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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25172 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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I, like the rest of the country, feel like nothing good will come of the election. However, I feel this way for a slightly different reason than your average person, and probably closer to the average Mottezian.

I actually don't really care too much who is president. Either one of them would IMO do a good enough job. I mostly care whether the president impacts my everyday life or causes nuclear war. However, though it isn't his fault directly, having Trump in charge would impact my everyday life negatively, mostly because it would fuel another 4 years of incessant leftist whining all around me, from all my friends and family, along with people starting to (erroneously, IMO) see and declare that racism and sexism is everywhere again. It'll start causing fights between me and my wife again. My workplace and all local institutions will start making statements about how they're standing up to Trump and racism. Under Biden, I have truly enjoyed some nice peace and respite from politics.

However, I find this state of affairs to be very irritating. It feels like the left, or at least the leftists in my life, are taking an infantile tactic: we better win or we'll whine and complain for 4 years. I don't respect sore losers, and moreover, I don't like the fact that there is no path forward for the right.

Scott said this back in 2016:

If the next generation is radicalized by Trump being a bad president, they’re not just going to lean left. They’re going to lean regressive, totalitarian, super-social-justice left.

Scott was absolutely correct here in how it played out. But what option does this leave the non leftists with? If the Democrat wins, then the currents move left. We get leftism enshrined into law over the next 4 years, because to the victor go the spoils. If the Republican wins, then the undercurrents move left, and more and more people get radicalized towards the left.

Is there a way for the currents to move right without the undercurrents moving left? Or is Trump just uniquely bad at making that happen? I'm tempted to say that this is just the fact that Trump is a polarizing figure, but at the same time, all the leftists I know scream bloody murder whenever a Republican is in command. They were infantile under George W Bush. And though I wasn't around then, I know many people who are still salty over Reagan and act like he was the worst.

I don't really think there is any solution until the generic Dem voter decides Dems have finally gone too far left and stop voting for them. Hard to imagine what point that would be though given we have currently got an admin trying to jail political dissidents and opponents along with the multitude of pro-Hamas marches.

I mean they need a reasonable offramp and Trump isn't that. This is why the Democrats have, correctly, zeroed in on the strategy of just pointing out the wild stuff Trump does and not talking about much else. If the republicans want to be the party of normal they need to actually take up that mantel.

I'm definitely very interested in how the next election without Trump being involved will end up going. Shame it couldn't have been this one.

I used to think this was possible. However in a local argument with a normie democrat arguing about those evil Republicans trying to ban books, I showed them images of Gender Queer, and the page where the kid is giving another kid a blowjob, and asked them point black if they honestly thought that belonged in middle schools.

They doubled down. Didn't shake them one iota.

I think you under estimate the DNC's ability to lead their voters where ever they want them to go.

showed them images of Gender Queer, and the page where the kid is giving another kid a blowjob,

In fairness, I just looked it up, and it's a strap-on.

Anyway, to your point.

I would find this pretty outrageous, but my default state is to be generally annoyed or outraged when our teenager tells us what he's learning about in public school. Be it economics, math or sex stuff.

In fairness, I just looked it up, and it's a strap-on.

WTF. I know this is besides the point, but I find that worse than just a blowjob for an illustration in a middle school book. Like, a blowjob at least serves a direct purpose of sexual pleasure due to the actual physical stimulation; a blowjob on a strap-on is only pleasurable from the psychological thrill of the act, at least assuming the giver isn't Linda Lovelace. To enjoy it requires getting into a certain headspace that's quite different from enjoying a blowjob, which is only requires the physiology (though the psychological pleasure isn't insignificant).

To enjoy it requires getting into a certain headspace (though the psychological pleasure isn't insignificant)

Looking back, it is absolutely shocking that Demolition Man absolutely nailed this is how female/feminized/progressive sexual pleasure works.

"Getting a blow-job but using a strap-on" is, I think, nearly the ultimate expression of this, and how hilariously it misses the point of what sexual contact is even supposed to be. It's all the cerebral pleasure of masturbation sex but none of the risk [that the "active/top" partner does something that you don't like; pattern matching to "this sexual encounter might end in pregnancy"] or the unprettiness (lots of bodies and the operative body parts are actually kind of ugly, and fluids are messy and smelly and dangerous due to what they can do).

To that end, maybe it's exactly the sort of thing that should be in schools- the problem with men (and traditionalists more generally) is that they do not even understand how female sexuality works much less understand how or why they must combat the toxic parts, and here they are, in their full (in)glory, for them to know the mind of their [class]-enemy. Of course, pornography extolling the virtues of the toxic parts of male sexuality would also need to be available in equal measure; have to present both sides of the argument to represent it fairly, after all (if that's too offensive, removing the porn altogether would be a reasonable compromise).

Well, she (he?) ends up not enjoying it. It's actually written on that same page.

Seems like a wash to me. I could easily see someone arguing the opposite, and it seems to me that it's an explicit sex act either way.

Remember, in real time conversations people are going to put on the spot. Either agree that this is bad, or double down. And given that giving even an inch on something that has been sold to them as a moral imperative which only hateful book burning nazis could possibly endorse, giving that inch is a big ask, and very few people will be willing to do that on the spot. That doesn't mean that you didn't put a crack in the wall and move them a little closer to being willing to admit that maybe the very worst stuff is not appropriate in schools, even if you hateful book burners are wrong about 90% of it.

This anecdote brought back memories to my own middle school sex ed in 8th grade in a very small hippie school (50-60 students per grade) in Cambridge, MA in the late 90s. We were taught using some illustrated book that had explicit drawn illustrations of adolescents (around our age at the time, i.e. preteens) nude and also actively experimenting with their own bodies. I don't remember if masturbation or orgasm were explicitly shown, though I recall at least one picture of a girl using a mirror to look at her genitals and of a boy with an erection.

Given that, a book with sexually explicit illustrations of preteens being used for sex ed today doesn't really surprise me. What I do find interesting is that, as best as I can remember, there was no actual hardcore sex between two people depicted in the book we used, and it also didn't cover sexual acts that were purely for pleasure, like blowjobs (I recall being amused when one girl complained that the book didn't teach us anything about anal sex). These seem like significant changes compared to what I was taught, and I'm honestly not sure what I think about it.

I'm curious, though, would the books that I was taught be more acceptable to you than Gender Queer, based on the way I described them, or would you consider those to also be inappropriate for teaching sex to middle schoolers?

I'm curious, though, would the books that I was taught be more acceptable to you than Gender Queer, based on the way I described them, or would you consider those to also be inappropriate for teaching sex to middle schoolers?

Unsure, but only because the line of what you may or may not remember is the bright flashing line I'm concerned about. You don't remember if masturbation or orgasm were explicitly shown, and those would be the exact sorts of things I wouldn't want in a middle school sex talk. The middle school sex talk I remember was focused entirely on anatomy and puberty.

I do recall the 9th grade sex ed stuff we got from our PE teacher. It rode an entertaining line between being casual and professional. But once again, from what I remember, it was very focused on STD and pregnancy prevention. How to pleasure, the morality (for or against) of seeking pleasure, etc was omitted entirely from the conversation. Which once again, feels like a fair line to me. I don't understand how much closer you could get to grooming than literally instructing middle schoolers how to give good head.

I'm curious, was this a private small hippie school, or a public school in a very small, open minded town?

This was a private school, located in (what I as an adult now recognize as) a quite wealthy neighborhood in Cambridge, MA. FWIW, I do recall we were specifically encourage to masturbate for health reasons (specifically no STD & no pregnancy - any other benefits such as pleasure or whatever weren't mentioned IIRC), but I don't think any actual explicit instructions were provided, either orally or visually.

Your line does seem reasonable, but it also does seem like one that's hard to maintain from the current hegemonic belief that pregnancy and bonding with a partner are merely a couple of optional consequences one can freely choose to get or not from sex. That mostly just leaves the pleasure portion, and not covering that, along with the many now-mainstream techniques for accomplishing those, would leave a big gaping hole in the education that the internet can rush to fill (less of an issue in the 90s).

but it also does seem like one that's hard to maintain from the current hegemonic belief that pregnancy and bonding with a partner are merely a couple of optional consequences one can freely choose to get or not from sex.

This belief is less hegemonic than it probably seems from a deep blue tribe perspective; plenty of people who don’t go to church every Sunday, fornicate and use contraceptives think that casual sex is morally wrong and people having sex should be prepared for the possibility of having a kid.

And I think that’s the rub; you point to a hippie-dippy private school, but public schools holding that same attitude of ‘of course we’re going to teach your kids progressive sexual ideas, it’s too hard not to’ is a problem because these are supposedly neutral institutions that are funded with taxpayer dollars partly on the basis of that supposed neutrality. If public schools are actually a vehicle for pushing blue tribe attitudes that’s a problem, and I suspect that sex Ed isn’t the only example of this.

Your line does seem reasonable, but it also does seem like one that's hard to maintain from the current hegemonic belief that pregnancy and bonding with a partner are merely a couple of optional consequences one can freely choose to get or not from sex. That mostly just leaves the pleasure portion, and not covering that, along with the many now-mainstream techniques for accomplishing those, would leave a big gaping hole in the education that the internet can rush to fill (less of an issue in the 90s).

I'm sorry, but this whole section reads, to me, like "Yeah, you're right, but I don't care." How is anyone supposed to push back against the "hegemonic belief that pregnancy and bonding with a partner are merely a couple of optional consequences one can freely choose to get or not from sex" when that worldview is baked into compulsory education you must send your children to? That's people's entire bugbear with supposedly public institutions not acting in a neutral manner that the entire public can agree on. All you've done, to refute my reasonable argument, is fall back on some sort of learned helplessness towards the problems that my enemy tribe have created.

No. Just no.

Well, I don't care about the state of sex ed in America in the most literal sense of the term - I have nothing in my life that would be affected positively or negatively based on what these sex ed policies are. If I had children of my own, I would care, and if I thought my own future would be affected meaningfully by the next generation of adults being taught the pleasure of sexual acts in explicit ways, I would care, but I don't see how it would.

I would certainly prefer it that kids today were taught sex in ways even more conservatively than I was taught, but that's just my own aesthetic preferences, along with some empathy I have towards those kids, who I feel sorry for to some extent due to the world we created for them. But it's not my responsibility to care about these kids, and their sexual well-being ultimately doesn't affect my life all that much.

Different people want different things. We don't live in a US where we all fundamentally want the same thing, but we just have different ideas of how to get there. No, we truly want different things.

For me, for example, leftist seething is a plus. I enjoy it. I don't care about national unity. It is not one of my preferences. I like the political tensions and the rage. For me it's a plus of Trump. I like right-wing seething too. The seething tastes good. The reasons why I don't like Trump are his authoritarianism and his foreign policy. If he suddenly supported drug legalization, promised to pardon Assange, and said that he would end all foreign aid to Israel, there's a good chance I'd vote for him. But those things aren't going to happen. So I'm not going to vote for him, but if he wins I will at least enjoy all of the leftist seething that he provokes.

Infantile seething is not just a leftist thing. I well remember all of the Republican seething during Bill Clinton's time. Populist republican forums practically considered him the Antichrist, his wife to be a murderer, and discussion of X-Files-esque black helicopter UN theories was not uncommon. Obama generated plenty of seethe on the right too, hence birtherism. It's just a part of modern American politics.

For me, for example, leftist seething is a plus. I enjoy it. I don't care about national unity. It is not one of my preferences. I like the political tensions and the rage. For me it's a plus of Trump. I like right-wing seething too

If that's the case, is this really the best forum for you to be participating in? It sounds like your values and the values of this forum are fundamentally at odds.

Infantile seething is not just a leftist thing.

No arguments from me here. But for whatever reason, I expect more from the left, and the fact that they've devolved in this way from previously having the moral high ground (in my previous estimation), taking everyone around me, and no one around me seems to be willing to acknowledge this, really drives me nuts.

It is true that in a sense, my pro-seething preference goes against the "light rather than heat" values of this forum. However, I try to make sure that my own posts here are not meant to draw seethe, so I do not think that I am violating the values of the forum with my posts. And I occasionally derive some entertainment and/or knowledge from the forum, so I also have a reason to keep participating.

I, like the rest of the country, feel like nothing good will come of the election.

…

I don't respect sore losers, and moreover, I don't like the fact that there is no path forward for the right.

If you thought it was bad before, Russell Berman has a piece at The Atlantic with an even worse scenario: "How Democrats Could Disqualify Trump If the Supreme Court Doesn’t":

Near the end of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments about whether Colorado could exclude former President Donald Trump from its ballot as an insurrectionist, the attorney representing voters from the state offered a warning to the justices—one evoking the January 6 riot that had set the case in motion.

By this point in the hearing, the justices had made clear that they didn’t like the idea of allowing a single state to kick Trump out of the presidential race, and they didn’t appear comfortable with the Court doing so either. Sensing that Trump would likely stay on the ballot, the attorney, Jason Murray, said that if the Supreme Court didn’t resolve the question of Trump’s eligibility, “it could come back with a vengeance”—after the election, when Congress meets once again to count and certify the votes of the Electoral College.

Murray and other legal scholars say that, absent clear guidance from the Supreme Court, a Trump win could lead to a constitutional crisis in Congress. Democrats would have to choose between confirming a winner many of them believe is ineligible and defying the will of voters who elected him. Their choice could be decisive: As their victory in a House special election in New York last week demonstrated, Democrats have a serious chance of winning a majority in Congress in November, even if Trump recaptures the presidency on the same day. If that happens, they could have the votes to prevent him from taking office.

[Emphasis added]

Just picture what happens if Trump wins in November, but a Democrat Congress refuses to certify in January and gives it to Biden instead — totally not an "insurrection," just "defending Our Democracy". Sure, maybe the lefties around you won't "whine and complain for 4 years"… or maybe they'll be complaining about how "racism and sexism is everywhere again" as demonstrated by Trump winning the vote despite being an illegitimate candidate, and what a perilous state Our Democracy is in that Congress had to resort to such extreme measures after the courts failed to do their job, and so on. While, meanwhile, there's certainly going to be even more unhappiness on the Right.

(Though, really, I'm coming around to preferring an outcome like this. Because if this doesn't get Republican voters to accept that "Our Democracy" is fundamentally rigged against them and that voting is pointless, I don't know what will.)

Is there a way for the currents to move right without the undercurrents moving left?

I actually want to discuss whether the currents/counter-currents situation leaves any actual options for non-leftists, and I think that merits discussion.

My first reaction is to say no, there aren't any actual options for non-leftists, we're doomed, all hope is lost, etc., etc. Though, when I express such views online, at best I get people going on at me about how "that's the depression talking" and so on. (And when I push those people for what they consider options, it's mostly of the "vote harder, debate harder, 'own the libs with facts and logic' harder, and somehow overcome all of the left's institutional, cultural, and rhetorical advantages through sheer excellence" sort.) More often, it's lectures about how "despair is a sin" (here, the "solutions" tend to be waiting for Divine Providence to eventually deliver), or even just denunciations as a shill ("are you getting paid for this demoralization op in shekels or yuan?") or a traitor ("getting killed by leftists is the real right-wing victory").

So, in the spirit of trying to be more optimistic — like my therapists keep telling me — I'll limit it to saying there are no options for non-leftists within "the rules of the game" as currently constituted (and so thoroughly rigged against us). As for options "outside the game," well, I don't think I can discuss those here without eating a ban. Thus, I'll vaguely gesture toward Sun-Tzu's comments about not fighting where your enemy is strong and you are weak, but where you are strong and the enemy is weak.

Just picture what happens if Trump wins in November, but a Democrat Congress refuses to certify in January and gives it to Biden instead — totally not an "insurrection," just "defending Our Democracy".

They do not have the votes to do this. Sure, some democrats will vote against certifying the election, possibly even most, but there will be enough defectors that democrats would need a very large majority to do it.

If Trump is unfit for office wouldn’t that be a constitutional way of approaching it?

Leaving aside whether it’s justified or proper or anything like that for congressional Dems to do that, it’s plainly not an insurrection unless lefties also try to occupy a building via force.

Also conservatives have a structural advantage in the senate and electoral college because our system is biased against population density, but if you want to believe GOP voters should think voting is pointless then I guess that’s one hell of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If elections are so rigged against the GOP why does it control so many states and remain competitive in national elections?

If elections are so rigged against the GOP

My argument isn't that Republicans can't win elections, its that their winning elections doesn't matter. As Yarvin once said, there's a difference between taking office and taking power. It doesn't matter if some Republicans get voted in, real power resides far more in the permanent bureaucracy, the "NGOcracy" non-profit networks, academia, and other such Left-captured institutions, which together have so many ways of blocking temporary, merely-elected GOP politicians, that it doesn't much matter who wins the election, because the Left wins either way.

And I had much more radical things in mind for "where the Right is strong" than the Senate and Electoral College.

Oh good. Even winning doesn’t matter.

Like I’m familiar with the points you’ve made and I’m a veteran of the Deep State, so I very much understand the bureaucratic dynamic, but also winning is still a lot better than losing if one cares about the GOP agenda.

winning is still a lot better than losing if one cares about the GOP agenda.

How has "winning" through the standard channels secured value for, say, us Gun Culture people? We passed laws, which Blues simply ignored. We won repeatedly in the Supreme Court, and nothing actually changed. What did we do wrong, and what should we have done better?

Ironic to bring that up when the courts are deliberating over Trump’s bump stock ban right now.

I promise you things would be a lot worse without all those GOP-appointed judges upholding the 2nd amendment.

Sure, places like NY/CA/NJ are doing their best to fight back against freedoms, but consider that those states are places where the GOP doesn’t win very much.

The real loser of an issue despite the GOP winning is fiscal responsibility, not the 2nd amendment.

Ironic to bring that up when the courts are deliberating over Trump’s bump stock ban right now.

Ironic how? I'm aware that Trump is not perfect on 2A issues. I actually wrote an effort post in the old place, prior to his ban, arguing that the gun culture should accept restrictions on bump-stocks as something along the lines of a peace offering. I think subsequent events have invalidated that argument, but Trump is still the least-worst option available, even on 2A issues specifically.

I promise you things would be a lot worse without all those GOP-appointed judges upholding the 2nd amendment.

The question is not whether things would be even worse if our enemies had even more power than they currently do. The question is whether the formal system can in fact provide impartial redress for our grievances. I think the evidence is pretty clear that it cannot. If in fact it cannot, further good-faith participation in that system is not advisable. At that point, we as a tribe should stop listening to arguments about how potentially-effective tactics are off-limits because they're against the rules, because the rules are a fiction.

Sure, places like NY/CA/NJ are doing their best to fight back against freedoms, but consider that those states are places where the GOP doesn’t win very much.

The whole point of the Federal paradigm was supposed to be that winning locally in NC/CA/NJ shouldn't actually matter, because Federal law and Supreme Court decisions override state law and state preferences. That's how it worked when the federal law and Supreme Court decisions were Blue victories. We played the game by the rules, unquestionably "won", and now see that the rules don't actually appear to matter. If they don't matter for the Blues, which they evidently do not, they shouldn't matter for us either. And that means all the rules, from disrespect for federal law to support for organized political violence against tribal enemies.

The real loser of an issue despite the GOP winning is fiscal responsibility, not the 2nd amendment.

I remember caring about the idea of fiscal responsibility, once upon a time. But again, there was no benefit to caring about this. Fiscal responsibility could not be established, and attempting to make it happen exclusively hurt us and benefited our enemies. The proper response is to get what can be got while the getting is good, and look for ways to stick the outgroup with as much of the consequences as possible.

I bring up the 2A issues because they are an extremely clear, entirely undeniable rebuttal to "moderate" arguments that the system should be respected. Under current conditions, respecting the system is consenting to your own victimization.

It seems common to me for people, especially moderates, to take the legitimacy of our existing socio-political system as a given. I think this tendency is dangerous. You do, in fact, need to convince people to cooperate with the system, or you will not have a system any more. There is no such thing as unaccountable power, there is only power whose accountability has been successfully occluded. Blue Tribe has been riding high for a very long time via strategies that seem, to me, to be fundamentally degenerate. I don't think they really have a plan B, and I don't think they really have enough time to make one. Whether Trump wins the election or not, social cohesion is not going to come back, and neither is respect for the rule of law or trust in institutions. All of these will continue to decline under all likely outcomes of this year's election, and the tech overhang is only going to get worse with time.

I guess I don’t understand your point.

Gun rights are clearly better off by a lot because the GOP won enough elections to appoint judges who recognize the individual right to bear arms. It has put super blue places on their back foot. Red states tend to have pretty good gun laws and so keeping the Feds from screwing with that is an ongoing victory.

Blue states trying to impose bans that will probably lose in court is the mirror image of Red states/counties saying they won’t enforce gun laws they consider unconstitutional. It’s par for the course and Red tribe is largely winning here (and in a way that doesn’t backfire, like winning on abortion does).

We’ve never had better gun rights in the modern era, with expanded right to carry and state reciprocity and no real chance anytime soon of a fed ban on sporting rifles and magazines, which we used to have in the glorious 90s.

The present state of gun rights exists because of GOP victories. It seems clear a future where the GOP gives up on winning election will not be good for gun rights.

This seems to clearly contradict the original point that winning doesn’t or won’t matter (the instant the left could it would at least take us back to the 90s). But yes, it was funny that Trump actually did support some gun regulation (which might get overturned!),in the same way it would be if he had a tax increase.

So I’m very confused why you think 2A rights of all things is a good example against winning within the system when we’ve had like 20+ years of mostly victories on that front. And, if you’re a conservative, avoiding a bad change is a victory itself.

I agree fiscal responsibility is one hell of a problem because trying to fix it is a political dead end and so it seems both parties have agreed to drive off the cliff and then the crisis will take the blame off of anyone in particular. I’m just also sad the GOP has largely given up even pretending to care.

I also generally agree with your description of the social and institutional decay we’ve seen and that the large part of it is Blue Tribe Elites overplaying their hand and violating important norms. I just think gun rights are a pretty good counter example. See also: drinking/brewing.

Of course, I would have blamed the progressive left a lot more for their share of the overall problem pre-Trump, when he played right into their narrative and flagrantly ignores norms and laws (for no actual victory, mind you), and now that so many constitutional conservatives dropped the first word (along with fiscal).

If the culture war situation was, on average, where it is specifically on gun rights then I’d be a goddamned optimist, because when push comes to shove Blue loses on that issue and things have trended in the direction I prefer during my lifetime.

More comments

The question is not whether things would be even worse if our enemies had even more power than they currently do. The question is whether the formal system can in fact provide impartial redress for our grievances. I think the evidence is pretty clear that it cannot.

Yeah, when the choice presented is between losing quickly and losing slowly, the answer is to flip the table.

However, though it isn't his fault directly, having Trump in charge would impact my everyday life negatively, mostly because it would fuel another 4 years of incessant leftist whining all around me, from all my friends and family, along with people starting to (erroneously, IMO) see and declare that racism and sexism is everywhere again.

The left, initially blindsided by Trump, turned it their advantage in 2016-2020, starting with the explosion pronoun and gender issues in 2017 , impeachment and FBI investigations in 2019, and then ending with Covid restrictions and mass social media censorship in 2020. I don't think it will be as bad if Trump wins again. The difference now is the left no longer has as much control over the narrative, as seen on Twitter now with Elon's takeover. I think many of these issued are played out.

I really hope you are right! But... "fool me once". I've seen so much that strikes me as going past the point that I ever thought our society would go, that has shattered my notion that logic and reason can win out over mob mentality spurred on by the media's desire to push a juicy story. And it kept coming back again, and again, and again. It was not one year ago that I had coworkers sharing with me the joyful news that Trump was indicted for the whateverth time, as if I care or want to talk about it.
I really wish you are right, but I'm afraid that we're just in a lull right now.

I suspect @greyenlightenment's point isn't that logic and reason will win over, but that the lack of control means just that- a lack of control. Mob mentality won't be defeated by logic and reason, it will be more counter-balanced by opposing mob mentality and increasing lack of civil difference that the last decade's mainstream media-political consensus depended on.

George W Bush was really bad. He invaded a country under false pretences, got the US into two inglorious, expensive, losing wars. He provided the example for the pre-emptive strike/who cares about international law doctrine that Russia is now implementing. Maybe Afghanistan was necessary but he managed it with the same contempt and neglect he showed in Iraq. There was no plan for running the occupied territory, no clear and sustainable objective, nothing! Bush also pointlessly threatened a bunch of countries with invasion - lo and behold Iran did its best to cause problems for America lest it be the next Iraq. After being put on the Axis of Evil North Korea decided to nuclearize.

On domestic policy he wasn't great either. No Child Left Behind was a huge waste of money. He started the unconstitutional mass surveillance program. What is there to like about Bush?

You think Russia needed to use Bush as an example/excuse to invade a neighboring country and to blow off international law.

Come on man please. Bush can be bad/wrong for the invasion without trying to blame him for Putin acting like an average Russian autocrat over the last few centuries.

NK did not decide to nuclearize merely because they got put on a rhetorical naughty list.

Ironically, threatening Iran put them off their nuclear weapons program.

I don’t like Bush. I came of political age during Bush and was polarized because of the blatant incompetence and inability of the Red Tribe to admit they fucked up on Iraq, in particular.

But also it’s very important to criticize bad people/things accurately and not simply add unjustified blame.

NK did not decide to nuclearize merely because they got put on a rhetorical naughty list.

Bush made a list of three countries he regarded as threats, rhetorically justified pre-emptive strikes and then invaded one in 2003. In 2003 North Korea left the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to pursue nuclear weapons whole-heartedly. The connection seems pretty clear.

without trying to blame him for Putin acting like an average Russian autocrat over the last few centuries

It certainly doesn't help when Bush goes and flushes UNSC legitimacy down the toilet, embracing unilateral action. Other countries can also play that game. America exiting the ABM treaty and proposing NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine were very unhelpful for US-Russia relations.

threatening Iran put them off their nuclear weapons program

Possibly but it surely encouraged them to fund militias and harass the US so the US wouldn't be able to encircle and invade them. There are many dead US servicemen at the hands of Iranian-backed militias who might well regret Bush's need to threaten countries with invasion.

Please read the following and acknowledge the chronology and the fact NK had a weapons program before it left the NPT:

https://www.cfr.org/timeline/north-korean-nuclear-negotiations

Russia is the primary problem with US-Russian relations, which is why it gets so pissy when anyone interferes with their ability to dominate/invade their neighbors. I don’t know that the Bush admin did the best job on Russian policy, but trying to blame Bush for the path Putin has taken—given how many times the US tried to make friends with him—strikes me as highly unjustified.

The Iranians have been killing US servicemembers for 40 years. Our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan gave them an opportunity to do it close to home. Ironically, we did them a huge favor by eliminating Saddam and it’s not like they like the Taliban either.

the fact NK had a weapons program before it left the NPT

You think I didn't know that? That's why I said pursue nuclear weapons wholeheartedly, as opposed to half-heartedly like before, when they had a deal trading power plants for non-proliferation.

Russia is the primary problem with US-Russian relations

The US undeniably tried to overthrow two friends of Russia in Yugoslavia and Syria and very likely were behind the Ukraine coup, the Nuland phone calls show their involvement was deep. If you express hostile sentiment and behave with hostility, you get hostility back. It makes perfect strategic sense for the little Baltic countries, Ukraine and Poland to seek US patronage - but what does the US get out of exposed Baltic allies who feel emboldened to harass their Russian minorities and have negligible military capabilities? The most reasonable conclusion from the Russian perspective is that the US wants bases and real estate to encircle and attack Russia from - why else would they want Georgia in NATO?

The US attitude can be most succinctly expressed in Biden's prophetic words:

Zyuganov is saying how they don’t want this Nato expansion, they said if NATO keeps expanding they’ll look to China. So I go ‘Good luck. And if that fails, try Iran.’ And it shut them up because they all know that they have to look West, they need the West.

https://twitter.com/CarlZha/status/1646291932552003585

The American foreign policy attitude (Bush is an exemplar but the others are similar) seems to be 'get fucked, we can do whatever we like and nobody else can do anything'. Not unsurprisingly, this attitude makes enemies. US leaders don't seem to understand or care about that, they think it's a joke. There's no self-awareness: the US interchangeably derides North Korea as a joke and threatens to attack them - oh wait, North Korea then sends Russia more shells than the EU can manage. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to demand they give up their nuclear weapons, after you attacked two other countries that halted their nuclear weapons program. Maybe it wasn't such a great idea to renege on the Iran deal when Shaheds are wrecking Ukraine...

Somehow I doubt the thing that put NK over the edge was the rhetorical Axis of Evil. The point is that they were in violation for a long time and chose to exit when they were close enough to success that dealing with inspectors wasn’t going to work.

Blaming an outcome decades in the making on Bush is asinine.

NATO is a defensive alliance and believing that a tiny country bordering Russia joining is an actual threat to Russia, vs. the real problem of taking away Russia’s ability to dominate, is simply not justified by any understanding of Russian foreign policy for the last century. You do a good job of not being very charitable to US leaders, but they’re saintly compared to Putin.

Blaming Putin’s regional aggression on Bush is asinine. (You can observe that whatever its faults our war in Iraq was clearly not territorial conquest.)

American foreign policy is far from perfect and the Bush administration was a particularly bad case (only superseded in modern times by the administrations that dragged us into Vietnam IMO), but that’s without needing to exaggerate or misplace blame.

I do agree backing out of the Iran Deal was stupid and there was a pretty strong bipartisan consensus on that (even among those who had opposed initiating it). But Trump was Trump.

When you say “after you attacked two other countries that halted their nuclear weapons program” are you referring to Iraq, Syria, or Libya?

When you say “after you attacked two other countries that halted their nuclear weapons program” are you referring to Iraq, Syria, or Libya?

Iraq and Libya, though I guess Syria sort of counts.

