The trans debate suffers from the very common problem of "the most loud, obnoxious, and obvious members of a group come to represent the group in the broader population's minds".
Other examples of this phenomenon:
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People thinking that vegans in general are obnoxious and morally self-righteous because those are the only vegans they notice. They might pass plenty of vegans in the street and just assume that those people are meat-eaters, since eating meat is the default. But obnoxious vegans draw attention to themselves, hence come to represent vegans in general in the public mind.
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People thinking that individuals who are concerned about climate change are all annoying lefty activists who want to destroy capitalism.
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People thinking that the majority of black Americans are inner city gangbangers.
Etc.
I think there are plenty of trans people who are chill, but on both the left and the right people are motivated to elevate the obnoxious, deranged activist subset of trans people. On the left, there is a purity spiral - "Do you even support trans people at all if you criticize these trans activists for being obnoxious and insane??? How dare you??? Are you even a leftist?". On the right, there is the obvious motive to focus on the most annoying trans activists and act as if those people represent trans people in general, since that helps the right overall get a culture war win.
Personally, I have never had any issue with trans people. I just find many of the more vocal trans activists to be repulsive. Not because they are trans, but because they are shrill and irrational fanatics.
On a side note, one thing I find interesting when other men say that they find male homosexuality disgusting is that I do not experience this, to the point that it's hard for me to even understand having such a reaction. The idea of having sex with a man repulses me somewhat, but there is no moral dimension to this feeling, for me it's just a subset of "the idea of having sex with someone I am not attracted to repulses me". When I see two men kissing it does not bother me in the least bit. I do wonder why some men grow up finding male homosexuality to be a fundamentally disgusting thing and others simply don't.
One thing I've learned over time is that it's true, "love is love". To me, a loving homosexual relationship is much more beautiful than a bitter, hate-filled heterosexual one.
One thing I want to mention about your quote:
Holding her hand is electric. You just want be with her forever, to sweep her into your embrace, and damn it, why the f&!k are you getting a boner right now, you were having this pure and chaste and beautiful reverie and now you're thinking about sex.
I think this is the classic "Madonna-whore complex". Or, more broadly, this kind of attitude is a limiting and in my view incorrect view of love and sexuality that separates it into, on the one hand, "pure beautiful love" and, on the other hand, "dirty sex". This is a very damaging way to exist, psychologically. It's damaging not just to oneself, but also to one's sexual partners. I say this as someone who used to have this kind of psychology when younger, but have since largely overcome it. I'm someone who is into some pretty kinky, rough, BDSM sex and I can say from experience that nothing about that kind of sex is incompatible with love and tenderness. Fulfilling each others' sexual appetites, no matter how raunchy and wild those might be, is one of the most loving things that two people can do for each other.
If NATO directly entered the war with large numbers of its own combat forces, it would defeat Russia's military and drive it out of Ukraine. Russia's only way of stopping NATO from doing that is to make NATO think that if driven far enough into a corner, Russia might actually escalate to using nuclear weapons. This works because, some extreme hawks aside, the vast majority of people who are well informed about the risks probably do not think that ensuring the Kiev government's ability to control Ukraine would be worth, say, a 10% increase in the chance of total nuclear war that would lead to the destruction of every major NATO and Russian city. On the other hand, they might think that it would be worth a 1% increase in that chance. Of course I am making up these specific percentages, but my point is that there is some threshold of the risk of nuclear war above which NATO does not think that helping Kiev with direct military intervention is worth that risk. The Russian government's task is to do whatever it can to make that threshold as low as possible. Hence Russia benefits from behaving in its rhetoric like an increasingly angry man being driven into a corner. Allowing NATO to think that the chance of nuclear war is zero would with very high probability lead to Russian defeat, since Russia is not strong enough to militarily defeat a direct large-scale NATO intervention. On the other hand, Russia of course does not actually want nuclear war any more than NATO does. Russia's proper strategy is thus to act like NATO is driving it closer and closer to the nuclear button with every NATO escalation.
Presumably and I hope, the people who actually make NATO's decisions have studied history and realize that just because NATO has broken multiple Russian red lines without major retaliation, it does not mean that every red line is meaningless. An example from history would be Germany breaking England and France's red lines before World War 2. Germany remilitarized the Ruhr, expanded the size of the Wehrmacht in violation of treaty agreements, united with Austria, and occupied Czechoslovakia all without provoking a large-scale war, but when it invaded Poland then England and France declared war - that had been a red line too far.
