This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I wanted to write about the WPATH leaks: the cancers and the shrinks debating over how many of a 12 year old's "multiple personalities" need to be transsexual before they should give them hormones and surgery.
I wanted to write about a woman I know who just got a $90,000 government grant for her instagram hobby farm, alongside hundreds of other fake businesses like "the Black farmers collective." Taxpayers gave her more money than her business will ever have in revenue to play upper-middle-class status games while the few remaining real farmers around her are going out of business.
I wanted to write about watching my friend once again change all the grocery store tags because prices keep skyrocketing as talking heads insist we're imagining it all and everyone's actually getting super rich.
I wanted to write about my state banning non-"cage free" eggs and claiming it won't increase prices... because they negotiated a kickback deal with the remaining suppliers to eat the cost until after the '24 election, after which they can harvest their monopoly rents and some lobby group can release an official report claiming the price increases were unrelated.
I wanted to write about how my state house just banned natural gas hookups and enabled pressuring companies to drop service to existing customers.
I wanted to write about the people chanting "glory to the martyrs by any means necessary" while insisting nobody could possibly suspect them of supporting Hamas, with every leftist somehow getting an identical memo about how to provide cover for them.
But what's the point? Seriously, why even talk about this just to get gaslit by the people who are celebrating it at the same time as denying it's happening?
You could spend your entire life writing tens of thousands of words explaining and analyzing this insanity, and all it does it give the perpetrators the satisfaction of gloating about getting away with it.
What are we even doing here? Are we just going to keep doing it forever as the country goes completely insane?
Why? What possible good will it do? Is this whole place just a safety release valve to stop any pressure building up against the overton window slamming left faster than the eye can see?
Does anyone actually get any pleasure out of this? Does anyone think it's doing any good? Can anyone point to an example of it doing any good in the past? Has culture war discussion on the motte ever actually led to anyone solving culture war problems? The closest thing I can come up with are TracingWoodgrain's exposés, which while incredible have hardly moved the needle on public awareness.
Virtually all the energy expended here seems to be vented straight into the void, almost like it's deliberately set up to do so, keeping people arguing in circles until it's too late to do anything about it. And it's been going on for over a decade! When will it stop?
Edit:
I hope this example might get across what I mean. A few weeks ago I wasted time finding out about "multiplicity" (the new social contagion of kids who spend too much time on discord deciding they're all "plural systems" of different personalities). Did a bunch of research, got on a bunch of discords that use the "pluralkit" plugin, found examples of psychologists taking it seriously, started writing a post.
It turned out Gattsuru was already talking about it last year like it was just a normal thing that normies will learn to accept soon.
Yesterday we found out a bunch of WPATH associates all treat it like a legitimate and uncontroversial diagnosis that lots of their "trans kids" mysteriously have. It hardly made a splash in the news. Pretty soon people will be mocking anyone who cares about it.
I realized that any discussion I started on the motte would be pointless. It would just run the same circle of "noticing, denial, minimization, celebration, resigned acceptance" that literally all culture war events go through here.
What good would bringing it to anyone's attention do? Even the most bizarre event that would have been considered unimaginably stupid until the second it happens will just be rationalized away like it's no big deal.
I think you underestimate that conscious awareness of something does affect people. It might not lead to definite results right away, but people's attitudes do change over time. You are right that most might go into the void, but it depends on what is the void to you. If one or two people who propel the next revolution are influenced by discussions from the motte, I think that's meaningful.
This might sound optimistic, but there any culture war that became out of hand started from something small. Ideas do affect and change people and can even spread to the masses. If anything, what you are saying is proof that talking to the void isn't really talking to the void
More options
Context Copy link
If it's any solace to you, I'm a leftist of yesteryear and I don't feel like I'm winning either. Any accusation that I'm just unhappy because this is "too much of the same thing I advocated for" rings hollow - where exactly is the conservation of direction here? I fought against squares and religious nuts trying to ban me from reading and writing the things I wanted to read and write, and briefly things seemed to go uphill, but now I am once again fighting against people wanting to ban me from reading and writing the things I want to read and write. Same for reality-based policymaking, avoiding war, et cetera, all of which used to be considered leftist causes, and I can assure you I wanted them for themselves rather than because this was just what lay in the direction "left" happened to be pointing in at the time. Surely the people who you see as winning nowadays will "lose" eventually too, whether this will be in a way that you would recognise as "their thing going too far" (transracialism?) or something that looking forward from the present era will be as utterly unrecognisable as "left" as the push for joining the Ukraine war or bad-word censorship in every home would have been 50 years ago. Chances are whatever wins at the time will still be considered "left", but should this have any impact on how we feel about it? Do you feel differently about Chinese battles from the Warring States period if you learn that the winning army was called "left" (for entirely unrelated reasons to our modern terminology)?
It turns out that the past and future are usually not just some foreign country, but more akin to the actual Aztec Empire. Greater people than us have tried to do something about it to no avail. You know that meme prayer that ends with asking for serenity to accept the things you can't change?
I could describe your allies back then, and the people who you agree are going to far now, in the same way: They're trying to advance the cause of oppressed groups, especially racial and sexual minorities.
I admit it's a matter of framing, but it looks from my point of view that it's all the same direction, even if they expanded their definitions of "oppressed groups" and "advance the cause". It's true that they've gone from supporting free speech to opposing it, but that's a change in tactics, not a change in principles, even if you have principles.
If you squint hard enough, isn't any political movement that has not already won "trying to advance the cause of oppressed groups"? That description applies increasingly well to most facets of the American Right as it fully realised the position it is in, too. I don't think racial and sexual minorities were a big focus in my environment (but consider that I lived in Germany back then). The main focus was on curtailing the powers of classical power centers like police, military and banks, and the grift and self-serving laws constructed around them. There was also a large environmentalist streak, but I was opposed to them from the start and there seemed to be enough room for a "non-environmentalist left" that could be for, say, individual gas-guzzling while expropriating big oil executives.
True, but it seems to be the same sort of oppressed groups as before. They didn't shift from blacks to Star Trek fans or anything like that and while you could argue they shifted from gays to trans people, the gays and trans people are part of the same coalition.
I would agree that opposing banks or military is deemphasized nowadays and I don't know how different it was in Germany.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Do leftists of yesteryear still count as leftists? It's a question I keep grappling with, not knowing if I should keep screaming "don't call me right-wing! I was right there with you on the barricades!" or just go "eeeh, fuck it".
As for conservation of direction, we did just have a conversation the post gay marriage slippery slope, and it still feels like one of the areas I have a massive egg on my face given how things panned out.
It's definitely a hard question to answer, in no small part because of how there's no standard definition of what counts as "left," and how "left," "liberal," and "progressive" get conflated. When I look at the values that tend to get associated with such groups, I see values that I support today as much as ever - e.g. sympathy and support for the least well-off in society for "left," freedom of speech for "liberal," and changing the structure of society to get "better" in some meaningful way (i.e. for it to "progress" rather than merely "change") for people who used to be ignored or denigrated for "progressive."
Where I see myself departing greatly from the modern left - besides the fact that they largely just reject the principles of liberalism - is the willingness to check that claims are true and that policies really do create desired outcomes. E.g. the whole WPATH situation seems to be the result of people just deciding not to check what would actually lead to the best outcomes for kids who claim to be trans and just going along with people who are sympathetic and sound like they know what they're talking about. To achieve anything good in this world requires some level of brutal honesty about the reality of the situation, and I just don't see that happening.
And this is one insight that I think right-wingers of yesteryear had when I was poo-pooing their claims of "slippery slope" (I too admit that I have egg on my face on this, for whatever little it's worth) that I lacked. They understood the psychology of self-proclaimed leftists/liberals/progressives than I did. Perhaps unsurprising, because I'm not known for understanding the way others think, but I would have thought back then that as a leftist/liberal/progressive, that I understood their thinking better than their enemies would. They understood that the left/liberal alliance was largely one of convenience, and that liberalism would go out the window if the opportunity presented itself to most of those identifying on the left. That's what they were warning me about, and I was pushing back using basic philosophical/logical arguments instead of recognizing the way the landscape was shaped. Often, when someone is proven wrong, it's not that hard to reach for excuses for why it was reasonable to be wrong at the time or how this thing doesn't actually prove oneself wrong, as a way to save face, but in this one, I don't see any way around just completely submitting to any "I told you so"s that anyone might want to throw at me.
More options
Context Copy link
The way I see it, voluntarily recusing oneself from the term is a rare example of something I'd consider to be a legitimate case of quokka behaviour. Certain circles in society have spent so much energy into establishing a belief or vibe that amounts to "left=good, whatever left happens to be", in no small part cashing in on the goodwill that the left that I associated with amassed - why should I let them have that goodwill and actually get to use it against me? A principled stand for words having a fixed meaning can't be had if you react to every successful redefinition of a word with a "fine, I guess its fixed meaning is what you say now".
I think I started seeing the warning signs there when proponents widely came out against legally equivalent "civil union" proposals. Sure, they could have argued against it on the basis that a difference in terminology might cause problems when you go abroad, or would be easier for hostile forces to rollback, and so on - but instead it was largely argued on the basis that the union ought to be recognised and validated in the same way as it is for heterosexual couples, which was the first significant foray into legal rights over someone else's thoughts and speech.
The latter is basically the same argument as the former though. The reason it might be easier for hostile forces to roll back is because it wouldn't be validated and recognized in the same way as it was for heterosexual couples. In other words, for it to be as safe as heterosexual marriage it must be thought of as equal to heterosexual marriage, not just be legally equal.
Progressiveness (in this context) requires changing minds, not just legalities, because legality is dependent on what the polity thinks. Historically we have been pretty bad at "separate but equal". Therefore it has to be just "equal".
Even if the effective mechanism (minds being changed) is the same, I think the difference between quietly hoping that people's minds will change and openly communicating the will to compel the change is significant; the latter shifts the window towards other forms of mental compulsion (of which we have since seen many) so obviously that only someone either reckless or more accepting of them than I can tolerate in my own camp would do it.