NATO is a defensive alliance and believing that a tiny country bordering Russia joining is an actual threat to Russia, vs. the real problem of taking away Russia’s ability to dominate, is simply not justified by any understanding of Russian foreign policy for the last century

Great powers do not like it if hostile great powers expand into their sphere of influence. The US seems to think Russia doesn't deserve a sphere of influence - the Russians disagree. This could have been avoided if the US had just accepted what even their own CIA chief Burns said in "NYET MEANS NYET: RUSSIA'S NATO ENLARGEMENT REDLINES" and done nothing. It was a can of worms that shouldn't have been opened.

And this 'taking away Russia’s ability to dominate' strategy has failed on its own terms. European security is far worse than in 2014 or 2008. Russia is mauling Ukraine to the point where Macron's been floating sending French troops to Ukraine.

If the US really thought that Russia was this rampant, expansionist power, why didn't they foresee this war and plan to win it? Why is Russia outproducing the entire West, let alone the US in shells? Nobody seemed to think about producing large numbers of munitions until 2022, which is exactly what you'd do if you thought that Russia was this aggressive imperial power. I'm not sure if US leaders were thinking at all, aside from Burns that is. I think they assumed 'we're invincible, we don't need to prepare, compromise or make any special effort'.

I do not blame Bush for Putin invading Ukraine but he illustrates the thoughtlessness in US foreign policy that has led to all kinds of bad outcomes.

Libya voluntarily stopped its nuclear weapons program.

Saddam most definitely did not. His reactors got bombed into oblivion and then he pretended to still have a program and didn’t cooperate with inspectors, even though it got him invaded. Basically everyone thought he had one going and he kept up the pretense to appear strong.

The US and NATO providing security guarantees is not something Russia has to like. But the fact that they don’t like it so much is kinda the whole reason countries want to join, and that case seems stronger than ever. Reasonable people can disagree about what exactly was the best way to handle Russian aggression, but please don’t pretend the West caused Putin to regress to the USSR/imperial mean. He has agency.

European incompetence is immense on many fronts, security and foreigner policy high among them. If I thought some US policy stance could fix it I would advocate for it.

I don’t think you understand how the US viewed Russia. No one was thinking Putin was going to try to conquer Ukraine until suddenly that’s what he was doing. Sure, a little invasion here and there to annex a slice of any given country, but not a full-on war. Being a Russia hawk went out of style a while ago (except for Mitt Romney in 2012), then Trump screwed up the traditional US political stances on top of that.

Once it was clear an invasion was coming, almost everyone thought Putin was going to win pretty quickly. The Ukrainians have outperformed expectations immensely, and the Russians underperformed. Unfortunately, that means a bloody quagmire for the indefinite future. (Which they judge better than being Putinized.)

The US military has not been very focused on countering a Russian land war for over 30 years. We are trying to focus on China after so much time in the Middle East. We let our traditional artillery production fall off too much during that time and rebuilding capacity doesn’t happen instantly.

You phrasing things as if we think “we’re invincible” is not even wrong. We, the United States of America, are not being threatened by Putin. We have never had more of a military advantage over Russia in century or more because Putin is burning up so much of his military in Ukraine. You’re simply assigning beliefs to the US national security apparatus with little bearing on reality. We spend an immense amount of money on the military, but no one was excited to spend that on artillery production capacity (old, boring) and not say an F-35 (new, exciting).

Russia invading its neighbors is a tale as old as time and the US is almost an irrelevant variable, except for the part where becoming a formal member of The West is an alternative and insurance policy for counties at risk of Putinization. Ukraine was moving towards the EU and Putin did not want that trend to succeed.

More comments

Bush made a list of three countries he regarded as threats, rhetorically justified pre-emptive strikes and then invaded one in 2003. In 2003 North Korea left the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to pursue nuclear weapons whole-heartedly. The connection seems pretty clear.

Arguably Iran too has already got the bomb, or is pretty close to the threshold, and not quite politically committed to crossing that line yet. It seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy that has continued to act to destabilise both South East Asia and the Middle East.

PEPFAR is estimated to have saved over twenty million lives, if that's worth anything to you.

I've literally never even heard of this before, thanks for bringing it up.

I'm not a Bush fan, but if I were to try to say:

  • He managed the country without it dissolving or getting destroyed. I know this may be a low bar to some, but I don't think it is. It must be the hardest thing in the world to be the president
  • He rallied America after 9/11. Getting the nation through that, and stoking feelings of patriotism and solace, and trying to get people to believe that they're actually safe in the face of the most unprecedented event in American history is no small feat.

He managed the country without it dissolving or getting destroyed.

I disagree - I think he was part of the dissolving. Look at the profits accrued to Halliburton et al as a result of the Iraq war, a war which has had ruinous consequences for the rest of the world. Those private profits came about through the expenditure of the USA's blood and treasure.

He rallied America after 9/11. Getting the nation through that, and stoking feelings of patriotism and solace,

I also disagree here - he (if he actually had much power personally) exploited those feelings to drum up support for a terrible war that he and his friends personally profited from.

This truly sounds more academic than realistic. I think it's well easy to say what you might have done in a perfect hypothetical world, but actually leading the country, and leading the country through such an unprecedented, harrowing event is another thing

Perfect hypothetical world? Who needs that? I can absolutely do a better job that would have far more positive consequences for the future, and I can do it with a single policy statement: Don't start a war of aggression in the middle east so that my friends in business can juice their profit margins at the cost of thousands of lives, billions of dollars and creating not just a refugee crisis but the Islamic state terror group.

I have an intensely heartfelt and deep disagreement with your post and what it implies. There's nothing "academic" about simply not starting a war - there are several US Presidents who avoided starting wars of aggression or invading other countries. The only way I can make sense of your comment is if you're so deeply cynical you believe that the military industrial complex has so much power over the government that the role of President is largely ornamental, and making the decision to avoid the war would have just lead to me getting shot in the head in public so that my war-hungry VP could take the top job.

I definitely don't disagree that he should not have gone into Iraq, and probably not Afghanistan, too. Uhh, I was responding in the car and maybe I got your post mixed up with another one at a similar time, also about Bush and how he responded to 9/11, when I said it was more academic.

Uhh, I was responding in the car

This is actually illegal in my country - please keep your eyes on the road and drive safely!

He blew 9/11 way out of proportion. The smart play would have been to ignore it and build the trade center back exactly how it was. That would have been the true power play. It was just a mosquito bite after all to a multi-trillion dollar economy and a country of almost 300 million. It could have been ignored. Instead, the terrorists won.

Oddly enough there was a Trump plan in the early-mid 2000's to do just that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Towers_2

Also the country basically runs on auto-pilot. You could have no president and not much would change. In fact, 8 years with no president would have been better than bush.

That is so unrealistic. No one would have stood for that. Maybe you weren't in America at the time, or maybe you weren't even born yet. But trust me it was a harrowing experience well before Bush said anything. No leader would have simply done nothing in response to an unprecedented attack of American citizens on American soil, and if he had, no one, not even most of the people on the left would have stood for him.

I was in my freshman year of college. I helped put together the google page of news as it was happening. I said this exact same thing then. I stand by it now. It was crazy and stupid to respond the way we did. I voted for Bush and was against leftist nonsense. It was just a bad way to respond.

I was in high school in 2001, and the view espoused by @AhhhTheFrench , that we should do nothing and that Bush is playing into the hands of Al Qaeda by attacking Afghanistan (even moreso Iraq) was basically the mainstream consensus where I lived. It certainly wasn't universal, but enough that there was social pressure to conform. I recall thinking at the time that this was just another murder, scaled up by not even 3,000, and thus only criminal proceedings are justified.

Given that my environment wasn't typical, I think you're right that most leftists still would've complained if Bush took the pacifist route, but I think there would still have been quite a bit of support. Minority support, to be sure, though.

88 % of Americans supported military action against Afghanistan in October 2001.

Just to make my point clearer, I don't necessarily think that Bush needed to parlay 9/11 into attacking Afghanistan, and definitely not Iraq, and I don't think there was universal support for those specific actions. But I think to simply ignore it, as @AhhhTheFrench said, was out of the question. Where I was (in the blueish-purple part of northeastern US), it was basically a given that he had to acknowledge the loss and try to coach the country through it in some way, swear vengeance, and at least try to go after Al Qaeda in some fashion.

It was so far out of proportion or balance. They killed a few thousand people, they were not a nation state. It was an immune reaction almost killing the host.

I don't respect sore losers

Would you consider the Right good losers?

I don't respect sore losers

Would you consider the Right good losers?

I just posted about the antagonism in the top level post. Other people being antagonistic, is not an excuse for you to be antagonistic. You get a warning. Next person who responds to the top level trying to start something is eating a ban.

  • -16

I think this is very bad moderation and the equivalence between the GP and the post you are responding to is false. This is already the case on a purely syntactic level: the OP makes an assertion, while the response asks the OP for his opinion (even if you could argue that the question is more of a "have you considered this" type than of the "I want to know the answer" one). Moreover, OP uses wording with insulting baggage ("sore loser") while the response is more neutral ("good", as opposed to bad, loser).

More generally, as I see it, prompting culture warriors who ascribe bad qualities to their outgroup to ask themselves if their ingroup is actually different in that regard is an important technique for keeping the heat of the discussion low: it promotes empathy, as one is encouraged to wonder why both sides act the same if one of them is so right while the other is so wrong, and prevents the "deathballing" dynamic where one tribe reaches a critical mass of common knowledge that everyone agrees their outgroup is worse than them and starts feeling more confident about coordinating meanness.

Finally, you noticeably did not threaten the original poster with a ban, despite the open egregiousness there. I don't know if it was intentional, and might well be a consequence of OP having been a singleton in your eyes while you spent hours dealing with separate anti-OP posts, but the way it winds up looking to anyone reading the thread top-to-bottom is blatant favouritism. The result of moderation leaning one way is that besides making some more people check out altogether, everyone who still cares about the balance of the community will try to counterbalance - i.e. go out of their way to make those perceived as receiving the moderators' favour feel a little less welcome. This means more antagonism going around. I'm trying to be charitable of your perspective here, but choosing which patterns/bandwagons to ignore and which ones not to is also a way of expressing favouritism: a moderator with opposite biases could have considered the responses to OP in isolation, while moderating OP (or any of the recurring posts in the same spirit!) with something to the effect of "next person who makes a top-level post with a sentiment amounting to 'DAE leftists are whiny bitches?' eats a ban" (and actually following up on it).

Normally, yes I like when people flip the script. But the original post had generated a lot of heat already and I was in more of a damage control mode. And OP is not republican, so it wasn't really a flip the script type moment. It was sort of just an opportunity for OP to trash another group as well.

I didn't make it explicit, but yeah if someone did a flip the script and just rewrote the OP from another perspective and posted it top level they might also eat a ban.

We do allow for mistakes here. I don't think the OP was originally intending to be as antagonistic as some of their language suggests, they just weren't being careful. Once moderators have come by and said "hey you messed up and this is too antagonistic" it is not ok for someone to then pull a "flip the script" move. Because its basically flaunting the rules and the enforcement of those rules.

Three things that make me a little more cautious to endorse your moderation here:

First, regarding your last point about ignoring moderators, I don't know that I can see it now, but how much time had elapsed between you saying that it's too antagonistic and KnotGodel's comment? Since they're right next to each other, there's probably a good chance that he didn't see, because the page wouldn't update until he reloaded? I do understand that it was not just that that resulted in the warning, though.

Second, I don't actually know whether KnotGodel was trying to be antagonistic; while it comes off a little harshly to me, that might not be intentional. I don't know.

Third, while I definitely wouldn't trust popular opinion on all moderation, in this case the vote count on your warning is genuinely pretty low.

I think some of us are confused by you using “antagonistic” to refer to the loaded language of “boo outgroup” from the “sore losers” and not the response itself being antagonistic against the OP himself.

(Also, a lot of us probably comment in a way we don’t necessarily see mod action trying to reset a tone shift before we pile on.)

I know you wrote elsewhere in the subthread that "some questions are inherently antagonistic", but this makes it seem like you consider any instance of what you call "flipping the script" to fall under that category. I think that that is wrongheaded, and in particular I really don't think that this question was "inherently antagonistic" - if it were, then surely basically every interaction here where people talk about each other's opinions rather than those of abstract people who are not part of the conversations would be inherently antagonistic, and everyone is posting on borrowed time while moderator goodwill lasts. If you want to retain that level of potential for anarcho-tyranny, you ought to put some thought into it before threatening its application.

Finally, you noticeably did not threaten the original poster with a ban, despite the open egregiousness there.

if "next person who makes a top-level post with a sentiment amounting to 'DAE leftists are whiny bitches?' eats a ban" (and actually following up on it).

What open egregiousness? I admitted I probably could have phrased some things better, but "leftist whiny bitches" is clearly not the sum totality of my post, and I was honestly not trying to be provocative. I actually want to discuss whether the currents/counter-currents situation leaves any actual options for non-leftists, and I think that merits discussion.

FWIW, I agree that it doesn't make sense to mod @KnotGodel's question.

The "with" in that sentence was intentional - I'd say there is ample evidence that the post contains a sentiment that could be summarised in that way, not that the sentiment is all there is to it (though I would go as far as saying that it's a central component of it). As for that ample evidence, just excerpting the sentimental terminology,

incessant leftist whining
infantile tactic
"we win (...) or we whine and complain"
sore losers
scream bloody murder
infantile
still salty (...) and act like he was the worst

Apart from the literal references to "whining", there are also two mentions of "infantile" and ascriptions of bad sportsmanship and emotional deregulation (scream, salty, act, the babytalk in "he was the worst"), which I think is a picture it's appropriate enough to gloss as "bitchy". I don't think this is cherry-picked from a longer post describing the behaviour of leftists, either; apart maybe from the much more indirect statement you ascribe to your "workplace and all local institutions", this seems to be the totality of behaviours you ascribe to leftists in your post, and there are quotes in the collection from every longer paragraph in it.

The "with" in that sentence was intentional - I'd say there is ample evidence that the post contains a sentiment that could be summarized in that way, not that the sentiment is all there is to it

This seems to me that you're backpedalling. Your original phrasing was

with a sentiment amounting to 'DAE leftists are whiny bitches?'

To "amount to" something means:

to add up to, be in total, be equal to, or be the same as

Therefore, by saying my post had sentiment amounting to "DAE leftists are whiny bitches?" you were not saying that my original post had that tone. You were saying that my original post was entirely equal to "DAE leftists are whiny bitches?". As I said verbatim above, that was "not the sum totality" of my post.

Furthermore, I think that saying things like:

It feels like the left, or at least the leftists in my life, are taking an infantile tactic

is actually a very gentle way of putting it, and I was attempting to convey my point while still maintaining detachment. If I wanted to be less, detached, I would have phrased it as "they're being crybabies", or if I wanted to be "egregiously" inflammatory I could have even said things that were far worse.

I really don't think so - if I wanted to say that was the whole post, I would have gone for the shorter "post amounting to 'DAE(...)'".

I also really don't think that "I could've done much worse" is an argument for what you did being particularly good. That being said, I perhaps should remind you that I put the accusation in the mouth of a putative moderator who I took to be taking cjet's action with inverted polarity - given that I was against what cjet did here, it should stand to reason that I'm equally against what Bizarro cjet would have done... (not because it'd be a wrong claim about your post, but because I think that the implied collective punishment is not a good modding strategy).

Wait, how could I have conveyed that idea in a way with less antagonism than I did? [Edit: I didn't want to assume he believed this (which is putting words in his mouth and against the rules) - so the only option if I wanted to engage was to ask for clarification]

Some questions are inherently antagonistic.

Next person who responds to the top level trying to start something is eating a ban.

Just to be clear, does this mean that people are allowed to make responses agreeing that the left is bad, but are not allowed to make responses arguing that the right is also bad?

Maybe if you are at the point of 'This post is bad to the point where most people replying in kind will be so bad that they deserve a ban', you should just remove the post? I think this is what lawyers call 'an attractive nuisance' at this point.

No, it doesn’t, and no, we won’t.

I guess not. But I don't exactly respect them, either. But I do sympathize with some of their frustrations.

mostly because it would fuel another 4 years of incessant leftist whining all around me

There were definitely better ways to phrase this. This was antagonistic.

At the risk of being tedious, how would you phrase it if the goal is to convey the directionality and annoying tone of interlocutors? I can see why this would be inappropriate to direct at another user and can be off-putting more broadly, but really, sometimes people really do whine about something a lot and some people will experience more or less of it based on what communities they're part of. As a fan of the Buffalo Bills, I am sick of incessant Bills Mafia whining about Lamar Jackson winning the MVP. I even like the people that are whining just fine! It just gets old. I think describing my irritation with their endless complaints about the same old shit more or less requires being a little tonally mean.

I see examples as the key to complying with the rule to "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion." The highlighted phrase is part of a 136 word paragraph that is emphatic without being explicit.

For example, "It'll start causing fights between me and my wife again.". I feel as though I have learned something about Americans and their politics. But have I? I imagine telling a friend "America politics is so toxic that if Trump wins, it will start fights between men and their wives." And my friend will be skeptical, pushing back with "Really? How does that work?" and I won't know. I've just got the vibe, but if I'm pushed as to what specifically is meant by "incessant leftist whining", I have to fall back on what I already know.

Perhaps what I already know is wrong. The emphatic nature of the paragraph encourages me to believe more strongly in what I already know. The lack of explicitness deprives me of the opportunity to believe less strongly in what I already know because it clashes with the examples given.

Ah, yeah, I guess. Sorry! I wasn't really thinking about it on that level, just expressing my thoughts/frustrations.

Trump was also uniquely incompetent. Lefties cried bloody murder over Bush but the undercurrents didn’t shift left until after his popularity had tanked(and really not until he left office). Trump’s poor management and erraticism are a big factor.

He made a lot of promises and initiatives that were half-assed or had little hope of happening, like promising to stop social media censorship, the wall, etc. but this is typical of politicians. Firing James Comey was an unforced error though.

Firing James Comey was correct. Comey lied to Trump's face about Russia investigations, when Comey knew that he was investigsting Trump and his appointees on spurious charges. It's not Trump's fault that, once Comey was fired, basically every other political actor was seized with hysteria over Russiagate and empowered more investigations into Trump. But it almost certainly would have been just as bad, if not worse, if Comey had continued to run everything.

You may be right, I'm not certain. Is there an explanation for Reagan?

Also, if you are right, then my next worry is that to get elected as a Republican anymore, you basically actually have to be as erratic as Trump! If that's the case, then I worry about whether things will ever stop moving left as fast as they are today.

The undercurrents shifted right under Reagan, Clinton was so popular in large part because he moderated so much.

I guess when I said

Is there an explanation for Reagan?

I meant to be asking why so many leftists seem to have this vitriolic hatred for Reagan to this day, to see if there's an explanation besides just "they'll have vitriolic hatred for any Republican who's in power".
So are you saying that the left to this day hate Reagan because he actually had sway over the populace, and he managed to shift the country right?

It is worth noting that the liberal elite/centre-left establishment/Deep State/Blob do not have the same kind of hate-on for Reagan that they do for Bush Jr and Trump (and, as far as I am aware, never did - although I was too young to be following US politics when Reagan was in office.) For example, Reagan usually comes slightly above average in historical rankings of Presidents by academics.

The anti-establishment left hate Reagan because he successfully claimed the moral high ground for the US at a time when the anti-establishment left had been rooting for the Soviet Union with varying degrees of plausible deniability for decades. The pro-establishment left are broadly pro-Reagan because he gets the credit for achieving two long-term uniparty goals - winning the Cold War and working with Volcker and the congressional Dems to clean up the Nixon/Carter economy.

It is worth noting that the liberal elite/centre-left establishment/Deep State/Blob do not have the same kind of hate-on for Reagan that they do for Bush Jr and Trump (and, as far as I am aware, never did - although I was too young to be following US politics when Reagan was in office.) For example, Reagan usually comes slightly above average in historical rankings of Presidents by academics.

That's interesting. I will say that it's hard for me to determine how much the left (in various factions of the left) hate Reagan, and this is probably because I wasn't around then. But fairly often, I hear people positively hating on him in what seems like an irrational way. I may be weighting those cases too heavily.

I'm probably one of the older people who read The Motte. I was an adult for all of Reagan's time in office. And I was a daily NPR news listener too.

I can assure you the left hated him with a passion back then.

When I was much younger, the transformation of Poland into a free market democracy and reactions to it by the communist party remnants (turned social democrats) was quite fresh in my memory. I thought that leftists hate Reagan because he presided over the victory of capitalist America over the communist vision of the world.

Then I got fluent in English language and eventually American politics, and learned about many policies of Reagan that were quite disastrous, like kicking The War On Drugs up a notch. I thought then that leftists hate Reagan because he gutted the welfare state, broke a major strike (air controllers) and left the gays out to die.

These days I think that many of the things that Reagan was blamed for were inevitable, or rather that they were symptoms of larger trends not influenced that much by the presidency - that stagflation was the result of forsaking atom, and so the American civilization's capacity to generate energy stopped growing (I don't remember the details, but I remember seeing a group of charts that suggested that energy prices and capacity over the centuries are the answer to "why did everything started going to hell in the 70s"). And after reading the Salo thread, I don't believe that a Dem president would make a difference w/r/t AIDS - the public sympathy just wasn't there yet for this to get major funding, that required decades of positive propaganda. No funding means that PrEP isn't developed, which means that mostly nothing can be done.

(The viable solution would be to go full authoritarian and shut down the bathhouses, but no American president would do that. I think that for example in the USSR less gays per capita died of AIDS, mostly because homosexuality was much more seriously persecuted and so they had, ahem, less opportunities to get infected. That's some heavy duty tragic irony.)

Also, seeing people talk about Late Stage Capitalism I'm kinda back to thinking that many leftists do in fact have unprocessed grief over the collapse of the USSR and a miserable failure of their imagined future. Mark Fischer pretty much made an entire sub-school of thought out of that grief. And so they hate Reagan because he is the face of the triumph over their future.

What's the Salo thread?

This one probably:

https://archive.ph/2020.10.16-171741/https://salo-forum.com/index.php?threads/patient-zero-and-the-early-days-of-hiv-aids.3167/

Yep, that's the one. By the way, if anyone has a better, more mainstream source to read up on the history of AIDS crisis, I'm all ears.

I don't believe that a Dem president would make a difference w/r/t AIDS

I really believe the current view-back of AIDS in the 80s is hysteria. What would the activists rather have happened? Gays were dying of a novel disease, the government opened an investigation, started spending money, and eventually facilitated a cure. Meanwhile, people were catching AIDS because it was a sexually-transmitted disease -- and nobody blames gay men for spreading it. Was the government supposed to tell gay men to stop having sex? And somehow, it all becomes Reagan's fault.

Was the government supposed to tell gay men to stop having sex?

If you take the COVID response as yardstick, which many on the left still endorse, then the answer should be unequivocally "yes". While not the same as HIV/AIDS, I found the contrast between the "stay indoors/wear a mask/etc" response to COVID and the soft-touch response to monkeypox incredibly jarring. After large parts of the country were imprisoned in their own homes and dissent suppressed in response to a novel disease, the message to the gay community dealing with its own novel disease was more like "please consider at least getting the names of the men you have unprotected sex with, so that we can actually attempt some contact tracing". I wish I'd saved some tweets from that era, which feels like another lifetime ago, but my browser history is being uncooperative.

That said, it all seems to have died down, so maybe the monkeypox response worked, which is more than can be said for the COVID response. And perhaps that soft response was necessary to get enough gay men to come forward and get vaccinated, which cut off the transmission chains.

Of course the response to monkeypox was different from COVID. Monkeypox:

  • had no hope of overwhelming the health system
  • killed zero people in western countries
  • wasn't novel
  • wasn't airborne
  • had a pre-existing vaccine stockpiled that was proven to be effective

Obviously treating monkeypox as anything as bad as COVID would have been absurd.

Separately

Was the government supposed to tell gay men to stop having sex?
Yes

The government has learned the hard way over and over again that that doesn't work. Both in abstinence-only education of teenagers, and the HIV/AIDS reaction of adults back in the 80s, telling people how to behave in private doesn't work. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. Gay men did largely stop hooking up after it became apparent what was happening; monkeypox takes a while to present symptoms after infection.

You seem to be a little aggravated that the government got COVID wrong but you are.. also a little mad that they got monkeypox right.. because it feels unequal?

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I broadly agree with what you're saying, but I guess I was making a different point: if the government had done something like close the bathhouses, the activists would not be happy that something was done. I think they would be furious, and call it a proof of oppression. My experience is that older gay men refuse to think of AIDS as "just" an STD. And if you suggest that the gay community perpetrated the disease through risky sexual behavior, they can become furious. I don't think they can distinguish something like that from the idea that Christian evangelicals are saying they deserve to die and AIDS is the proof. I don't think they can be rational on this topic. If you broach these ideas to the younger generation, they'll just roll their eyes and refuse to hear what you're saying, in the way that people today internally cancel you for breaking a social taboo. But the older generation will understand what I'm saying, and immediately shut it out.

I don't think there's anything the government could have done that could have solved the AIDS crisis, and I don't think there's anything the government could have done that would have assuaged the gay panic at being outcast and broken and dead. Reagan is a convenient scapegoat.

One of the effort-posts I haven't gotten around to writing is to compare the social narrative surrounding the AIDS pandemic with that of the COVID pandemic. The consensus narratives for the two are completely irreconcilable.

Please do this, I'd love to read it!

I mean, they don't have a vitriolic hatred for Bush sr.

Reagan was popular and charismatic enough to win blowout elections, and he also forced the national dems to moderate on policy by a lot. I suspect this latter part is a big reason for why leftists hate him so much; Clinton stuck pretty close to the center in actual governing and dragged the DNC with him.

I mean, they don't have a vitriolic hatred for Bush sr.

I don't know that you can really call it vitriolic hatred, but they certain didn't think highly of him at the time, while he was in office.

The truth is that there is a certain segment of the Left that has and will hate any Republican President whatsoever, under the pretense that they're an incipient authoritarian dictator. Truman accused Dewey of being an American Mussolini.

I mean, they don't have a vitriolic hatred for Bush sr.

That could be true. I honestly don't even know enough about him and his term to say one way or the other. I may not know enough about him either because he was just bland and forgettable, or maybe because the left didn't hate him as much. Or maybe the left didn't hate him as much because he was bland and forgettable?

Bush Sr. is regularly pilloried by many on the left as a warmonger due to Panama and the first Gulf War, as well as, later in his life, accusations that he was a sexual assaulting perv (see the David Copafeel joke). In my view he was the last honorable man to be elected president, though full disclosure I did not vote for him. The world was different then, or seemed so to my younger self.

I suspect, yeah, that's it. He was popular and charismatic and beloved and totally destroyed the left in his elections and thus he's loathed by his enemies.

He also pushed a lot of deregulatory policies that upset the left. But I think the hatred for Reagan on the left outpaces the actual impacts of his policies.

I think it's similar to Obama, who was and remains pretty loathed by the right, but whose policies haven't really made much of an impact -- the big one was the ACA, which has been mostly defanged. It's the fact Obama was popular and charismatic and defeated the right's challengers, some of the most qualified Presidential candidates in recent memory, easily (and, admittedly, with often dirty rhetoric).

If you live most of your life surrounded by leftists and consuming leftist media, then of course leftist whining is the type of whining that is most annoying to you.

As someone with Republican relatives and in-laws, I assure you that rightist whining over the last four years has been both intolerable and often scary. I can't imagine what it's like to live in right-leaning communities at a time when most believe the election was stolen and they're living under the equivalent on an anti-pope.

4 years of Biden has not particularly enshrined leftist values into law, as far as I'm aware? Some of the massive infrastructure spending was earmarked towards renewable energy, I guess, but that's not exactly super-radicalized social justice leftism. As far as I can tell, the law has moved to the right significantly during Biden's term, because of Republicans owning the Supreme Court and most state legislatures.

Honestly, I think that the way to make things move right without backlash is to give in on the tiny culture war sticking points while persuading people on the underlying conservative norms.

Legalizing gay marriage was seen as a radical leftist movement, but the actual result was that all the gay people - and most importantly, gay artists and icons and culture warriors - stopped living as radical counter-culture outsiders challenging every pillar of the nuclear family, and switched to being respectability-politics-first normies living quiet lives in the suburbs with 2.5 adopted kids. Conservatives had to give up on oppressing gay people, but managed to bring them largely into the tent of traditional marriage and neoliberal economics and so forth.

So do it again. Say fine, trans women are women, and they should be modest and wear makeup and stay at home to raise the adopted kids. Say sure, diversity is a strength, so lets hire some black CEOs who align with our mission to crush unions, roll back regulations, and lobby for tax cuts for the rich.

Basically, assimilation. It's actually true that the basic conservative values are appealing to a lot of people, and a comfortable default for a lot more. A lot of people will happily fall back into those values without thinking about it, if you just stop doing things that look explicitly bigoted or unjust or cruel in ways that get them mad and turn them against you.

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gay artists and icons and culture warriors - stopped living as radical counter-culture outsiders challenging every pillar of the nuclear family, and switched to being respectability-politics-first normies living quiet lives in the suburbs with 2.5 adopted kids

I don't know what gave you this impression. It bears no resemblance to the gay world I live in. Very few gays are getting married and having kids. Most remain "counter-culture outsiders" ("counter-culture insiders," I might suggest) who "want to challenge the nuclear family". (That might be putting it too strongly, I would characterize the spectrum of gay responses to the nuclear family as critical, but not entirely in opposition.)

I mean, genuinely, I'm not trying to shut you down here. This is just so different from my gay experience, that I'm not sure what information you are considering. In my experience, the vast, vast majority of gay men are dating casually and sleeping around. Gay marriage has been positive for the small minority of gay men in stable relationships who want to have kids. For the rest, I'd say it's basically had no effect at all. The organizing around the fight for gay marriage was much more important than the actual final result.