Goodguy
15d ago
Can someone steelman requiring prescriptions to buy medicine? Why not just allow people to buy whatever medications they want over the counter? Obviously many people would seriously hurt themselves as a result, but I don't think that's a good argument in favor of prescriptions. People hurt themselves with cars, knives, and guns all the time but we allow people to buy those in part because cars, knives, and guns are useful. Why is medicine any different? If we stopped requiring prescriptions to buy medicines, then people who wanted to consult doctors about which medications to buy could still go ahead and do it. As for people who preferred to do their own research or consult alternative sources instead of doctors, in the vast majority of cases they would just be hurting themselves when they made mistakes, they would not be hurting others, at least not in any direct way.
The way it seems to me, the only pop star out of the ones I mentioned who even comes close to subverting conventional standards of female attractiveness is Lady Gaga, and even she makes sure to make herself look hot and to behave in at least some feminine ways in all of her videos that I've seen.
Katy Perry and Lana Del Rey's personas are practically retro male fantasies - hyper-feminine, dolled up, pouty.
It is possible that what I find hot in women is just different than what you find hot, especially when it comes to behavior. I am turned on by Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and Lana Del Rey's personas, whereas you might not be. I find them to be seductive in a feminine way.
Goodguy
17d ago
I do not see anybody, anywhere, downplay the importance of vaccines and antibiotics.
It's actually pretty easy to find such people in some corners of the Internet. For example: https://x.com/Inversionism/status/1857457277860540898.
Easy to find them on 4chan, too.
Goodguy
17d ago
For me it is amusing how much overlap there is between people who yell about their political opponents being communists, on the one hand, and people who would prefer that medical innovation be driven by a socialist rather than a capitalist system, on the other.
I'm not sure about that. Taylor Swift is just one of many conventionally attractive massive female pop stars of the last 25 years, some others being Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and Lana Del Rey - some of whom have portrayed themselves garishly on occasion, but none of whom could be characterized as embodying the worship of the weak, ugly, and broken. Even at the very height of wokism, pop music was full of conventionally attractive women singing about the usual pop music topics of love and relationships in ways that cannot be described as woke. There have perhaps been musicians who did celebrate the weak, ugly, and broken during that time, but from what I can tell the top pop stars were never like that in their music and presentation, even though some of them did espouse wokism in their professed political views. Taylor Swift is not a reversion to pre-woke kinds of music and presentation, since wokism never significantly affected the music and presentation of the top of the pop charts to begin with.
Goodguy
19d ago
I think the Democrats unleashed the most massive wave of bot and shill astroturfing that they ever have before onto Reddit in the last year or so. I have heard a theory that seems very plausible to me, which is that one of their main astroturf focuses has been to put political posts up on relatively obscure subreddits and then massively upvote them using automated or semi-automated means to drive them to the front page. https://old.reddit.com/r/houstonwade/ is often presented as an example of this theory, and if you take a look at it it seems to check out.
The astroturfing combined with years of censorship having driven out most political dissent means that a large fraction of the political discourse on Reddit in the last few months has consisted of waves of bot and shill astroturfing slamming into the minds of people who are already mentally prepared to believe in wild pro-Democrat political theories.
Reddit is almost done as a political discussion space. Even /r/politicaldiscussion, which was maybe like 70% pro-Democrat a few years ago, is now more like 90% pro-Democrat. /r/moderatepolitics is still holding out but I don't know for how much longer. The dirtbag and socialist left on places like /r/stupidpol and /r/redscarepod is still being tolerated but again, I do not know for how much longer given that they criticize mainstream Democrats almost as much as Republicans do.
I don't know if trying to turn Reddit from 95% pro-Democrat to 99% pro-Democrat was worth what the Democrats invested in it, but it might be. Such astoturfing campaigns are not necessarily very expensive, and in a close election they well might swing it.
X has also been full of astroturfing, and still is for that matter. But in the case of X, the astroturfing is coming through from both sides, rather than almost entirely from the Democrats like on Reddit. I don't know if Republicans didn't bother to invest much into astroturfing Reddit or if it's just that their attempts got foiled by censorship, but on X their astroturfing attempts seem to have decent penetration.
I love it. I'm not nearly as pro-Trump as you are, I'm not sure that anyone is, but reading this actually fills me with a lot of optimism about the future. Is the optimism justifiable or unjustifiable? I don't know, but who cares! It is good to feel hopeful. I hope that you are right!
I think that would make for a good top-level post in the main thread. All this definitely may be a good reason for some people to, as the rationalists like to say, update their priors. On a more subtle level, the Trump presidency is going to be an interesting test for Curtis Yarvin's idea that even if a right-winger gets elected, he will not be able to significantly change things. But one thing is for sure, Trump did just win. He did not die at the last minute to a mysterious accident, and apparently there were no container trucks full of Harris votes showing up at the last minute to give Harris the election.
