domain:betonit.substack.com
FtttG
20m ago
The fact that similar patterns are visible in other countries with a strong union tradition (e.g. France, UK) but without legal analogues to the American antitrust legislation you cite.
FtttG
22m ago
Scott, by his account, has a good marriage, a tightly knit community and a pair of twins. He still finds poly a net-positive to his life. I know poly isn't for me, but if someone says it works for them, who am I to argue? Maybe you'd argue they should give monogamy the old college try so they can make an informed decision on which suits them better, but follow that line of reasoning far enough and you'll find yourself arguing that every man should have sex with another man just so he can be absolutely sure that he's straight and not just a closeted gay/bi.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
27m ago
My opinion that unions are evil is largely based on the negative externalities they impose on society, the distortionary effects and inefficiencies they wreak on the economy, and their strong and not-at-all-coincidental historical affiliation with organised crime.
But how much of that is intrinsic to unions, and how much is a result of a specific implementation of unions, under which they are immune to antitrust laws while companies are not (1 2)?
FtttG
27m ago
The Holodomor was a half-deliberate half-targeted famine which killed 4 million.
A quibble: some estimates put the death toll as high as 5 million.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
27m ago
if practised by a person who is weird or abnormal,1 it will work better than adhering to the status quo
See here's the thing... I don't even think it works better than the status quo for almost anyone. I strongly believe if these poly people had good marriages, a tight knit community, and children, they would be happier and better off.
SigurdsSilverSword
34m ago
May 7th, the day the Conclave started (no number given but ranked 3rd)
May 5th (-0.176; fell due to bad press after SA coverup accusations
April 1st, the favorite at -1.796
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
35m ago
"Legalized prostitution is good"? For every independent escort charging rich businessmen $5000 for a dinner and a gentle romp there's multiple women turning tricks for their pimps in exchange for a small cut of the profits and a daily dose.
This sounds like a strawman. What about the middle of the curve—the prostitutes who are neither desperate streetwalkers nor luxurious escorts, but merely work for reasonable wages in clean, legal brothels?
The first example is spot on, and it's pretty much the same as the OnlyFans one (very attractive women stand to gain, others less so).
My opinion that unions are evil is largely based on the negative externalities they impose on society, the distortionary effects and inefficiencies they wreak on the economy and their strong and not-at-all-coincidental historical affiliation with organised crime. I don't really have a strong opinion on whether the modal worker stands to benefit by joining one or not.
FtttG
42m ago
Ah, interesting. Funnily enough, one of the few words in the Irish language I think the average Irish person could be expected to recognise and understand is "beangarda", meaning a female police officer (as opposed to garda, which is a male police officer).
Great post!
I don't have any problem with the idea of "luxury beliefs" in the sense that some beliefs appear to indeed be things that it is costly to believe, and that some people are able to bear the cost while others are not. I think that what makes them tricky is that the costs themselves are arguably grounded in what other people believe. Where "luxury beliefs" get controversial seems to be when it is a matter of controversy as to whether the costs are themselves a consequence of the belief, or a consequence of e.g. social norms.
Post-WWII, American culture underwent a radical shift. Progressivism to that point had mostly been about the perfectibility of mankind through social programs--public education, proper nutrition, clean water, etc. were things that many American communities still lacked circa 1920. In the century from 1870 to 1970, the percent of illiterate white Americans over the age of 14 dropped (PDF) from 20% to 1%; the percent of illiterate nonwhites dropped from 80% to around 4%--and those percentages went to about 0.5% and 2% in the ten years following. Similar strides were made in nutrition, hygiene, clean water, etc. and we were exporting these advances, too--engaging in imperialism modernization efforts around the world.
But today if you've "caught the vision" of progressivism, you needn't pursue it very long to discover that the low-hanging fruit is well and truly plucked. Of course new children are still being born (for now...) so there's always more work to be done, but the extent of visible progress achieved by the progressive project within living memory circa 1995 was unprecedented and jaw-dropping. We'd conquered nature so thoroughly that the only thing remaining to hinder our own progress was... other people!
Prototypical progressive thinkers--I'm thinking specifically of John Stuart Mill, here--were very interested in the idea that we should all have maximum liberty, constrained only by the compatibility of that liberty with everyone else enjoying liberty in similar quantities. "My right to swing my fist ends where your right to swing your fist begins," I suppose, though there is probably a more pithy version of that floating around somewhere. At the root of this is the idea that we are all the best judges of our own flourishing, provided we start from a place of adequate education.
