, it's very hard to be successful on the aggregate. Without going into the amount of criminals or ne'er-do-wells hit the psychological diagnosis arena and get 7 different things assigned, one of which is invariably ASD. These people are already on an atrocious course and further drag down averages. It is my belief that if diagnosis was a firmer line and was universal, that the gap would be a lot smaller.

The most 'successful'/able-to-cope Autistics are also unlikely to ever pick up a formal diagnosis, especially if they're presently older than mid thirties. I'm diagnosed with what was Aspergers. My dad is a very successful engineer who is 99% to also get diagnosed (and indeed self-diagnosed after I received the diagnosis) if he ever had occasion to pursue it, but as he's now in his mid 70s, retired and in no need of psychological assistance he's unlikely to ever get his autism certificate.

I feel like you are picturing the 'average autistic person' as a FANG developer who struggles with dating/social contact but is otherwise able to get some benefits out of the quirk in their brain chemistry. This is a person who's like 85th percentile.

Mmhmm.

I spent a couple years at a private school which was designed for autistic integration. Maybe 10% of the students had a pretty severe disability. Some of them worked through the social skills, the emotional development, and so on. Presumably they get to engage with society. Others...they will spend their whole lives with significant reliance on their caretakers. These were all kids with loving parents and enough of a support network to pay private-school tuition. Not everyone has that.

Exactly. That's essentially the environment my mom worked at (albeit essentially purely aimed at the bottom 10% of your cohort), and a positive outcome of a 12 year education at that school was 'capable of holding a shelf stacking job or consistently contributing on government subsidized work for the lesser-abled and moderate sociability'.

I had a friend like that at high school. Basically stuck at an 11 year old's level of mental development, though he was more like a 5 year old at the start of high school. (Adolesence seems to have done him a lot of good.) With a ridiculously good family and presumably some government help, he's been able to hold a steady job through all of his adult life, a very happy long-term romantic relationship with an autistic woman, and enjoy a diverse range of interests (biking, video games, anime). Many non-disabled young men don't do so well.

I feel like you are picturing the 'average autistic person' as a FANG developer who struggles with dating/social contact but is otherwise able to get some benefits out of the quirk in their brain chemistry. This is a person who's like 85th percentile.

Agreement on this. None of us in my paternal family have (so far as I know, it may be different for the current generation of children) formal diagnoses of at least Aspergers (before that was folded into the Autism Spectrum) but there are undeniable signs of something like that scattered all through, going back generations. I've done online "test yourself" quizzes and come out as "probably autistic", so while self-diagnosis is no diagnosis, I think I probably have something.

I'm nowhere near as high functioning in a FANG job because I have no maths skills. I can get by with literacy skills (and the slight obsessiveness over details that comes with the package), but I have no social skills (and hence can't 'network' my way into anything), and while support would be nice, it's way too late in the day for that to make a meaningful difference to me now (back from the age of six? oh yes, but no use crying over spilled milk). I'm not a success by any metric of any area; 'but at least you have friends, you have this, you have that' - nope, no, none of it. I liked the Covid lockdown in my country because you want me to stay indoors, don't go out, don't gather in groups, don't socialise? I do none of that already, I am not suffering the deprivations other people complain about. For once, the world was running the way I liked it (no noise! no crowds! no having to pretend to care about chit-chat and small talk! no interacting with people for more than the tasks we need to do! stay in my shell? bliss!). Which brings me on to:

We live in a neurotypical society.

Yes, we do, and that's just a fact of life. While there should be support and accommodation, autistic people also have to learn how to adapt to the wider world, as best they can. If the majority of people are right-handed, things are set up for the right-handed. If over-exposure to sunlight gives you sunburn and skin cancer, you can't demand the right to walk about naked for twelve hours a day under the desert sun. Learn to cover up and put on sunscreen.

This support is not provided to allow the child to feel comfortable in their skin, but to minimise friction both with neurotypicals and with the school and work systems.

Ironically, in view of everything, I've ended up working in a place that deals with children with additional/special needs, and that includes autism. They're pre-school aged, and part of the care is helping them pick up the skills that will help them integrate when they go on to kindergarten and primary school. It is about helping those kids feel comfortable in their skin, because they do suffer otherwise, either locked in their own isolated little world or rigidly sticking to a set routine that cannot deviate in the slightest or else the child has a full-blown meltdown. It's not about turning them neurotypical, it's about doing as much as can be done. Maybe that's not a lot, maybe they'll never be able to integrate and function, but leaving them be is the worst thing you can do and it's a disservice (as I said, I wish there had been something when I was six, maybe my life would not have been such a failure if I learned better how to pretend to be normie). And some are severely disabled, like the cases of "will literally beat his brains out against a wall so has to wear a helmet 24/7" teenager encountered in another job. It's not one-size-fits-all, Hollywood Crazy (which just means quirky) nice view of "smart, high IQ, maths nerds autistics who work the big paying jobs in software engineering that give you normies the high economic value society you enjoy".

This is the way it is. Fire burns, water is wet, society is neurotypical, and that shouldn't be changed. Accommodation and support yes, "I'm (self-diagnosed with, or even officially diagnosed with) Such-And-Such, I get to do what I like and no consequences and you have to cater to my every whim!" no.

One my (deeply unpopular) autism related views are that the elimination of Aspergers as a diagnosis and the folding of all similar conditions into vague levels has been an absolute disaster. Normies have a slightly less uninformed idea of what Aspergers is, even if their idea gravitates towards Sheldon Cooper. Meanwhile, if you say the world Autism they will automatically assume "Guy who punches himself in the head and screams", regardless of any attempts by the establishment to reband Autism away from this thought.

I agree with this, but the Aspergers diagnosis got banded about willy-nilly so it kind of had to be hauled back (plus the culture war tones, I guess)


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