But if they are less open won't they just face accusations of attempting to change minds secretly and nefariously? If you assume that in order to get marriage equality secured (because it is at risk if not as we discussed) people's minds must be changed then your options are to be open or secret to varying degrees.
Openly seems the best option. We all are products of mental compulsion, our upbringing, the social values of our peers and the pressures they put on us to conform. There is no society without mental compulsion in this format. The thing we are fighting over is just which mental compulsions reign. And I would rather know about all of those competing.
Churches openly proselytize their beliefs. Would we better off if they were doing so secretly?
Churches are also recognized as churches for purposes of separation of Church and State.
That doesn't have anything to do with the question in hand though. Would we be better off if churches or ideologies were attempting to change minds secretly or were being open? The fact the US has a specific separation of Church and State for historical reasons doesn't really impinge on this question. The same question would hold in the UK, which does not have such a separation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Some other discussion here.
To be clear, I think it's (much) more likely for multiplicity to become a culture war flashpoint than to be accepted by normies, or even 'accepted' to the extent modern LGTBQIWTFBBQ+ stuff is accepted by a dominant portion of one political party. Even to the extent that it is possible to show up as a culture war thing, I'm not confident that it'd show up in the sense of "EEOC and teacher's unions start pushing it" rather than "LibsOfTikTok finds the absolute nuttiest one, and after a sequence of hilarious events, it ends up on a Presidential debate stage".
I'm aware of a lot of weird groups -- I've been following therianthropy since before Y2K! -- but very few of them mainstream to the point of normies even recognizing them enough to make fun of them, nevermind accept them, and there are a lot of pragmatic reasons that both groups are unlikely to take off in mainstream awareness.
A lot of the complaints have been floating around from anti-WPATH people for about five years.
That said, at least from the available parts of the leak, it's not clear that this is particularly good as an example of something seen as "a legitimate and uncontroversial diagnosis that lots of their "trans kids" mysteriously have", especially from trans-skeptic views. Page 76-82 from the PDF are the only leak-specific discussions of multiplicity I could find. They seem like more discussion about additional caution: one doctor mentioning that one of the three plural patients he'd seen didn't end up wanting to transition even socially despite uniform gender identity, another doctor that two out of twelve went to hormone therapy and then wanting more (presumably talk) therapy instead.
The excerpts instead show discussion of what the authors wanted to call "complicated PTSD", which is definitely a little euphemistic (and less charitably, probably to bilk some billable hours out)... but it's also partly downstream of few plural people meeting, or even attempting to masquerade as, the full criteria for DID -- which requires at least some level of amnesia and interference with normal functioning -- or the rougher categories of OSDD. It's possible that they've just found the absolute severest (or heaviest faking) plural people around, but I'd compare Scott's discussion: most plurals claim perspectives that are weird, and some even do so in ways that are especially disruptive or demanding, but it's pretty far from what someone familiar with the 1980s DID panic would have expected.
And the part where they are throwing a different diagnosis on top, where they give a diagnosis at all, suggests recognition that it would be seen as controversial.
I'll probably post my own writeup on the WPATH Files, but for now:
might sound like "additional caution" from the perspective of someone who finds the whole multiplicity thing valid - they got consent from all the alters, after all - but it's going to sound like endorsing utter madness to anyone who doesn't. To any normie you'd pose this as a hypothetical, "additional caution" is going to mean "make sure to address any other deep psychological issues, like their DID, before giving them hormones".
I don't have good insight on the normie perspective, but is that means in the sense of "addressing" as in 'managing condition and checking that nterest remains once managed', or as in 'completely cure', or if somewhere between, where?
Because the former seems a good way to avoid genuine problems like schizophrenic or fugue cross-dressing, but the latter is pretty impossible for a wide variety of common conditions (and 'conditions').
That's gonna depend on what you mean by "managed". All of the trans stuff is already on thin ice with regards to believability, so if you slap another meme-disorder on top of it, most people won't be able to handle it.
"Managing" might be a good framework for, say, depression. "I used to have crippling depression, couldn't get out of bed, but for several years now I have it under control, even if I occasionally lapse. I have a stable life, a good job I've been able to keep, etc. etc. I now want to transition, and no, I don't have any hopes that the transition is going to cure my depression" is something you can sell to people. "I now only occasionally switch to my alter 'Jessica'" is not. "We consulted all the alters, and they all want to transition" is something people expect to see in a cringe Daily Wire comedy skit, not from a practicing clinician.
The fact that this would make transition for multiples, and people with other "conditions", impossible, is the point.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
RE: the multiple personalities thing, years back (we're talking the 80s or 90s) I remember reading a SF story in (I think) Omni magazine about that - in the future time of the story, multiple personalities were an accepted thing, and some people treated it like transness, they wanted so desperately to be multiple that they even underwent brain surgery to split their minds. Others tried faking it by consciously creating new personalities and learning to 'switch' between them and behave like the genuine multiples.
So this doesn't surprise me that being plural is the new fad.
More options
Context Copy link
FWIW I do hope you come back after the ban and keep posting here, even though we disagree you clearly have things to say.
On the particular topic of plurals: It's not even a new thing. There have been waves of multiple personality disorder diagnosis before the internet was a thing, and in the resulting controversy a consensus emerged that the diagnosis was actually helping to cause and perpetuate the supposed disorder. here's a very nice article about that.
There's an interesting parallel here to claims I've seen here about how teachers "find" transgenderism in kids, it fits really nicely. However: I think in your discord explorations, most of the kids weren't diagnosed by a psychologist, but "discovered" it themselves on the internet. I think the same thing happens with the trans kids.
I don't think so! I'd read it.
About 10+ years ago when I signed up for tumblr I took the username I have now and boy, oh boy, did I get a lot of messages from people who wanted it badly. They offered to buy it, they threatened me over it. There were many exclamation points. So, I'd agree with the idea that this is just an old thing with a new name.
Though, I do agree that plurals is definitely a thing that has expanded beyond its normal base because of people's fetishism over identity these days. It's like diagnoses from doctors are now invitations to a fandom rather than treated as any actual problem. I feel like every person I meet online under 30 is either furry/bi/trans/nonbinary/plural/etc. because, I suppose, there's power in being something more than just normal. Most just put it in their bios and I wouldn't know if I didn't check them but there are a few, notably ones that are plural that have a lot of performative elements to their identity specialization where they make new discord accounts, change their account name constantly, etc. They're like Anthony Hopkins in Magic when he tries to stop talking as the puppet for five minutes. They have to tell you all about their multiple personalities, it's impossible not to.
It's also interesting to me that unlike whatever fiction on MPD I've seen where they put on a big show, the plurals I've noticed change nothing about their presentation except to deliberately tell you how that personality is different (this one is gay, this one is a girl, etc) but there's no discernible difference to me in the text, it's just the same person telling me a list of biographic details. I suppose back before 'systems' you'd have to perform to get a diagnosis, I somehow doubt you'd have to now if someone is handing out diagnoses for this, and even if they aren't self-diagnosis is good enough, anyway.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's always been explicitly part of the Motte's mission, as I understand it, to not do this.
If you want to solve problems, do not come to the Motte. It's right there in the top-level introduction: do not use the thread to wage the culture, and argue to understand, not to win.
"Doing good" is an activist concern. If you want to be an activist, go somewhere else. There are plenty of web forums and communities out there with the goal of mobilising activity and changing the world. The Motte, as I understand it, is not among them.
More options
Context Copy link
If you want to change things, if you want your cause win, yes, complaining online (or offline) solves nothing. You should become part (or full) time activist and dedicate your life to educating, agitating and organizing. Of course, there will be very substantial costs to be paid for very unclear benefits (most causes in history failed badly, most idealists wasted their lives for nothing).
You do not have to start from point zero - all causes you listed aready have many people fighting for them.
This place is not activist space, this place is debate space for curious people who want to understand how the world where they live works.
More options
Context Copy link
This is a discussion forum for people with sometimes drastically different views. It feels like a fragile thing somedays. We are asking people to talk politely with one another when they may disagree with each other's entire existence. Most of the internet is filled with people pointing out that politeness in those circumstances is absurd. And thus most of the internet has descended into a bit of a hell hole that I cannot personally tolerate for any topic much less the topics where people might actually have a reason to hate each other.
@Tyre_Inflator and @Chrisprattalpharaptr I don't like seeing how this discussion happened between you two. Its a severe violation of the ethos we are hoping for here. 1 day ban for both of you for now. Mods will discuss this further. Those bans might be rescinded, extended, or left alone.
My read was that chrisprattalpharaptr was essentially trying to push for conversing politely, and tyre_inflator's main point was that the conversation that happens here is useless.
So one seems closer to me to needing mod action than the other, given the standards of this place.
I agree. "1 day ban" seemed fair for CPAR, vs overly charitable for TI. But:
"When the people like you were diluted by those who were well-meaning", "But whatever", and "Bravo" were not pushes for polite conversation. They were impolite conversation, written as if they were supposed to be subtle enough to superficially toe the line of debate rules, but clearly just jumping into the mud pit to wrestle there too. "Forget about the black person who got taxpayer money for a moment" was an egregious sideswipe, rephrasing a complaint in the least charitable possible way. I've probably posted worse attacks than all these before, and I'm certain I've restrained myself from making worse attacks before, and even when I'm provoked it's usually a conscious decision. I don't think CPAR is someone who would make a mistake like that by accident.
And, though I hate to apply an unfair double-standard, lest it be interpreted as an unfair imbalance in confrontation rather than in concern, I think that's what bothers me most about the whole exchange. Speaking to @Chrisprattalpharaptr:
No, but it's both clear and horrifying that you changed as well as the space! I admit there are usernames here that just make my eyes glaze over and my scroll wheel accelerate, but when I see a @Chrisprattalpharaptr post, it's supposed to be time to stop skimming! You've built up some expectations! I'm not saying we have to make every comment a winner here, but the drop even from "sort-by-controversial" quality to yesterday was great enough that I keep trying to reinterpret it as some kind of "mirroring" performance art that I'm just failing to get. Even granting that the original post was no better: you don't write replies for the other debater, you write them for the audience. Perhaps FCfromSSC here doesn't completely persuade all his interlocutors, but he's probably still doing a good thing for both their and his own mental clarity and mental health, as well as writing something lurkers can see and pick up and benefit from. The contrary "neither cast ye your pearls before swine" philosophy was a lousy one when I used to see it coming from the right, and it's no better these days when I see it (without the reference, this time...) adopted by the left.