For what it's worth as an over-50, nearly all of the gay men and lesbians I know (from work, from high school, from college, from my military years) are with long-term partners or married. The few who aren't are partiers/drinkers/a bit nuts, like a fair number of the single/divorced straight people I know in this cohort.

As far as I can tell from googling, it's something like 38% of gay/lesbian adults married or cohabiting with a long-term partner, vs about 62% for straight adults (with the caveat that the LGBT community skews young right now, so those rates might be higher if you looked at adults 30+, but I can't find that data).

That's definitely a gap, but 38% of people in traditional pair-bonded relationships (vs a baserate of 62%, so like 28/62=61% conversion rate) is nothing to sneeze at from a conservative family values viewpoint.

If you are talking about your personal experiences, I'd guess that this has a lot to do with selection effects; married people tend to disappear from a lot of communities, especially those based around dating and hookups, and of course this is hugely correlated with age.

40% is a shocking number to me, that doesn't match with my experience in the remotest. I would need to see a lot more to believe that's anywhere close to normal. If you throw in "cohabiting with a long-term partner," then maybe that gets up to 40%. Googling around I casually see 1/10 "LGBT" are married, but I'd really need to see that split out between gay/lesbian and bisexual. (Would be easy otherwise to conflate bisexuals in heterosexual marriages with gay marriages.)

but 38% of people in traditional pair-bonded relationships

I also want to add that, from experience, a lot of these "traditional" relationships in the gay community are open. I would not assume every cohabiting same-sex couple is automatically "traditional". A significant fraction of gay male relationships would not be. (I couldn't begin to estimate how many -- one-fifth? One-fourth?) I would imagine lesbian relationships to be much more monogamous, but I wouldn't be surprised if the baseline of polygamy was still higher than for the heterosexual population.

If you are talking about your personal experiences, I'd guess that this has a lot to do with selection effects; married people tend to disappear from a lot of communities, especially those based around dating and hookups, and of course this is hugely correlated with age.

Could be, could always be, but I still really doubt ~40%. I've known a lot of gay men in various stages of life. I can think, off the top of my head, of five married couples. (1) just had their first kid via surrogate. (2) is planning to. (3) seemingly is not. (4) was happily married until one died of a freak condition. (5) got married to celebrate gay marriage getting legalized, immediately proceeded to celebrate the honeymoon with an orgy (with (1)), and divorced a year or so later when the relationship wasn't fun anymore.

There's probably a lot more I could dig into here, and I don't want to just dump all of this on you. But I would theorize that, generally, there are some gays who match your earlier description of "radical counter-culture outsiders," and some who match your earlier description of "respectability-politics-first normies". And I think these two groups are basically distinct, and always have been, and the balance between them shifts like political parties in a democracy, and there's not much of a pipeline. Gay marriage changed a lot of different dynamics, but I'm highly skeptical that it really induced gays who would not have formed stable relationships to form them.

Say sure, diversity is a strength, so lets hire some black CEOs who align with our mission to crush unions, roll back regulations, and lobby for tax cuts for the rich.

Ah, but then those would be the wrong kind of black people. In fact, not really black at all. Uncle Toms or Oreos. See the comments about Clarence Thomas.

I think your point is probably right that that would reduce tension, though in all likelihood that would just shift elsewhere (e.g. economic policy). But I think your specific policy suggestions are pretty bad.

Say fine, trans women are women

I'm definitely more sympathetic to this than many other conservatives, at least in the sense that I do think that taking cross-sex hormones has appreciable effects putting people into something of a tertium quid. But I don't think this is good policy. The trans movement on the whole seems pretty clearly deleterious to people: giving people costly treatments, making them dependent on hormones for the rest of their lives, now they probably can't fit in with either gender too well, can't have children, they have higher rates of suicide, etc. Since it seems clearly to be the case that it's in part a social contagion, that's a really bad contagion to have and normalize. It's possible that normalizing it could decrease rates of trans-ness—not sure that I have an opinion on that—but I think it should be unequivocally the case that we should want fewer people to transition. So because I think this has fairly large social harms, I think it might be a mistake to just let it be.

Moreover, I think this is something that seems weirder to many normies than gay marriage does.

Say sure, diversity is a strength, so lets hire some black CEOs who align with our mission to crush unions, roll back regulations, and lobby for tax cuts for the rich.

I think the current affirmative action regime is bad in a whole bunch of ways. For one, it's the product in a bunch of cases of regulations: the disparate impact standard makes everything possibly illegal, because nothing you do will be without an impact, so you have to play by the rules the agency in question sets, as well as that all government contractors, which is a quarter of the economy, have to follow rules that are definitely (ha!) not quotas. This sort of regulation seems clearly bad to me, and is one thing that I'd want to roll back. It's bad because I don't think that the skill distribution matches the racial distribution, meaning it distorts things away from what's economically efficient. It also leads to attacks on meritocracy, because any attempt at choosing better employees has to be racially equitable if you don't want to be sued, and ability is not evenly distributed across the buckets that the US government tracks. I also think the principle of colorblindness and individualism is admirable, and don't like the identitarianism.

Because efficiency results in racial gaps, and we're trying to adjust everything to fix racial gaps (at least, at some levels of society), we lose out on much of the efficiency.

I have no problem with black CEOs, I just want them to be the most capable man for their job.

Further, racial discrimination is not something that's popular, and is something that's already prohibited by the statutes if people would just interpret them in the manner that they were obviously intended to be interpreted, so it seems like a fairly low-cost, high-reward thing to try to fix.

So do it again. Say fine, trans women are women, and they should be modest and wear makeup and stay at home to raise the adopted kids.

That doesn't work, because "trans women are women" means treating them as women for the purpose of sports, prisons, bathrooms, etc. Treating gay people as married doesn't mean letting them do any controversial things. And having your child decide one day that they're trans is a lot bigger problem than having your child decide one day that they're gay.

Say sure, diversity is a strength, so lets hire some black CEOs who align with our mission to crush unions, roll back regulations, and lobby for tax cuts for the rich.

If you loosen the requirement to "CEOs are social justice allies but can be any skin color", we're already getting that. We just end up with CEOs who crush unions, roll back regulations, lobby for tax cuts for the rich, and still promote their ideology in everything they can get their hands on that doesn't personally disadvantage themselves. The guy in charge of Google Gemini may not literally be a CEO, but he's a person in charge of a project at a big corporation, and I'm sure he's not going to start a campaign in support of unions at Google, but the project itself was DEI enough that even regular media can notice.

Treating gay people as married doesn't mean letting them do any controversial things.

Eh, I remember a lot of dumb opinion pieces in media about how gay marriage would finally break heterosexual marriage, and that was from those who thought this was a good thing, because traditional marriage was so patriarchal and heteronormative and oppressive, and the 'monogamish' version of fidelity that gay spouses had would mean that open marriages would be more acceptable for the straights, and sexual jealousy and all the fuss around affairs would relax and finally disappear.

Much the same as the current push on poly and how it's going to be so much better once everyone learns how to be open and flexible. Some numbskulls are always going to use Current Fad to push for Old Things Bad.

Treating gay people as married doesn't mean letting them do any controversial things.

There's been a lot of (recent!) debates about the appropriateness (and funding sources) of IVF, surrogacy, adoption, and so on for married gay couples, for one low-hanging example. It's not the only matter. Not got as many or as obvious ramifications that you see as much, but policy seldom exists in a vacuum.

Much like Walterodim, I supported gay marriage back in the day, and have come to deeply regret that support in light of the transgender movement that followed. I too consider all the "crazy" religious slippery slope doomcasters to have been vindicated.

I don’t find that line of reasoning very convincing. If the religious critics were right, it was in a stopped-clock sense.

Here are some circa-2010 objections, mostly on theological grounds. Either it’s a sin or it’s not. Either the denomination can extend rites to unrepentant sinners, or it can not. Lots of link rot, but in the statements I could access, churches weren’t justifying based on a slippery slope.

Here and here we have articles debating the slippery slope, but it’s towards polygamy. That’s a more credible threat than this 2004 scare story about horse marriage, though it’s more a vehicle for delivering the full slate of polygamy, social consensus, and “think of the children” arguments.

Transgender politics wasn’t in the Overton window at this point. It still wasn’t as of 2012, from what I see. Which makes sense—their issue isn’t marriage, or even equal rights. The current debate over social acceptability is categorically different.

I’m left with an impression that churches had their theological debates. The secular public backed those up with arguments like the slippery slope against polygamy. Nobody talked about the tiny, weird minority within the minority. But once that group gained traction, pattern matching kicked in, and suddenly this was the next step of the slippery slope. I don’t buy it.

The religious types told me that the LGBT squad wouldn't be content to just win and go sit down, but rather would return with a new set of worse and disgusting demands. They were correct. Pointing out that they didn't guess the exact flavor correctly isn't that interesting to me.

I don't need you to "buy it", I'm just telling you why I will absolutely never give the LGBT movement another inch under any circumstances.

And that proves way, way too much. It applies just as well to anything you already find unsavory. “My outgroup will demand something disgusting” is a heuristic that almost always works.

Except the LGBT movement wasn't part of my outgroup at first, the religious weirdoes bitching about it were. That outgroup predicted that the LGBT movement would escalate with a series of increasingly unreasonable and disgusting demands, and sure enough here we are.

So no, I didn't apply a heuristic of "my outgroup will demand something disgusting" whatsoever. Rather a movement that was at first nominally part of my ingroup started demanding to teach queer theory to kindergarteners and keep children's "gender transitions" secret from their parents.

Have they won? Gay marriage in the US only holds due to a Supreme Court ruling. Which is able to be overturned much as we saw with abortion at any time. It is very precarious. As I pointed out, in the UK where gay marriage was legally put in law by a Conservative prime minister and thus is much better protected, the trans movement does in fact seem to have lost allies and steam.

If they haven't actually won then complaining they didn't sit down after winning is missing the point.

There were court challenges attempting to overturn Roe and Casey quite regularly when they were in effect- what’s one trying to overturn obergefell?

I distinctly remember seeing a twitter thread in which a gay relationship advisor (that's bracketed (g (r a)), not ((g r) a), mind you ;) ) wrote that the religious were right, it was a slippery slope, and it's a good thing that it was. @TracingWoodgrains, help me out, I remember you conversing with that guy.

https://tracingwoodgrains.medium.com/no-josh-weed-our-gay-marriages-will-not-destroy-their-traditional-ones-345b2d0147e7

Josh Weed?

Yeah, that one

(that's bracketed (g (r a)), not ((g r) a), mind you ;) )

You included a bracket smiley in your bracketed explanation of the bracketing.

My hat is off to you.

I always struggle to decide whether to add a corresponding parenthesis or not, when I do that. (That is, whether I should do it like he did it, or like this :).

You did it the right way before. This time it looks like you have extraneous punctuation.

Finding older commentary on socially-controversial subjects is hard at the best of times, and we're not in the best of times. Mainstream debate focused on bestiality, polygamy, and child abuse, in no small part because they were easy strawmen for each side to target; the role of each gender within the family was a major part of intellectual religious conversations and is... basically invisible from the internet now.

Transgender politics wasn't in the mainstream awareness yet as of 2012, but it had at least bubbled to political awareness in the aftermath of the Affordable Care Act's Section 1557, and the ENDA/GENDA debates.

There were also more general arguments about a slippery slope to some unknown problem that are more readily available, though I understand the concern about this being so wide a prediction as to be meaningless.

((That said, I'll reiterate my general disagreement with somedude and walterodim's claim; the transgender movement long predates the acceptance of gay marriage or even Lawrence v Texas, and it's very far from clear that Obergefell had anywhere as big an impact for normalization of transgender stuff or for the political sphere as any of a thousand other things.))

We exist on an offshoot of an offshoot of the comments section of a psychiatry blogger who has openly practiced polyamory, and frequently discuss people like Aella, who promote sexual relations with multiple partners as an enlightened and superior alternative to monogamy. These discussions have been had here as recently as a few days ago.

Polyamory is also, as far as I can tell from my experience in it, rapidly becoming normalized in what's left of the atheist movement and the broader "nerdy woke people" subculture. Heck, my mom is an HR director in my conservative hometown, and lately had a job applicant who spoke openly about their poly lifestyle (they didn't get the job, mostly because they seemed legitimately crazy). This stuff is widespread, and I think it's more common in queer dating than straight dating. This is a slippery slope coming from the same people: gay people and nerdy woke people.

Maybe the slippery slope isn't leading to polygamy right now, exactly. But it has been, and is, pretty clearly leading to the normalization of polyamory. I think polyamory is more difficult to translate into the existing legal framework around marriage than gay marriage was. But if it weren't, I would be under no pretensions that Scott, and Aella, and Ozy (was he dating them at the same time?), and all the rest of the crew wouldn't be arguing their hearts out that recognizing plural marriages is a human rights issue (TM). As far as I'm concerned, it's just a matter of time.

Okay, I really thought about including this as an aside, because it was a much closer prediction. I agree that polyamory has gotten much closer to the mainstream. It is a bit weird that it’s done so without getting any traction in, say, divorce law.

Regardless, the OP is not regretting support for gay marriage because the religious were right about polyamory. I’m arguing that current trans issues are poor evidence for this slippery slope model, since they were neither predicted in the model nor obviously caused by gay marriage.

Is it true that gay activists, with their goal achieved, moved on to other progressive causes? Sure. Was keeping them occupied the reason people were intent on “defending marriage”? I don’t think so.

I mean, my memory is that the slippery slope people were not talking about transgenderism back then, they were talking about bestiality and pedophilia becoming accepted and mainstream. Same as they are now, same as they always are.

There's a difference between an advance prediction of 'X is a slippery slope that will lead specifically to Y', and a retroactive claim that 'X was the start of a slippery slope that has led us to current thing Z'.

You can make up a retroactive narrative about anything leading to anything, once you've observed them both.

But the religious people of the time didn't actually predict the things that have actually happened since then - or if they did, those predictions were tossed out alongside a barrage of thousands of other predictions that failed - and therefore, they are not 'vindicated' and don't get any credibility from it.

Well, we do have mainstream progressive outlets (Vice and Vox at least off the top of my head) writing articles trying to normalize pedophilia. Along with the current progressive push to allow children to consent to permanent alteration of their body and being encouraged to hide it from their parents or non-prog authority figures. So I'd say they were correct on that front.

Well, we do have mainstream progressive outlets (Vice and Vox at least off the top of my head) writing articles trying to normalize pedophilia.

Could you link to the articles you have in mind?

Here are a few from Vice. It looks like the one I thought was from Vox was actually a Salon article. Another from NYMag.

Certainly, I was and remain sceptical about "legalising gay marriage will not lead to polygamy". Why wouldn't it? Now that you've decided that marriage is not between a man and a woman, but between two persons of any gender orientation, what is so sacred and immutable about the number of indeterminate gender persons in the legal contract?

I expect that over time societies that are making progress will repeal laws against victimless things, with gay marriage and polyamorous marriage both being examples, alongside marijuana, blasphemy, etc.

I don't especially see an argument that one thing along that track leads to another thing long that track, just because they happen in order.

What's a victimless crime? See, I see people using this about things like shoplifting and property damage (remember when the antifa and black bloc first got mainstream attention, back in the protests about Trump winning the election? all the social media posts about "you care more about a few broken windows"?), but I don't think those are victimless.

Marijuana is victimless! And other drugs? Because right now, the people supplying User with their fun party substances are not nice people, they kill and terrorise. You can argue that this is the fault of the squares making laws making the fun party substances illegal, but the reality is that there's blood and misery associated with "my little weekend treat".

There's an incentive on the part of those pushing for changes to say "this hurts nobody, it's victimless, in fact it's a good thing". But it's only down the line we get to see if that's true or not. And I don't think "gay marriage is harmless" can be neatly disassociated from "one thing leads to another", because it was overturning an established and pretty much universal cultural practice (marriage is men and women, not men and men and women and women) for the sake of political ends (making gayness normalised and accepted by mainstream society).

It won. Do you really think the other groups who want massive social change, normalisation, and acceptance, didn't look at that, take notes about it was achieved, and are not following the same playbook? And using "but gay marriage!" as a point of leverage against opposition and criticism?

You can't saw through the branch just a little bit and no more; even sawing a little bit weakens the branch, and the next bunch who come along to saw through just a little bit are doing more of that.

Even you admit that polygamous/polyamorous marriage will possibly be the next liberalisation of the custom. That couldn't have happened without same-sex marriage softening up the opposition first. After all, if two people who weally, weally wuv each other dis much!!! deserve the right to get legally married, then three or four or five people who weally weally wuv each other dis much!!! should deserve the same, right? We overcame the irrational bigoted prejudice about the sex/gender of the spouses, why are we now hung up on the number?

All the people contorting Scripture on behalf of gay marriage ("David and Jonathan were lovers! Naomi and Ruth were lovers!") have a much better case when it comes to "more than one spouse", the Patriarchs were permitted to have several wives, and Solomon the Wise who had multiple wives is celebrated and honoured.

Marijuana is victimless! And other drugs? Because right now, the people supplying User with their fun party substances are not nice people, they kill and terrorise. You can argue that this is the fault of the squares making laws making the fun party substances illegal, but the reality is that there's blood and misery associated with "my little weekend treat".

Whatever the "reality", drug warriors do not get to claim damage they caused as being caused by their opponents. This is the same concept as when death penalty opponents object to the death penalty based on the high cost of imposing it -- well, yes, it has a high cost, but that's entirely the fault of the death penalty opponents' obstructionism, and so they don't get to use it as an argument for their position.

After all, if two people who weally, weally wuv each other dis much!!! deserve the right to get legally married…

The gays weren’t the first to start sawing off that limb; the no-fault divorce crowd were. They were the ones who redefined marriage as being purely about love and redefined love as being purely about emotions. No-fault divorce and its effects (single parent households, destruction of wealth, and the like) have caused far more damage to society than gay marriage ever will, and that’s ignoring the fact that the push for gay marriage probably would never have succeeded had no-fault divorce not fundamentally redefined marriage in the first place.

I'm petty sure the interracial marriage crowd was first, actually.

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I've argued this same point with fellow right-wingers IRL (and it's interesting which ones tended to agree), to the point of arguing that overturning no-fault divorce should be a higher priority than trying to get Obergefell overturned. First, because AIUA the former is primarily statutory, and passing legislation is generally easier than overturning Supreme Court precedent; and second, because without no-fault divorce, I'd expect gay marriage rates drop significantly even if still legal.

I disagree that poly is not victimless. I briefly dated a poly girl, and I hated being put in the double-bind of either not pursuing other women or having to have "the poly/ENM conversation" with them, and the latter made me feel like I was leaking bad memes into the groundwater. Missed out on a possible relationship with a lovely mainstream girl that way because my ethics wouldn't allow me to hook up under those circumstances. I've said this before, but a world where poly is more normalized is a world where it's more acceptable to proposition other people's partners because "they might be poly, you never know these days, she can just say no". And then you have a world where the baseline temptation to cheat is raised, making monogamous life harder for those that want it.

By that logic marriage being between a man and a woman is a step on the slippery slope. I remain skeptical about "Legalising marriage will not lead to gay marriage" Why wouldn't it? Now we've decided that marriage is between a man and a woman, whats is so sacred and immutable about it at allm? Your logic implies we shouldn't even have taken the first step!

But I think the fact many places had polygmous marriages before gay marriage means this isn't a slippery slope. One does not lead to the other.

This is a case where there are multiple overlapping groups who have different ideas of marriage and just because one is convincing does not mean the others will be in any given culture.

Clearly in Islam the polygamists generally won in a way which didn't lead to gay marriage. There is no reason why it can't be the opposite way round somewhere else.

Societies that had polygamous marriage still made it "one man and several women". And Western societies stamped out polygamy (ask the early Mormons). Redefining marriage as "it's about how you feel and your own personal fulfilment, and not about kids or families or being part of society, and now it's not even about men and women but whoever you like can be your spouse" does not put up a solid bar about "but no more than two spouses of whatever gender turns you on for as long as you both get the Obama thrill down your leg! we stand rock-ribbed traditional on that!"

But the government having to deal with multiple spouses with all that entails (tax benefits, insurance benefits, custody cases etc etc) is a strong indication that even a left wing government is going to think very seriously about expanding it further. Noticeably in most places with polygamy laws the mechanics around divorce, property, custody are all pretty much skewed towards the man, this simplifies the whole process.

So unless you are think that the whole totality of Western law is going to be rewritten this seems highly doubtful here. And if that happens then most likely polygamy is not going to be the biggest worry.

The fact is the secular administrative state did not have many reasons to prevent marriage between two men or two women, it means very little there. Add in more people and it will require significantly more changes, resources and fights, that I predict pretty much no Western politician is going to want to get involved with.

Given that we have functional polygamy, with people having relationships and kids by multiple partners, I can see someone arguing for "the conservative case for poly marriage" ('conservative' here the way Andrew Sullivan argued the 'conservative' case for gay marriage).

Instead of Jackson knocking up a string of baby mamas/Janelle having a string of baby daddies, they can now have a recognised legal relationship that gives them rights and duties. It will be more stable for the kids to have both (sets of) parents in the home. Janelle can now have her new guy move in, become part of the family unit, be there for his kids. Jackson can do the same with his new girl. There's no need for jealousy or competition or that Janelle can't cohabit with the father of her (third) child because that means she would lose her social welfare payments. It makes economic sense, it is better for the children, and it means men can't skip out on their responsibilities to the women and children in their lives, and women can't dump the father of their children with ease.

Sure, we're going to have to rejig the entire set of laws about divorce, property, custody, social benefits and the rest of it, but hey, isn't that what the courts are for, when the first cases about this happen?

We're going to the polls in March in my country to fuck around with the wording in the Constitution about the family because it's sexist and outdated. "Based on marriage"? Nah, "durable relationships" are the new thing! Nobody has given a definition of what constitutes a "durable relationship", but hey, isn't that what the courts are for, when the first cases about this happen?

If a majority votes YES, then the Constitution will change.

The constitutional protection of the Family would be given to both the Family based on marriage and the Family founded on “other durable relationships”.

The Family founded on marriage means the unit based on a marriage between two people without distinction as to their sex.

The Family founded on other durable relationships means a Family based on different types of committed and continuing relationships other than marriage.

So, different types of family units would have the same constitutional rights and protections.

You say that:

Add in more people and it will require significantly more changes, resources and fights, that I predict pretty much no Western politician is going to want to get involved with.

Hillary didn't want to touch same-sex marriage in 2008, but her views 'evolved', as did those of other politicians. When there's enough of a push and the straws are blowing in the wind, then it's worth it for the politicians to get involved.

And Clinton eventually got where her friends wanted her to go, though her change of heart came when the political risk had disappeared — close to a year after similar shifts by President Obama and Vice President Biden.

...Among the Bill Clinton-era policies that Hillary Clinton has disavowed on the presidential campaign trail is the Defense of Marriage Act, the law signed by then-President Bill Clinton in the lead-up to his 1996 reelection effort that prohibited the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage.

See? Going from "declaring that she was unwilling to support legalized marriage" to "running as a forceful advocate for the LGBT community and a full-fledged supporter of same-sex marriage."

If the polling says the people want poly marriage, the politicians will 'mature their views' on it:

By May 2012, as polls showed more than half of the country supporting same-sex marriage, top Democrats began indicating their support. Biden declared in a television interview that he was “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriage. Obama followed soon after, saying that “same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

So give the books and book reviews and think pieces in the media and appearances on chat shows time to soften them up, same as with gay marriage. Mona and Rupert just had a glowing puff-piece in the NYT about their twenty-year long 'unmarriage' where both of them manage to have upper middle-class careers, two children, and seventeen different lovers in varying degrees of partnership and relationship levels, this is the future of marriage, society just needs to recognise the changing mores and enable them to have legal rights for their boyfriend, boyfriend's girlfriend, and girlfriend's pan enbyfriend as part of their 'unfamily'. Those are the people with the money, time and networks to get involved in pushing the politicians. It's not the single mothers with three kids living in social housing in council estates that are pushing for the Constitutional change on "women in the home" in my country, and it won't be them pushing for poly marriage in other countries.

But they'll be used as "it'll make things so much better for Jackson and Janelle" rationales by the people who wouldn't go within ten feet of where Jackson and Janelle live.

So unless you are think that the whole totality of Western law is going to be rewritten this seems highly doubtful here.

Honestly, I have to laugh here. And just exactly what did you think had to happen, to permit same-sex marriage? "No, for a thousand years anybody could rock up to the local druid, priest, or minister and say 'me and the boyfriend wanna get hitched' and that was cool, it just wasn't formally written in to the legal code!"

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The Family Research Council (James Dobson's lobbying org) was bringing up a link between homosexual parenting and increased rates of gender disorders as far back as 2004 more than a decade before Obergefell. That's not explicitly transgender but the term was much less common then. Similarly, they also discuss the lack of sexual fidelity in homosexual marriage (more like open marriage than poly but in the ballpark).

If I’m getting this right, transgender in 2004 referred specifically to post-op trans women, and gender disorder was the term in use for the majority of what we would call transgender today.

I guess there are two ways to read the relevant comments. One would be that religious people actually had better predictive modeling skills and their rejection of gay marriage and similar trends was based on them having an accurate model of how that would lead to specific bad outcomes.

The other reading has a bit more wiggle room. Maybe, conservatives and religious types had passed down and maintained social technologies that were valuable and well-honed, ironically, by a process more like evolution than intelligent design. It was from these inherited norms and values that they knew 'something' was wrong without actually understanding the complicated multifaceted societal shifts and changes that would come about in response to any given policy.

If the second position is all that is being claimed, then the internal experience might have gone something like; back then I believed in secular hedonistic sexual norms and values and thought religious people were crazy. Two adult homosexual people having relations, dating, and getting married, all seemed like totally acceptable/good things, and I supported the general cultural zeitgeist that was in favor of gay marriage.

As time has marched on, I am increasingly confronted by things that seem to be coming out of that same cultural movement that I once supported, that I know find distasteful. I can see a through-line, from the arguments and ideas that I once repeated to the slogans and activism of today. I regret the confidence with which my younger-self dismissed the concerns raised by traditional/conservative/religious figures. It increasingly looks like their social technology was correct in some way about the nebulous dangers of increasingly liberal sexual norms and values and now we are living through the consequences of them losing that battle.

This certainly speaks broadly to my personal rightward shift.

I believed that we really understood sociology and that the social sciences were robust, accurate models of reality. That all calls for traditional/religious/conservative values were born of ignorance at best and malice at worst. Then I started reading SSC and my faith in the social sciences was shatter (irrevocably?). My whole worldview came crashing down, sexism first, then racism, every aspect of the liberal progressive package was called into question. Where once it was obvious beyond question that Christianity was an arbitrary useless hatful ideology, now I wonder, how it spread so far(it wasn't always powerful and rich)? How did enslaved priests convert the Vikings? Maybe memetic fitness is a real thing and Christianity was actually a valuable and insightful social technology that made the societies that adopted it better? I don't actually strongly believe this is true, but it certainly seems possible to me now.

So I might be projecting, but when I hear someone say that 'maybe the religious doomsayers were on to something', it speaks to me. Even if I doubt I could find a specific religious doomsayer whose positions I would endorse.

Maybe, conservatives and religious types had passed down and maintained social technologies that were valuable and well-honed, ironically, by a process more like evolution than intelligent design.

A lot of this stuff was actually dictated top down in like 1000 AD or before, though.

I mean, my memory is that the slippery slope people were not talking about transgenderism back then, they were talking about bestiality and pedophilia becoming accepted and mainstream.

"Sure they said next I'd put poop in your Cheerios, but look this is clearly just pee!"

I don't think you understand what a massive blackpill it is for some of us to see the LGBT movement try so hard to include kids in their agenda. Watching them flip their wigs over a law preventing them from teaching their ideology to children below the third grade, or whatever, was bad enough. The fact that the first person to say "hey maybe the parents don't need to know" wasn't instantly exiled and nuked from orbit is, unto itself, a dog-fucking level offense in my eyes.

The fact that the first person to say "hey maybe the parents don't need to know" wasn't instantly exiled and nuked from orbit is, unto itself, a dog-fucking level offense in my eyes.

This is too much heat, not enough light. Please don't do this.

Fair enough lol

Have the other predictions failed or just not come true yet? I think the normalization of pederastic relationships is coming absent a culture shift, but I don’t think it will happen for another several decades at least.

Not a historian, but my understanding is that people have been saying 'if you allow my opponent to do the thing I dislike then pedorasty will be normalized next' for literal centuries and have never been correct. At some point you have to just take the L.

If anything pedorasty is getting far less acceptable over time, as drawing lines about what sexual ethics should be draws a clear division that pedorasty violates. I don't think Michael Jackson or R Kelly could have continued their careers after credible pedo accusations today, the way they did back then.

(similarly AFAIK laws against bestiality are getting stricter over time, I think?)

Not a historian, but my understanding is that people have been saying 'if you allow my opponent to do the thing I dislike then pedorasty will be normalized next' for literal centuries and have never been correct.

Depends on how you define pederasty. In the UK, 16-21 year olds were initially regarded as children for the purposes of gay sex, when the latter was legalised. This was lowered to 16-17 year olds, because of course 18-21 year olds. Finally, it became legal for a 50 year old man to have sex with a 16 year old boy in 2000. By definition that's not legalising pederasty in the sense of "sex with an underage boy" (but in that sense, neither would legalising sex with a 5 year old boy) but it is legalising pederasty in the sense of "sex between an adult man and an adolescent boy." It also happened via a classic slippery slope process: first male homosexuality, then male homosexuality between full legal adults, and finally male homosexuality between full legal adults and schoolchildren.