Goodguy
26d ago
Well, it would have been stupid and unnecessarily risky for Democrats to rig the vote so hard in 2020 that they won by 7 million popular votes. Presumably, people smart enough and capable enough that they could rig the vote so massively while leaving no clear smoking guns of a massive election steal would also have been smart enough to just win by a safe small margin, not by 7 million popular votes.
Goodguy
26d ago
Might be interesting to see how Democrats square the circle of "Trump is a fascist who will end American democracy if elected, but we are going to concede peacefully to him now".
I assume it's going to be by the standard method of just ignoring it and pretending there is no contradiction.
Trump has looked really tired and slow the last few months. He got his team over the line of winning the election, and he is already easily the most important Republican President since Reagan and maybe even before. Republicans have good reason to build a mile-tall statue of him tomorrow. But I doubt he has the energy remaining to actually do a lot as President. Is this about to be the age of Vance, Musk, Thiel, Ramaswamy, and so on to become the new actual center of the Republican party? If it is, I think it is probably going to be good for the Republicans, since those individuals are relatively young so they will be able to be energetic and electable for years to come. Trump seems so worn-out in his recent public appearances that I wouldn't be surprised if the Trump Presidency is actually effectively run by people like Vance and Musk instead of by Trump.
To be fair, it's possible that Trump's visible tiredness might be at least partly cured by a nice spell of actually being the President-Elect instead of campaigning. We'll see soon enough.
Guesswork here: Jews tend to be wealthy (mainly) because they rolled a high IQ stat on average, and as a result American Jews tend to avoid some of the most unpleasant consequences of Democratic party politics, like poor policing. This makes them more likely to support higher degrees of empathy than the average American because they can afford those higher degrees of empathy without it substantially impacting their lives. It is also possible that the higher IQ is also just correlated positively with high degrees of abstract empathy. American Jews also, being wealthy on average, tend to support America's establishment status quo on average because if you're benefiting from the current situation, why rock the boat? A combination of Trumpism somewhat pattern-matching to Nazism, high levels of empathy and ability to afford empathy, and valuing the status quo gives American Jews a high level of incentive to vote against Trump even despite 10/7 and the interests of those Jews who are in Israel. The fact that it's the lowest level of support in 24 years can be explained by the fact that for many American Jews, Trump presents a viscerally unpleasant issue, whereas Israel's issues are relatively abstract and distant.
Goodguy
27d ago
What's going on in Arizona and Michigan? Seems like the counts have been stuck for over an hour now.
Goodguy
27d ago
I think we stress out too much about this shit because terms are too long. If we had Presidential and Congressional elections every six months people would be a lot more chill about it all. People would argue that such terms would be too short for the winners to develop any sort of continuity once in office but you know what, it's not the 18th century anymore, they have access to much more powerful tools than before. And in any case, that's their problem.
Shorter terms would also give us more opportunity to see how different politicians handle relatively similar issues. So much changes in four years that there's relatively little way to get a feel for how two politicians would handle the same issue.
Goodguy
28d ago
Just because one owns an Al Qaeda training manual does not mean that one has been radicalized by Islamists. Al Qaeda knows a lot about terrorism, so if you want to do terrorism it might be a good idea to read their manual even if one's political ideology has nothing to do with Islamism.
Goodguy
1mo ago
I think this has also enshittened movies. When I watch movies made before 20 years ago, they seem like they were made by people who had life experience outside of filmmaking and celebrity scenes. Which is maybe strange, because Hollywood has been very nepotistic since the moment it came into being. But for whatever reason, Hollywood used to pull in more talent who had experience with life outside movies. There were soldiers, blue collar people, hippies, wild politically unorthodox guys like John Milius, and all sorts of other kinds of people who got into the film industry. When I watch modern film, on the other hand, I often feel like I am watching something made by people whose life experience consists of watching other movies and going to parties in New York and Los Angeles.
I could be biased, maybe my political opinions are filtering into my perception of movies. But this is how it feels to me.
Goodguy
1mo ago
I'm not sure, it just kind of came out that way. I think maybe it's because as far as I know, Curtis Yarvin is perfectly happy using his birth name in public, whereas as far as I know BAP until recently has tried to maintain anonymity and his birth name of Costin Alamariu only became known because he was doxxed. Also, Curtis Yarvin seems to have long preferred using his own birth name and does not seem to have any attachment to his pseudonym, whereas BAP seems to prefer using his pseudonym over his birth name. But I'm not sure really.