I'm torn about what to advise ("advise" sounds too pretentious ... "beg for"?) here. On the one hand TheMotte has gotten a bit worse, and although it's also recovered from bad phases in the past, I'm always worried that maybe this time will be the final "evaporative cooling", where level heads get burnt out enough to leave and hysteresis makes problems permanent, unless enough level heads have the fortitude to stick it out despite the unwarranted negative feedback of doing so. I'd love to stop this paragraph here. But if I'm asking too much, if the feedback is so bad that "level" requires too much effort ... take a break before you break, and wait for a week or two until you're less easily trolled before returning? It's okay that individual people have cycles of good and bad phases too. As a wise man once said, and I repeat with no irony or sarcasm:
More options
Context Copy link
@curious_straight_ca this may also be of interest to you, since you said you wanted Tyre_inflator to stick around.
People with this viewpoint often don't last very long on themotte. If you think this place is useless then the mods enforcing the rules trying to preserve it are just pointless acts of aggression.
The mods' ability to "reform" these types of posters is often limited and doomed to failure, because we only have one stick (banning), and one carrot (AAQC, or recognition for being a good poster). But being banned from a place you consider useless is a mercy and a favor rather than a punishment. And being recognized as a useful contributor to a place you consider useless is an insult.
In general, if you think a place is useless and a waste of time, my suggestion is to not go there and waste your time. If you can't hold yourself to this the mods will happily ban you for any length of time at your request. Its not like TheMotte is in your face in any way. You literally have to know where to go on the internet to be here. We have a minimal presence on reddit that is easily ignored, and otherwise generally aren't on social media.
I think Tyre_inflator's original post was culture warry, and definitely not talking as if everyone was listening. If they were a user with no past history of bans or warnings I'd just give them a warning and move on probably. But:
My preferred course of action is that @Tyre_Inflator requests a permaban from a place they ostensibly think is pointless. Me saying that probably makes it less likely to happen. The likely course of action is we do some token ban time ~7 days for them being bad here, and we double double promise to permaban them next time. And within a few weeks of them coming back from the ban they will trigger the permaban.
@Chrisprattalpharaptr's response was a problem of saying something that is ok: "can you say this in a polite way so we can actually talk about it, instead of just waging culture war towards me?" But saying it in a way that is not ok: 'go touch grass, stop whining, etc'. And they have gotten warnings in the past for sort of taking the bait and getting into shit flinging with others users. But they've also had quality contributions, and the length of times between warnings is pretty large. So mostly they are a good user and they misbehaved this one time. I think we can tell them to knock it off and be better, and they will listen because they actually want to be here and our mod incentive structure of carrot (AAQC) and stick (bans) actually works properly on them. But I'm still in favor of using the stick, because its not ok to antagonize other users, even if that user seems to hate it here and might be on their way out soon via bans.
Tyre's been around for about a little under a year, and the name sounds like an alt name a bit. But the invitation to stay around was implicitly an invitation to stay around while making more valuable posts, as opposed to more of that, yeah. It's not like I like his posts more than the average poster, but I think most people like that could post productively if they genuinely wanted to, so it's good to have some good cop with the bad cop.
More options
Context Copy link
Fair enough, "touch grass" is virtually always condescending.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Sometimes I think this is all a simulation designed to imbue some kind of pathos. The bizarreness of it all seems unnatural, in a surreal kind of way.
I don't think that it requires the theory of a simulation to explain why the fast-moving nature of modern global hyper-technological society sometimes feels unnatural and surreal to hardware that evolved largely to live in small tribes and be good at hunting antelope and so on.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I am truly beside myself, like you, these days. And every smarmy "You just need to touch grass" remark sends me further over the edge. Because the insinuation is that I'm only this fucking destitute because I'm extremely online. When the reality could not more manifestly be the opposite.
I'm trying to raise a daughter in a world that already hates her. I have a school system that wants to tell her she's evil (I'm sorry, privileged, not like there is much meaningful difference). It wants to promulgate "queer theory" at the earliest age they can get away with. I live in a state where the school system will secretly transition children, no matter who is elected. The increasingly blue state legislature keeps creeping closer and closer to just defacto taking custody of children who's parent's won't "affirm" their identity. Which isn't to say they don't do it anyways already. The paranoia I have whenever I'm forced to expose my child to these systems is off the charts. You cannot tell me it's not justified.
I often reflect how I could possibly explain to my child all the freedom we used to have. How easy air travel used to be. Or how fun it was to wait in the terminal to greet family as they stepped off the plane. How there didn't used to be security guards and metal detectors at theatres. How there weren't transients destroying every public work constantly. And literally nobody was murdered more often than not, under any circumstances, in the town I grew up in. I went back and checked the old FBI statistics, because I had one of those "Did I just not notice as a kid, or what?" moments, and it turns out, wouldn't you know, there was actually infinitesimal amounts of murder back then after all. That I had free reign to bike 10 miles to town, maybe 12 years old, along a busy parkway with zero reason to believe anything could possibly happen to me. And I find myself especially at a loss to explain what happened to all that.
No, touching grass is not the answer. Unless it's in a prone position at a shooting range.
Obviously this is location dependent, but the homicide rate per decade: in 1960 was about 5.1 per 100,000, it peaked at 9.8 in 1974, at 10.22 in 1980, 9.8 in 1991, then 5.8 in 2006 and 6.8 in 2020 and 2021.
So when I was a kid the US was much more dangerous than it is today, and despite peaks and troughs it stayed pretty high from the end of the 1960's to the tail end of the 90's. Your particular town may have seen an increase of course, but overall even including 2020 and 21, the last 20 years have been much safer than any time since the mid 1960's.
Indeed the homicide rate didn't fall below that 6.8 figure any year between 1968 and 1998. We had 30 years of higher (or equal) than 2020 and 2021 homicide rates in a row in the golden era of letting your kids out go out alone. The lowest homicide rate since 1960 was in 2014 for example.
More options
Context Copy link
I was with you on most of this, but have to draw the line here. While different locales will vary, it remains true that there just isn't very much random crime. The standards for safety and the paranoia that something bad will happen is the main thing that has changed. My city doesn't have much crime in the first place, but the few murders that do happen are almost exclusively interpersonal, often even within family. There is really no good reason for 12 year olds to not be allowed to basically bike around town happily, as they please.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't liking making old arguments that didn't stick the last time I made them, but progressivism, trans 'ideology', being 'anti-white', all spread much more potently over the internet or through peers and popular media than through teachers. When you say that schools tell kids they're privileged or that they secretly transition kids, this gives off an extremely strong impression that the school's physical custody of or social power over the children is a significant force in actually causing the children to be trans. I am really confident this isn't true, just by observing the trans people (including kids) around me, and talking to trans adults and "might've decided to transition if my life had gone another way" types. The problem isn't that The State is using it's power to oppress you, the actual problem is that a lot of smart people are, without any particular malice or plotting, coming to severely incorrect conclusions and spreading them to others.
This does suck, but I think it's minor.
This is less minor. Not civilization-destroying, but not minor either. I don't think this one is inevitable though. I don't know much about eg the "sf dems for change" and the recent win in SF, but that seems very positive for fixing the worst excesses within the progressive framework.
Speaking of moving the conversation forward, if you know you're repeating an old argument, and you know it didn't stick the last time, can you try addressing some of the counter arguments when bringing it up again?
The problem with your argument is that without the support of the education and healthcare systems "children being trans" wouldn't mean much more than "children being emo". That's without touching on the fact that the Internet itself is far from a neutral meme melting-pot, and has several thumbs on the scale built into it, including by the state. The problem isn't people coming to the wrong conclusion. People come to these conclusions, because our institutions deliberately stifle debate, and put propaganda on a pedestal.
Every once in a while, you express confusion about people not realizing you're "far-right" even though you have explicitly declared yourself to be such, and reactions like this would be one of the (but far from the only) reasons why this happens. Reacting to "my country used to be safe and high-trust and it's not anymore" with "this sucks but it's minor" will, at best, get you pegged as a Hlynkaesque alt-right progressive.
I agree that the healthcare system is in a direct sense harming every trans kid (and adult) who transitions*! That said, (based on contestable personal inferences) most children who transition as kids (distinct from most children who identify as trans as kids) would've transitioned as adults anyway in the current social environment. I don't think the education system is doing anything at all similarly impactful. Even in the case of the healthcare system, they're doing it with the consent of parents in almost all cases, and it all basically reduces back down to 'it's happening because everyone involved believes in the trans stuff and people want to transition', not 'institutions are forcing themselves on unwilling people'. The only way to stop the healthcare system from doing that is to win on the main issue.
I think saying 'education and healthcare systems' isn't right, because it's just healthcare.
Responding to more points OP made:
"The state taking your children away to transition them" ... just doesn't happen that often, and every case of that I remember was something more like 'a custody battle where one parent wanted the kid to transition and the other didn't' and 'the child was trans but the state claimed the reason for taking the child away was abuse and a severe eating disorder'.
I'd like for you to justify this more? I don't see any plausible mechanism here. Trans stuff spreads exactly as quickly among kids in private discord groupchats or on 4chan, places where I don't think the thumb is particularly likely, as it does on reddit or tiktok.
I do not think this makes sense. America was much more violent in the past than it is today, even if it's also lower trust today. Flying being annoying is an attempt to compensate specifically for violence, not lower trust generally. So it's much more an example of a pointless, poorly executed regulation than it is of violence getting worse.