Personally, I don't have a problem with that, but it would be dishonest not to acknowledge that the social conservatives were right in this case. True, a 50 year old man with a 16 year old boyfriend will face social problems in the UK, but no more than a 50 year old man with a 16 year old girlfriend.

Still, I agree with your overall point. In general, human disgust instincts against pedophilia and pederasty seem to both stronger and be more linked to ethics than those for male homosexuality. I find male homosexuality nauseous, but I have no moral objection to it. And many people, even normal people, don't find any sort of homosexuality disgusting or more disgusting than e.g. anal sex in general.

No, I don't buy that definition game. Gay marriage has not opened the way to any age gaps that weren't already allowed between men and women. If you call that pederasty, then we've already been living in the age of general pedophilia and been fine with it.

However, it turns out that no, the sexual revolution has not actually opened up the floodgates of adults fucking kids, and in fact has been increasingly moving away from it. Where marrying 16 year old girls has been widely accepted before and younger wasn't out of question, we now only see the allowed age/perceived maturity gap shrinking (that's an AND slash, not an OR - "she was very mature for her age" doesn't cut it anymore).

Gay marriage has not opened the way to any age gaps that weren't already allowed between men and women.

Right, but that had entailed legalising sex between adolescents and fully developed men. Whether it's "normalised" it is more debatable, though, since normality /= legality.

If you call that pederasty, then we've already been living in the age of general pedophilia and been fine with it.

This is conflating attraction/sexual activity with adolescents with pedophilia.

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I’d be interested to hear any examples you can give of past pederastic predictions. I spend a lot of time reading 19th and early 20th century primary sources, and I don’t remember ever coming across that concern, nor can I think of anything that would have caused concern about it in the 16th–18th centuries. The closest I can come up with is opposition to castrati, but that’s closer to opposition to trans procedures for minors than to anything related to pedophilia. I guess there was also opposition to child brothels, but those were apparently actually a thing in some areas, and polite society was unanimously happy to shut them down.

As for the present, I agree pederasty normalization is extremely unlikely in the next several decades for reasons that you note. I can’t help but notice, though, that some pedophilic activists and sympathizers have started to mimic techniques that other marginalized groups have used to gain acceptance, and I could see a concerted effort paying dividends in, say, 50–70 years.

Not a historian as I said, and I have a lot of ignorance on this topic, I was referring to a general sense this is true that I'd gotten from reading other people talk about this argument and the slippery slope fallacy in general. I could very definitely be wrong and it's a more recent development.

Are you talking about MAP stuff and the 'gold-star' (non-offending) pedophile narrative?

I have certainly seen stuff along the lines of 'people who are attracted to minors can't help it, they should not actually be woodchippered if they haven't actually done anything to any kids, we should let them looks at drawings or AI porn to deal and monitor them to make sure they don't offend but they're not actually evil just for the thought-crime alone'.

I will say that I've seen this exist, although all the leftist spaces I'm in are pretty hostile to it and I've seen people trying it get banned from several places.

But I'll also point out that 'non-offending' is the central distinction in this rhetoric, this rhetoric relies on drawing a sharp distinction between offending and non-offending pedophiles in a way that actually draws more attention and vitriol towards hating and punishing offenders.

I wouldn't be totally surprised if in 70 years we don't talk about woodchippering people who say they are unfortunately attracted to minors but strictly use AI-generated VR porn to deal with it, or w/e. I actually would expect a world like that where those people are known and monitored (informally at least) and have outlets and a life script to follow to have less child abuse than our current world where they hide off the grid.

Unless you think you have seen people using leftist rhetoric to say why actual sex with children in reality is fine and good, and seen that get any uptake? I absolutely have not seen that, if that's what you mean.

(I'd also point out that groups like NAMBLA have tried that tactic in the past and failed, I think you will always have some people trying to appropriate the current paradigm to support their dumb/bad thing, but that doesn't mean they will succeed nor that the current paradigm favors/helps them. That's just how anyone tries to make their point)

Are you talking about MAP stuff?

Largely that, yes, though I also have in mind some of the pedophilia-adjacent things in the trans arena—child drag queens and the like. I largely agree with hydroacetylene’s comment below on how pedophilia could be normalized; I just think he’s missing an additional set of arguments borrowed from the trans movement. If pre-pubescent children can choose to medically transition from one sex to another, it really isn’t a huge jump to give them agency over their sex lives as well (personally, I’d go further and say that allowing transition but not sex is plain incoherent; if anything, it should be the other way around). The case for giving barely-pubescent children sexual freedom is even stronger, and I agree with hydroacetylene that this is more likely for children who opt for same-sex relationships, since that eliminates the concern about pregnancy and since ephebophilic relationships are already more common among gay men. (And yes, I know that technically pedophilia doesn’t include attraction to 12 year olds, but that’s what the vast majority of people consider it.)

In general, though, I tend to look at pedophilia normalization through the lens of the gay rights movement’s history. If you asked the average American in 1960—a time when sodomy was illegal in every state in the union, a year before the famous Boys Beware! educational film was released, and nine years before the Stonewall riots—whether he thought same-sex marriage would ever be legalized throughout the country, he’d laugh you out of the room. Forget marriage, he’d think you were insane if you suggested SCOTUS would rule as it did in Lawrence v. Texas. I think we might be in the same spot today with regard to pedophilic relationships.

This is why I’m not really happy about the MAP and non-offending pedophile stuff I see, even as I agree with pretty much everything they’re saying. Pedophiles don’t choose to be attracted to children, it’s wrong to conflate temptation with action, and it’s a problem that non-offending pedophiles don’t feel safe to discuss their problems with therapists, etc. I wish society would change to make those distinctions clear, but I just don’t trust that the current reasonable concerns raised by MAP activists aren’t a camel’s nose peeking its way into the tent.

Google Gemini will already tell you about the need to Destigmatize Minor Attracted Persons (MAPS).

Only a few years ago "MAP" was a fringe phrase, originally developed by administrators of the site "AttractedToChidren.org". A MAP pride flag was developed on tumblr in 2018 by exactly the sort of people you'd expect. Saying it or putting it in a bio was social death. But behind the scenes a lot of well-funded activist and public health organizations (but I repeat myself) have been normalizing it.
In 2021 Allyn Walker of Johns Hopkins University published A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity, popularizing the phrase among right-thinking (left-thinking?) people, and apparently well-trained AIs as well. Note that Walker was hired by JH med school after the book came out.

This is another one of those cases where the bleeding edge of leftist academia is at odds with the reddit-tier lumpenproles spewing woodchipper memes. And in all these cases the social mechanisms of leftist ideological dissemination lead to the academic version winning, because "umm, yikes, that view is actually Reactionary and Harmful according to my new sociology degree" is the ultimate trump card in those circles.
You can expect to see a left-wing flip on MAPs in only a few years, rather than decades.

Google Gemini will already tell you about the need to Destigmatize Minor Attracted Persons (MAPS).

Link for those who are interested.

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Reddit was halfway there when I left a couple of years ago. I’d regularly see talk about non-offending pedophiles, and Reddit was quite quick to defend the distinction between ephebophiles and pedophiles. They wanted outpatient treatment with no registrations or job/home location restrictions. Basically, a pedophile could be working in a position that left them alone with small children with no need to even disclose their desires.

I disagree with you. Actual normalization of pedophilia will take at least a couple decades; redditors are not a majority even if they could be converted over to supporting pedophiles relatively more easily.

I expect the progression to be 'well MAPs shouldn't face discrimination unless they're active pedophiles'-> 'cartoon CP isn't CP'-> 'CP that already exists isn't hurting anyone to keep consuming it'-> 'ethically produced CP'-> 'what of the child's rights to engage in relationships with adults'-> 'what's wrong with sex? You know they used to say this about homosexuals, too?'. Maybe with a parallel process towards accepting homosexual ephebophilia; AFAIK typical examples of "male bad behavior" like that seem much more accepted among the gay community than among straight people, but I don't think all or even most gay men are pedophiles or in fact want anything at all to do with anybody younger than a teenager, sexual or otherwise. But the history of left wing movements is pushing for more by taking smaller victories than the ultimate goal so as to advance the end state; you couldn't have obergefell without lawrence v Texas and you couldn't have lawrence v Texas without a large majority of the country already thinking that homosexuality is deplorable and all, but actually making it illegal is ridiculous.

Now if you'll excuse me I'll feel gross for typing that for a few minutes.

You're correct that the specific predictions didn't pan out as stated in the 90s and 00s. To cut them a little slack, nobody really anticipated a hot debate about the definition of 'man' vs 'woman' or the 'gender spectrum' to enter the fray.

However, that the Left enabled that kind of blindsiding has shown me that they can't be trusted to not flip the board and mealmouth things that I find rather horrid, like puberty blockers. I have to say that my trust for the Left to stay within reasonable lines has done a complete 180 on this topic, and I wonder if the 'kink wing' of the party is just waiting for more favorable conditions to finally push through. And they could very well do so even if the vast majority of their compatriots don't like it. We have not slid to the specific point that moral conservativism predicted, but I don't want to be distracted from the fact that a slide did occur, even if indirectly.

My suspicion is you will ultimately be found correct. There won't be a mass normalization of beastiality and pedophilia. But that's predicated on my faith that surely people don't change that quickly, and I don't know how I justify that. So personally, I'm going to extend the deadline to 2040 and see where we stand after swimming in AI futa cocks for a decade or two.

And the irresolvable difference here is just that I know a lot of trans people and think that allowing them to transition has been better for them and their lives than not allowing that, so I don't see anything unreasonable there.

I expect pedophilia and bestiality not to get normalized because kids and animals don't actually want to have sex with you, there's an actual victim there. I expect that the future will normalize a lot of things I find weird or upsetting but which don't actually harm anyone on net, which is how I see the trans movement.

We probably can't reconcile our predictions before reconciling that disagreement-in-fact.

I expect pedophilia and bestiality not to get normalized because kids and animals don't actually want to have sex with you, there's an actual victim there

They can't consent to sex. Whatever consent to sex is (not an easy concept to analyse, to put it mildly) it's not the same thing as not wanting to have sex. I definitely wanted to have sex when I was 11 (and pre-pubescent). A cat in heat wants some sexual activity and doesn't particularly care with what. The problem is that children and animals can't engage in consensual sex, whether they want to or not, any more than they can make a mature decision about whether to become addicted to heroin.

Are you opposed to animals having sex with each other?

I'm opposed to bestiality, but I do think the "animals can't consent" argument isn't good.

Are you opposed to animals having sex with each other?

No, because I don't make the same moral requirements of animals as I do of humans. "It's wrong for humans to have sex with a non-consenting partner" doesn't imply "It's wrong for animals to have sex with a non-consenting partner," any more than "It's wrong for humans to torture mice for their amusement" implies "It's wrong for cats to torture mice for their amusement."

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They can't consent to sex. Whatever consent to sex is (not an easy concept to analyse, to put it mildly) ... The problem is that children and animals can't engage in consensual sex, whether they want to or not, any more than they can make a mature decision about whether to become addicted to heroin.

This is more than just not an easy concept to analyse. From my comment here a while ago:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your comparison to "mak[ing] a mature decision about whether to become addicted to heroin" is definitely somewhat relevant here, if you read the full linked comment. People think that there's something "more" and "different" about sex and heroin and things like that compared to "normal" things that children can definitely, totally consent to. But the theory here is just completely whack and not at all up to the challenge of explaining why. You can simply ask yourself, "Why can't children consent to sex?" When you do so, you might go down the same road I went down; you might read the same major works by professional philosophers that I read. But I really don't think you'll get a good theoretical answer. It's just sort of an axiom that is held by some. To others, it's just the dogmatic mantra that they were forced to repeat in order to help justify fighting the X-ophobes. But when the same people who convinced you to subscribe to a consent-only sexual ethic and who swear that the thing we need most is early comprehensive sex education to help children understand the sexual choices that they're allowed to make come calling, they're going to ask, "Why can't children consent?" If you don't have a better answer than the professional philosophers who are making the best case possible for a consent-only sexual ethic, you're going to find out that you're an X-ophobe. You're going to get stared at like you're an alien for making outdated assumptions about people. For Sagan's sake, everyone knows that kids are capable enough to choose their gender, have parts of their body hacked off, and keep it all secret from their parents! Of course they're capable of deciding to have a little fun with some friction on the bits.

Of course they're capable of deciding to have a little fun with some friction on the bits.

Just not with adults.

Kid on kid is fine, obviously.

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But when the same people who convinced you to subscribe to a consent-only sexual ethic

How are you using the word "you" here?

I have never subscribed to a consent-only sexual ethic.

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kids and animals don't actually want to have sex with you

There are people who believe that's not true. The harm of adult-child sex (wherever we draw the line about what constitutes a child) is not the sex, it's the stigma, secrecy, and shame. The child is forced to lie, is made to feel ashamed, is made to feel they are a victim. That's the trauma, not a grown man or woman having sex with them.

Same with the zoophiles: if my (animal) lover doesn't want to have sex with me, they can protest. I don't force them. They can make noises, vocalise, wriggle out of my embrace.

Both types will make loud noises of agreement about how real rape is bad, real violation of consent is bad - but then start chipping away at "but why do you say a child can't consent? that children are not sexual beings? that adult non-human animals can't enjoy a mutually loving relationship with a human?"

Part of the revelations of the Catholic sex abuse scandal in Ireland, with a report published years back, was how many of the offending priests had convinced themselves that the children were willing, they wanted this, and besides it was 'just' taking them on the adult's lap or hugging them or intimate contact. They didn't think of themselves as forcing unwanted attention on unwilling victims.

Oh, you think paedophilia/zoophilia is gross and disgusting? Sorry, disgust reaction is not enough to make something wrong. Bigots used to say gay sex was disgusting and unnatural, too.

EDIT: We've had a guy on here going on about emancipation of minors, and part of that (once he got into his stride) was sex between early teens and adults. There's a guy (and I have no idea if he's the same one, but I begin to have my suspicions) right now on ACX arguing that adult men are naturally attracted to 12-14 year olds (I'm cutting out the links because believe me, you don't need them):

In the literature on female attractiveness it's often claimed that men find women with neotenous features very attractive. Some psychologists may run a study showing men pictures of 18+ women and ask them to pick out the most attractive faces. The women that then get picked are ones with facial proportions typical pubescent girls about 12-14. This is then interpreted to mean that men find adult women with "neotenous faces" the most attractive.

Now, I can't be the only one who's spotted the glaring flaw in this reasoning. Men find women who look like pubescent girls most attractive. Well, who else looks like pubescent girls? Who else has the facial proportions of girls about 12-14? Well, actual pubescent girls look like pubescent girls. Actual girls about 12-14 have the facial proportions typical of girls about 12-14. It's not neoteny men find highly attractive, it's immaturity. What men find most attractive simply isn't adult women but young teen and pubescent girls. Some women happen to retain the facial proportions of a pubescent girl into adulthood and men continue to find them highly attractive because of it.

Psychologists have naively started out with the presumption that a sexual preference for fully developed adults must be the norm. When confronted with evidence that men find the faces of pubescent girls most attractive they bend over backwards to avoid the obvious conclusion that their presumption is wrong by claiming that what men prefer is adult women with "neotenous faces" who look like pubescent girls. There's no law of evolution that says the males in a species have to prefer the fully developed adults. The only thing that ultimately matters in evolution is reproductive success. If the males in a species can achieve greater reproductive success by going after immature females due to the way their mating system works then they will evolve to do exactly that.

In South Korea facial reshaping surgery is popular. What facial proportions do women choose to get with this surgery? Well, the proportions typical of girls about 12-14 because they know they're the most attractive. For comparison this is a real pubescent Asian girl about 12 (Nozomi Kurahashi). She looks basically the same as the after pics

Notice also that the skin in the after pics has been made to look softer and smoother like the skin of a pubescent girl.

The BMI men rate most attractive is about 18-20 which is low for an adult woman but normal for a young teen or pubescent girl. BMI also increases after pregnancy. It would have been important for men in ancestral times to prefer females who are young and haven't started reproducing yet as these females would be capable of giving them the most offspring over the long-term. So a low BMI appears to be another sign of immaturity and nulliparity that men have evolved to find attractive.

The vulvas men find most attractive are also those of pubescent girls. Many women have had their labia trimmed down to make themselves look like a pubescent girl down there because they know men find it more attractive just like men prefer the faces of pubescent girls. I won't link to it here but there's a site called Autoblow Vagina Contest that have a leaderboard of vulvas. The vulvas at the top have the small inner labia typical of pubescent girls. If real pubescent girls could post themselves on this site I'm sure they'd be voted to the top.

The schoolgirl image. Popular in porn, especially across Asia where there's less taboo over attraction to minors. This is another sign of immaturity. If a girl is still wearing a school uniform then she's obviously not yet adult and still a bit immature.

TLDR: It's not neoteny men find attractive, it's immaturity.

A couple of weirdos convincing themselves of self-serving lies does not reverse all cultural norms and laws.

So how did we get same-sex marriage? That's an entire ton of cultural norms and laws just tossed in the bin for the sake of "love is love".

So let me just try to clear the table a bit and assure you that I'm not too concerned about people marrying their dogs, daughters, or what have you. To the the extent I would draw a connection between gay marriage and our current tensions, it's more in the possibility space that was left in the wake of its victory. For a variety of reasons I find it to be extremely unlikely and just too plain viscerally disgusting for legalized pedophelia or beastiality to ever be digested by society at large. But whereas previously I would have reflexively scoffed at the suggestion, I've lately been reduced to a more meek-sounding "well, that just seems so unlikely" and that shift low-key disturbs me.

I'll accept that your trans friends are much happier now than they were before. The tension is if this has come at the expense of those not convinced of the efficacy of activist talking points applied broadly, those erroneously misdiagnosed at an early age, and social stability on the whole (deleterious as opposed to ruinous). There are always a small number of people that would have their lives radically improved if society rearranged towards their preferences. That still leaves everybody else. Prescribing puberty blockers (or any 'affirmation plan') to minors who show an inkling of gender dysphoria is quite unreasonable to me. Ditto for any reprimands or punishments meted out to people who misgender trans or NB people. Whatever merit the the current gender framework has, I would throw it all in the bin if those are baked-in unavoidable consequences of it. That's before we even get into scenarios like 'penised individuals' raping women in shelters, which - I am not really sure how to totally quantify as a loss on net. Feels like a pretty big loss of something to me! Like a reasonable expectation that nobody would allow such a scenario to be possible?

You say there's no path towards normalization of pedophilia or beastiality because there's a lack of basic impulse for it. While I agree on the general nature of man's sexual proclivites being at headwinds with such a development, I find it hard to reconcile this with the growing body of work that suggests people really can be influenced by their media (read: porn) consumptions, and the rabbit hole of extreme acts hardcore porn addicts find themselves watching, unable to cum to anything less. Clearly our minds are highly susceptible to suggestion, and we now live with a cornucopia of suggestions available at a whim. While I still don't think that's likely to breed a generation of 'pedos and furries' as some doomsayers get on about, I do think you can get some big swings on those margins, and that leaves the question of how we should regard them.

But even deeper than this - and the thing I'm struggling to communicate - is that the language games the Left has played on this terf has nuked a lot of patience, charity, and goodwill that can be generalized to anything else they say. If they are willing to demolish the classic and useful definitions of words like 'man' and 'woman', whilst replacing them with bloated concepts and jargon that are meaningless to the average person, then the sky is the limit. We can do the same thing with words like 'victim', or 'consent', or 'sexual desire', and I have noticed this is already in the water supply. If you want an extension of this principle, see the same dynamic play out with 'protest', 'riot', and 'insurrection'. I am worried that when my opponent says he wants 'peace' as I would understand it, and I reach out for a handshake, he may stab me because "Well, duh. Of course he meant 'peace at your expense' in his local parlance! You can't even say he lied!". When a trans activist or sympathetic ally makes me second-guess what it means to be a woman, it's natural to second-guess any other term they employ that's loaded with ambiguity you didn't realize was even possible a second ago.

It's been a slow trek here, and it's informed by personal experiences as well as the public/political sphere, but the last 15 years or so have gradually cemented for me that humans are a strange species, capable of a lot I had thought was unfathomable, at least in the west. There were a lot of metaphorical guardrails I had taken for granted that were totally banking on people being constrained by 'reasonable' but unspecified assumptions about the human condition. I think those boundaries have already been crossed several times in my mind, which then in turns leads me to believe those boundaries didn't actually exist outside of social conformity and enforcement. Rewind back to 2004 and I'm betting very low odds on people marrying pets by 2024. What odds would I have placed on gender transitioning for minors, had I even known that was going to end up on the table? Assurances that nobody's gonna fuck the dogs doesn't carry the same smackdown it used to.

For a variety of reasons I find it to be extremely unlikely and just too plain viscerally disgusting for legalized pedophelia or beastiality to ever be digested by society at large.

This seems odd to me given the plentiful historical precedent for both.

There were a lot of metaphorical guardrails I had taken for granted that were totally banking on people being constrained by 'reasonable' but unspecified assumptions about the human condition. I think those boundaries have already been crossed several times in my mind, which then in turns leads me to believe those boundaries didn't actually exist outside of social conformity and enforcement.

As an Orthodox Christian, it's nice to see someone notice instead of doubling down on the madness.

A question I'd like to ask more people (if it were even remotely socially acceptable) is, "Why do you imagine anyone finds zoophilia odd?" Or leaving infants to die of exposure, or slavery, or any number of other things.

Most people would just say “well because zoophilia and infant murder are wrong!” Without any conception of the fact that before Christ these things would’ve been totally normal.

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I expect pedophilia and bestiality not to get normalized because kids and animals don't actually want to have sex with you, there's an actual victim there. I expect that the future will normalize a lot of things I find weird or upsetting but which don't actually harm anyone on net, which is how I see the trans movement.

Here's a mechanism: AI-generated (or hand-drawn) CP doesn't actually have any victims. No actual person is harmed on net, except by very legally tenuous chain-of-causation. By your logic, banning this is unreasonable. However there are fairly obvious paths by which the legitimization of CP which doesn't harm anyone leads to increased tolerance of CP generally, and increasing exposure and tolerance (in the lack-of-disgust sense) to the idea of child sex as a concept.

I generally agree with the AI CP has no victims line of thought. I think you see the same basic issue when it comes to writing fictional stories about unsavory topics as well.

I think it's a bit silly when you see erotica sites with stories about high school girls who happen to be exactly 18 years old. It feels like a strange purification ritual that has to be performed at the start of a story. Like saying "bless you" when someone sneezes. "You're about to read a story about a sexy young teenager, but don't worry - she's actually 18, so you have a fig leaf of plausible deniability!"

I don't think fictional stories about underage sex should be illegal, or impossible to host on appropriate sites, no matter how unsavory they may be. I'm honestly amazed that some countries punish those kinds of stories, and I'm saddened at the increasingly puritan regime that credit cards companies and sites like Amazon are creating around non-standard porn categories recently. First they came for the mind control erotica fetishists, and all that...

Would you say it's fair for me to characterize this as sort of the same argument as 'violent video games lead to murder'? Fantasy depictions lead to exposure and tolerance leads to adoption and mimicry?

My intuitions on this just go pretty hard the other direction. I think it's just true that introducing porn to an area decreases instances of rape, and I expect that to be true even if it's rape porn.

My intuition is that separating fantasy from reality is a basic skill that pretty much every member of our screen-addicted society has to learn early, and it's a pretty strong mechanism in most cases.

Having fantasy depictions of something despicable doesn't normalize real depictions showing real living victims, it makes them less acceptable because people with an interest in that topic have a harmless alternative, and makes them less prevalent because the legal and approved fantasy versions eat up all the market share and are far more convenient and safe to find than the illegal or dissaproved real version.

Having a plethora of convincing fantasy depictions available is a viable alternative for lots of potential offenders who can wean themselves on that instead. And they can stake their respectability in society as being the type of person who knows that it's just fantasy and games and is more concerned and knowledgable about ethical consumption practices than the general public (think about how BDSM people got really mad at 50 Shades for depicting unethical BDSM in a positive light).

Etc.

That's how I a priori expect things like that to go.

The legal and approved fantasy versions eat up all the market share and are far more convenient and safe to find than the illegal or dissaproved real version

Ah yes, this is why legal alcohol is the only intoxicant anyone ever uses, and nobody bothers with the illegal drugs? And certainly have not campaigned for some of the illegals like weed to be decriminalised/legalised and on sale in retail outlets just like you can buy booze?

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I don't really know your politics (because I can't keep track of people's username over time), but from this thread, you seem to lean progressive. However, I don't know your particular politics and how progressive you are, so this may be a gotcha and it may not be.

But I'm wondering how you feel about things that feminists may consider demeaning to women, such as fantasy depictions of violence against women, or women in skimpy outfits, etc. I don't know what the party line is these days, but 5 to 10 years ago, people were falling over themselves to denounce a plague of violence against women in media and video games, on the basis that this normalized such depictions, ultimately causing more violence against women or more unrealistic beauty standards, not less. Anita Sarkeesian made a career on this, there were protests against movie ads that feminists found to be unsavory. Overall this sort of thing seemed to be one of the biggest issues of last decade.

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You’re assuming a lot there with “don’t actually want to” that will not go well for you here if taken to a logical conclusion.

Leaving aside debates over informed consent and consent as a measure of moral, realistic sex robots of illegal categories are probably going to be a real problem for culture and law to deal with.

In other words, normalization can and will happen for some version of these things without being wrong per se according to the moral framework you draw here.

There was recently internet drama over a prominent YouTuber for both beastiality and pedophilia on his computer and he embraced the former as something he was open about.

For those unaware, this is reference to Vaush, a rather infamous Breadtuber who has been rather outspoken on both lowering the age of consent as well as loosening the taboo against bestiality, amoung a few other opinions.

He has also been rather vociferous against lolicon and how anime is a gateway to the alt-right.

Just recently, he was outed as a blatant hypocrite mid-stream when saving a file to his computer showing that he also had pron saved that was rather explicitly lolicon.

Take that for what you will.

realistic sex robots of illegal categories are probably going to be a real problem for culture and law to deal with.

I mean, if we're talking about victimless crimes that are just really really gross, I consider that a different topic.

There was recently internet drama over a prominent YouTuber for both beastiality and pedophilia on his computer and he embraced the former as something he was open about.

But just drawings of both, right, if it's the one I'm thinking of?

The point I’m getting at is “normalization” might happen the “gross victimless crime” way until it reaches some critical mass.

Our present standards for legal consent are not etched in stone, and we do know societal moral norms can shift pretty rapidly.

As someone with Republican relatives and in-laws, I assure you that rightist whining over the last four years has been both intolerable and often scary. I can't imagine what it's like to live in right-leaning communities at a time when most believe the election was stolen and they're living under the equivalent on an anti-pope.

Bad phrasing. Don't do this. If you see someone else doing it report them, don't imitate them and start a flame war.

You have this tendency to only respond to and then imitate the maximally offensive or most rule skirting of right wing viewpoint posts. This makes your value as a "counter-viewpoint" poster very minimal. This is a forum for discussion, and there are network effects. Our best users provide unique viewpoints, follow the rules of discussion, and participate often in a positive manner. I rarely see you engage with these users. SSCReader and Walterodim have some nuanced and careful takes in this thread, you responded to neither. Both users have long mod notes of just AAQCs. Instead you respond to ArjinFerman who has long mod notes of warnings and short bans.

Your net-effect seems to be to create flame-wars here, and only engage in discussion with our more troublesome users.

Some people think we give you leniency because you have a unique viewpoint. I just want to nix those complaints right now. We provide standard leniency to guesswho. And guesswho does not provide value to most of the users we care about, so there is no reason for us to provide extra leniency anyways. As far as I can tell guesswho upsets a bunch of people because he basically holds up a mirror, but seems intent on only holding up that mirror in front of uggos. The lovely looking users that might appreciate a mirror get nothing.

Pretty damn funny to me that OP who introduced this topic using that same terminology gets a one-line 'please phrase this better', and I responding using the exact same language get a four paragraph 'you are awful, you are terrible, I'm informing everyone else reading this that you're worthless' tirade. It might look less like a double-standard if you made one post modding the actual behavior that violates the rules, and a separate post with the personal attacks?

If no one should engage with posts like the one I'm replying to, why aren't the other 10 people who have done so getting a warning?

It's bad to engage with things that are egregiously wrong or offensive, because that draws more attention to them? That's a central tenant of cancel culture, surprised to see it endorsed here.

I literally (did)[https://www.themotte.org/post/882/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/188688?context=8#context] reply to Walterodim already, maybe you should look at my posts outside the report queue before confidently declaring what my posting tendencies are like?

And the only post I see by SCCReader is the reply to my own comment, I considered replying with 'Yeah of course you're right and the real answer here is that OP's premise is wrong and they're just being histrionic', but I thought that would be more rude and confrontational and not worth getting into!

Pretty damn funny to me that OP who introduced this topic using that same terminology gets a one-line 'please phrase this better', and I responding using the exact same language get a four paragraph 'you are awful, you are terrible, I'm informing everyone else reading this that you're worthless' tirade. It might look less like a double-standard if you made one post modding the actual behavior that violates the rules, and a separate post with the personal attacks?

OP is getting their first warning ever, and most of their engagement in this thread was not rule-violating. You are on your 8th, and you are actively flaunting the rules in another comment. OP's response to modhat: 'oh sorry, didn't mean to do that'. Your response: 'i did nothing wrong'

If no one should engage with posts like the one I'm replying to, why aren't the other 10 people who have done so getting a warning?

It is possible to engage with a post that does things badly, without also doing those same bad things. Or at least it seems possible for other posters.

I literally (did)[https://www.themotte.org/post/882/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/188688?context=8#context] reply to Walterodim already, maybe you should look at my posts outside the report queue before confidently declaring what my posting tendencies are like?