Goodguy
1mo ago
If Vance really does read Curtis Yarvin and Bronze Age Pervert, as has been reported he does, then nothing here on The Motte would bother him much.
I kind of doubt that it matters. Normally it would, but I don't think most people really view Biden as being the President anymore. They think of him as just some old grandpa who wanders around between Delaware and DC and occasionally says something random. So in practice this just comes off as "old half-senile retired guy says something random". Not only that, but calling Trump supporters garbage is such a minor thing against the background of all the insults that have been flying back and forth this election season that it's a tiny drop in a big bucket.
One of the funny things from this election season has been seeing Trump supporters ask "well, who is actually running the country?" after Biden dropped out of the race. I know that many of them probably don't actually think it's an issue and are just saying it rhetorically in order to try to damage the Democrats' chances. But probably some of them do care about it, and to me it's like seeing grown people who still believe in Santa Claus. It's an interesting misunderstanding of how the government actually works. The reality is that the government would run mostly the same as it does now even if a literal block of wood was elected to be the President. If you didn't pay attention to politics, you might not even notice that the President was a literal block of wood.
Does that mean that the election doesn't matter? No, it matters. Even if Trump would do nothing other than post on social media if elected, him being elected would still at least bring some non-leftists into high office and would do a lot to motivate non-leftists across the country. If we're lucky, he might even do some good by hiring new people and sending out some helpful executive orders. But the reason why it matters is not because the country needs to have an alert, mentally healthy person in the chair of the chief executive. It really doesn't. It would probably be nice to have, but it's far from crucial.
I don't know about VCs, but I think that the shift of tech executives toward Trump has another major cause besides just that he looks like he might win. The idea that it's driven by some sort of awareness that Trump is a heavy favorite to win doesn't make sense to me because to me it's pretty clear that, prediction market weirdness aside, the race is still a toss-up. There is no actual good evidence in favor of the theory that Trump is running away with it.
So what is the other cause for the shift? I think it's pretty simple actually. Most tech executives come from the kind of blue tribe middle/upper-middle class family and cultural backgrounds where either voting Democrat is just what one does, because "it is the right thing to do" (I don't believe that, but people in those cultures do)... or, at least, the idea of voting for a Trump seems beyond the pale. One might vote for a Romney, but not a Trump. Being in the middle/upper-middle class does not grant people any sort of special degree of interest in or understanding of politics. Indeed, most such people are politically pretty apathetic. They feel that they are doing the right thing for the world by voting for the Democrats or for moderate Republicans once every couple of years and they don't think much about politics otherwise except maybe to occasionally grumble about some particular blatant excess like the WMDs-in-Iraq clusterfuck. They are the kind of people who think that the New York Times and the Washington Post are paragons of journalism and trust that writers like Stephen Jay Gould and Jared Diamond have given them a good understanding of anthropology. They are repelled by the Republican political umbrella's religious conservatism, its talk about Judeo-Christian values, its adulation of traditional family structures, its reflexive worship of the military, and many other things. As, to some extent, am I for that matter... and I myself would never vote for a Republican, if it was not for my belief that somehow, the Democrats have become even worse.
They are not stupid people, indeed many of them are brilliant, but a person's intelligence is usually not evenly distributed among different areas of understanding. It is at least as common for someone to be brilliant in one field and mediocre or even actually unperceptive in others as it is for a person to be smart all across the board. Take tech, for example. I have met many good coders who have very little interest in politics, have not thought very deeply about it, and do not have anything particularly interesting to say about it. The typical white collar professional knows very little about history and is not particularly interested in it. When he is done at work for the day, he does not spend hours thinking and reading about politics, he goes home and puts on Netflix.
Understandably, if one grows up in a background like this, spends most of one's time in college and the business world around other people who came from such a background, and spends most of one's energy focusing on business decisions and technology instead of on politics, it might take one a long time to come to the conclusion that maybe the Democrats are actually not on the right side of history any more than the Republicans are. Even when they begin to pressure you to use your company to censor their political opponents. Even when you realize that a large fraction of their rank-and-file voters automatically despise you simply because you have made a lot of money. Even when their policies make the cities where you live dirty and poorly policed. And it might especially take one a long time when the only alternative to those Democrats isn't a safe Romney type of figure, but is instead Trump and his whole gang of rabble-rousers.