Well, if contestable personal inferences are a valid argument, than based on mine you're wrong. From what I've seen kids that decide to transition do so due to a mix of autism and puberty blues. Chances are that if you get through puberty, "dysphoria" turns out to not be such big deal after all. That's pretty much what past research was showing.
"""Consent""". Yeah they argument-from-authority the parents until they sign the paper, and most of them think the guy in the lab-coat knows better.
I know, you keep asserting it, but it's hard to respond to it, if you don't bring anything beyond the assertion. I, and I think others, brought it up before, it's about legitimacy. We all went through some goofy phase during our adolescence, and a big part of growing out of it was most adults being bemused with our antics. If my parents were freaking out about my acting out, but my school was yass-queening me all the way, I can guarantee I'd never adjust.
So what? Should we bring back Primae Noctis, because it just won't happen that often? I'm over that whole numbers argument.
There's at least one recent case where they took the kid from both parents, and the "abuse" was misgendering, and another one when the kid ended up sex trafficked twice while in state custody.
Out of the 2 I might give you 4chan, because truth be told, I don't know much about what's going on there. Private Discord groupchats rely on there being an ecosystem where like-minded people can meet, if you places when one sort group gathers, but not the other, you're still placing thumbs on the scale.
It's fine if you disagree, it just doesn't sound like a particularly right-wing thing to say, let alone "far-right". As to the fact of the matter - which America? The big cities, or OP's home town, and all the towns that acted as a refuge for crime for a couple decades? I don't even have a dog in this fight, but I heard this conversation enough times that I know what the right-wing response is. Someone who is "far-right" should be at least familiar with it as well, even if you ultimately disagree with the argument.
I should've said "medically transitioned" not "transitioned", those are often used differently, and that was a mistake. Medical transition is a lot more of a commitment than wearing the other gender's clothes. I know a lot of people who "realized" they were trans as teens, and didn't transition until much later.
Medical transition filters for the most committed.
I think in the typical case the child's opinions are a more significant driver, and the parent is themselves bought into it. I agree that in some cases the doctor persuades a reluctant parent. But, still, the problem in general is that everyone believes this stuff. The parents believe it and the doctors believe it and so does everyone else.
If you are a parent, you can just say 'no you aren't getting your breasts cut off until 18' and that's that. Even for hormones, in the US I don't think kids can get them without parental consent. (Apparently they can for hormones in canada though ... lol) In the US the risk is more them ordering hormones online from ukraine or something, which does happen.
The theory here is ... that by banning nazis discord increases the number of trans kids? It's not wrong, but. More seriously, the size of the effect there is just going to be very small. Discord doesn't ban that many topics, and for small groupchats they struggle to actually ban any of the banned topics, including the ones everyone including you agree are bad (malware, cp, grooming). It's not really plausible that that measurably increases the frequency of trans. And 4chan is still a strong example, a whole lot of trans stuff there. The trans culture there certainly has a different character than the more popular trans cultures, but it doesn't seem to be less popular as a % of people there.
This is certainly the most plausible version of the argument so far. That's definitely a nonzero effect. It's just ... the effect doesn't seem so large. Like, the school allows the child to use their chosen new name instead of not. Maybe it assigns them a counselor they meet with a few times. I think this is a much smaller effect than the approval of their online and real-life peer group, and the large procession of celebrities, influencers, etc they see on tiktok or in media being trans accepting. I don't think it justifies the focus on schools as places that are harming kids with trans.
I don't even mean black violence, there was significantly more political violence from white people in the past too, which is the right class for airport security. It's just kind of a non sequitur. I would agree that crime, or even black crime, is not the same kind of dismissible minor issue. I just don't think airport security is particularly related to black crime.
Don't worry, that's how I understood you meant it.
No it doesn't. Your kid comes to you and says "dad, I think I'm trans", you say "oh shit, I don't know anything about it, better go to the doctor", your family doctor says "oh shit, I don't know anything about it, better refer to a specialist", and the "specialist" is someone like Michelle Forcier who thinks puberty blockers are a magical pause button. The kid doesn't even know what they're committing to, the parents trust the person in the lab coat, and the person in the lab coat is nuts / completely ideologically captured. If there's a filter in this process, I'm not seeing it.
The child's opinion is probably why they ended up in front of a doctor, but most of the time parents don't know what the hell is going on, and defer to authority. Often against what their instincts are telling them.
Yeah, except you have to be terminally online to know what's going on, and have balls of steel to go against every authority figure in your way. Most people have neither.
You're the one saying that trans kids come from Discord, I gotta work within the constraints you set.
I also don't know so much about Discord, but I'm much less inclined to concede that one. We even talked about this before, the Distributist had not 1, but 3 of his Discord servers banned. Don't tell me he's a grroming, malware-spreading, cp gooning Nazi.
The small groupchats are irrelevant to the argument. Once you ban the big places, you disrupt people congregating on the platform.
This might work under your "medical transition filters for the most committed" assumption, but I dispute it. Like I said, without reinforcement from serious institutions there's no reason to believe this would be anything more than an emo phase, it had peers, influencers and celebrities backing it too.
I don't want to get into esoteric arguments about Saudi's whiteness, but surely it was 9/11 that was the relevant event here? I doubt OP was wistfull for the days you could escort someone directly onto a plane like Humphrey Bogart. In any case OP also specifically brought up "How there didn't used to be security guards and metal detectors at theatres. (...) And literally nobody was murdered more often than not, under any circumstances, in the town I grew up in.", so plain old fashioned violence fits perfectly well into that (which I was referring to geographically, not racially, BTW).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Does your locale have any meaningful degree of school choice?
More options
Context Copy link
It's pretty crazy that there's metal detectors at theatres in Virginia. Even in deepest San Francisco you don't have to pass TSA to go to the movies.
Horseshoe theory. In safe places you don't need metal detectors. In ultra-progressive places you don't have them because they might catch the wrong people.
i.e. the people it's objectively meant to catch
More options
Context Copy link
Metal detectors show up when Something Has to be Done. Their absence from SF theaters doesn’t mean they’ve been evaluated and found problematic, but that they were never considered at all.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
All those things truly suck and I agree that touching grass isn't going to fix them. I just want to push back against the "everything is falling, we are doomed" mindset. There were probably many people in the 1988 Soviet Union who felt the same way about having to recite communist bullshit in order to get any kind of decent job, and were depressed about raising their kids in a system so pervaded by corruption and irrational dogma. A few years later, the Soviet system collapsed. And it wasn't even so much because the people rose up in some glorious violent revolution, it was probably more because a bunch of people wanted blue jeans and rock and roll and meanwhile the Soviet elite decided that things needed to change both for their own personal benefit and because the existing system wasn't working very well. It is very hard to predict the future. Of course the Soviet Union was replaced by a system that became just as oppressive, but again I don't think there was anything necessarily inevitable about that.
Incidentally I think something similar is likely to happen in the US in the coming decades. Currently a gerontocracy is ruling over a social structure that is increasingly stagnant, degenerate and dysfunctional. This is likely to remain the case for one or two decades, and was also happening in the Soviet Union before 1985. Eventually someone not old and senile but merely middle-aged will come into power as the situation becomes desperate, and will promise to enact comprehensive reforms. Which, in the end, will collapse the entire edifice unto itself.
Every once in a while my mother says how Biden reminds her of the old Soviet leaders, and is flabbergasted how a country of 300 million cannot pick someone younger to lead it.
This, of course, assumes that it is that "300 million" who do the picking…
You have to forgive my boomer mother her boomer pretense. I think she's pretty sharp relative to the average anyway.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I feel like this is self-defeating reasoning. Concerns of "Everything is falling, we are doomed" are not solved by "wait for societal collapse", they're validated. If the outcomes are "let the current spiral continue into societal collapse" or "wait for societal collapse to end the spiral", you're basically making an argument for accelerationism, but would that actually solve anything? I don't know how closely the institutional structures of Lysenkoism map onto our social structures but could a collapse actually affect our modern, decentralized online Lysenkoism?
Am I making sense?
More options
Context Copy link
Counterpoint, North Korea still exist. More over, given their respective fertility rates, North Korea will likely win in a few more decades. Sure, they are both below replacement, but North only slightly so, and South is in full blown population collapse.
Win? With what? I'd like to see their antiquated air defenses deal with stealth fighters and drone swarms. Just having enough artillery shells stockpiled to level Seoul is far from sufficient to win.
They would get utterly stomped in a few decades, as opposed to being utterly stomped today. The only hope they have is reform and catch up, which isn't on the cards, or China lending a hand, and that's also extremely unlikely. Population, while far from irrelevant in war, matters far less when two powers aren't peers.
I imagine it will happen the same way as Europe. An increasingly aged South Korean population will become desperate for the children they refused to have to care for them. North Korea doesn't need to march across the border with rifles. They'll only need relatively able bodied workers able to wipe a geriatric's ass. And completely displace the political order of the society that adopts them, but you know...details.
I...don't think it'll happen that way. North Koreans practically aren't allowed to leave North Korea to begin with, the dictator semi-recently announced that the DPRK no longer seeks to reunify with the South, but to destroy it instead, and even so, I imagine any subversive tactics would themselves be subverted by the overwhelming power of culture in South Korean society (and, you know, actually having food).
No, should North Korea ever decide to conquer the South once and for all, it will be by the sword and no other method.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm lowkey rooting for the Philippines to take over all of Asia in that method. They've got the only country still going strong in having children (thanks, Catholicism) and export a lot of nurses to foreign countries. For now they're still a small minority but in a hundred years...?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
North Korea started with strong cohesion and locked everything down early and very hard. That is not the situation our present structure enjoys.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The most infuriating thing to be told to "touch grass" by people whose fake email jobs seem to let them do nothing but sneer at people online. I spend almost all my time just trying to stay afloat, and don't really even have time to be doing this. I found out about that grant while driving from one job to another, noticing the obscene spending she was doing with no visible income and googling her on my phone.