That comment wasn't loaded when I was looking through the thread, so I missed it. Sorry for accusing you, but in this case I do feel like it holds up my general point. Your posting is like a mirror to those you speak with. Your response to walterodim is measured, reasonable, and without any level of flaming. If you only responded to our top quality posters you'd probably be considered a top quality poster yourself, instead of a troubled case that constantly causes us headaches.

And the only post I see by SCCReader is the reply to my own comment, I considered replying with 'Yeah of course you're right and the real answer here is that OP's premise is wrong and they're just being histrionic', but I thought that would be more rude and confrontational and not worth getting into!

You are assuming a level of equivalence there that SCCReader and others might disagree with. And the point can easily be made in a non-confrontational way. "I agree with you, but I think the point you are making that rightists mostly just go about living their lives is also true for leftists. {optional addition if you want to make a good post:} For example [x complaint about leftists is mirrored by rightists doing y](repeat for two or three different values of x and y)"

Your posting is like a mirror to those you speak with.

Yes, this is true. I'm pretty autistic and don't understand tone and norms very well, I ussually get by through mirroring.

I would try harder to avoid doing this if I thought it was more wrong to do so, but... I don't see why people should get away with being rude or antagonistic without getting the same in kind?

And more importantly, given that most of this board is anti-leftist/anti-woke in ideology, I don't see why one side of that conflict should get to use rude and antagonistic tactics, but the other side shouldn't get to use them back? That seems like it creates a clear double-standard that pushes the board in one direction only.

It's not that I don't understand your point, having rudeness met with rudeness does create more total rudeness on the board in a way that decreases the overall quality of the average post. And I know a lot of teachers, I understand the logic of 'I don't care who started it, fighting is not allowed and you're both in trouble'.

But I do think that if that's going to be the standard you hold people to, it creates a greater responsibility for you to clean up the people starting things even when they don't degenerate into fights. You're correct that my interactions with Arjin are often suboptimal on both sides, but they reply to so many of my comments in ways that seem confrontational or ridiculous, how long am i supposed to just ignore them (especially when I've received lots of critiques at other times about 'not answering my critics and dancing away when I get challenged')?

You are assuming a level of equivalence there that SCCReader and others might disagree with. And the point can easily be made in a non-confrontational way. "I agree with you, but I think the point you are making that rightists mostly just go about living their lives is also true for leftists

I'm confused, didn't SSCReader already basically say that in their last paragraph?

I don't see why people should get away with being rude or antagonistic without getting the same in kind

Given the ratio, you're inevitably going to draw more reports, so this is a bad game for you to play.

I'd recommend rather to just try to defend your positions/show yourself right sufficiently clearly. (Yeah, that's hard when people don't want to listen to you.)

I sometimes feel like I'm too confrontational, and I'm definitely less confrontational than average (where average is defined by the possibly highly biased measure of what I notice).

You're correct that my interactions with Arjin are often suboptimal on both sides, but they reply to so many of my comments in ways that seem confrontational or ridiculous, how long am i supposed to just ignore them?

Maybe point out the lack of civility, and then respond more levelheadedly? But you're often fairly levelheaded anyway, from what I've seen. (I'll gesture back at the comment about what I notice.)

Yes, this is true. I'm pretty autistic and don't understand tone and norms very well, I ussually get by through mirroring.

Well this helps explain some things and makes me less frustrated with you, thank you for that.

I'd just suggest picking better people to mirror. If you have some basic negative emotional reaction to a comment I'd try just reporting it and not responding.

And more importantly, given that most of this board is anti-leftist/anti-woke in ideology, I don't see why one side of that conflict should get to use rude and antagonistic tactics, but the other side shouldn't get to use them back? That seems like it creates a clear double-standard that pushes the board in one direction only.

I think there is a reporting bias but not an enforcement bias. When I see reports there is definitely bias towards more reporting of leftists, but when I get to the thread I have to go through and read the whole thing, and I'm gonna hand out warnings and bans based on my assessment of people's behavior, not just on who is reported.

I think the bias I'm talking is more of a structural network effects thing rather than something anyone is doing actively. Like...

Toy model, a board is 90% anti-X, 10% pro-X, and has 100 people who are willing to engage in name-calling (90 anti, 10 pro). Each name-caller makes one post per week. All name-callers have a 10% chance to respond to each name-calling post on the other side with a name-calling reply. Each participant in such an interaction has a 10% chance of getting banned for it.

(I'm going to switch to A and P as name-callers on each side, and 'bad post' for name-calling post)

Week 1 has 10 bad P posts. Each of the 90 A posters responds to an average of 1 bad P post, meaning each A poster gets about 9 bad P replies. From these interactions, every P poster has a 10% chance of getting banned this week, and every A poster has a 90% chance of getting banned this week.

Week 1 has 90 bad A posts. Each of the 10 P posters responds to an average of 9 bad A posts, meaning each P poster gets about 1 bad A reply. From these interactions, again, each P poster has a 10% chance of getting banned this week, and every A poster has a 90% chance of getting banned this week.

Taking those two chances together, next week we expect to have about 81 A posters left, and we have a 10% chance of one A poster surviving.

The end result is the same if you start at 51% vs 49%, and if the reply rates and ban rates are 1% instead of 10%. It just takes longer.

You can try to decrease the rate at which people make bad posts, and the rate at which people reply to bad posts. But again, that just takes longer.

You can try to ban people for bad posts even if no one replies to them. But I'm pretty sure that again just takes longer, as long as you're hitting both sides a proportionally equal amount I don't think it changes the long-term trend.

As long as your policy is to not care who started it and punish both people in the exchange, you will long-term converge towards whichever side has the larger starting population ending up with complete domination.

They will at some point become the only side making any bad posts at all, and you will have an ideological echo chamber at least on the fringes.

And once that's established, new people making bad posts on the dominant side can join and not get punished because there's no one to reply to them and trigger moderation. So the number of bad posters on that side can swell ad infinitum.

And new entrants making bad posts on the non-dominant side are especially screwed. As the numbers are so lop-sided, they're very likely to disappear immediately, so that side can never build up more numbers to challenge the existing dominance.

From a structural perspective, I only see two simple ways out of this.

1 is to ban people for making bad posts before people make bad replies to them, and remove those posts so people can't make replies. I don't think you can/should have to respond that fast, and I think it goes against the ethos here to remove the posts.

2 is to respond initial bad posts more strongly than bad responses. It's galling and may feel like a double-standard from one perspective, given that both did the same behavior in the abstract. But I think it's the only policy that doesn't a priori lead to one side dominating over time.

Or, you can just accept that one side is going to dominate as an inevitable result of your policy, and accept that as better than the other consequences of changing your policy. That may well be the best you can do.

But if you're doing it, then it's kind of disingenuous to claim that you're not an A-leaning board, that your moderation does not favor A posters. If you know that your policies, enforced fairly and regularly, will lead to a board with lots of egregiously bad and antagonistic and aggressive A posts, and few to none on the P side, then own that consequence and talk openly about how it is an outcome you are accepting in your moderation policy and vision for the board, even if only as an unfortunate but necessary evil.

(and of course, it's not really that there are posters who are 100% and others who are 100% bad, it's that each poster has some percentage chance of each post being bad, with wide variance. In the very long run, any A with a non-zero chance of making a bad post ever will be eliminated by the same structural network dynamics above, eventually creating a complete echo chamber across the whole spectrum of post quality)

These are all things we are aware of.

We don't remove posts that have been publicly visible at any point for any reason. (there are extreme exceptions to this rule that have not yet been triggered, such as doxxing, or things that are illegal to share)

We do respond to stuff as soon as we see them, and part of bringing on new mods was to increase response time. We can get through the modqueue every couple of days with just two or three active mods. But with about 5 active mods, someone will get through it every day.

We do have a policy that top level stuff gets judged most harshly on multiple dimensions. Especially on low-effort posting, but also on culture-warring and antagonism.

I think the reason things do not totally devolve in practice is that neither side is monolithic. You have a pet example and the math checks out, but people don't always fit perfectly into the ideological boxes. I disagree with you on woke/progressive topics, but I'm also probably more in favor of open borders than you are. And that topic gets me dogpilled around here. And I certainly get some amount of downvotes that might make me come out net negative in those threads, but the report volume is generally very low or non-existent.

Ymeshkout also manages to make semi-regular posts about the 2020 election, and is consistently defending a minority viewpoint around here. But again, rarely any reports, and their behavior is great despite lots of disagreement and downvotes.

I'm aware enough of being a minority viewpoint that I even tried to write some helpful advice for people that get ratioed on themotte. That was before you created your account, so if you weren't lurking you likely missed it.

Instead you respond to ArjinFerman who has long mod notes of warnings and short bans

but seems intent on only holding up that mirror in front of uggos

I know I ain't no [insert latest hunk the ladies are swooning over], but this is bordering on abuse!

Legalizing gay marriage was seen as a radical leftist movement, but the actual result was that all the gay people - and most importantly, gay artists and icons and culture warriors - stopped living as radical counter-culture outsiders challenging every pillar of the nuclear family, and switched to being respectability-politics-first normies living quiet lives in the suburbs with 2.5 adopted kids.

So if everybody got respectable, why was there all the complaining over how Mayor Pete was the wrong kind of gay?

And kink should be at Pride, it's gotten too family-friendly?

And why can't my non-binary queer friends get dates?

We've already rehashed the Drag Queen Story Hour, but now "if you don't bring your minor kids to strip clubs for drag events, you're a bigot"?

Yeah, that sure is respectability-first normie quiet surburban life!

First of all, most of that is very niche online-only stuff that most people haven't heard of. It's not on the same level as the fight over gay marriage and everything that went along with it.

Second of all, half of those are about trans stuff, which proves my point? Trans people are forced into counter-culture, and the trans culture war brings all kinds of weirdness to the front of the Overton Window, including stuff about drag queens who aren't even trans. That's what you can take out of the Overton Window by just not fighitng about trans people anymore.

And for that matter, the first two which are largely about gay people also prove my point? Gay people who are normie and straight-passing become nationally important politicians, gay events like Pride become family-friendly and wholesome, and the people who have a problem with that are relegated to writing think pieces in dying old-media outlets.

Third, see the second half of my reply here, I was talking about the immediate decade-or-so aftermath of the gay marriage fight ending. Yes there will eventually be new fights, you can't win everything forever, but that's doesn't negate the huge wins you actually got at the time.

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Let me insert here that although I disagree with you, I appreciate your persistence in offering counterpoint and I am not among the downvoters. While I do downvote unnecessarily antagonistic and low-effort posts (including yours at times) I don't think this is either.

Okay, so trans stuff is counter-culture, so please do explain: how did it go from "event hosted in libraries where nobody is forcing you to bring your kids to see it" to "it's in school for kindergarten onwards and you can't opt out"?

'You can take the heat out of this dispute by just giving in, shutting up, and letting the other side do what the hell they want in public spaces that are supposed to be for all' is one solution, certainly, but not one I'm very inclined towards. "Sure, nobody likes slavery, but why are you going on protests about it? Just stay quiet and all this fighting will stop and then it'll be fine!"

how did it go from

It didn't.

Pride become family-friendly and wholesome

Do you have any video of these? I don't know that I've seen any pride events I'd view as wholesome, but I'll accept they may exist somewhere.

Uh, aren't pride parades still full of public nudity and kink and all that jazz, right out on main street?

I mean the example I am responding to here is OP saying that that pride has become too family friendly and people are complaining about that. You can reject that premise if you disagree, but then OP loses it as an example in their own argument, which supports my original position.

They’re not mutually exclusive. You can have a festival of filth and degeneracy that some members of the lgbt community think is still too family friendly. Do I know that this is the case? No, I don’t have much evidence either way- it could be that pride parades are toned down from back in the day, it could be that they aren’t, the complainers could be a fringe view, they could be mainstream. But writing off the possibility out of hand seems like a lack of rigour.

My political positions are ... on the same side as conservatism, at least. I think you're right, at least, that the 'culture war sticking points' aren't really moving anyone towards conservative norms - banning drag queens, not allowing gay marriage, banning abortions for poor black women, this doesn't really move us towards a more conservative society.

I think it's bad, on an individual level, for anyone who transitions. Meaningful desires aligned with their outcomes (desire for sex/romantic relationship that produces kids) are replaced with confused simulacra. And actual children (pretty important! whether you're a radical inegalitarian or a sum of hedonic state utilitarian, more people existing is good) fail to be produced.

But if you actually try to consistently pursue the underlying values that generate something like 'trans is bad', the harm actually has to come from 'not having children' - and 'trans people being .2% of the population' is simply 50x less of an issue than many people not settling down into families, or those that do deciding to have 2 children. I do think that conservatives should focus on the latter, and not the former.

Unfortunately, I'm not having a rational conversation with "conservatives", the conservative movement is a huge mass of a hundred million people that hypes itself up about a whole bunch of nonsense. Just like progressives. So, idk. Maybe the only way to change things is elite persuasion, even more likely there's just not enough time to change things too much until AGI is too big of an issue.

'trans people being .2% of the population' is simply 50x less of an issue than many people not settling down into families

The degree that this and other culture war issues are inserted into public schools increases the burden on conservative families with children that now feel they need to homeschool to avoid the indoctrination.

I think I've expressed my opinions on 'trans in schools' enough here (tldr for kids who decide to be trans they see <.1% of the trans content they see at school, they get it from the internet, the school plays almost zero causal role in them deciding to transition).

But even if schools were pivotal in causing every single trans kid to be trans, that's still less important than TFR being under replacement by a solid system of values imo. Trans is bad, sure, but there are a lot of bad things - disease, obesity, being born with low IQ, crime, popular consumer media - all of those have negative aggregate impact either on the same order of magnitude as trans or much higher. And "people not having kids, especially smart people" is just way higher.

Like, if you have an extra kid and that kid has a 5% chance of going trans, and let's do some absurd but illustrative math and say that if someone becomes trans it's not only better for them not to exist, but for a whole other perfectly good person to also not exist because being trans is just THAT bad - in expected value it's still much more important to have the kid. Kid also has a 5% chance of having some weird disease, disability, personality disorder, or whatever.

(tldr for kids who decide to be trans they see <.1% of the trans content they see at school, they get it from the internet, the school plays almost zero causal role in them deciding to transition).

I think the worry is not necessarily that the school starts it, it's that the school enables it by their policies. Schools allowing children to socially transition, keeping information from the parents, etc. could be a lot more influential than just seeing content.

It's not even that there's a risk the school is going to make the kids trans. It's that it's presented in school at all as anything other than mental illness.

I don't think this argument is going to go anywhere unless I write a 5000 word effortpost with a dozen tiktok, reddit, and discord screenshots each to actually convey the understanding of what it's like to be a 'trans kid' and why the school isn't relevant. And the time for that was a year or two ago anyway.

So instead, I'll go back to the above argument - put the mental effort into having an extra kid (or two, or ...) instead. Even heavily discounted, it's more important.

Or I guess working on AI or something. It probably seems like an odd tic that I keep bringing that up, but all of our moral philosophies depend on and don't make sense outside of the indefinite continuation of human life and civilization and power, and that is very much in question! If you're having a kid who will themselves have kids who will ... and so on and so on, I can see that as a divine duty of infinite importance, an unbroken chain - or, really, an unbroken interwoven net of sexual reproduction tiling the whole of your nation - of intergenerational devotion. If you have two kids who each have three kids who all starve to death because we're now to silicon as horses were to us ...

I largely don't care, what it's like to be a 'trans kid' or an anorexic, or a spaz.

I have 4 children. We may have had more if we were able to send them to a non-globohomo school. Our culture pays outsized attention to people that won't or shouldn't have children.

I've no specific fear of the earth running out of people, only running out of people competent to run and administrator modern civilization.

I will say that one outcome of normalizing trans people that I would love to see, and find plausible to expect, is more effort put into helping trans people have kids.

For MtF you can freeze sperm before beginning treatment, and help pay for IVF. For FtM you can normalize a focus on top surgery and social transition in the early years. For everyone you can further normalize the use of sperm donors and make access to IVF and adoption easier.

Same-sex couples raise kids at around 56% the rate of straight couples, which is a large difference, but is not an order of magnitude different nor 'impossible' which I feel like some conservative arguments seem to imply. And for lesbian relationships it's more like 80% the rate of straight couples.

Honestly as time passes and things get more normalized, I would expect the rates of same-sex and trans-including couples having kids to converge on those for cis straight relationships. There's no a priori reason those people would want kids less, and a mixture of IVF and adoption and various other social maneuvers can make it possible. The only barrier is cost and access to those things, and taboos against them, all of which we can work to remove.

I mean, the a priori reason is that straight sex naturally creates children and gay/lesbian/trans sex (usually) doesn't. Not in a 'natural morality' sense, just it's a lot easier to have a 'happy accident' than to have a series of medical appointments over a year. I doubt it'll converge. (I mean, in principle, future technological developments make predicting the future on current trends ... questionable)

I was saying there's no a priori reason they would want kids less, not no a priori reason we would expect them to have less kids.

I guess my point can be restated as 'I would expect all types of couples to want the same number of kids on average, and I would expect the number of kids a couple have to converge towards the number they want over time as technology and society improves and barriers to having kids/accidental ways of getting kids are removed/mitigated.'

Also this is 'converging in the infinite limit', not making a confident claim about how fast they will converge because yeah, this is partially an argument based on extrapolating future technology and social change, which is hard/impossible.

Same-sex couples raise kids at around 56% the rate of straight couples, which is a large difference, but is not an order of magnitude different nor 'impossible' which I feel like some conservative arguments seem to imply. And for lesbian relationships it's more like 80% the rate of straight couples.

90% of straight couples in that sample are married only 50% of same sex couples are. You are also using the married stats without saying so. I was confused by your post at first since the survey you cited shows same sex couples having much lower rates of child rearing than what you claimed.

Yeah, I meant among married couples since this was a discussion about gay marriage, but you're right it would have been better for me to say that explicitly.

'trans people being .2% of the population'

Which should be "okay, majority rules, you get basic decent treatment but you don't get to have screaming fits in public about being a real woman/real man" but instead we get Trans Day of Visibility, remember all the trans murder victims who were murdered for being trans (and not for being sex workers, which is already a hazardous occupation, or murdered in domestic violence incidents just like cis people, no it's because they were trans and no other reason).

Declare that you are a woman, with no effort at transitioning, and the 99.8% rest of us have to pretend we believe you and behave as if that's true.

Yes I agree that all of that is dumb, and I think all but .2% of the people who use this site do too, so we don't really need to be reminded, because it doesn't directly impact the more substantial discussion above.

okay, majority rules, you get basic decent treatment but you don't get to have screaming fits in public about being a real woman/real man

That's not on offer and never has been. If it was, it would probably undermine the more radical trans activists in much the same way that the normiefication of homosexuality undermined the weirdest and most radical elements of the gay rights movement. However, until trans Bismarck comes along and sabotages the trans left by offering a compromise that aspiring transnormies can tolerate, trans activism is likely to continue to be defined by the angriest and most radical voices.

It complicates things that, as far as I understand, a trans normie probably does HRT later/not at all and thus passes worse than a radical.

See, the thing is, I think there are a lot of trans normies who just want to go about living their lives as best they can. Maybe they don't 100% pass, but they don't march around demanding that "I have a dick and a beard and I'm a woman!", so the bargain of civil treatment can be made: you don't make it impossible for me to ignore that this is not your natal sex, I'll treat you as your legal sex.

It's the weirdoes and edge cases who make the most noise and get the most attention, and nobody is willing to slap them down because "oh no, we can't do that, that would be giving in to the bigots". So the crazies get their way, and the reason people make a fuss about guys with working reproductive systems getting into women's prisons and impregnating the inmates is not because there are a large number of such cases, but because such a thing should never happen in the first place. But somebody takes a test case, a judge makes a ruling, and now the Department of Corrections have to let George (now going by Georgina) into the women's prison even though the only effort George has made is to change his name and put ribbons in his hair.

If people on the progressive side were willing to give in on "Okay, George goes to the men's prison", there would be a lot more willingness to compromise on "Okay, Sally is not the most female woman you'll ever meet, but she tries her best, so let's all get along". At least from my side of the fence; I don't care what equipment you've got in your knickers if you're using the ladies' loo, I do care about the fetishists who fantasise online about periods and tampons and accosting women in public bathrooms with such intrusive questions.

you don't get to have screaming fits in public about being a real woman/real man

Isn't the root of this that we're not able to treat them as we would when someone with another type of mental illness did this?

Treat them with the same compassion as someone with delusions or hallucinations, who are sometimes loud and unpleasant in public. Your not expected to endorse or validate in any real sense their claims, generally the public avoids these individuals when possible. I'm not going to try and argue them out of whatever their experiencing either.

@cjet79, I disagree with this point and think it's pretty bad, but am I allowed to reply and say why I think it's wrong, or would that be starting a flame war?

(and yes, I'm kind of being a shit about this, but I'm trying to demonstrate why I find your reasoning here really egregious and dangerous)

Not cjet, but I’d recommend against it.

It is absolutely possible to deliver a tactful, rule-abiding response to @FarNearEverywhere. Perhaps

I strongly disagree with your characterization, which I think is really uncharitable. There is a reasonable position where trans people get better treatment without any screaming fits. Your reaction is also disproportionate to [insert actual claims about murder rate or whatever].

You could do it. I’ve seen you take a measured approach, and it’s one of the things I appreciate most about your posts. But I assume it would not be your first reaction, both because you’re already under a lot of pressure, and because FNE has opened with her infamous signature flair for the dramatic. If you mirrored her style, I would expect it to stoke the flames.

Before you ask, yes, I would like to ask FNE to cool down as well before she starts any more fights. I know this is a sensitive topic.

FNE has opened with her infamous signature flair for the dramatic

I am an International Man Woman Person Of Mystery!

Declare that you are a woman, with no effort at transitioning, and the 99.8% rest of us have to pretend we believe you and behave as if that's true.

No, we do not, and significantly more than .2% of the population refuses to go along with the stupid charade.

Legalizing gay marriage was seen as a radical leftist movement, but the actual result was that all the gay people - and most importantly, gay artists and icons and culture warriors - stopped living as radical counter-culture outsiders challenging every pillar of the nuclear family, and switched to being respectability-politics-first normies living quiet lives in the suburbs with 2.5 adopted kids. Conservatives had to give up on oppressing gay people, but managed to bring them largely into the tent of traditional marriage and neoliberal economics and so forth.

Is this how you remember the sequencing? As someone that was vigorously in favor of legalizing gay marriage, I recall the path being inverted from this, where the respectability politics had already happened and the big selling point was that our gay and lesbian friends are not degenerate weirdos, they're totally normal and just want the same thing that straight couples have. This was a pretty good selling point! It convinced me handily, and I certainly see couples that live exactly like that now. The problem is that the aftermath of that win was not declaring victory and slapping a Mission Accomplished sticker on the Pride flag, it was moving onto trans politics, leading up to the modern day "trans kids", trans "women" in women's sports, and so on. At this point, I've basically been convinced that I was wrong, the slippery slope people were completely right, and that simply winning on the one cause and then moving on with normalcy was never an option.

just want the same thing that straight couples have.

What was that all about? Gay people always had exactly the same right to marry somebody of the opposite sex as straight people.

As for adopting children, why not make them? I don't know the exact cost of adoption these days, but even heterosexual couples spend a lot on fertility treatments, surely there are sex workers available for a cheaper price to get your own biological child.

it was moving onto trans politics, leading up to the modern day "trans kids", trans "women" in women's sports, and so on. At this point, I've basically been convinced that I was wrong, the slippery slope people were completely right, and that simply winning on the one cause and then moving on with normalcy was never an option.

Can we actually draw that thread though? Are the advocates for gay marriage, exactly the same advocates as for trans rights? (which is pretty nebulous itself). Is the slope slippery or are there multiple overlapping staircases, such that gay marriage could be rolled back tomorrow and that we would have trans advocates focusing on their issues and gay marriage advocates focusing on their issues?

The Progressive alliance is basically a mish-mash of groups that were (or perceived themselves to be) marginalized and mistreated under older more conservative social conventions. The average black person is not all that on board with homosexuality (compared to white progressives) so it certainly isn't homogenous.

Is what you are seeing with trans issues the result of a somewhat successful gay campaign OR a symptom of the amount of power that the conservative stack lost, such that even the smaller groups in the progressive stack can punch above their weight, such that rolling back gay marriage in and of itself would have no impact on that debate (other than as a symptom of the regrowth of conservative power).

See my reply here. I don't know.

Absolutely a reasonable position. Personally I think its a "rising tide lifts all boats situation" when one side is doing better all the various causes and clusters of causes have a better chance, but if you remove one boat, its not likely that the situation changes much.

The thing for me is that, by that analogy, the thing that conservatives of yesteryear were fighting against was that rising tide that was lifting the one boat called "gay marriage" and claiming that by raising the tide to lift that one boat, we'll also inevitably lift other boats that we don't want lifted. Accompanied with the argument was that you can't just install hover jets onto that one boat and lifting that boat inevitably requires raising the tide (i.e. the argument that eliding any boundary between gay and straight marriage necessarily pushes social norms away from people taking responsibility to do their duty to keep human society running and existing and more towards self-discovery and liberation).

There are arguments to be made on whether or not the current trans movement is a good thing or a bad thing. But in my view, all the conservatives whose slippery slope arguments I poo-poo-ed back in the day have every right to say "I told you so" to my face now, as their slippery slope did come true. We could try to draw a thread from gay marriage to the current trans movement, and I'd bet we could even do it pretty well, but my view is that that's largely irrelevant. Because the point was never about gay marriage specifically, it was about the principles underlying - and necessarily implied by - the push for gay marriage.

And that is reasonable! But it isn't a slippery slope. If coalition A wins it will do coalition A things is a separate problem, than if Issue 1 from coalition A wins then Issue 2 from coalition A will casually follow.

For example Coalition B could carry out issue 1, which says nothing about whether issue 2 will happen.

Because the boats can move to different sides of the harbor. Just as happened with white rural working class voters over the last decade or more.

Practically does it make a difference? If you are a politician yes, because you may be able to beat your opponent to the jump, and get a pragmativ "win". I would agree that practically to the average person who doesn't like gay marriage or trans "rights" then it is mostly a moot point. But it is a distinction we should look at from an analysis pov if we are trying to be accurate.

And that is reasonable! But it isn't a slippery slope. If coalition A wins it will do coalition A things is a separate problem, than if Issue 1 from coalition A wins then Issue 2 from coalition A will casually follow.

For example Coalition B could carry out issue 1, which says nothing about whether issue 2 will happen.

Because the boats can move to different sides of the harbor. Just as happened with white rural working class voters over the last decade or more.

The way I see it, the point that the conservatives can rub in my face, i.e. the slippery slope in this situation, is that these coalitions aren't arbitrary. It's that Issue 1 necessarily implies something similar to Coalition A, because of the principles encoded into Issue 1. This doesn't necessarily imply that Issue 2 will causally follow, but it does imply that some Coalition similar to Coalition A that wants Issue 2 (more accurately, Issue X, since we can't determine beforehand that it will be Issue 2 specifically) will gain greater credibility and more ability to get that Issue 2 implemented.

That is, the conservatives who were telling me, "Sure, those boats could move to different sides of the harbor. But they won't. And here's why," can rub it into my face. It's probably not much of a consolation, but I suppose they can at least enjoy having company in their misery.

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Can we actually draw that thread though?

They used the thread to sew new stripes on the rainbow flag. Maybe if they were evicted from the rainbow I'd have an easier time not thinking one led to the other.

Well thats the nature of a coalition. It still doesn't mean that gay marriage led to trans rights. Like if evangelical Christians and neo-liberal free marketeers are in the same Republican coalition it doesn't mean that financial deregulation leads to an abortion ban.

You have to actually be able to draw the line directly. I think thete are fractures bmbetween the LGB and the T that are being somewhat hidden by the fact of perceived right wing antipathy towards both.

I'll point out in the UK, a Conservative government explicitly legalized gay marriage and there is some significant anti trans (from their pov) headwinds. Some of that could be attributed to loss of support as parts of the coalition get what they want explicitly codified in law by a right wing government, rather than getting it through the Supreme Court (and therefore being more tenuous).

If thats the case legalizing gay marriage might be the opposite of a slippery slope. Depending on how and by whom it is done.

right wing government

Perhaps to the right of Labor or the LibDems (are they still a thing) A right wing government would probably not have passed gay marriage.

Many free-market Republicans talk openly about a compromise position on abortion, typically accepting upto viability.

I've seen the TERF distance themselves from the T, the LGB still seem to invite them to all their events and platforms.

coalition

If your coalitions purpose was bank robbery and another member of the coalition shoots and kills a guard, your still up for felony murder even if your part of the coalition only wanted the money.

I understand your claim that gay marriage didn't lead to trans. People will judge you by the company you keep.

The company you keep is an entirely different claim than a causal one though. And i'm not sure from the point of political coalition how useful it even is. It is when you look at things personally of course.

I understand that the average neo-liberal Republican is probably not too worried about abortion, but because of the way their coalition is built the evangelical Christian wing is.

But if i oppose banning abortion, pragmatically my best option might be to peel that coalition apart. Not force it closer together. Horse trading is the life blood of politics. Maybe you aren't exactly in favor of gay marriage, but if it guts the support of a coalition opposing you, then if you think its going to happen anyway you might as well get the credit.

The next Labour government with a reasonable majority was going to legalize gay marriage. Just a matter of time. This way, the Conservatives get to claim that forever. Now if you really hate the idea of gay marriage maybe that isn't worth it. But pragmatically taking credit for something that was going to happen anyway can be one way to defang your enemies.

Politically in the US, if Republicans could pass a gay marriage bill in exchange for robbing momentum (through a whole bunch of activists no longer worrying about it), for further change and in exchange for getting say 8 years of dominance it doesn't matter about the company those activists kept until then. Exploit the weakness in the coalition.