So here in the 21st century, we have responses to your identified categories.
- Gender transition is a way for people to flourish by breaking the bonds of restrictive social constructs. The only costs are those imposed by transphobes.
- Sex positivity is a way for people to be honest and open about what actually brings them pleasure. The only costs are those imposed by slut-shaming.
- Drugs are a way for people to pursue their interest in feeling certain ways. This is more complicated and may not apply to certain highly lethal drugs, but the costs imposed on e.g. marijuana or nootropic users are predominantly imposed by moralizing busybodies.
- Psychotherapy is a way for people to flourish with the help of trained professionals. The only costs are those imposed by... psychophobes? Do we have a neat slur for people who think therapy is for the stupid and the weak?
- "Do what you love" may be the single most obvious good that any human could choose. If you read Freddie deBoer's manifesto, his whole "imagine a world where..." is a story about people being free to just do what they want, when they want to, without any consequences being imposed on them by society--indeed, with all possible consequences being absorbed, costlessly and without a single judgmental comment, by society.
I think that some of the rising conservatism I see in today's young people--which of course the Cathedral has already tarred as right wing extremism--is a growing suspicion that these claims about the source of oppression being socially constructed, which it may have been understandable for people to believe as recently as 50 years ago, no longer plausibly hold water.
- Gender is more than just a social construct, and a true sex change operation would involved extensive (impossible at current tech levels) brain surgery, to say nothing of the endocrine system. Sorry, you're going to have to wait for better tech.
- Sexual feelings are more than just a social construct; pair bonding has biological roots and slut shaming is a defense mechanism against defections from the stable equilibrium of general monogamy.
- Psychotherapy might be beneficial for the truly damaged, but most likely you're depressed (or whatever) as a result of trying to believe things your biology tells you that you shouldn't believe. Psychotherapy is a way to maintain in humans the view that their inability to thrive in the new progressive world is their problem, not the progressive world's problem.
- If we all really did what we love all the time, we would all starve to death in short order. Or if we really did manage to make robots do everything for us, our antifragility would lead to widespread psychological breakdown due to a universal crisis of meaning. Humans are evolved to do the work of humans, not to perpetually enjoy only the enjoyment of humans. Loss of the latter means the extinction of the former.
I'm intrigued by the fact that these are all actually fairly empirical disputes--they're just not the kinds of questions it is easy to get clear answers on. Sociology is tricky even when you don't have political activists thumbing the scales, and these days the scales are so covered with thumbs as to render the payloads utterly invisible.
This all applies, I think, to polyamory as well. I can imagine a society in which humans were more like bonobos--where we had sexual interactions as part of all of our social interactions. The first step, I suspect, would have to be the eradication of sexually transmitted disease! But psychologically this would require a transformation that seems to run deeper than culture. Sexual jealousy is universally attested. There are apparently people who can make polyamory work, and for whom it arguably works very well (though a question arises--if you have to make it work...). But for those for whom it doesn't work, I don't think the problem is poly-shaming or other cultural roadblocks. The problems seem more biologically grounded than that. My question is whether the rationalists now doubting the viability of polyamory will realize that this has structural implications for some of their other beliefs.
(In particular--the sneer faction of the ratsphere has always been comparative conservatives about polyamory, and yet they are if anything more progressive than the modal rationalist when it comes to, say, transsexuality. I notice that I am confused.)
Tree
49m ago
Well, truth be told, I was thinking of my native germany, where job offers as well as official new language guidelines require phrasing of the type “workers …. and workerinnen” for everything.
FtttG
52m ago
Don't feel like answering if you don't want to, but do you mind my asking - are you a Jewess?
FtttG
58m ago
Although you raise a point I've found interesting: the arbitrariness of how some individual national demonyms encode gender (Irishman, Frenchman) and others don't (Nigerian, American). I presume it's entirely downstream of euphony, but it's still funny to think about. Also funny to think that it might be easier to come out as non-binary if you're American than if you're Irish ("Bambie Thug" is an Irishwoman, not an Irishthey; whereas Sam Brinton is just an "American").
Many women have their self-worth tied up almost entirely in how other people view them. They are self-centered enough to believe that they should be in full control of how others perceive them and that anyone who is perceiving them in a way they don't approve of should be punished. They think people shouldn't be allowed to fantasize about them sexually without them being in control--and thus able to exploit--those fantasies. Men, and society in general, should ignore their whining and tell them to get over themselves.
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