There are so many things I see every day that someone needs to talk about, but I don't have time and the people who do usually seem to be actively hostile to anyone noticing it. Some evenings I come home and write a few hundred or a thousand words just trying to get across how horribly fucked things are, and then delete it after coming on here and seeing that people had already discussed it in the usual way: "this is happening", "no it isn't, and also it's good", repeat until everyone forgets about it.
Well I don't know about others, but I'm not hostile about anyone noticing it, I just think that an "everything is broken, everything is getting worse" perspective is irrational. Some things are getting worse, some things are getting better. There are many reasons for optimism if you just look for them. And we are, in the US, currently very distant from a top-tier shithole situation like living in Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, Pol Pot's Cambodia, or North Korea.
Like what?
More options
Context Copy link
It sounds like you're not even rebutting Tyre's claims? He didn't say everything is broken or getting worse.
I agree that the modern West isn't currently as bad as Pol Pot's Cambodia. But the point is that something like that is always a possibility, and there are reasons to believe we might eventually head in that direction.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There are of course many reasons to worry, but the modern US is still one of the freest and least corrupt societies in human history. We have a lot of corruption and stupidity in the US, of course. However, the average human society, either today, or historically, would be amazed at how well the modern US is doing at balancing individual freedom and collective action. I don't like wokist authoritarianism, DEI corruption, or inflation, but if you feel that they are such great threats that they are worth becoming deeply emotionally distraught over, you are doing the same thing that leftists do when they become deeply emotionally distraught over the (in my opinion, near-zero) chance of Trump becoming a dictator.
The reality is that most things are going alright. The number of minors getting sex change treatments is a drop in the bucket. All the DEI corruption in the world hasn't stopped the strongest economy in human history from continuing to innovate. Inflation sucks but we're not living through the Great Depression or anything close to it. The Hamas supporters in the US didn't get any identical memo, they're just excited about somebody sticking it to what they view as an oppressive regime and they are ignoring the various atrocities that the rebels commit... which means that, while they are not being objective, nonetheless they're just indulging in an extremely common human psychological pattern that people on all sides of the political spectrum regularly indulge in. Musk owns Twitter and Google Gemini is widely mocked, the scary predictions about how the wokes would put us all in gulags have not panned out.
Basically, things are just not that bad. It's just that they seem bad if you focus a lot of attention on everything that is going on that you dislike.
By what metrics? How do you rank the state taking away people's children and sterilizing them? It's virtually never happened before in history, although the few examples we have didn't exactly age well.
This argument seems to me like people, utterly immersed in a culture of fascism and corruption, thrilled at watching their cultural foes beaten and humiliated, musing that things aren't that bad. After all, they're doing ok.
In my experience, the claim "X has never happened before in history!" is almost always founded in a paucity of historical understanding and imagination. There is nothing new under the sun and the past contains an almost infinite well of horrors for the present to draw from.
The first sentence in the "history" section of the wikipedia article for castrato says this: "Castration as a means of subjugation, enslavement or other punishment has a very long history, dating back to ancient Sumer." Spend some time thinking about the depth and breadth of brutality and misery that sentence contains. Contextualize your breathless outrage.
I view castration as slightly different from sterilization. Mostly because you can't castrate women. Surgically sterilizing women really hasn't been around that long at all, and so doesn't have the millennia of human history to compare against or contextualize.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think this is basically true. If you have today's American or modern values, most any particular thing cited in this thread has something 3x worse even 50 years ago, and worse farther back. If you value things like religion, chastity, the TFR, national pride, or even go further back and value conquest and racial purity (this is not intended to be snide) things are clearly going wrong. But dumb regulations, endorsing foreign violence, corruption ... all are actually better now than eg 100 years ago.
edit: Moldbug would claim this is technology masking political/civilizational decline. This is significantly true in many of the areas Moldbug claims it in (although I don't think we're going to descend into something like South America like moldbug claims), but the political 'progress' in the last century more than compensates for it for most peoples' values. If you're philosophically willing to 'die for your freedom' and conceive of freedom the way most to today, then (purely as a comparison, this is in no way a real tradeoff) being mugged a few times is more than worth homosexuality and free love being legal.
There are definitely exceptions, like "private actors being able to build things" or "government competence at large-scale projects" or "homeless people everywhere", but liberals are in fact noticing those. Especially the first two are the kind of thing Ezra Klein wold talk about on his podcast, they're not taboo like OP complains.
And aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? Dumb regulations are far more numerous and worse today.
On average, yes.
But major counter examples exist. Trucking, airlines, and beer all got significantly deregulated. We are coming up on a century past the New Deal, and a lot of big gov overreach peaked in the 60s and then Carter started the neoliberal turn.
Housing is perhaps reaching a turning point as Blue cities/states face reality that zoning is bad/racist. Not sure if building infra is going to improve in that left-on-left fight over green energy/rail vs. environmentalism.
The day to day business of a trucker is far more regulated now as I understand it. GPS and electronic logbooks mean accounting for every minute and making sure the various regs are followed is practical and practiced.
Not being able to build things mostly falls out of the National Environmental Protection Act (thanks Dick Nixon), but there's a lot of other regs like building codes and energy requirements that are continuously getting stricter.
Yeah I think you’re right about the micromanagement of truckers (and other areas with ubiquitous monitoring. We already have cheap cameras/trackers/recorders and now AI can make analyzing the data cheap too. Privacy will be so very dead in most areas of life/work soon.)
The deregulation in the 70s was more about competition between firms.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
OP:
Me:
And - It would be shocking, a complete departure from history and plausibility, if literally everything about the present was better than the past. But, by most peoples' values, the vast majority of things are better now.
I probably should've been more explicit above that I think the 'modern values' that are being satisfied are incoherent and wrong, but OP is trying to criticize the modern world on its own terms and, as a result, failing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/microsoft-engineer-sounds-alarm-on-ai-image-generator-to-us-officials-and-company-s-board/ar-BB1jrH1c
The government is going to make sure that every AI is exactly like Gemini. The entire US media has, in total lockstep, taken the position that:
I just saw a motte post from JTarrou saying how we have finally seen "peak woke"... two years ago. Things keep getting worse, people here keep coping, nobody seems to remember anything.
Everything happening today would have been considered an impossible joke even two years ago, and yet here we are. What good did any of those discussions do except to ease us into accepting every new Current Thing as it happened?
I do not believe I am "coping", and while my memory is not infallible, I think it's pretty good.
I think my predictions from two years ago hold up pretty well, and am expecting them to hold up even better by this time next year.
Personally, I think it helped me gain an understanding of what is happening and why.
To what end? Understanding what is happening and for what reason is only useful if you can actually do something about it. It does no good to understand the "whats and whys" of something unstoppable and unavoidable.
Understanding what is going on, understanding that the experts are not to be trusted, understanding that the elites are not the best and brightest, understanding that the authorities are not there to serve and protect you, can make very real difference in your personal life, even if you are alone or one among very few with such understanding.
Just one random example.
More options
Context Copy link
First, the current situation was neither unstoppable nor unavoidable. True, those things didn't happen, but that doesn't mean it was never possible.
Second, I don't think understanding is really ever useless. It can help you formulate a strategy for next time. It can help you to sway others to your point of view. If nothing else, people generally like closure and understanding can help provide that. Understanding has value even if it didn't help you to avoid an outcome you consider bad.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How would they do that? The government has limited control over private individuals' local AIs. As for the big corporations, the more they go woke the more it creates both a monetary and an ideological incentive for competitors to offer non-woke AIs. Not only that, but China will probably offer its own AIs that will be politically correct in CCP ways, but not in the US way.
It's possible that we did see peak woke two years ago. Musk owns Twitter now and it's pretty much a Wild West of opinions. 4chan is still chugging along. TheMotte and rDrama got off Reddit. /r/europe is full of open anti-immigrant sentiment. A bunch of highly progressive US city subreddits regularly hate on progressive ideologues for taking things too far when it comes to law enforcement policies. Biden is at least trying to look like he is clamping down on immigration.
Two years ago? In 2022? How? Give me an example.
It's a lot better than it was, but it's nowhere near what people are making it out to be. Shadowbanning shenanigans are still afoot over opinions that offensively milquetoast.
More options
Context Copy link
Hell, didn't Goody-2 come out less than two weeks before Gemini, and everyone was laughing at the absurdity of an "ethically responsible" chatbot that refused to do arbitrary things? The parody became reality overnight!
Look at the example I edited into the bottom of my OP. A few years ago people were calling that a slippery slope hysteria that would never be a thing, because it was just conservatives exaggerating Some Kids On Tumblr.
In fact, Tracingwoodgrains actually tried to pull the "lol at least we can laugh at conservatives who think Plurals are a thing" gag recently on twitter, and his replies had people going "actually it is and accommodating them is just Basic Human Decency." It happened so fast one end of the leftist tail doesn't even know it's wagging yet!
Canada's bill C-63 is going to criminalize basically all dissent in the country, the UK is... jesus, just look at them. Germany is going to ban its largest party to keep the immigration coming. How are things getting any better?
What are you talking about here? Last time I recall mentioning systems on Twitter it was to marvel at the way some people take the whole thing seriously.
More options
Context Copy link
The distance was so close that for a moment I thought it was meant to parody Gemini, and I didn't get the joke. It was surreal.
More options
Context Copy link
I think people were laughing at it because it was already kind of true.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Consider that in writing mindkilled screeds about how terrible everything is, you're probably part of the problem. Maybe engage in a bit of self-reflection. Consider compromise. Read the aspirational text at the top of the culture war thread. Do something that makes you happy. Touch grass?
More realistically, Trump gets elected, Republicans suddenly stop caring about deficit spending and cut taxes and voila - all of your problems are magically solved. Instead of crying about how bad everything is you'll be crowing about the liberal snowflakes losing their minds over Orange Man Bad and TDS.
I used to. When the people like you were diluted by those who were well-meaning, who wanted to have actual conversations and maybe learn a thing or two from someone with a different perspective.
How about this? If you can manage to write a measured and polite post about any of the topics above, I'll respond in kind. If the though of trying to do that is so abhorrent, then maybe this isn't the place for you.