Of course if you don't think that will work, or it will lose you more than you gain then don't do it, but don't let thinking about coalitions like individuals cloud your judgement. Political coalitions aren't friends, they are alliances of convenience and those can be changed. Japan once sided with Nazi Germany, now it is a close US ally. White rust belt Americans used to skew Democrat. By your lights should their change not be accepted because of the company they used to keep?

The company you keep is an entirely different claim than a causal one though.

They're adjacent with some overlap, and the line of responsibility / credit is clear to many if not you. Having had some success the LGB brought the T inside the tent. If the LGB were still fighting for marriage state by state would T be in the tent? The pedos still want to be in the tent too but that's still too far for many of the LGBT. If I lend you my pirate crew and pirate ship to commit piracy that makes me the pirate king. You're going to tell the pirate king he's not causing piracy? Did Fagin not cause pickpocketing? You're view of 'causal' seems conveniently narrow. How proximate must the antecedent be for you to accept 'cause'?

Reasonable mainstream conservatives should view abortion as an issue best handeled by the state legislatures not the federal government, we're a republic. The issue is emotional for many, they're frequently blind to less emotive arguments. The MSM presentation doesn't help. Baby murdering sluts vs. Liberated Women is a framing that only serves to divide and cedes ground to the crazies.

Conservatives get to claim that forever.

This only works until actual conservative voters have somewhere else to go. You can see this in the rise of conservative populism. I'm not sure the UK conservatives owning gay marriage is the win for them they think it is. CINO isn't as good as RINO. Uniparty is the descriptor I prefer. Who was defanged? The perception by many is the fangs just moved on to T. Do the activists ever go home after their win? There are always some new downtrodden to elevate. Were people sure at the time that gay marriage would lead to trans, probably not, trans was even smaller then. I recall suggestions that bestiality, pedos or polygamy would be next. Furries, T and polyamory would be near enough for many. The machine built for gay marriage is now in use by T.

Political coalitions aren't friends

Not they way it's frequently done, but there's nothing to preclude it. You'd just need a smaller tent. If you can't live your principles, what's the point in 'winning'.

White rust belt Americans used to skew Democrat.

Rapid demographic change and the destruction of your industry can cause people to understand the nature of the tent they're in.

By your lights should their change not be accepted because of the company they used to keep?

Repentant sinners are welcome. They can be excellent members as they've seen it from the other side. Nobody knows alcoholics like an ex-drunk. Reformed degenerates are best to keep the active degenerates out.

That speed at which that ugly pattern was adopted and incorporated was certainly something.

I do agree it was more complicated than this in the moment, I was talking more about the long-term outcomes than the momentary tactics.

I do think that in that case it was more that the gay rights movement tried to win over the conservative movement by adopting their values and that worked, rather than vice-versa (although more detailed analysis is that it was more like a continuous feedback loop where more conformity led to more room for acceptance led to more conformity etc, and chicken-and-egg which one happened first on a micro-micro-scale).

But my point was more that there's a pattern here by which counter-culture outsiders get accepted and integrated into the herd and end up more traditionalist on a lot of metrics, and conservatives could be the ones to intentionally trigger that process this time if they wanted to.

The problem is that the aftermath of that win was not declaring victory and slapping a Mission Accomplished sticker on the Pride flag, it was moving onto trans politics

I mean, sort of.

First of all, that took ~15 years from gay marriage starting be legalized to any real movement on trans issues. It's not like there will never be a cultural backlash to changes you make, that's not how any of this works, but buying a decade or two of buy-in for your project is a pretty massive victory by culture war standards (which are usually minute and fleeting).

Second, the gay rights movement 'moved on to' trans rights largely by evaporative cooling. Most of the gay rights movement evaporated after marriage rights and worker protections and etc were won, the current trans rights movement is much smaller than the gay rights movement was in its heyday and faces a lot more trepidation and mixed feelings from liberals, including plenty of gay people. In my mind that's why it's weak enough that people can talk about 'eradication' at national party conventions to wide applause and that's barely a scandal, why states can pass laws ranging from school censorship to restricting medical care and have that be a selling point for politicians rather than a scandal, etc.

I'm going to need to noodle on this a bit. When Obergefell hit, I quite literally celebrated with gay friends. I'm really not wed to the position that this was bad, and certainly not wed to the position that it was bad in and of itself. That said, I'm not immersed in queer politics to any meaningful extent and tend to associate the various strains of it and their role in progressive politics more broadly as something of a monolith, which probably isn't accurate. I find quite a bit of trans discourse, particularly about kids, to be appalling, inaccurate, and even self-evidently ridiculous in some cases. When I've had family members that I disagreed with gay marriage bust out the old, "I told you so" routine, I have basically shrugged and said, "yeah, you sure did, I guess I was wrong". I'll think about it more - thanks for the reply.

the current trans rights movement is much smaller than the gay rights movement was in its heyday

"Smaller" means different things in an era of social media, combined with universal media approval. Fewer people, maybe. Less influence, no.

The problem is that the aftermath of that win was not declaring victory and slapping a Mission Accomplished sticker on the Pride flag, it was moving onto trans politics, leading up to the modern day "trans kids", trans "women" in women's sports, and so on. At this point, I've basically been convinced that I was wrong, the slippery slope people were completely right, and that simply winning on the one cause and then moving on with normalcy was never an option.

I feel like this is a weak sauce slippery slope, if it is one. It's hard to find good numbers, but this article claims around 2% of Gen Z and 1% of Millenials identify as trans. And I would wager a large portion of those are just non-binary with no plans for any medical interventions, but even if we assume that all of those people identifying as trans are all chasing medical interventions like surgery and hormone treatment this is hardly enough to destroy a society.

In pre-revolutionary France, the First Estate of clergy made up 0.5% of the population, and theoretically all of those people were supposed to be celibate. Even acknowledging the hypocrisy and non-compliance of some of those clergy, you're still looking at a social institution that causes large swathes of people to be childless if it is strictly adhered to. And yet the biggest issue people had with that institution were things like the Catholic Church owning 6-10% of the land in France, and having an outsized influence on French politics. It was not a widely feared thing that people's sons or daughters would become priests or nuns and be forced to live a life of celibacy.

I think that 1 or 2% of trans youth is not the main ill our society faces, and if we had other working social institutions, structures and norms, we could easily deal with 1-2% of the population becoming sterilized. Our low birth rates are not because of decisions that 1-2% of people feel emboldened to make because of greater social acceptance. I think general social atomization, and an emphasis of comfort over duty are greater issues facing our society than whether a tiny minority choose to sterilize themselves.

All of the other issues like trans women in sports are minor distractions barely worthy of serious discussion. If professional weight-lifting can self-regulate and have de facto anti-doping and pro-doping leagues, then I'm sure that left to their own devices sports organizations running women's sporting events will figure out ways to deal with trans women without the need for outside intervention or pressure on anyone's part. Far more serious are questions of women's prisons and violent trans offenders, and I feel like that only becomes an issue because it is the tip of the iceberg of suffering in prison. Violent trans women prisoners are a useful prop, but do most people shed tears for prisoners (men or women) and their bad living conditions the rest of the time?

Also a very minor note, but I'll point out that about half the over-30 trans people I know have biological children, through one route or another.

It's hard to find good numbers, but this article claims around 2% of Gen Z and 1% of Millenials identify as trans

I don't understand how this is supposed to be a counter argument. There weren't that many more gay people than that, and we were asked to rearrenge society for them, and were assured that any claim there will be further demands was a fallacy. We now have further demands just as predicted, therefore the slipperyslope claim was correct.

Also, if the low numbers of trans people mean their demands aren't a big deal, does that mean you'd be ok with rejecting them entirely?

I had a similar intuition to @vorpa-glavo: I don’t think gay-marriage opponents really called it. Even though their slippery-slope argument was pretty broad, no one talked about trans people as a next step, because trans politics weren’t even on the radar. If there’s not much continuity between the LGB and the T agendas, is it accurate to call them “further demands”?

As for your other question, yeah, I guess. It’d be immoral, but not uniquely so.

A collection of positions of religious organizations are obviously going to be focused on theological positions. They don't need slippery slope arguments. This is how you tailor arguments for a religious position piece.

Legal arguments tended toward the most convenient, most obvious legal slippery slope, especially because we have a solid history and case law concerning polygamy that opponents would have to wrestle with. This is how you tailor arguments for a judge.

To build on @ArjinFerman, I think it included, but was even more than "changing the definition of marriage, and if you can do that, what else can you change?" It would be impossible for me to find my old comments on a legal blog from the period, but I had predicted that this general area could continue to be a sore spot, more like abortion and less like interracial marriage. The reason is that it cuts into deep questions of philosophy and science in ways that are difficult to reconcile beyond short-term applications of pure social power.

That is, at the time that interracial marriage rose to prominence, the question was relatively simple (in comparison), and one that was reasonably easily cabined as a purely legal question. Everyone more or less agreed that race was basically a thing. Everyone more or less agreed on what marriage was. They just had to figure out what to do with these things.

On the other hand, gay marriage very much got down to philosophical concepts concerning what is sex, is sexual behavior distinct from an orientation, how is that determined, is it biological or not, etc., as well as questions concerning what marriage is, what its purpose is, why we have it, etc. This is very much like how abortion sparks deep questions about what life is, when it is human, when it has value, etc. Trans questions are likewise in the intersection of very deep and important philosophical questions, and I think they retain the potential to persist as a divide over time.

It is of little surprise to me that as people are getting past the point of peak social power to get a policy outcome, they're realizing that they've actually found themselves in a bit of a philosophical thicket, and some are even wondering whether they let the fervor get the best of them the last time rather than reasoned consideration. We're just digging deeper into the really hard questions. I recall predicting (from my experience taking a queer theory class at the time) that, if anything, we were going to see that the decisions made in the past concerning things like interracial marriage were, not wrong, but woefully shallow, as the philosophical eye would no longer take things like "race" to be more-or-less agreed upon as mostly existing as a thing, and that it might become messier in the future.

I definitely recall arguing (on SSC, even, not just legal blogs) that the philosophical and scientific claims were on dreadful grounds, and that it was going to be a mess, somehow, for them to enshrine, as a matter of Constitutional interpretation, these shaky claims, akin to how Justice Thomas often reminds us that segregation in schools was once justified by social scientists with shaky claims that it would surely enhance learning to be in a cohort of similar looking peers. I don't think those warnings need to be cashed out in ultra-specific predictions of exactly what form the fallout will take. Just a general sense of the "abortion distortion effect" in the legal space, where it seemed to be the case (following Roe/Casey enshrining questionable philosophy buttressed by appeals to science) that the question of abortion precedent mangled far-reaching areas of the law that wouldn't, on their surface, seem to have anything to do with abortion.

Once you walk down the line of enshrining Constitutional interpretation based on lies about science and questionable philosophy, there are going to be bad effects, somewhere, somehow. "Hey, this other claim looks really close to that other lie, and you are absolutely forbidden from acknowledging that it was a lie, so what'r'ya gonna do about it?!" The whole endeavor is built on a rotten premise, and the only question is how many other rotten conclusions will be adopted in service of that rotten premise along the way. It took almost 50 years for Roe to finally be repudiated; will this end up being repudiated at all? Or will it truly be enshrined as complete cultural dogma, irrefutable by science or the lack thereof, free to continue distorting everything that comes close to it? Who knows. No one can predict with any level of granularity. We can't predict which specific offshoots will garner sufficient strained legal analysis and which others will struggle. But I think we can predict that this deep philosophical rift will persist.

Again, to make an analogy to abortion, I think about the fact that Peter Abelard, in the 12th century, has preserved writings on questions that are extremely close to current questions on abortion. That rift is way older than the 50 years from Roe to Dobbs. I can't imagine that fundamental questions about sex, gender, sexuality, identity, nature/nurture, etc., are just going to become suddenly resolved in a stable way super soon. If those fundamental questions are going to stick around, building on a bedrock of questionable philosophy and absolutely horrid "science" seems to almost necessitate some form of weird and bad transient outcomes.

gay marriage very much got down to philosophical concepts concerning what is sex, is sexual behavior distinct from an orientation, how is that determined, is it biological or not, etc., as well as questions concerning what marriage is, what its purpose is, why we have it, etc.

Couldn’t you make up similar deep philosophical questions about race? What counts as a race, is race different from ethnicity? All the same questions about marriage would apply, too.

You’re correct to note they didn’t matter, because the important issue was equal protection under the law. Government guarantees on marriage had to be extended in a race-blind manner. But I’d say the same for gay marriage! The civil right of marriage ought to be extended in a sex-blind manner.

It’s trans issues which are the odd one out. They can get married, can use existing infrastructure. They’re staking claims on social prestige rather than securing some otherwise-inaccessible right.

I mean, I had a whole paragraph immediately before that one:

at the time that interracial marriage rose to prominence, the question was relatively simple (in comparison), and one that was reasonably easily cabined as a purely legal question. Everyone more or less agreed that race was basically a thing. Everyone more or less agreed on what marriage was. They just had to figure out what to do with these things.

I even said later:

I recall predicting (from my experience taking a queer theory class at the time) that, if anything, we were going to see that the decisions made in the past concerning things like interracial marriage were, not wrong, but woefully shallow, as the philosophical eye would no longer take things like "race" to be more-or-less agreed upon as mostly existing as a thing, and that it might become messier in the future.

So sure, nowadays, people are trying to ask more deep philosophical questions about race, along the lines of what you're talking about. But I don't think this was so apparent at the time.

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Even though their slippery-slope argument was pretty broad

Right, what I remember from the time was conservatives getting agitated over "changing the definition of marriage". It's an argument I found bewildering at the time, like bro, you can use whatever definition you want, but I recon that "marriage" defined as "a union between a man and a woman" was an important concept to them the same way "woman" defined as "adult human female" is important to a lot of women nowadays. The slippery slope argument applied to that was "if you can change that definition, what else can you change", and while it's true they focused on other ways the definition of marriage could be changed rather than the definition of "man" and "woman", given the reaction to the incremental hypothetical they were actually using, it's hard to blame them they didn't try something more radical.

If there’s not much continuity between the LGB and the T agendas, is it accurate to call them “further demands”?

I'm not sure I agree with the premise. Didn't some of the very same activist orgs that fought for the LGB move directly onto the T?

As for your other question, yeah, I guess. It’d be immoral, but not uniquely so.

Right, and I can respect that opinion, but I think it's inconsistent with his "the scale of the issue is so tiny" argument. If he expects the anti-trans side to concede the issue based on it's scale, I don't see why he shouldn't concede it as well based on the same reasoning.

There weren't that many more gay people than that, and we were asked to rearrenge society for them, and were assured that any claim there will be further demands was a fallacy.

Gay people didn't present a major restructuring of society. By and large the same people are in power, the same economic system is in place, and the only major difference is that two people of the same sex can sign a contract they couldn't before. Gay marriage did nothing to weaken globalist neoliberal capitalism - since that system is relatively egalitarian and doesn't care if the person at the top is a man or a woman, gay or straight, etc. You can have capitalists and laborers regardless of how you treat gay people.

We now have further demands just as predicted, therefore the slipperyslope claim was correct.

I seem to recall the specific claims I encountered pre-Obergefell being more along the lines of, "people will want to marry cats and dogs!" or "what if people make pedophilia or incest legal?" While I'm sure there are fringe weirdos advocating even those, I think the fact that the "slippery slope" ended up mostly being people asking for trans people to be legally and socially recognized and to have access to medical interventions is rather less alarming and catastrophic than interspecies marriage or pro-pedophilia/incest claim would have been. I think there were good arguments against these kinds of concerns, and the pro-gay marriage people tended to be right on these specific issues.

I don't recall anyone pre-Obergerfell saying, "If we legalize gay marriage, then we'll have 4,780 adolescents starting on puberty blockers after a gender dysphoria diagnosis over a 5 year period and 14,726 minors will have hormone therapies, and annually around 300 13-17 year old girls will have breast reductions a year in a nation of approximately 73 million total children, accounting (all numbers together) for approximately 0.02% of children." My complaint here is not that no one got the exact numbers, since that would have been unreasonable to expect, but that no one got remotely close to the (relatively small!) scope of the issue, even if I'm sure you could dig up someone pre-Obergerfell making emotive claims that gay marriage will break down the idea of man- and woman-hood, and plunge our youth into a deep spiritual crisis around gender.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the error bars on some of those numbers I'm quoting are high enough to make your average person worry more about the number of trans people. But I think there's a basic motte-and-bailley happening here all the time. When people want to be alarmist, they'll quote the "30% of Gen Alpha is LGBTQ" type of surveys, or point to a 400% increase of referrals to a gender clinic of the last 5 years, or bring up a single clinic in a single country that didn't vet children hard enough. But when people point out that, as far as we know the actual numbers of kids receiving breast reductions or hormones or puberty blockers is relatively low, it's crickets.

I'm generally not impressed with claims that the trans issue somehow poses an existential threat to our society. The numbers just don't add up to that. Even if society evolved to the point where trans people became our palace eunuchs, our celibate priests, our castrati, or our skoptsy, I tend to think that otherwise healthy societies tend to have ways to route around such issues. This article claims 20% American women born between 1885 and 1915 never had children. WWI killed 6% of the adult male population in Britain.

We're regularly producing large populations of people who will never have children, and a healthy society would be able to bounce back, route around and deal with this problem. If that's not happening, then the trans issue is just the straw that broke the camel's back, because we couldn't get enough of our other societal structures functioning right.

Also, if the low numbers of trans people mean their demands aren't a big deal, does that mean you'd be ok with rejecting them entirely?

I don't think society needs internal scapegoats to function. That's just a strong tendency humans like to indulge in.

I don't believe in the perfectibility of human nature via education, but I want to believe that we can set up society in such a way that alarmist claims about a tiny minority of the population aren't a necessary glue to hold everything together. We could channel those instincts in more productive ways than taking 1/1000th of the population and throwing them under the bus to make the rest of us more comfortable.

Look, the problem isn't just that people who don't think gender essentialism is a coherent worldview think that we're sacrificing the wellbeing of many children and adults needlessly. That's a problem of course but it's secondary to the point deer make horse dynamics. It's deeply unsettling to have what seems like plain reality not just denied but the denial to have in many cases incredible force behind it. There is a troubling kind of argumentation, where one is made out narratively to be a victim and then a huge chunk of the country will blindly support them while being not just immune to argumentation otherwise but actively against it. This feels like an autoimmune response, I don't know if a country can survive this kind of unreasoning in the long term. It's mildly terrifying to consider how easily nearly anyone can be framed as the oppressor against a new invented victim. There does not appear to be any limiting principle.

That's a problem of course but it's secondary to the point deer make horse dynamics.

I know I'm going to sound like a broken record, but it's less "point deer make horse" and more "point guardian make adopted parent."

I maintain that you don't need any dubious metaphysics or unproven biological hypotheses to get a basic conception of trans-ness off the ground. I think if you accept that a legal document can "transform" an unrelated adult guardian into a parent in the eyes of the law and society, then it is possible for a legal document to "transform" a biologically male person into a woman in the eyes of the law and society.

There's nothing magical or spooky going on. There's no need to throw our old maps of reality away. We can fully acknowledge every true, scientifically verifiable fact about trans people, and still treat them like their adopted sex in as many contexts as it makes sense to do so, just as we can treat adoptive parents as biological parents in as many contexts as it makes sense to do so.

I understand that trans people and trans activists are often making stronger claims than I do in my posts on this topic. They'll advance metaphysical claims that they are "real" men or women, or that they have the "soul" of a man or woman. They'll advance unproven or irrelevant facts about biology to bolster their claims. I'm a metaphysical materialist, so I'm unimpressed by most of the metaphysical claims, and I'm willing to concede that the replication crisis and the lurking threat of a repeat of a lobotomy-sized science scandal casts sufficient doubt to make some level of skepticism basically reasonable, no matter what the current state of research is.

I just think it's important to point out that there's no necessary connection between a playbook of regressive social policies and trans activism. The legal and social questions can be settled completely separately from the metaphysical, medical and biological questions, and all of those are completely unrelated to the tactics that are currently being employed by some activists to get what they want.

There is a troubling kind of argumentation, where one is made out narratively to be a victim and then a huge chunk of the country will blindly support them while being not just immune to argumentation otherwise but actively against it. This feels like an autoimmune response, I don't know if a country can survive this kind of unreasoning in the long term. It's mildly terrifying to consider how easily nearly anyone can be framed as the oppressor against a new invented victim.

As I said above, I think cancel culture and victim culture are completely separate issues from what legal regime we decide to adopt with regards to trans people. I don't think any more "unreasoning" is required than for any other social "reality." And I don't think if you somehow definitively ended the trans debate in either a pro- or anti-trans way, that it would magically lead to cancel/victim culture disappearing as important social forces. They're symptoms, not causes in themselves.

I maintain that you don't need any dubious metaphysics or unproven biological hypotheses to get a basic conception of trans-ness off the ground.

I acknowledge there exists a motte of social gender understanding that jettisons nearly the entirety of the movement's beliefs which is merely overly neurotically fixated on gender trappings. As you say though, it has practically no constituency because from that standing it really can't make any demands. The movement needs more than mere preference as motivation to justify demands for extraordinary treatment.

There is a clear and tangible need motivating treating adoptive parents like parents. They've taken on a real responsibility for the care of a child. If they just really liked PTA meetings and being seen pushing a stroller around we wouldn't humor them, or at least wouldn't tolerate any kind of top down demand to humor them.

If we reduce the question of trans down to "some people want to be treated s or they're the opposite sex". Then sure, it's coherent, and I'm even willing to humor it to a degree even though I think it'd be better liberalism to just say men can wear dresses and be treated like women while still being men if they want. This is of course all academic, we're talking about a reasonable version of trans activism that doesn't exist and won't ever be prominent.

I know I'm going to sound like a broken record, but it's less "point deer make horse" and more "point guardian make adopted parent."

I maintain that you don't need any dubious metaphysics or unproven biological hypotheses to get a basic conception of trans-ness off the ground. I think if you accept that a legal document can "transform" an unrelated adult guardian into a parent in the eyes of the law and society, then it is possible for a legal document to "transform" a biologically male person into a woman in the eyes of the law and society.

There's just one problem, the legal document does not define a "parent" as "whoever is designated to be a parent by the document", it just formalizes a legal relationship with rights and duties, and it is those rights and duties that are the functional legal definition of being a parent. Even then no one would begrudge a kid trying to find their real parents, and anyone screaming "They are your real parents! Adoptive parents are parents!" would be seen as completely deranged.

There can be no such functional definition for "man" or "woman" for at least two reasons that I can think of:

  • it will necessarily come into conflict with decades of feminist activism fighting for equality between the sexes

  • no matter how low you set a functional bar for being "man" / "woman" there will be those in the transgender community that do not fit the criteria, causing outrage about "gatekeeping"

This is where all the drama about "what is a woman" comes from. Pro-trans activists aren't spontaneously getting a bad case of the stutters, it's not that they've been put on the spot and can't come up with a satisfying answer, they don't have an answer, because there can't be an answer that doesn't cause a massive shitstorm. Like @ControlsFreak said, trans issues are in the intersection of very deep and important philosophical questions, and that simply can't be swept under the rug (though we've been trying furiously).

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I don't think society needs internal scapegoats to function. That's just a strong tendency humans like to indulge in.

I don't believe in the perfectibility of human nature via education, but I want to believe that we can set up society in such a way that alarmist claims about a tiny minority of the population aren't a necessary glue to hold everything together.

I feel like you're dodging my question. You say things like "Gay people didn't present a major restructuring of society. By and large the same people are in power...", "Gay marriage did nothing to weaken globalist neoliberal capitalism...", "I don't recall anyone pre-Obergerfell saying, "If we legalize gay marriage, then we'll have 4,780 adolescents starting on puberty blockers after a gender dysphoria diagnosis over a 5 year period...", "I'm generally not impressed with claims that the trans issue somehow poses an existential threat to our society. The numbers just don't add up to that". I might be misinterpreting you, but given the above I don't know how to interpret statements like that other than "unless the issue affects a statistically significant portion of society (or abolishes the current economic system, I suppose), you should not oppose it". If this is the argument you're making, I want to point out that it's symmetrical. You should have no problem with a complete ban on gender affirming therapies for minors, because the issue is exactly as tiny as those therapies being prescribed to them. You accuse the anti-trans side of being hysterical over this tiny amount of prescriptions, but the sitting president of the Unites States called the attempts to regulate them "sinful".

If you do have a problem with these bans, I want you to explain in why, while explicitly taking your own "it's so tiny" argument into account, and once you do that I want you to explain why I can't use the same reasoning as a counter-argument as well.

I seem to recall the specific claims I encountered pre-Obergefell being more along the lines of, "people will want to marry cats and dogs!"

Yeah, I know, I was laughing at those idiots thinking gay marriage might have any downstream effects at all too. The difference is that I never took it to be a specific prediction (though funnily enough that meme did get at least one specific prediction right), which is why I felt forced to concede they were right when the trans issue become more prominent.

even if I'm sure you could dig up someone pre-Obergerfell making emotive claims that gay marriage will break down the idea of man- and woman-hood,

I'd like you to elaborate on why that is a requirement to conclude they were right about the slippery slope. They were operating under constraints of believability, and like I said the idea that gay marriage will have any downstream effects was seen as absurd. As such it feels unreasonable to me to demand that they get second-order effects exactly right.

the "slippery slope" ended up mostly being people asking for trans people to be legally and socially recognized and to have access to medical interventions

"Legally and socially recognized" leaves a hole in the argument you can drive an oil tanker through. This is the part where we go from a sub-section of society wanting to live their lives in peace according to their values, towards where speech norms are being imposed on everybody else, people get banned and fired for expressing their opinions, are expected to smile and nod as their daughters are being clobbered in contact sports by men, and to turn their heads when a male rapist is being sent to a female prison.

is rather less alarming and catastrophic than interspecies marriage or pro-pedophilia/incest claim would have been.

Why? The number of people affected by these things would be just as tiny.

My complaint here is not that no one got the exact numbers, since that would have been unreasonable to expect, but that no one got remotely close to the (relatively small!) scope of the issue

My response to this is that the scale of the issue is not small at all. The numbers you cited eclipse the number of unarmed black men dying at the hands of the police, they dwarf unethical medical experiments like Tuskagee, and unlike the campus rape epidemic, they are actually happening. I could end at an argument from hypocrisy here, and say that I'd take your argument seriously, when I see progressives trying to reel their own in based on the numbers argument, but I'll go further: this argument is wrong.

Certain issues aren't about the number of affected people, they are worth talking about and addressing even if they affected only one person. I consider gender affirming care - generally - to be a medical scandal. It is scientifically unsupportable, and only tolerable when applied to adults, on the assumption that adults have a right to self-determination - a right that next to no one on the pro-trans side actually takes seriously, I might add. When it's applied to children, it becomes an atrocity. When it turns out that it's applied to children after years long assurances that this never happens, because we have strict standard of care to ensure accurate diagnosis and age-appropriate treatment, and after we find out this is in fact happening, those standards of care are then changed to remove age requirements... well, I'm running out of vocabulary to describe how messed up that is.

they'll quote the "30% of Gen Alpha is LGBTQ" type of surveys,

I agree that's a bad argument, which is why I never use it.

or point to a 400% increase of referrals to a gender clinic of the last 5 years

This argument was not used to claim the scale of the problem is earth-shattering, it was used as evidence for the social contagion theory

or bring up a single clinic in a single country that didn't vet children hard enough.

What happens inside a clinic is not public information, in fact, we consider medical information to be private and have put specific safeguards to ensure it stays as such. This means we're left with relying on whistleblowers (which has the obvious issue of people worried about losing their jobs and social standing), and clinicians inadvertently telling on themselves (which relies on them being unaware of doing anything controversial). Even then I'm aware of 3 separate clinics - Jaime Reed's, Tamara Pietzke's, and Diane Ehrensaft's. The claim isn't that the children weren't vetted "hard enough", the issue is that they made no attempt to rule out gender dysphoria at all. People running these clinics either belong in jail, or at the very least should have their license to practice medicine stripped from them.

I'm generally not impressed with claims that the trans issue somehow poses an existential threat to our society.

Sure, just like I'm not impressed with claims that there is an ongoing transgender genocide. Now, do you want to take a wild guess which claim is actually being made by activists, and which isn't?

But when people point out that (...), it's crickets.

That's just not true. We've had this conversation before, I responded to your points. In fact, you were the one that got quiet after that. I don't hold it against you, it's normal for interest in a conversation to drop off if it's going on for too long / you get responses from multiple people, but you shouldn't act like no one ever addressed your claims.

I might be misinterpreting you, but given the above I don't know how to interpret statements like that other than "unless the issue affects a statistically significant portion of society (or abolishes the current economic system, I suppose), you should not oppose it". If this is the argument you're making, I want to point out that it's symmetrical. You should have no problem with a complete ban on gender affirming therapies for minors, because the issue is exactly as tiny as those therapies being prescribed to them.

You are misinterpreting. A better construction of my position is a more classical liberal position along the lines of, "We should consider the amount of harm done to unrelated parties before we consider banning a practice." There are plenty of things that are legal that I think are best avoided such as getting a face tattoo, but I recognize that I don't have access to the One True Way of living life or organizing society, and I think that it is best to keep a diversity of experimenting viewpoints within society for the following reasons:

  1. New technologies have cropped up so quickly that we've barely had time to adapt to them as a culture. I think that cancel culture and victim culture are two maladaptive social technologies that have come up in that environment, and I think legally allowing a greater variety of viewpoint and lifestyle diversity makes it more likely that some group will through experimentation create social norms that make for a functional human society alongside modern technologies.
  2. Even without considerations of us adapting socially to new technology, I think that the economic effects of new technologies have also created a need for considering a wider variety of approaches in order to weather the coming storm from automation and a thousand other disruptive technologies. I welcome the idea of dominionist Catholics choosing Exit over Voice in order to form their own small scale societies that might outlast the collapse of society, I welcome the idea of Mormons creating granaries to outlast an ecological disaster, I welcome the idea of young LGBT people attempting to create fulfilling communities and found families within an individualist framework, etc. etc. I might have my bets on which ones are more likely to be around in 100 or 1000 years, but I'm open to the idea that I'm wrong.