This, right here, is exactly the thing I was talking about.
My friend is feeding his new daughter on the free expired baby food he gets from his grocery store job, while this instagram play-farmer writes grants for more money than he makes in a year. And you think I need to "touch grass" if that bothers me, and that I'll suddenly stop caring if Trump is elected for some reason?
I don't believe your motivation for engaging is to discuss the culture war. I think you're waging it by manipulating people into passive acceptance.
How would you feel about writing a post about the WPATH leaks and letting other people respond to it, rather than the other way round? Would you be willing to try?
I have spent a lot of time arguing with CPAR, and I assure you he is in fact here to discuss the culture war in good faith, and is not here to run a scam.
You are freewheeling. You have bitten off too large a chunk of the culture war to be chewed and swallowed, and you are metaphorically choking on it. What that looks like is a moment of crisis, where one is seized by the certainty that the present situation is absolutely intolerable, and that Something Must Be Done. I have experienced this myself, a number of times.
The Motte is not intended, nor is it fit, to Do Something. It does not exist to coordinate action, only discussion. The good the Motte has done is to allow people very different from each other to converse. That's it. It is not going to help your friend relying on expired baby food, nor is it going to deliver solutions to the problems you list in your OP. It never promised to, and was never intended to.
The horrors you are seeing are not new. Large segments of human experience have always been "intolerable", and despite this, have been tolerated by previous generations. Your great grandparents lived through a global economic collapse and trench warfare. The present situation is not even that bad, historically speaking, and we have so, so much further to fall.
The culture war is not going to stop soon. The part that has been going for a decade is only one battle; the actual war has been going at least since the 60s, and arguably since the 1600s. It is probably going to continue to impinge on your life and awareness in unpleasant ways for the rest of your life; if we are all very lucky, our children might potentially live to see the other side of it. You should attempt to make peace with that fact, because if you do not it is entirely possible that the culture war will drive you insane.
None of the above is an argument for quietism or surrender. There are many useful actions to take, many useful things to be done, many choices to be made, many strategies to pursue. It is, in fact, possible to Do Something, but it helps to have a clear idea of what one is trying to accomplish and what the actual effects of a given action are likely to be. Lashing out is not advisable, and is likely to be counterproductive. What the Motte can help with, for those with the patience to use it correctly, is to learn better about the realities of the situation, which makes productive action easier. I appreciate that this is not a satisfying answer, in an emotional sense. The truth rarely is.
I see absolutely no evidence to support any of this. Indeed, all I ever see people hold forth as possibilities are "plans" based on pure wishful thinking and optimism bias (and sometimes religious faith), none of which, at least to my perception, can possibly work.
And you were right to, and you shouldn't have let people dissuade you from it.
I don't think my "plan" of "prep to survive nuclear war so that you can clean up the mess afterward" counts as "optimism bias", except from a highly-mindkilled perspective. I mean, I've tried my best to get civil defence considered in policy despite it not being in my CW interest to do so.
Well, first, I'd note that the fall of (the western half of) the Roman Empire was a centuries-long process, not a sudden "Mad Max" collapse, and there's a lot of ruin in a nation. So, first, expecting a sudden end to the current system — like nuclear war — and for said sudden end to come in our own lifetimes are both rather optimistic. As is having enough left intact to make "cleaning up the mess" feasible. More likely is at least another century or two continuing the current trend of slow, grinding defeat, combined with slow decay increasingly held at bay by the consumption of the civilizational "seed-corn" that would be essential to rebuilding.
My point is that to think nuclear war is good because it mostly kills the Blue Tribe is Pol Pot logic; thus, to someone not highly-mindkilled, this is, if unrealistic at all, "pessimism bias".
The reason I think nuclear war is fairly likely has little to do with the CW except insofar as the CW is weakening the USA at a time when its hegemony is being tested (in particular Taiwan looks like a potential spark for WWIII).
More options
Context Copy link
The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed. A good analogy to watch is South Africa, which got a late start on multicultural technocracy but then speedran tribal spoils and the competency crisis well ahead of us. The analogy isn't perfect (and leans more heavily into ethnic conflict than I think a fair assessment of our predicament would), but by SA's timeline the USA and Europe aren't even close to a breaking point. But this does assume a closed system.
If you want to be more optimistic, you can imagine the situation is more like 1848, where the geopolitical order everywhere is being propped up by a few Metternichs, and if they lose power, all the creaky structures in the periphery will collapse all at once. Once the hegemony of one ideology falls, we enter a Warring States-like period and some pragmatic, ruthless Qin(s) (or Prussia if we hold to the analogy) will sweep up all the statelets running insane inefficient systems.
Of course, this Qin/Prussia probably won't be running a system you like. Just not our current one.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If you want to get involved in something where you have a decent chance of scoring a win, I'd recommend the trans issue. There are actual structures there within which people can work to push things forward.
If you want a global all-encompassing win, like the progressives have, than you're going to be pretty unhappy for a long time.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Can you tell me what you're doing? Can you explain how the motte has helped you do it? Can you point to something you've learned by engaging with people who don't just disagree with you on "issues", but spend enormous effort trying to lie and manipulate you like certain users do? (you can guess who I mean)
Just give me some hope there's a meaning in any of this. Because I read your "moment of crisis," and you were right about all of it. Everyone who said you were wrong or exaggerating was proven to be lying just because they didn't want you to take action.
Building a family. Having kids, building a good marriage with my wife, doing what I can to make us as secure in the future as possible.
Helping to build up my extended family. Trying to build good relationships with my nieces and nephews. I am pretty well established as the cool uncle, and I'm trying to leverage that to have a significant and positive impact on their lives.
Cementing myself into my community. For me, this mainly means church, and my friends from church.
Building my relationship with God, so that I have something firm to stand on regardless of what else happens, and thus avoid madness.
Beyond that, acquiring wealth, resources, tools. Learning skills, trying to improve the skills my career is built on.
Beyond that, I've made a hobby of weapons development. My goal is to contribute to the general thrust laid out by Defense Distributed, to make gun control entirely impossible by developing methods for manufacturing effective weapons out of uncontrollable materials. This has worked well enough for me and for others that it has entirely shifted my view of the 2A debate from "we have to fight or they'll beat us" to "they have zero conception of how utterly fucked their entire project is." There's multiple entire branches of strategy people haven't even considered tapping yet, ripe for the picking, from stuff that's just immediately delightful for gun culture types to stuff that I don't talk about because I think doing so would be legitimately dangerous. The mainstream debate and the structures attempting to enforce the issues are so far out of touch with the realities of the situation that their ignorance is probably actively dangerous to our society's continued function.
Having a hobby on this end also exposes me to the activist element of the gun culture, which is doing very, very well for itself in a quite hostile environment. The level of contempt they inculcate for federal authorities and for the Blue machine generally is always heartening to see.
The motte has, I think, helped me understand the Culture War, and perhaps more importantly, has helped me achieve a number of philosophical insights that have helped me better understand and accept the realities of life generally. These enable me to engage with the culture war with a great deal more equanimity than I used to possess. I am pretty sure I have a fair idea of where this is all going, which cuts out a lot of the worry and has allowed me to think through, precommit on, and make peace with some of the more bitter aspects during moments of calm. This is greatly preferable to attempting to do so in the heat of the moment.
There's more to say here, but it is very late, and I am very tired. Perhaps later.
And it is not about gun issue alone. The best and brightest's understanding of crucial science, technology, energy, military, health, environment etc. issues is on the same level. Evil masterminds exist only in movies and comic books.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ah. Was I 'gaslighting you while celebrating it at the same time as denying it's happening?' Slamming the Overton window leftwards on you? Or something else you edited out of your post?
I don't think my post was particularly celebratory, nor do I think I made any comment on the object level issues you raised in your post. But whatever, the one leftish leaning person who bothered to reply to your post managed to perfectly demonstrate all the problems you were complaining about. Bravo.
Alright. Forget about the black person who got taxpayer money for a moment (we can go back to it later if you like). Imagine that I'm an actual human being and I want to help your friend and people like them - what should I do? What set of policies do you think would be most helpful to your friend? Was he significantly better off when he was stocking shelves five or ten years ago? And do you think grocery store workers had it better in 1990, 2005, or 2020ish?
Hello, pot. Kettle here. You're black.
But then, give me some advice. How could I reply to your post in a way that wouldn't be 1) denying these are problems or 2) manipulating people into passive acceptance, short of agreeing with you on every point and accepting that leftists are evil? I'd invite you to sketch out a very brief outline of what such a post might look like such that you think you could have a productive conversation.
This place is right-wing twitter (insert "always has been" meme) but verbose and you're not allowed to call stuff gay or retarded. Accept that and you'll have more fun.
EDIT: Come on guys, you know it's true. Don't shoot the messenger.
You have upset the hive mind and will be downvoted accordingly.
When Trace split off I kinda thought he was being a pansy. But now I kind of get it. I’m pretty right-wing these days on a lot of issues, and get upvoted when I express such sentiments. But defending the left at all from unfair accusations or criticizing the right at all tends to bring a lot of downvotes.
I think we are a bit right of a sweet spot to avoid a groupthink spiral.
The linked photo is my thought on so much of what gets posted here. Twitter does it mostly from the left, others do it more from the right, but it's never all that useful.
/images/17101734210792935.webp
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is exactly what culture war "discussion" is. Snide little manipulative tactics, rhetoric meant to goad, bully, and insinuate.
We've been doing this for ten god damn years as things get crazier and crazier, but the methods always stay the same.
Why do you do it? How long will you keep doing it? Will you ever stop? Will you someday say "oh, the revolution has gotten to my stop and I want off," or is the only real goal to keep pushing and hurting and winning endlessly?
Contrary to what Trump claimed, nobody ever really gets tired of winning.
I don't think that Trump "claimed" that. Here's what he said.
I think it's pretty obvious that the first part's a joke.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Bro, if you think that Chrisprattalpharaptr is some kind of leftist demon who just wants to keep hurting people endlessly, you're probably psychologically as far gone into irrational wild overreaction mode as leftists who think that everybody to the right of Joe Biden is a literal fascist who wants to put trans people in death camps.
I've been reading his posts from the 2020 riots on reddit. Let's just say I firmly disagree with you.
Please link some.
ChrisPratt wasn't the most bloodthirsty during the riots, but it's always made his paeans against accellerationism fall a little flat when he said :
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
They're not going to get tired of winning any more than you're going to start enjoying losing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Every society in human history, except maybe a few that lucked into having access to enormous raw material wealth, has had people who struggle materially. I myself have been poor before, I know what it's like so please don't feel like I'm being callous. Your friend feeding his daughter on free expired baby food from his grocery store job does not mean that the US is in some calamitous state. There were people like your friend in the US 20 years ago, 70 years ago, and 100 years ago too. There were people taking corrupt advantage of stupid government policies in the US 20 years, 70 years, and 100 years ago as well. Should we try to make things better? I think so, but I don't buy into the sky is falling narrative.
In American history, the people who struggled materially organized to accomplish things by force. Sometimes 100,000 strong, forcing half of the supply chain to shut down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_violence_in_the_United_States
I’m not much of an historian but I have it on good authority that such events also transpired in Russia and China. Even in Ancient Rome, even in the European Middle Ages. So I think that is a big difference between today and, as you say, 100 years ago. They did believe the sky was falling, because it was for them and their family, and then they did the things that they felt rectified the situation. It doesn’t appear that America has anything close to the labor movements we used to have, partially IMO because of the distracting infusion of progressive social identity politics.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The point in your favor for suggesting moderation is balanced by your politely-phrased smug tone. "When the people like you," "If you can manage to write a measured and polite post," "maybe this isn't the place for you". Do you think you're better than him?
Yes, Chris is better than him. In the relevant sense of writing better posts, all this does have some correlation with all other ways in which you can judge a person's quality. The quality of posts an individual writes is strongly correlated across time, and I'd rather themotte have more chrises and less tyres, proportionally. There's a hierarchy - some people are better than chris, some people are worse than tyre, and a lot of noise, but it's true.
The first sentence is obviously somewhat inflammatory, but I don't think it should be. It is - first - a neutral statement of fact, phrased in the simplest possible way - and then, second - inflammatory because people do not like hearing it directly stated. But in order for the second meaning to exist, the first meaning must have come first, otherwise there'd be nothing to be upset about.
More options
Context Copy link
Nope.
As someone who supports some of the causes he decries to varying degrees, how do you think I'm supposed to participate in this conversation exactly? I could respond in kind and we could fling feces at each other while you tut tut and enjoy the show. Or more realistically I'm buried in feces by the largely right-leaning commentariat.
I could craft a thoughtful response to some of his individual points, but what kind of conversation do you think he and I will have?
I could be the apologetic, liberal whipping boy who takes his lumps for That Bad Thing The People I Don't Like Did This Week.
I've done enough of all three. At a certain point a spade is a spade, and a bad post is a bad post. I can link you to massive exchanges I've had extending weeks and tens of thousands of words with FcfromSSC, gattsuru, professorgerm (now desolation, I believe?) and others so clearly I'm capable of having a decent conversation with people who hold very different beliefs. The process certainly changed my worldview.
That hasn't happened in...upwards of a year, I don't think? I'm sure you could make the argument that I changed rather than the space, but then I'd challenge you to show me any interesting and civil back-and-forth between a real liberal and conservative here that's happened recently. At a certain point, what exactly am I supposed to do with OP?
You would be correct, but I'm on indefinite hiatus from The Motte. I do sometimes miss reading FC, Gatt, you, but the value proposition of being here much stopped being worth it. Still puttering along under the old name at trace's spinoff, not that Mr. Bigshot is around there anymore. Good luck!
I see. Despite being on hiatus though, you managed to dig up a pretty obscure post.
Hope you're doing well!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm hoping professorgerm and FCFromSSC had a better experience out of it, because the example that you selected in the past [!] is... not what I would personally choose to highlight as an example of an extended decent conversation.
He's one of my favorite people to talk to.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's really quite sad.
I wonder if there's some way to promote more of this. Because the site is rather lopsided politically, it's significantly harder to have an evenhanded conversation.
Yes, a mind-wipe that makes people entirely forget the last ~8 years.
While I agree a lot of people have become too bitter, possibly myself included, I would like anyone bemoaning how "lopsided" this place has become to explain what is the point of a discussion space, if not to reach conclusions, and move the conversation forward? How many iterations of the same conversation do we have to go through, before we're allowed to point out we've done this before and that things that were said and done have certain inescapable implications? Or are we meant to re-enact the same debates, with the same open-mindedness, like we're characters stuck in a 90's sitcom, that aren't allowed to go through any character growth?
The only other way I can think of is to relax the "discussion space" constraint, and turn it into a "get things done space", at least partially. If you want people to stop looking at each other with resentment, and mistrust, you need to give them a common cause.
I think a lot (but not all) of the consensus is more from change in which people participate, rather than through changing minds.
That doesn't change much, since a lot of it is driven by the background bitterness of non-progressives. I'm sure I could have a lovely conversation with Chris post-mindwipe, but as it stands I'm not in the mood to give so much benefit of the doubt to his ideology or to accept his framing of issues, and as a result he has me blocked. Or you can look at some of the reactions to FCFromSSCs position that the red tribe should cut all ties with the establishment, and build parallel institutions. There's certain type of talk that progressives don't like being around, but that kind of talk becoming more popular is a direct result of long-term exposure to Noticing.
Therefore, the only way to get past that is to forget you noticed. Either that, or work together on something that is irrelevant to the things you noticed. The act of cooperation itself could create trust and goodwill.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's not just you, and I'm not particularly left leaning. There are way too many right wing doomers these days, and too few people who are willing to have a measured discussion. IDK when it changed (probably gradually I suppose), but I first noticed it probably 6-8 months ago.
More options
Context Copy link
Good for you? I don't know who you are. This reads like you are trying to prove you're better than OP.
I think if you had stopped at your first two paragraphs ("Consider that [...] Orange Man Bad and TDS") you would have made a merited point and not sounded like you had something to prove.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If it makes you feel any better, your opponents feel approximately the same way about you.
Consider reading the sacred texts:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
I reread some of the SSC classics, and I think they were very much a reaction the specific 2010s era of hot-take new-media clickbait. Most of the sites he links to as bad examples don't exist anymore, like Feministe, Jezibel, The Huffington Post etc, or only as a shadow of their former selves. In retrospect I think they were just desperately writing the most provocative clickbait they could possibly get, to get eyeballs, because web journalism is just a brutal business. It lead to a lot of angry discussion in comment sections, which they were happy to allow, because it meant even more eyeballs for their next piece. Scott's posts were great because they couuld go through the entire gish-gallop of bad arguments, one by one, without losing his cool, which most of us were not capable of doing.
Now there's no arguing, sites just ban anyone they dislike. Whether that's discord mods, corporate HR, or university admissions officers. There's no "argument," not even a bad one, we're just shut out. Most sites don't even have a forum or comment section anymore.
The sites died out because their format of pouring incandescent hot rage into your eyes has moved to youtube, tiktok, twitter, etc. Those offer either condensed format or visual augmentation, whereas for as bad as those former sites were for humanity they at least forced you to READ a bit.
The comments on youtube/tiktok/whatever are still largely unmoderated even if the more text-based social media sites are.
True... I feel like that stuff is well "silo'd" be the algorithm though, so you just don't see it unless you go looking to it. I haven't seen Scott or any other rationalist blogger offer a big rebuttal of Andrew Tate or any big feminist vlogger on youtube, twitter, or tiktok. And I would have to laugh if they did. It just seems unnecessary.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Your "sacred text" includes the phrase "glob of snot" in the first (spoken) paragraph
It's a technical term.
More options
Context Copy link
It sounded better in Aramaic.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I read "the sacred texts" as they were written. Do you know what I noticed? Scott's prime example of "whale cancer" was not strangled by infighting like he predicted. Instead, he's a major democratic party influencer, with a reach greater than Scott himself.
I'm starting to think that the sacred texts were maybe wrong on a few things, and the prophecies never came true.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The blatant lying aside, where do you stand on animal rights? Chicken cages do look fairly torturous.
It's another one of those bills that tweaks definitions just enough to put the lobbyists' competitors out of business. Chickens now need exactly 116 square inches of space, and if yours have 115 your investment is now worth nothing.
You can guess how the 116 number was arrived at.
But the general point of my post is why we even waste time saying things like "the blatant lying aside" when the blatant lying is the driving force behind all the individual examples.
We could spend days arguing about how many chickens can lay on the head of a pin despite none of us having any relevant experience in chicken housing (all mine were free-range when I bothered--it wasn't worth it).
But what would be the point of that? We've been doing it for over a decade and things just keep getting more and more insane as the same people keep lying to our faces about it until it's too late to stop them.
Wait, 116 square inches? That's less than a square foot of space per chicken, how is that a "cage-free" environment? Are they all just packed into a large barn like Japanese salarymen into a train carriage? That's doesn't sound like a material QoL improvement for the birds.
Certified Humane mandates 6lbs of chickens per square foot, so a full-grown ten-pound broiler should have at least 1.67 square feet of space. Their definition of "free-range" requires two square feet per bird in addition to 1.67 square feet of shelter, but even that doesn't sound like much of an improvement. You have to go all the way to "pasture-raised" (108 sq ft per bird) to get something that doesn't resemble a death camp.
You realize they're all death camps, right, including the ones with 108 sq ft per bird?
That doesn't mean the poor things can't enjoy their lives while it lasts.
You know that PETA slogan about farms being Auschwitz? You know that neonazi talking point about how Auschwitz had a swimming pool for the prisoners? Thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis? Eh?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You can make this argument against any minimum area restriction.
You should make this argument against any minimum area restriction, unless you have solid evidence that the minimum area restriction was arrived at through an impartial and objective process. Under no circumstances should the evidentiary basis and objectivity of such a process be simply assumed.