At the federal level (speaking in a US context), all I advocate for is that adult trans people have the ability to use public accommodations of their adopted sex, except where that would be biologically impracticable. I get that even this position is controversial, but it makes no metaphysical or scientific commitments that can't be justified, and it leaves the more controversial issues of trans minors and things like trans participation in sports to be dealt with as each state wishes.

For me, it is simply a recognition that if any form our society or species is going to survive, then we can't put all of our eggs in one basket when it comes to how we organize society, and allowing trans people to use their preferred public accommodation is a part of making something like what Scott calls Archipelago a more practicable reality.

I fully appreciate that someone who believes strongly in the social contagion hypothesis might consider the mere idea of trans people to be a form of harm being done to people. Personally, I don't know if the social contagion hypothesis is true, and I don't know if I've seen any evidence that makes it particularly more likely than the:

  • Social Acceptance/Medical Advancement Hypothesis: As social acceptance of trans people has increased, and likelihood of passing has gotten better for people who medically transition, the number of people who already would have had relatively strong, consistent and fixed desires to live as a member of the opposite sex has stayed the same, but appeared to grow since more people are willing to take the risk of being open about it.

Heck, there's nothing stopping some form of both being true. The number of detransitioners is only evidence of us being bad at doing differential diagnoses, and not really evidence of social contagion as the major driving force of the uptick. There will always be hypochondriacs, or people with OCD who obsessively fear they might have some disease or condition, or teenagers learning a bunch of new medical or psychological terms and wondering if one of those explains the trouble they've been having in life.

My response to this is that the scale of the issue is not small at all. The numbers you cited eclipse the number of unarmed black men dying at the hands of the police, they dwarf unethical medical experiments like Tuskagee, and unlike the campus rape epidemic, they are actually happening.

I tend to think most of the other things you listed are also a bit overblown, and in our efforts to "learn from" them and create rules for avoiding them we might have done more harm than good. Do you disagree?

Even then I'm aware of 3 separate clinics - Jaime Reed's, Tamara Pietzke's, and Diane Ehrensaft's. The claim isn't that the children weren't vetted "hard enough", the issue is that they made no attempt to rule out gender dysphoria at all. People running these clinics either belong in jail, or at the very least should have their license to practice medicine stripped from them.

I'm not so naive as to believe doctors will always do the right thing, or that current best practices will always be good for the health and well-being of patients. Lobotomies are the perfect example of a medical scandal that I think we should strive to avoid in the future.

If there are bad clinics, I'm not against the idea of shutting them down, stripping a bunch of people of licensees, and letting families affected sue. I have acknowledged in other posts that I think the replication crisis has undermined the basic trust we might place in medicine, and so I don't find it unreasonable for a given person to weigh the evidence and come out against large portions of trans medicine and healthcare.

However, my basic position is a separate one to almost every other part of the trans debate. I think we could allow trans women to use women's restrooms even in a legal regime where cross-sex hormones and surgeries were 100% illegal. There is no contradiction there at all.

Let the best practices in medicine evolve how they will as more, higher quality evidence emerges. We're always making judgements under uncertainty anyways.

Sure, just like I'm not impressed with claims that there is an ongoing transgender genocide. Now, do you want to take a wild guess which claim is actually being made by activists, and which isn't?

I don't control what bad arguments or bad tactics people broadly "on my side" make. Obviously, if I had my druthers such people would only ever use good, convincing arguments and honorable tactics, and never use bad, unconvincing arguments and dishonorable tactics. It is beyond my power to make that happen. All I can do is try my best to articulate what I think are the better reasons for this position.

I'm open to being convinced that I'm wrong, and I get that people who don't share some of my underlying commitments or values might validly arrive at different positions in spite of us looking at broadly the same evidence base.

That's just not true. We've had this conversation before, I responded to your points. In fact, you were the one that got quiet after that. I don't hold it against you, it's normal for interest in a conversation to drop off if it's going on for too long / you get responses from multiple people, but you shouldn't act like no one ever addressed your claims.

Fair enough. I understand I might not have responded to every point you raised in past posts. As you say, it is often hard to respond when I get too many responses.

A better construction of my position is a more classical liberal position along the lines of, "We should consider the amount of harm done to unrelated parties before we consider banning a practice."

I don't follow. If I want to heavily regulate or ban pediatric gender affirming care, and you point out that the amount of children going through these procedures is small, what does that do to consider the harm done to unrelated parties? Who even are the unrelated parties here? We both seem to be focusing strictly on the children going through gender affirming care. I can understand the disagreement if my claim is that GAC hurts children, and your claim is that it helps them (the usual debate that happens with trans activists), but I don't understand how your "come on, it's just a couple thousand" is supposed to parse as anything other than "it might hurt them, but there's so few of them you shouldn't care".

If you want to say that concerns over children shouldn't limit the rights of adults, I'm mostly with you. I still have plenty to say on the subject, as I don't think the evidence for adult GAC holds up very well either, but I don't think blanket bans are the way to tackle that.

but I recognize that I don't have access to the One True Way of living life or organizing society, and I think that it is best to keep a diversity of experimenting viewpoints within society for the following reasons

At the federal level (speaking in a US context), all I advocate for is that adult trans people have the ability to use public accommodations of their adopted sex, except where that would be biologically impracticable.

That's a fine principle to follow, but for me it would mean no federal policy at all. Let the states sort it out internally. Some will be restrictive, some will be permissive, and time will tell who was right.

Your approach would just result in kicking the can down the road, and people fighting over what is "biologically impracticable" (Is putting male rapists in female prisons "biologically impracticable"? I mean clearly, it can be done).

I tend to think most of the other things you listed are also a bit overblown, and in our efforts to "learn from" them and create rules for avoiding them we might have done more harm than good. Do you disagree?

I don't disagree, but I resent having a wet blanket thrown on a conversation I care about, when I've just been forced to seriously consider several grievances that felt frivolous to me. As for the reaction causing more harm than good, it's all in the reaction, rather than the issue being overblown. Like I said, I think BLM was frivolous, but body cams were a great idea. This is why the numbers conversation feels like such a deflection, if you're worried about a particular policy being an overkill, I'm sure we could hash one out that will be more acceptable to your classical liberal sentiments. In fact, from everything you're saying it doesn't sound like we even disagree on that much when it comes to policy, which is again why it's so frustrating to get served the numbers argument, and have it implied that it somehow refutes my concerns.

Let the best practices in medicine evolve how they will as more, higher quality evidence emerges. We're always making judgements under uncertainty anyways.

In a perfect world, yes, I'd be happy to let science sort itself out. In the current world science is held hostage to ideology, and political action is part of the self-correcting process you're asking me to trust in, so I feel like I have no other choice than to participate in the politics.

I don't control what bad arguments or bad tactics people broadly "on my side" make.

Right, and I'd never demand that from you, but then surely you must understand why I was bemused when asked to answer to some "existential threat" claim that you said was implicit in my position.

Fair enough. I understand I might not have responded to every point you raised in past posts.

That's absolutely fine, it's just the *crickets* bit I took issue with.

"We should consider the amount of harm done to unrelated parties before we consider banning a practice."

I don't think this has ever been anyone's position in the history of getting things banned by a government. A far more consistent way of understanding bans is that they are used as a way of hurting or disadvantaging people that they don't like, or social engineering attempts at removing undesirable behaviors.

People don't give a shit about harm, and when they do at all, it's often the point to maximize harm to the outgroup.

My understanding of why gay marriage was legalized is that it was a power and institutional flex by the ascendant progressive left as a way of hurting their outgroup, the religious right. They saw an opportunity to stamp on some faces after the religious right was used as a political force by Bush 2 to win his elections, and they did it. Had it been any other issue they could have hurt their political opponents on, they would have done it. Gay marriage was an easy low hanging fruit because it had little to no short term economic costs, there was little political capital used in getting it passed if you worked in a heavily urban area, it stimulated a lot of fervor in the voting base, and it expanded the marriage/divorce lawyer clientele.

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I agree it’s not an existential threat - quite possibly every actually does. The people on the other side of you on the issue are not making a claim on the grounds of Utilitarianism.

I would argue that quite a few trans skeptical arguments are clearly utilitarian/consequentialist in nature: "irreversible damage", detransition woes, and bathroom/women's prison fears all seem to have their basis in a line of consequentialist reasoning.

I'll concede that many trans skeptical arguments are built on foundations of different conceptions of fairness, or metaphysical/epistemological commitments of some kind. But I do think that the "think of the children" type arguments veer into an implicit claim of existential threat. If we're supposed to take it seriously as a call to action, we must believe that more than 0.02%-2% of the population are going to be brainwashed by the trend of "trans ideology." Because "think of a tiny, insignificant minority of the children" is less of a rallying cry than, "it could be your kids next!"

If we're supposed to take it seriously as a call to action, we must believe that more than 0.02%-2% of the population are going to be brainwashed by the trend of "trans ideology." Because "think of a tiny, insignificant minority of the children" is less of a rallying cry than, "it could be your kids next!"

I disagree. If something moves from "so rare you've only heard about it happening in America, via sensationalist media" to "several cases in your tiny, rural, eastern European town" most people will still parse that as "it could be your kids next!"

I don't undertsand why the 'tiny minority' argument still gets play on here of all places.

The issue is not Lizardman's Constant. The issue is society needlessly and uncomfortably contorting itself to accommodate Lizardmen. I've said it elsewhere here, but trans activism has reached into my world on several fronts over the last decade, twisting up everything from hobby groups, to corporate politics, to the software I install prompting for pronouns. This is all possible even without even so much as sharing room air with trans person.

I may be a simpleton, but - there is something infuriating about the follow-up 'What consequences are you so worried about?'. And I'm really not sure in the specifics! Call it a hunch, but I think the officiated dissolution of the man/woman binary will manifest in a thousand indirect and different ways down to the level of how one socializes with other people. And the amount of confusion and irritation it produces will never abate. They're building a house without a ground floor, because they think floor boards are just ugh trivial.

The issue is society needlessly and uncomfortably contorting itself to accommodate Lizardmen.

I think this phrase conceals a lot of different things, not all of which should be considered in the same breath. All of the following are different:

  • A private software company deciding to include a pronoun prompt.
  • A private Hollywood movie studio deciding to include a trans character in their next movie.
  • The Federal government making discriminating against trans people in housing, public accommodation, employment, and banking illegal.
  • Companies doing the bare minimum to comply with Federal laws.
  • Companies going above and beyond to comply with Federal laws.
  • Your local hobby community having enough scolds to make it difficult to talk about trans people the way you think is most accurate.

I'm sure I could split out thousands of more specific scenarios, but you get the idea. My overall response would be that where "society" is doing something you don't like, it is important to distinguish between private individuals, groups of private individuals, private companies, or the government. If your complaints are about the first three, then I don't really know what to say. Society is allowed to drift from social norms you would find preferable. I don't like tipping culture in the United States, but I do participate in it in spite of that. You have to choose how much you're willing to interface with larger society, and dealing with the consequences if you step away from the most common social norms around you. You can make the choice to be the guy who never tips anyone out of some principle, but you'll deal with the social fall out of that choice.

If it's the government's actions, or their follow on effects then the answer is "simple", but not "easy." Organize, win over the hearts and minds of the voters, convince the Supreme Court to undo all the laws you hate. There are plenty of laws I don't love in their current form, but if they're relatively small burdens on me I don't spend a ton of time worrying about them. If Federal trans legislation is hurting you personally, then find specific places you can move the legal regime in your favor and work to make it happen.

I really wish we could have these conversations without somebody dropping the "Have you considered that society changes?" chestnut as if this had never occured to their interlocutor. I don't believe in a moral arc of the universe, that this world owes me or anybody anything, or that I will be anything more than insignificant dust and long-forgotten memories long before our universe blinks out. The world is nakedly and unashamedly unfair, and good guys don't always win. I am fully aware of the consequences for participating or abstaining from the social games society expects people to play. I understand that my future position in this new world ranges between softly smiling while keeping my thoughts to myself or the Principal Skinner meme should this state of affairs be permanent. I know that it requires organization and coordination to fight against. Half of the problem with the 'woke resistance' is getting coordinated at all before they buckle under their own ridiculousness or get sabotaged by a hostile media!

Just assume I have thought about this, and that I realize my own predicament. I'm sure you can appreciate that your appeal means nothing to somebody who believes they have legitimate concerns with this forced, artificially imposed consensus while they have years left on this rock. It's certainly not going to stop them from sharing those thoughts on a pebble-sized forum dedicated to that very purpose.

I appreciate that formal and informal 'trans support' manifests through different mechanics and pathways vis a vis public and private actors, but your distinctions just illustrate to me the messy, tangled wholeness of the issue. That a company is just forced to comply with the 'bare minimum' of federal laws imposed by activists - or the increasing set of secondary yet nonetheless important rules alternatingly concocted by and imposed upon every major corporate and media entity that functionally comprise a second government - does not soothe my ire, but speaks to the totality of the whole problem. You recall what Father Merrin said.

I've heard the "it's only a few kids on college campuses" argument, and while I was happy enough to think it would stay in America and only in certain circles, next thing I knew I was getting people putting their preferred pronouns in work emails. It's not something mandated by government or law, which makes it even more insidious; it's people in certain areas or positions who feel that they should, if they believe in all the guff, or that they have to, if they don't, do this thing to signal that they are good greengrocers who know what signs to put in the window.

This thing I was told would never be imposed on anyone, would never become widespread, and was just "a few kids/academics on college campuses in the USA".

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Legalizing gay marriage was seen as a radical leftist movement, but the actual result was that all the gay people - and most importantly, gay artists and icons and culture warriors - stopped living as radical counter-culture outsiders challenging every pillar of the nuclear family, and switched to being respectability-politics-first normies living quiet lives in the suburbs with 2.5 adopted kids.

I don't think this really changes your point, but "all the gay people" is definitely an exaggeration here. I definitely know people whose queerness is central to their counter-culture identity of "down with heteronormative patriarchal capitalism" or whatever, including speaking out against nuclear families. And queer artists who joyfully include the same themes in their work.

For sure, blanket statements are always wrong, I was trying to invoke top-level demographic trends and using imprecise language.

Although I would guess (not high confidence, interested in input) that the people doing that now are more interested in the being counter-culture first and are bringing their queerness into it second, as opposed to back then when queerness forced you out of the mainstream culture and a counter-culture was developed as a result. I think that's a real and important difference, though maybe I can't fully articulate why... in practical terms, just the number of people affected, should be different.

I can't imagine what it's like to live in right-leaning communities at a time when most believe the election was stolen and they're living under the equivalent on an anti-pope.

It's fine to be honest. Just as the opposite is fine mostly. Most of my Red neighbors don't rant about Biden or Trump all the time. It certainly isn't what i would call scary. Just as with abortion, or that capitalism is murder or whatever, what people say and what people actually do is very different. And what people mostly do is go to their jobs, come home and then repeat.

Almost every Republican who says they think the election was stolen are not going to do anything about it. Just as almost no-one who says that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism actually does anything about it. Let's not get people's rhetoric confused with something they believe enough to actually do something.

You would be perfectly fine living in the vast majority of right wing leaning places in the US, just as your right wing counterpart would be perfectly fine living in a left leaning area. The vast majority of people are simply not that politically engaged.

I've been instructed by the mods that I should have replied to this.

I didn't because my response is just 'yeah I totally agree, I guess I should have questioned OP's premise instead of accepting and mirroring it', but that feels like it doesn't add much to the discussion so I was just going to upvote and move on.

I’m going to disagree a bit. There’s a tipping point for any person at which they’re willing to cross a whole lot of lines to get things back to how they believe they should be. And to be honest most of the people who believe that believe in either communism or stolen elections are probably not going to do anything to stop someone else from doing it. If I truly believe that Joe Biden won in 2024, I may not personally fly to DC to try to stop certification, but I’m also not going to stop you from doing exactly that. If it bothers me enough, I might even donate to causes that believe in what I believe. The lady in the pews who opposes abortion probably donates to the cause.

To cut a very long story short, there are gradations in radicalization and normalization in any political or social opinion. And there are gradations of being involved as well. Not everyone is going to be on the bleeding edge, but they will often at least grudgingly accept those who are. And as you get closer to whatever edge you’re on, you’re increasingly okay with personal involvement in the cause. And those support networks allow the fringe to. Operate more easily. If it’s a militant group, someone might allow them to meet in their field. Or even just not say anything to outsiders about the group.

I agree with most of this, but I don't think the US is anywhere near where it was in the 70's in this regard, and certainly not as divided as Northern Ireland was, and things held together just fine. The tipping point for most people in a wealthy country is pretty high.

1973 saw 2-3 domestic bombings daily! We don’t blow up transformers and police stations anymore so much as shoot groups of random people.

Of course, the domestic terrorists of the 70s were left wing radicals whose white leadership often went on to careers in academia which is hard to imagine for the current right wing radicals.

Back to the topic at hand. I don’t know how to compare the two.

4 years of Biden has not particularly enshrined leftist values into law, as far as I'm aware? Some of the massive infrastructure spending was earmarked towards renewable energy, I guess, but that's not exactly super-radicalized social justice leftism. As far as I can tell, the law has moved to the right significantly during Biden's term, because of Republicans owning the Supreme Court and most state legislatures.

Honestly, I think that the way to make things move right without backlash is to give in on the tiny culture war sticking points while persuading people on the underlying conservative norms.

It sounds like part of what you're saying is that undercurrents are more powerful for change than the currents themselves. This is very interesting, and if true, speaks to some sort of profoundly strange with our world or our culture. I feel like this could be worthy of someone writing some kind of political science thesis about this. I'd love to know more about why that's the case, has it always been the case, are there nuances, what things work better for undercurrents vs overcurrents, is it because of our unprecedented online culture, and what this means for how future political movements should be trying to accomplish their ends.

A lot of people will happily fall back into those values without thinking about it, if you just stop doing things that look explicitly bigoted or unjust or cruel in ways that get them mad and turn them against you.

Well, this is probably my libertarian, mottezian, contrarian-style behavior coming out, but I can't stand the fact that you're probably right about this, that optics rule our world more than truth.

Well, this is probably my libertarian, mottezian, contrarian-style behavior coming out, but I can't stand the fact that you're probably right about this, that optics rule our world more than truth.

I have a more charitable but patronizing view of the general populace, I guess, which basically says 'Most people don't have the time, inclination, or ability to understand most issues deeply, and relying on hueristics when they need to form an opinion or take a side is not actually crazy given that. To a first-order approximation, 'this person seems cruel and/or crazy, their side is probably wrong' is a pretty good hueristic, and a lot of our cultural problems come from more-engaged people realizing that normies are using that heuristic and trying to manipulate their sensory inputs in order to trigger it on their opponents'.

Which is to say, most people do care about being directed by the truth, they're just not competent to discern it.

(which I don't exclude myself from, that's why I check in on arguments from places that disagree with me, just in case)

Of course, maybe that reduces down to your sentiment, anyway.

I don't have a vote in any American election, but I think if I did, and my choices were "the hard-lefties are going to whine anyway, no matter the result", then I would vote for Trump (or whomever). May as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Even if it's a doomed effort - as I think the upcoming vote in our referendums will be, to change "sexist" language in the Constitution; I'm voting "no" even though I expect "yes" to win - because then at least I can say to myself that I didn't passively go along. If I don't, then I don't get to complain about "they do stuff I don't like" because I didn't even put up a token resistance.

But if you want to vote for "whatever will cut down conflict in my personal and work life", I'm not going to call you names or tell you to do otherwise. If you want a quiet domestic life, instead of listening to your spouse bitching about the horrible guy, then that's absolutely your choice and your right to make that choice. I take your point about no matter who the Republican candidate is, they'll be unacceptable; see this opinion piece about Nikki Haley. If you're a Democrat, then better her than Trump, who is Literally Hitler, right? Wrong!

I'm starting to think the only thing that would satisfy some is if the Republicans decided to never again run a candidate in any election and announced "You're right, we're wrong, only a Democratic president/governor/dog catcher is the proper and suitable choice, we'll all just go away now and convert to the other party".

Interesting that Scott campaigned against Trump in 2016 on the supposed nonpartisan basis (Trump is uniquely bad, it's better to the right if he loses too), but didn't endorse DeSantis or Haley in the republican primary on the same basis.

When has he endorsed anyone in the primaries? The Trump/Hillary option came really late in the game.

I think Scott could see neither of them realistically had a chance. I've always thought this was the wrong time for DeSantis to go, and the way his campaign crumbled demonstrated that. Even if he had been picked, all the rhetoric would just have shifted to him being Literally Hitler - think of the DeathSantis moniker. That seems to have started with his handling of the Covid response, then shifted to "he won't repeal the death penalty" and then used for whatever was grinding that particular person's gears. I like the bit here about the Christian Catholic (as distinct from us non-Christian Catholics, I suppose?)

Ron Death Santis, a supposed Christian Catholic, is now pushing what the New York Times on April 10 dubbed the “Toughest Immigration Crackdown in the Nation.” He has moved beyond “banning the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through third grade” and banning books that tell Black history through his “S.T.O.P Woke” act, and has gone back to manipulating the state to “crucify” undocumented immigrants and those who help them.

So, DeathSantis because he's opposed to queer trans Black illegal immigrants, or whatever?

As for Haley, well she's not really got the name recognition yet. She needs to build her base and maybe 2028 will be her better chance, but if all she's got then is "two terms as governor of South Carolina and I couldn't even win the primary against the Orange Beast", then I don't prognosticate hopeful outcomes.

DeSantis was the leading candidate before Trump got indicted.

Not sure that DeathSantis would catch on. The combination of two different fricatives adjacent to one another, combined with how people pronounce death for longer than de might make it feel a little awkward to say and clumsy? But Trump was using the only marginally better DeSanctimonious, so what do I know.

Scott might be excused for not opining any more on party politics in the basis of the reception (and misunderstandings) of that article, though. I don't get the vibe from Astralcodexten Scott that he might.

I actually don't really care too much who is president. Either one of them would IMO do a good enough job. I mostly care whether the president impacts my everyday life or causes nuclear war. However, though it isn't his fault directly, having Trump in charge would impact my everyday life negatively, mostly because it would fuel another 4 years of incessant leftist whining all around me, from all my friends and family, along with people starting to (erroneously, IMO) see and declare that racism and sexism is everywhere again. It'll start causing fights between me and my wife again. My workplace and all local institutions will start making statements about how they're standing up to Trump and racism. Under Biden, I have truly enjoyed some nice peace and respite from politics.

I'm also not looking forward to the toxicity that will result from a Trump win. I would argue against Trump having a greater effect on ones own life though as Biden reinforced and introduced such draconian measures during COVID, such as the vaccine mandates, which was a HARD and direct effect on my life vs a SOFT effect of putting up with a bunch of whiny liberals. Not to mention the censorship industrial complex, wars, judicial overreach; a leftist executive wields hard power much more readily than a trump administration with all of the deep-state headwinds.

I am not expecting the same level of whining we saw in 2020. One reason is we don’t have COVID so fewer bored leftist. The second reason is it’s tough to cry wolf for the tenth time and still get people outraged.

They've had eight years of whining (it wasn't fair that he beat Hillary, he must have cheated, the Russians, the Russians! in 2016, coup attempt killing democracy in 2020, law suits, criminal, lock him up! to date) and no sign of stopping yet, why not another four years? It's all being hyped up as "if Trump wins, Fascism now!" so there's somebody out there still outraged and noisy about it.

The second reason is it’s tough to cry wolf for the tenth time and still get people outraged.

This doesn't really seem true. Back in 2016, I wasn't upset about Trump winning the way that other people were, but I did have some pretty significant concerns about what I would have described as a high-variance Presidency. What the hell is this weirdo going to do? I didn't know and thought it was reasonable to be concerned that it would be something actually catastrophic for Americans. And then... pretty much nothing. After a pretty ordinary three years, things were actually looking pretty good heading into 2020 and I figured Trump was probably going to win a fairly easy reelection on the strength of a potent economy and there just generally being not much in the way of actual bad outcomes for Americans or even anything all that radical that anyone could point to.

This is where the narrator voiceover comes in to correct me that 2020 was not in fact a fairly normal year lacking in chaos or bad things for Americans.

This is where the narrator voiceover comes in to correct me that 2020 was not in fact a fairly normal year lacking in chaos or bad things for Americans.

I'm really not sure how we got the narrative that the liberals were crying wolf over the bad things Trump was doing, and then an actual catastrophe happened as a result, and somehow you still think they were crying wolf?

  • -15

Firing 30 people in Beijing did not result in the Coronavirus pandemic, that's absurd.

Eliminating the people in charge of keeping China honest on containing pandemics only a few months before China proceeds to not even try to contain a pandemic and blatantly lie about it seems like it might be a little related. Sure, they may have failed to contain it if they did try.

To be fair, the more important line of defense would have been keeping China honest on enforcing the rules about live animal markets they implemented after SARS and then stopped enforcing after a few years; I'm having trouble finding a hard timeline on that, but that's definitely primarily Obama's fuck up.

To be fair, the more important line of defense would have been keeping China honest on enforcing the rules about live animal markets they implemented after SARS and then stopped enforcing after a few years; I'm having trouble finding a hard timeline on that, but that's definitely primarily Obama's fuck up.

Wet-market origin has been discredited at this point - COVID was almost certainly leaked from a lab doing Gain-of-Function research. Changes to regulations around wet markets would have done absolutely nothing to stop the pandemic.

That said, the idea that the US could have done anything whatsoever to keep China honest in this regard is a joke - too many people in the US government had their fingers in this particular pie for them to be able to do anything about it.

Wet-market origin has been discredited at this point - COVID was almost certainly leaked from a lab doing Gain-of-Function research.

Can you cite proof of this? I wouldn't mind being able to prove this to some people I know.

I actually don't have a single source that sums everything up - I'll go looking for one that ties everything up, but unfortunately all the good summaries I have so far carry the kind of undeniable political valence that makes them not terribly effective at convincing regular people.

My impression was that that wasn't the case: I know there was some series of fairly thorough videos recently that I didn't watch where two sides presented their positions, and the judges ultimately came out in favor of the natural origins hypothesis.

Not certain what I think, though my priors definitely would lean toward lab leak, but I haven't looked at any concrete evidence.

I don't know much about what they were doing there other than the articles you posted and similar ones that I remember from the time. The only specific position they mention from the CDC was a woman who trained Chinese workers to search for pandemic outbreaks. That does sound useful but since you're saying that the Chinese blatantly lied about it and didn't even try to contain it then detecting the pandemic wasn't the issue and having more Chinese government workers trained to do that wouldn't have helped. I don't know what leverage the CDC would have had to make the Chinese government be honest about anything.

Even in that article some of the people involved were skeptical that it would have made a difference:

“In the end, based on circumstances in China, it probably wouldn’t have made a big difference,” Scott McNabb, who was a CDC epidemiologist for 20 years and is now a research professor at Emory University. “The problem was how the Chinese handled it. What should have changed was the Chinese should have acknowledged it earlier and didn’t.”

China wasn't letting the CDC investigate:

“Dr. Redfield and I made the offer on January 6th - 36 days ago, 60,000 cases and 1,300 deaths ago,” Azar said. “We made the offer to send the CDC experts in to assist their Chinese colleagues to get to the bottom of key scientific questions like, how transmissible is this disease? What is the severity? What is the incubation period and can there be asymptomatic transmission?”

I certainly don't think the CDC was capable of containing a pandemic in China given that they failed to do so in the US and that every other government that tried to contain it also ultimately failed, with the exception of a few island nations like New Zealand. Probably the only things that would have helped would be banning wet markets and banning gain of function research, but it seems like we've moved on now and nobody is going to do either of those things.

The catastrophes of 2020 were the Covid freakout and the riots. The left got its way on both things. To the extent that Trump fucked up in 2020, it was in failing to reject the advice of "experts" and failing to listen to Tom Cotton on riots.

The catastrophe was our Covid response. We could have ignored Covid and been fine, or gotten away with a far more measured response and still been fine.

Yes, trump was president when the Covid response was decided on. But the democrats were demanding even more of the catastrophic policies; maybe if Ted Cruz had won the 2016 election we wouldn’t have high inflation right now, but whatever. Saying ‘Trump caused a catastrophe by doing slightly less of the things we told him to do, and those things turned out to be catastrophic’ is giving yourself too much credit.

One reason is we don’t have COVID so fewer bored leftist.

I hope you're right! But I've always viewed the crazy COVID response itself as being because of leftism. I remember the leftists in my life talking about how COVID was Trump's fault and saying they need to take the pandemic response into their own hands. And people did this, making everyone think that COVID was the most serious illness ever that was going to destroy our country, which caused businesses to have everyone work from home because they didn't want to seem like they were uncaring. And before you know it, we had 3 years of lockdowns. I think that if a disease as non-deadly COVID happened 20 years prior, it's possible we wouldn't' have locked down like that, it was maybe only because the leftists had such groundswell power.

The second reason is it’s tough to cry wolf for the tenth time and still get people outraged

That's what I keep thinking, but they keep proving me wrong!

Yes people will be outraged. It’s a motte and bailey. I just think it will be far more muted. You can go on Reddit when you feel like it and post something like Trump isn’t that bad in a bash Trump thread and get downvoted.

I just think it will be 4-5x smaller this time around compared to 2020.