I don't know what kind of evidence would possibly be considered 'solid' for something like this for people who disagree with the whole project to begin with.
I'm not generally a fan of "studies show", but this seems like an area where a study showing things might be helpful. If the idea is to reduce chicken misery, some objective definition of how we measure/recognize chicken misery and a demonstration that enclosures over the specified size reliably reduces it would be appreciated.
For that matter, pointing out that the enclosure size is being set by proxy via California's import regulations settles much of the question, and updates me against taking the OP's narrative on this point seriously.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not really. If it was an obviously large number set at an obviously round number, it would be pretty unlikely that it was set based on regulatory capture.
AFAICT 116 square inches originates with California rules issued in 2013. I would assume that other states copied the number because it's the smallest number that still grants access to the Californian market (previous laws required compliance with prop 2 (2008) to sell eggs in California, which didn't actually specify a cage size but it seems producers mostly play it safe and follow the 116 square inch rule). Maybe you can blame California for making up a dumb number, but that's not why other states are following suit now.
Since then, Washington and California have passed a law requiring 144 square inches (which I am sure will be unobjectionable to the OP since this is a round number) with a lengthy phase in (so no, the investments don't disappear overnight).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
For me, it makes more sense to focus on the ~1 million infants who are circumcised every year in the US than to focus on the relatively much smaller number of minors who undergo gender hormone treatment or surgery. Circumcision isn't as harmful on average, however it is happening to a much larger number of minors than the number of minors who are gender-transitioning, and unlike with gender-transitioning minors, there isn't even a faint amount of consent from the person who gets the surgery, there is literally zero.
I think it's fine to focus on both at the same time, of course.
At least for me, there's three problems with this perspective: 1. Circumcision is not really a thing in my country except for a tiny jewish minority, and there is no movement to spread it whatsoever 2. The evidence is quite strong that circumcision or not just doesn't matter much for any important life outcomes 3. As far as I can judge, even in places where circumcision is common, it's perfectly acceptable to just not do it.
Now compare the trans (and to a lesser degree other LGBTA) movement: 1. It's rarer here than in the US, but there is a dedicated lobby pushing it and similar things have spread here in the same manner 2. The evidence is quite strong that being trans is very bad for most important life outcomes, especially once you actually read the studies in more detail and notice that trans individuals are far worse off irrespective of the support they're getting, and that the studies are often deliberately designed to obfuscate this distinction 3. Saying "my daughter identified as a cat last week and as a princess the week before and has been consistently been very feminine all her life, I don't think we should overinterpret her saying she is a boy" already outs you in certain circles as "conservative"
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not in favor of circumcision (jews, muslims, etc. excepted, of course), but it's seems far less bad than the trans things. The latter causes tangible harms to people's lives, and is currently warping society around it.
More options
Context Copy link
In my case this is the literal equivalent of "why don't you do something about FGM in Somalia" thrown at western feminists. I find the practice barbaric, but over here it's next to unheard of (at least outside of the protected classes in coalition with the trans movement). Even in America, there are certain characteristics of this issue that doesn't make it prone to becoming a culture war hotspot - most importantly people leave you alone if you don't participate. The other thing is the direction the practice is trending in, 1M per year would put it at ca. 1/3 whereas I remember the stat of 2/3 of men being circumcised in the US back when I was getting into spats about it on internet forums.
All in all, if it makes more sense to you, than go and focus on it, but why do I get the feeling what you actually mean is for people like me to stop talking about the trans stuff?
I don't mean that you should stop talking about the trans stuff, I just don't agree with how big of a deal some people here make of the trans stuff, and how often they post about it, given how few people it affects compared to other issues. I get that it's a leftist vanguard in the culture war, but then people should be more honest that they care about it because it's a leftist vanguard more than that they care about it because of the kids who are getting hurt by it. I agree with you though that the direction the practice is trending in is encouraging in, that makes me happy.
I think there are two big points here:
Despite #1 I personally don't proactively start fights about this, but I've been willing to wade in here and elsewhere when the topic comes up, and I get why it's some people's cause area.
More options
Context Copy link
I think a major motivation there is that, for people who have kids, there is a portion of the trans activists who will directly try to influence your kids in their direction; if you are unlucky, your kid could suffer serious consequences. It's one of the aspects of the culture war that has the potential for the most direct, severe personal impact, even if the absolute odds may not be that high. I would be against it even if it were a rightist point.
By contrast, nobody's trying to secretly circumcise the kids. (Or if they are, they're doing an incredible job keeping it secret.)
But that's because they succeeded so well they became the status quo. Assuming you think transness is harmful or something similar, a future where "transing" your kids is done openly is not better one than they have to do it in secret. It's worse because it means they won so thoroughly it is now entirely accepted.
That's status quo bias. Because X succeeded and is now the way things are, it is not as bad as Y which is a new change.
Now Y can still be worse than X for other reasons, but the fact X is done openly isn't on its own an argument for it being less harmful.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I just had this numbers argument with @vorpa-glavo. I categorically reject that framing. Saying I should post more about circumcisions than the trans issues makes about as much sense as saying people should have talked more about circumcisions than the Catholic Church child sexual abuse scandal. If we approached every medical scandal this way, we'd probably never hear about any of them. Nobody takes that kind of numbers-based utilitarian analysis seriously, and for good reason.
I have a better idea - if leftists want me to stop pointing out how they're hurting children, they can stop hurting children.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
But anti-circumcision activism is just as hopeless as it was ten years ago, or moreso now that the men's rights activists (who were the only people who cared) are now on official "hate-speech terrorism watchlists" in most countries. None of the discussion on the motte has even moved the needle here, let alone made a dent in society.
So what was the point? If rationalism is about winning, why does none of this ever win anything?
I'm not sure that's true. Even if it is, anti-circumcision activism is much less hopeless than it was 50 years ago.
Well first of all, not everybody on TheMotte considers themselves a rationalist or has a background in the rationalist community. Personally, while I enjoy and have learned from some rationalist writings, I do not consider myself a part of the rationalist movement.
Second, while TheMotte largely agrees with your policy preferences, the rationalist community as a whole does not. It is not surprising that a movement that is not dominated by people who agree with your policy preferences is not winning at enacting policies that you prefer.
Third, even if the rationalist community was dominated by people who agree with your policy preferences, it is not clear that rationalists are particularly good at getting policy changed. I think that the rationalist movement has definitely had some effect on politics. It has, for example, produced a few quite good writers who have convinced a pretty large number of people to either change their minds about certain things or to speak more openly about what they already believed. But the effect has been limited. I think one reason for that, even putting aside the question of whether rationalists are actually any smarter or more rational than the average politician, is that most rationalists are not the kind of personality types who crave power and are willing to do what it takes to get it.
Yudkowsky wrote that "Rationality is Systematized Winning", one of the few things written by him I've ever even glanced at so far, and it seems to me that even there he pointed out that it is irrational to act as if being a nerdy hyper-verbal person who cares about truth is going to magically give you political power.
But rationalism attracts people who care more about being nerdy hyper-verbal people who care about truth than about gaining brute power through hook or crook, and it's far from clear that rationalism is actually more rational than competing movements, so I'm not surprised that rationalism is not dominating politics.
I would also like to point out that, even if rationalism does not win as much as you would like, it's quite possible that in the absence of rationalism, your preferred politics would win even less.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I'm not sure if matters of consent are of the utmost primacy to me.
I have no interest in being hamstrung by the circumcision debate while more clear and obvious ethical violations are occuring in front of our eyes. Especially since nobody's going to harangue me for having incorrect opinions on circumcision.
I get why it may be logically consistent and principled to go after both circumcision and gender transitioning wrt to minors, but I think reality is screaming for some triage and focus here.
To me it's not clear which is the more clear and obvious ethical violation.
Depends on where you bring up the topic.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It is comforting to read your post, I feel similarly.
More options
Context Copy link
This requires first showing that circumcision is majorly harmful.
I'll grant you that it appears to be a net harm for most boys who undergo the procedure. If I have sons they will not be circumcised. But we allow parents to make decisions for their children that turn out to be mildly bad all the time. I'm yet to be convinced that circumcision isn't in this category. Circumcised men can still have and enjoy sex, they father children, they have no trouble with any of this.
I agree, but I think it's clear that if somebody proposed that we should let parents have a small part of their sons' ears cut off during infancy the vast majority of the public would be against it, even though it would be no more harmful than circumcision. Circumcision has been grandfathered in through tradition. The very fact that it is legal points to a disturbance in society's approach to what parents are allowed to do to their kids. I think it would be good to hold the infant's body inviolate from parental decisions except in the case of genuine medical issues, even if we still allow parents (as I agree we should) make some stupid decisions for their kids like making them to go to a bad school or whatever.
It is legal, as far as I know, to have your son’s ears reshaped into pointy ones, which sounds like the closest analogue to what you’re describing.
I guess point to you on the basis of ‘it’s still legal because nobody has done it yet’. I just think circumcision is too small a deal to forbid outright when it’s that widespread; maybe there’s ways to reduce its prevalence somewhat(which I support), but outright banning something undergone by the majority of the male population and not particularly harmful sounds like a bad idea.
More options
Context Copy link
Right, but those are strong religious and traditional headwinds to be battling against, opening up multiple fronts of conflict when I am only interested in one in the here and now - eliminating nonsense about 'reversible puberty blockers' and the commonly accepted pseudoscience in that orbit. I'm not sure if badgering potential allies about circumcision helps towards that aim. Table it for later, I say.
If I could be convinced that banning the practice and any other 'cosmetic' surgery for minors was the silver bullet to my issues with gender transitioning, I'd sign off on it. Just doesn't seem feasible. And I don't think people are all that confused about circumcision and what it entails. That is less the case for 'dilating' your nether regions. I think a lot of passive support for minor transitioning would dry up if it were exposed to the reality of the practice without the safety of WPATH euphemisms. I don't think that dynamic is in play with circumcision.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link