There were strident Covid responses by both left- and right-wing governments. Few Hungary-loving conservative influencers seem to be familiar with what sort of Covid policies Hungary had, for instance (though it was far from the strictest ones). While Covid policies were polarized into left-right fairly quickly, things were considerably hazier in a host of other countries.

There's a pretty clear reason for this though, right? As dispositions, left and right aren't intrinsically authoritarian or libertarian in nature. In the United States, the broader right tends to be the home of people that are more libertarian-inclined, not uniformly, but to the extent of having guys like Ron Paul (in the older days) and Thomas Massie around.

I do think it's interesting to look around the globe and note that being Covid-insane (or Covid-cautious/Covid-serious if you're not the kind of hater that I am) doesn't really look all that linked to political ideology, but to belief in the power of the state to improve lives through controlling citizens. But really, in the United States, this does look like the sort of thing that will wind up highly left-coded and it's reasonable for Americans to react to their own politics accordingly.

There's a pretty clear reason for this though, right?

There is, but it's not that American conservatives love freedom more than American liberals. Trump was president at the start of Covid, which made his response a natural angle of attack for Democrats. Rather than defend his performance, Trump argued that Covid was actually not that big a deal. That more or less set the partisan alignment on the matter.

Well, the obvious counterexample would be Sweden, ruled at that time by Social Democrats (who had historically based their power specifically on the power of the state to improve lives through controlling citizens), but with a notoriously lax Covid regime compared to most other European countries. (Belarus had a laxer one, but it's also led by a bonafide authoritarian populist who was initially elected as the left candidate and has exploited Soviet nostalgia even more heavily than Putin.)

It feels like the left, or at least the leftists in my life, are taking an infantile tactic: we better win or we'll whine and complain for 4 years.

From my position as a moderately liberal griller this sounds like exactly what the right did after Trump lost: whining about stolen elections, utterly and embarrassingly paralyzing Congress, leading half the country into a fact-free conspiracy fantasy land, and so on.

Scott was absolutely correct here in how it played out.

?? Biden has been extremely moderate and a bunch of far left cultural elements seem to be coming to heel. What’s going on in the movie you’re watching?

It doesn’t feel that way to me, but thinking back that’s probably accurate in terms of policy. Attempting to cancel student debt strikes me as his most radical position. He also seems to be on board the caboose of the rainbow train which feels transgressive somehow.

I’d place moderating radicals at the feet of the murder rate more so than Biden.

?? Biden has been extremely moderate and a bunch of far left cultural elements seem to be coming to heel. What’s going on in the movie you’re watching?

You'd describe the border as moderate? Ketanji Jackson-Brown? Numerous attempts to imprison Republicans over slap on the wrist level infractions?

What Republicans are we talking about here and how much is the Biden administration responsible for the decision to prosecute?

The DOJ is part of the Biden administration. So all of them? All the J6 people including a Blaze journalist. https://www.glennbeck.com/radio/jan-6-journalist-fbi-arrest

Trump himself, of course, also Jeff Fortenberry who's conviction was recently overturned by a federal judge.

DoJ is traditionally quite independent of the presidential administration. Biden doesn’t make prosecutorial decisions.

Any federal prosecution of J6 peaceful protesters and Trump was going to happen under any Dem, because federal prosecutors have independence, and so it’s not evidence against Biden being moderate relative to his peers.

Also Biden is also a moderate relative to his peers on the border.

DoJ is traditionally quite independent of the presidential administration. Biden doesn’t make prosecutorial decisions.

That is the story, yes. Meanwhile, in reality there are multiple reports of Joe telling Garland what to do. What we've consistently seen since 2016 is that almost all of the executive branch only works in a fair and reasonable fashion when people are obeying a whole cadre of unwritten rules that vast swathes of them no longer want to obey WRT Trump and populists generally.

Biden has not been “extremely moderate” even if he hasn’t given the progressives everything they ever wanted.

He’s significantly to the left of Obama by any consistent measure.

But your overall point stands IMHO.

From my position as a moderately liberal griller this sounds like exactly what the right did after Trump lost: whining about stolen elections, utterly and embarrassingly paralyzing Congress, leading half the country into a fact-free conspiracy fantasy land, and so on.

Wow, sounds rough. It sure puts things into perspective. I now feel silly for complaining about riots resulting from a drug addict dying in police custody, which caused a massive spike in crime across America, an international rape hysteria that resulted in any form of benefit of doubt being thrown out in the court of public opinion, possibly the biggest medical scandal in recent history seeing thousands of children undergo irreversible hormonal and surgical interventions, the philosophical view that caused it becoming so enmeshed that teachers in many western countries help to facilitate the process while keeping it secret from the kid's parents, and law enforcement hardly think twice about sending rapists to female prisons, and having to talk about all that on a self-hosted forum, because that's the way you co discuss these topics without the fear of getting banned, and having to do so anonymously for fear of losing my job.

I should worry more about real things like my political outgroup "whining", paralyzing congress, believing in conspiracy theories, and other things that haven't been claimed by every group about it's political opposition in every democratic country, ever.

What’s going on in the movie you’re watching?

Indeed. Can you give me an example of an extremist democratic president, you'd understand people complaining about? And a few example of far-left cultural elements coming to heel?

Essentially zero of this is a product of Biden being elected. You picked Floyd, which was during Trump's term, and a bunch of things that are generally not action by the federal government.

Like, there's plenty to complain about Biden for (e.g. student loans!), but stick to what he's actually done? Or explicitly say that the problem is the missed opportunities for the right to crack down on these things, in which case the problem is not so much that the democrats are (mostly) in power, but that the republicans aren't?

Essentially zero of this is a produce of Biden being elected. You picked Floyd, which was during Trump's term, and a bunch of things that are generally not action by the federal government.

Yes, I know. He was talking about how red tribers reacted to Biden getting elected, so I compared it to blue tribe's reaction to Trump getting elected.

In hindsight, I'll admit the trans stuff is a stretch, and probably would have happened regardless

Trump was president in 2020.

So it’s strange you bring up the Floyd situation in response to that comment talking about complaints after Trump left office.

Tomato was talking how red tribe reacted to Trump leaving office, so I compared it to how blue tribe reacted to Trump entering office. What's strange about that?

Riots in 2020 were not reacting to Trump entering office.

So your sense of chronology seems a bit off.

I completely agree that things would have (almost certainly) gotten less out of hand if Hillary (or any Dem) had been president.

Not sure how that should influence your vote.

Riots in 2020 were not reacting to Trump entering office.

I completely agree that things would have (almost certainly) gotten less out of hand if Hillary (or any Dem) had been president.

Now you're just being pedantic.

Not sure how that should influence your vote.

Vote for who your brain / heart tells you to, I was just addressing the claim which tribe's reaction was worse.

It’s remarkable you think it’s “pedantic” to point out you aren’t responding with apples to apples in your comparison based on chronology alone, even without the whole issue that the 2020 riots did not have anything explicit to do with Trump, since it’s not the federal government that controls the police.

You can still believe the Blue tribe is bad. I’m not trying to convince you it’s not. I don’t like them either and I certainly think the 2020 riots were atrocious and excused by many progressives, along with the “defund the police” insanity.

But do try to criticize your outgroup accurately when you do it. The Motte is best when we can at least be consistent and precise even when we’re not charitable.

It’s remarkable you think it’s “pedantic” to point out you aren’t responding with apples to apples in your comparison based on chronology alone,

Why? Yes, I shouldn't have used the word entering, because that allowed you to restrict the analysis to the period when his term only started. That's what pedantic means.

even without the whole issue that the 2020 riots did not have anything explicit to do with Trump, since it’s not the federal government that controls the police.

That's only relevant if you take the BLM movement at face value, and believe they were actually concerned with the police's conduct, or "black lives" for that matter.

More comments

I suspect there's literally no way I can phrase this that the mods will approve of, but I think it's actually an important point to make so I will say it plainly:

This comment is a pitch-perfect example of the type rightist whining we've been putting up with for years. I can assure you it is indeed very annoying.

  • -15

You’re correct: dismissing your opponents’ fears as whining is petty and counterproductive. If there’s any value left in the Motte, if there’s one reason to hang around here, it’s to actually engage with stuff you think is obviously wrong. Take that away, and you might as well flounce off.

I’m not modding you for responding in kind to a thread of people making the exact same dismissal. I do like it a lot better when you resist the urge.

Right, but this whole post is about how annoying it will be for OP to have to leftists whining for four years if Trump wins.

Which sides whine about what and how annoying it is, is the object-level purpose of this conversation thread.

In other situations I wouldn't have brought this up, and indeed have never to my knowledge done so despite engaging with these types of sentiments dozens or hundreds of times.

You didn't answer his question.

And you didn't respond to the substance of my comment.

Sometimes we have a point to make that's not a direct reply. That's totally fine, and it's weird to me that you seem to criticize it at the exact same time you're also doing it?

Oh never mind, I'm getting confused and thought you were the parent commenter. Apologies.

Ah, if it was a misunderstanding then my critique is off-base, and apologies back.

It wasn’t actually directed at him.

Which, yeah, raises the question of why respond at all. I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing his answer or Tomato’s.

From my position as a moderately liberal griller this sounds like exactly what the right did after Trump lost: whining about stolen elections, utterly and embarrassingly paralyzing Congress, leading half the country into a fact-free conspiracy fantasy land, and so on.

I really don't think this is comparable. Mostly just the status quo at least since Nixon. An embarrassingly paralyzed Congress has been a feature of American government since I became remotely cognizant of it in the 90's, regardless of who the president is. That's the whole reason the first 100 days of a presidency has been fetishized for as long as I've been alive.

What was truly novel about the era of libs throwing a tantrum was suddenly, DEI, explicitly anti-Republican training sessions became mandatory. Schools integrated explicitly anti-Republican lessons geared towards children. Fundamental web based utilities began instituting explicitly anti-Republican TOS to boot them off platforms vital to engaging in the modern economy. Where I used to live, the town center got boarded up and businesses closed from time to time over "mostly peaceful" tantrums that threatened life and property. One morning at a farmer's market, in front of our families and newborn babies, I said I didn't like the new Star Trek and another liberal father there started yelling at me at the top of his lungs in public about the importance of punching fascist.

I moved to a red area shortly after Trump lost. You meet a person who can't help but grumble about a stolen election or bamboo ballots or whatever. But no business ever had to close for fear of their wrath. Nobody has been subjected to specialized anti-Democrat workplace seminars. The schools haven't changed the curriculums to focus on the long history of fishy elections, wink wink nudge nudge. I've never been subject to being publicly screamed at, or witnessed it the new local farmers market when someone wears a BLM slogan.

One morning at a farmer's market, in front of our families and newborn babies, I said I didn't like the new Star Trek

Another person who thinks DISCO Trek was an abomination! That makes at least two and possibly even several of us on here! I've been told it got better but sorry, even Christopher Pike can't entice me back to that nonsense, and I understand Michael "I'm So Special, I've Got A Man Name (Even Though This Is The 24th Century And Nobody Cares About That)" Burnham is not locked up forever in a maximum security Federation jail as being a galactic pest, but instead gets to be captain of her very own starship. You want me to cheer for whoever the bad guys are, being all mean to Mikey Mike? Because this is how you get me to cheer for the bad guys.

Discovery is an abomination. The first season of Strange New Worlds was decent, at least. Not perfect but I enjoyed it. Haven't watched the second season yet though.

I’m sorry, but complaining about modern trek is perhaps the least controversial thing you’ve ever said on this board.

I disliked modern Trek before it was popular or profitable; I was mildly disappointed by Voyager because the writers didn't know what they wanted to do or stick to it; I was very disappointed by Enterprise, and then when I thought I had hit the floor in "being let down by Trek revivals", along came Disco.

One morning at a farmer's market, in front of our families and newborn babies, I said I didn't like the new Star Trek and another liberal father there started yelling at me at the top of his lungs in public about the importance of punching fascist.

I've never been subject to being publicly screamed at, or witnessed it the new local farmers market when someone wears a BLM slogan.

Well-put. This lines up very well with my set of experiences, too. TBH, I really do think that Scott's recent theories in The Psychopolitics Of Trauma are pretty spot on, for better and for worse.

One morning at a farmer's market, in front of our families and newborn babies, I said I didn't like the new Star Trek and another liberal father there started yelling at me at the top of his lungs in public about the importance of punching fascist.

I remember the day I said The Last Jedi wasn't very good and some 40something mom said I was just against strong role models for girls. I told her to go back to the internet and take her opinions with her. It was a big moment for me, because politics intruded on one of my favorite hobbies; bitching about film and TV.

I agree, I think a lot of people are serious denial about the degree to which these opinions have broken social media containment and bled out into the real world. I'd guess mostly because of TikTok, but that's just speculation.

This was when the Last Jedi had just come out, and in a Costco. This shit's been going on since way before TikTok.

Schools integrated explicitly anti-Republican lessons geared towards children.

I wouldn't go that far, but yes: somebody explain to me how it went from "look, Drag Queen Story Hour is only hosted at libraries, it's voluntary, if you don't want your kid there then don't bring them in the day it's on" to "we must have it in schools, yes the same schools your kids have to attend for mandatory education, no you can't sign them out of those classes otherwise we'll suspect you might be abusing your children at home as a transphobe homophobe bigot terrorising your queer trans kid".

From my position as a moderately liberal griller this sounds like exactly what the right did after Trump lost: whining about stolen elections, utterly and embarrassingly paralyzing Congress, leading half the country into a fact-free conspiracy fantasy land, and so on.

I don't have much comment about how the right is handling this, probably because I live in a very progressive area. If the right whines about things, I don't hear about it, and I don't get bothered by it. Quite frankly, I hold the left to higher standards than the right, and I think that the left should be above such behavior.

?? Biden has been extremely moderate and a bunch of far left cultural elements seem to be coming to heel. What’s going on in the movie you’re watching?

I didn't say anything about Biden, I was talking about how Trump's presidency played out.

Quite frankly, I hold the left to higher standards than the right, and I think that the left should be above such behavior.

Why? If you think the right shouldn't be expected to behave when they lose, why do you think they should be trusted with power?

Biden would have been a moderate if he left in the Trump EO against racial scapegoating. He didn't. His administration have embraced "race conscious" policy, and the only thing preventing it is Republican judges. "We must discriminate against white Americans in every aspect of society" is not a moderate policy.

Extremely moderate?

He’s 10x illegal immigrations.

He’s executive ordered a welfare state for excessive college debt.

Caused the greatest inflation from excessive spending since Jimmy Carter.

Invited naked Trans people to the White House lawn.

I mean rhetorically I can say things like what did Trump do wrong he’s been extremely moderate. He’s mostly just done GOP type things like cut taxes and appoint Pro-Life judges.

I’ve got no clue on what you mean by fact-free conspiracies. Most of those have ended up being true. They went a little too far anti-vax.

Invited naked Trans people to the White House lawn.

And clothed non-binary suitcase thieves to the Department of Energy. Well, one.

In fairness, based on how poorly his outfits matched, he probably was naked before he stole all those suitcases and wore whatever he found in random women's luggage to a reception at the French embassy.

Invited naked Trans people to the White House lawn.

To be fair to Joe, I think that was more whatever munchkins there are in the administration are responsible for that, and he just showed up for the photoshoot with visitors as Mr. President. I can't see him having a list of "trans strippers I'd like to invite to cavort on the White House lawn" (Hunter maybe, but not Joe).

We're not hearing too much these days about trans non-binary queer folx in the Department of Whatever. Maybe they're still there, but they're a heck of a lot quieter since the unfortunate luggage misplacement incidents.

Caused the greatest inflation from excessive spending since Jimmy Carter.

...wouldn't a large part of that be Trump-era Covid spending, though?

Invited naked Trans people to the White House lawn.

This case?

...wouldn't a large part of that be Trump-era Covid spending, though?

No, inflation expectations across every horizon remained low in 2020 and only really started to go up after Biden's spending spree got off the starting line in 2021. Remember Larry Summers being pilloried for pointing out that the ARPA spent more stimulative dollars than the size of the output gap by a large amount at that time?

The early Biden administration's spending explosion stimulated the economy enough that the Fed's late 2021 plans to start tightening became very out of date for the actual state of the economy. If they had tightened earlier (so, March-April 2021), there might have been no serious inflation but there also might not have been any serious inflation if Republicans had kept the Senate or the White House and not passed the huge spending bills of that year.

...wouldn't a large part of that be Trump-era Covid spending, though?

Yes. The one truly awful set of policies that Trump had were the ones where he decided to trust the experts that are pretty much all left-aligned.

Caused the greatest inflation from excessive spending since Jimmy Carter.

The incredible growth in M1 happened under Trump.

Don’t really want to redebate these issues. Mostly just wanted a little rebuttal to “Biden was moderate” which both sides claim of their guy.

Fwiw though I don’t M’s do a very good job predicting inflation. Part of this is IOER and other plumbing by the Fed that sterilizes a lot of the production of the M’s created by the Fed.

I don't reasonably see any way to handwave and say that quadrupling the money supply would have no effect on inflation. That seems like one of those things you can only believe after a lot of education.

If that weren't enough, the biggest budget deficit in a hundred years was under Trump, not Biden. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD

If you don't want to redebate the issues you shouldn't make claims that are at odds with easily observable reality.

The Democrats consistently pushed for higher spending and tighter pandemic restrictions and were opposed by the Republicans. Biden mostly benefited from taking office after the worst was over. Biden also wanted to do students loan forgiveness but was stopped by a conservative court. Trump is certainly not a budget hawk but I don't think it tells the whole story to just look at results without taking into account the circumstances of when they happened.

It's crazy to blame inflation on Biden when the deficit and money printing happened under Trump, and justify it with a Biden policy that never happened.

My claims are inline with the economics profession. Bob Elliot had this exact debate on twitter a few months ago and no one though the M’s were predictive.

Also if you look at them we should be having a large amount of deflation right now. Which is obviously false.

And obviously we should have had hyperinflation at some point in the past.

Like I said, a lot of education.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that printing money and deficit spending happened most under Trump. If you don't think either of those cause inflation i don't know what to say.

Does a thought requiring a lot of education or expertise mean that the thought is therefore false?

For those not familiar, I just want to link this out, because it is genuinely one of the most unhinged graphs you will ever see.

I'd like to see one that shows the pre-May-2020-definition and post-May-2020-definition versions of M1 as two separate lines. With this graph it's hard to tell how much growth is money printing, how much is savings pattern changes, and how much is just semantics. There's just a big gasp when you first see the big May 2020 jump, followed by a big meh when you read the "that part was all just semantics" fine print afterwards.

The FAQ page includes the chart you asked for (up to December 2020), which shows there was a pretty big jump in early 2020, but nowhere near as large as it looks on the official chart (i.e. around 2x instead of around 10x).

That's exactly what I was looking for; thank you!

2x is still more than I'd have guessed based on subsequent inflation (or M2 data, which seems to be applies-to-apples) alone. I wonder to what extent that means the Fed was partly fighting a natural permanent fall in the velocity of money, vs to what extent it means we still have more future inflation "baked in", vs to what extent it means I don't understand macroeconomics. Probably around 3%/2%/95%...

I actually don't really care too much who is president. Either one of them would IMO do a good enough job. I mostly care whether the president impacts my everyday life or causes nuclear war. However, though it isn't his fault directly, having Trump in charge would impact my everyday life negatively, mostly because it would fuel another 4 years of incessant leftist whining all around me, from all my friends and family, along with people starting to (erroneously, IMO) see and declare that racism and sexism is everywhere again. It'll start causing fights between me and my wife again. My workplace and all local institutions will start making statements about how they're standing up to Trump and racism. Under Biden, I have truly enjoyed some nice peace and respite from politics.

Move. Trust me, it's worth it. Can't solve the wife problem for you though. But if she's anything like mine, once removed from the hyper-lefty echo chamber, and if you can confidently argue your points, her opinions will change.

If anything my wife is even more right wing than me now.

would you say that she adopts the opinions of the environment she see herself in regardless of what they are?

Scott was absolutely correct here in how it played out.

Not really, because we didn't actually get the generation being "radicalized by Trump being a bad president", we just got them radicalized by Trump being president, despite him not doing anything all that radical or harmful.

What I want doesn't really matter in any material sense, but I'm not going to base electoral politics on how whiny the loser will be about. I want Trump to win because I think he'll do some of the things I want a President to do and few of the things I don't want a President to do. My top priority by quite a bit is reducing the role of the federal administrative state in everyday life, which Trump's leanings and setup with groups like Project 2025 seem likely to do. His judicial appointments will also assist with deregulation and disempowering the discretion of petty bureaucrats. My other top priority is stanching the flow of immigrants, which Trump seems likely to do.

If you disagree with those positions, that's fine, but being willing to sign up for federal policies that you disagree with so that political obsessives whine less just seems kind of cowardly to me. You're getting crybullied!

despite him not doing anything all that radical or harmful.

Roe vs. Wade just got overturned because of his SC nominations.

That might not be a big deal to you, but I assure you it's a big deal to a lot of women around the country, and the men who care about them. That's a big harmful thing, just on its own.

I'll also point out that most on the left will blame Trump for not having a strong response in the early days of Covid where we could have maybe actually headed off the worst outcomes, and for letting his party fall into turning COVID into a partisan issue where it was impossible for any policy to fight it because half the country would disobey. I don't in a million years expect I could convince you that;s factually true, so I don't want to argue about it, but you have to be aware that it's the type of thing the people who disagree with you think about when they say 'Trump was a bad president'.

  • -19

most on the left will blame Trump for not having a strong response in the early days of Covid where we could have maybe actually headed off the worst outcomes, and for letting his party fall into turning COVID into a partisan issue where it was impossible for any policy to fight it because half the country would disobey

This to me sounds pretty strongly like the perception-of-reality-warping whining that leftists did under Trump (see where I talk about it here). Trump needed to do exactly what the leftists told him to do. When he didn't do that, the leftists got everyone to believe that Trump was the one making a partisan issue out of it.

not having a strong response in the early days of Covid

for letting his party fall into turning COVID into a partisan issue

You and I are not remembering the same sequence of events. It was Democrats who made it political first, and they did it by whining about anti-asian racism.

This is not coming from the right.

Liberal publications were attacking Trump, and his supporters, as racist for trying to shut down the Kung Flu, right up until the point they completely switched into authoritarian lockdown mode.

Yeah...

I am old enough to remember, even though it's now been about 4 years, Nancy Pelosi telling people to go out and Celebrate Lunar New Year (as in telling people to go out in public around large groups) when fear of Coronavirus was right-coded. Its right there in an official communication.

This position was, later, switched towards banning any sort of large gatherings altogether.

Which THEN switched to allow people to gather as long as it was a BLM protest.

I saw this with my own eyes in real time, while all the while I'm becoming increasingly afraid of the implications of the virus itself and the politicization crippling our ability to respond to it.

I could pull my old posts from the motte subreddit at the time to back this up.

The left initiated almost every major action that drove the politicization of Covid.

Some days it seems like having memory better than a goldfish is a superpower.

Nancy Pelosi telling people to go out and Celebrate Lunar New Year (as in telling people to go out in public around large groups) when fear of Coronavirus was right-coded. Its right there in an official communication.

While I agree that there was a very interesting dynamic with left-coded cries of "racism" being used by public health and "pro-science" professionals to pooh-pooh the need to close ports or intitute quarantines on points of entry in January 2020 (1), these particular statements by Pelosi were boilerplate well before the pandemic from 2006 to 2021, and only stopped when China went full Wolf-Warrior diplomacy in late 2021 and early 2022.

As evidence, I give you some other official announcments. The omission of years prior to 2017 just means I didn't bother looking for them, and the URL wasn't obvious.

Please check your arguments to verify that they are solid before presenting a weakman argument for your point.

(1) IMO, the Trump admin could have used the national emergency to close all border flows, left the US epidemiologically secure like Taiwan, and used the inevitable leak as further justification for border security. But Trump is incompetent, Trump's staff was incompetent, and the CDC isn't competent enough to quarantine tourists anyway.

Please check your arguments to verify that they are solid before presenting a weakman argument for your point.

Okay, I feel a little bad about this, but I was actually presenting a weakman to see if anybody would actually try to argue the counterpoint.

If you want to hear Pelosi's thoughts on the Coronavirus at the time, listen to her exact words, spoken from her own mouth:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=2SKy8XAn5MQ?si=ycMLrkzra7wkEEJD

"PELOSI EASING OUTBREAK FEARS" is the Chyron. This was the official Democrat/lefty position, that racism was the bigger danger, and the virus was of moderate concern because they 'took precautions.' This was aired on January 24, BEFORE she issued her boilerplate press release.

Once again, I saw this with my own eyes. Heard it with my ears. People trying to convince me I was misinterpreting can politely sod off.

Not the most sporting of me, but I also don't appreciate people gaslighting me, and I suspect you're not interpreting my objections in good faith.

Damit. Why didn't you link to the YT video the first time? Would have saved me a lot of time drudging through Pelosi's official statements. This is the kind of link I can save for use in future online arguments.

having memory better than a goldfish is a superpower

cynically, the superpower is having either a goldfish memory or absolutely no conscience about telling the most convenient lie in any given post. In a lot of modern discussion environments, having the nagging memory that we weren't always at war with Eastasian-flu is an active hinderance to keeping friends and staying unbanned.

Yeah, I think the latter (having zero conscience) is the actual 'superpower' insofar as it grants one strong advantages when navigating a given social environment.

But I think it at least in part depends on others not having a decent memory.

If you have a good memory and can recognize the scam that has been pulled, because you remember the sequence of events that led to it, at least you can protect yourself from a repeat performance.

Roe vs. Wade just got overturned because of his SC nominations.

Oh, I completely understand the position with regard to abortion, but this is simply baked into the cake of any Republican. I don't particularly like abortion restrictions either, but it's not some weird, radical position that Trump cooked up.

I'll also point out that most on the left will blame Trump for not having a strong response in the early days of Covid where we could have maybe actually headed off the worst outcomes, and for letting his party fall into turning COVID into a partisan issue where it was impossible for any policy to fight it because half the country would disobey.

Yeah, this is a fair description of what I understand the left-leaning position to be. Still, I find it disorienting to hear people refer to Trump as "authoritarian" when one of their strongest criticisms of him was that he wasn't anywhere near authoritarian enough.

I mean 'authoritarian' is definitely a hugely overdetermined word with lots of definitions and conflicting connotations, yeah.

I think that this is basically correct. I'll be damned before I let other people's whining determine who I support for public office. If Trump is the best, then I'll vote for him, if not I won't, and nobody else comes into it.

Well, consider "whiny" is perhaps an understatement, or a proxy for other things. What happens when the whining is so intense that it actually distorts people's perception of reality? As an example, I really can't trust any news source for anything that is said about Trump. They can basically say whatever they want, because half the country is ready to believe it, and they have tons of precedent to draw on from other new sources doing the same thing.

And the same thing happens in my everyday life, too, when dealing with all my friends and loved ones. It's a complete uphill battle for me to try to communicate to anyone that they're being a conspiracy theorist crazy person, and ultimately I end up sounding like the conspiracy theorist because I'm going against the grain. It's hard enough to argue against a Gish gallop, but even worse when there's precedent for the Gish gallop, and everyone dogpiles on board, and there's a whole industry devoted to that one Gish gallop.

edit: I can't find it now, but I remember Scott wrote an SSC article where he talks about how when refuting crazy theories (like aliens built the pyramids or something), you end up sounding like you're making a bunch of one-off refutations that are not seeing the bigger picture.

What happens when the whining is so intense that it actually distorts people's perception of reality?

What people?

Most normies are on Twitter for sports news, maybe a favorite celebrity, and possibly something location specific, and don’t check it every day. The whining- and the people who pay attention to it- is a very small percentage of the total.

Normies get their news and opinions from sources that are downstream of it, a lot of time. George Floyd and the response to it has to be a central example, I would think. Tik-tok lefties may be a minority of the population, but if they start evangelizing to normies in real life, and get mass media backup for their evangelizing, that's more than enough to create false beliefs in an outright majority.

Well, I think that sort of thing trickles down to the normies, too. If there's this ambient level of crazies constantly spouting "Trump's insane, Trump's going to kill us all, Trump's going to usher in a second holocaust, Trump cheated his way into the presidency", at some point the normies start to believe it. It has become truth to anyone who doesn't pay really really close attention or at least have some source of information that doesn't fall in line, because of this onslaught of one-sided information coming from sources that were considered reliable prior to Trump's presidency. Like, my cousins are those sports news people, and they are pretty checked out of world events, but even they believe Trump is the complete worst, tacitly.

@gattsuru had it right with Pyramid and the Garden. I thought Scott elaborated on the part where a sufficiently advanced defense also looks like a conspiracy theory, but it wasn’t in Epistemic Learned Helplessness. Maybe Prospiracy Theories counts?

Edit: JulianRota found the real part you were looking for while I was typing this. I really appreciate that we have so many users willing to pore over the sacred texts for that one thing we remembered seeing.

That would be You Are Still Crying Wolf, section 17 near the end. Which, curiously for this thread, is exactly about refuting the crazy theory that Trump is racist.

Thanks! I kept thinking of The Pyramid and the Garden and kept combing through it to try to find it, but it is funny that it's actually from Scott's post about this exact topic!

What happens when the whining is so intense that it actually distorts people's perception of reality?

Have you considered that you’re affected by the same thing? Honestly everything you wrote sounds like a really unhinged rightoid conspiracy theory to me. Maybe this is just evidence that everyone’s brain is broken.

  • -12

everything you wrote sounds like a really unhinged rightoid conspiracy

Don't do this. Its antagonistic phrasing. There are better ways to get your point across.

I can't find it now, but I remember Scott wrote an SSC article where he talks about how when refuting crazy theories (like aliens built the pyramids or something), you end up sounding like you're making a bunch of one-off refutations that are not seeing the bigger picture.

Maybe the ACT post Contra Kavanaugh on Fidism? Or SCC The Pyramid and the Garden?

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