I think it is notable that two of the most prominent anti-Democrat tech businessmen, Musk and Thiel, both spent time in South Africa. I do not know to what extent that experience shaped their political attitudes, but I doubt it is a coincidence that they share in common some experience having grown up not just in nice blue tribe suburbs in the West, but also in a country that has experienced a lot of devastation from racial animosity, crime, and corrupt political patronage systems.
Goodguy
1mo ago
I think those remarks have low potential upside for Trump's campaign and high potential downside. I doubt that the number of people who would decide to go out and vote for Trump because a comedian at his event said Puerto Rico is a floating island of garbage is as large as the number of people who would decide to come out and vote against Trump because of it. So it was careless for Trump's campaign to allow it to happen. It's another unforced error, following on the heels of when Tucker Carlson, a few days ago in a public speech, made a long political metaphor involving spanking one's daughter. These are the kinds of things that make me wonder, did Trump's campaign people start smoking meth the last few days or something? It's just stupid, stupid shit that might endanger an election that might well be decided by a few tens of thousands of votes, especially given that the Democrats have spent the last week putting a lot of media energy into trying to make the Madison Square Garden rally seem like a Nazi rally. Like come on, Trump campaign people, just shut up and go do more McDonalds type photo ops and talk about crime and immigration and shit. There's a time and a place for crude, controversial jokes. A week before the election and at a highly publicized rally at a major venue where most of your main people appear is probably not the right time and place.
I turned it off after about 20 minutes. Just couldn't stand Trump rambling and repeating himself. Oddly, I find those traits of his to be kind of endearing in his big public speeches, but in the context of a 1-on-1 conversation I found them to be very grating.
I don't think the interview will hurt Trump, but I also doubt it will help him. He looked and sounded like an old tired grandpa, his makeup looked weird under the lighting conditions, and he didn't say anything particularly interesting to me, at least not in those first 20 minutes. He didn't seem like the bellicose, charming, unpredictable Trump that made him famous as a politician, he seemed really tired and out of it. Maybe he should have gotten more sleep before the interview or something.
Overall, I'd say that the interview is a disappointment compared to all the hype. Basically a nothingburger. You'll probably like it if you can imagine that it would be fun to hang out 1-on-1 with a tired Trump while he freely associates about random things. Otherwise you'll likely think that it's boring.
From what I saw, Joe Rogan did fine though.
I think the interview slightly helps Trump in that it does make him seem human, not like some kind of uber-Hitler. Unfortunately for Trump, it also hurts him by making him seem really really old and unfocused. One almost wants to put him to bed and give him some nice warm tea to soothe him to sleep when one watches it. I didn't see any signs of the fiery, snarky Trump who makes people think he'll do big things if elected.
The fundamental problem of being a typical software developer, in my opinion, is that it's essentially creative work that in practice runs like factory assembly line work because of business pressures, Darwinian pressures, Moloch (in the Scott Alexander sense), whatever you want to call it. I am not sure that "autists" do better at it because they have some special hyper-ability at it, I feel that it is more that "autists" (when I use that term I do not mean the psychology definition, I mean the pop culture one) do better at it because they care less about other ways of spending their time than someone like I does, so they just simply have more time that they are willing to devote to this often interesting but also often very dry activity, whereas I get bored and want to go do something that does not involve looking at a screen.
Being a software developer in a typical CRUD software company is kind of like being a novelist whose job depends on being able to write 12 decent novels a year. It doesn't psychologically work unless you're one of those rare people who lives and breathes engineering.
The fact that tech people have gone from being seen as geeks to being seen as billionaires is more meaningful than some people understand. This did not happen because the geeks developed better social skills, although they did. I agree with Marxists about little, but I do agree with them that politics is usually downstream of economics and technology. The geeks are taking over the world in part because the technology that they have helped to build has changed the calculus of the kinds of jobs that pay a decent living. On a deeper level, the reality is that the geeks are not any more in control of what is happening than anyone else is. The world situation is racing towards things we can barely predict, not so much because any people or groups of people are guiding it, but because there is a cold calculus of power that follows its own Darwinian logic. The global techno-human organism is stirring. Speaking of which, where is IlForte/DaseIndustries nowadays? I disagreed with probably more than half of his viewpoints, but I kind of understand his bleak outlook that values technological development over everything else when trying to comprehend the future.
I think that at some point the increasing development of technology will bump against some fundamental limits of Homo Sapiens and its ability to tolerate increasing techno-cyborg extensions of itself beyond its original nature. The "autists" of the world often do not understand this, they seem to have largely grown up in peaceful suburbs reading science fiction and fantasy novels in which the heroes they identify with generally win, and the current level of techno-cyborg extensions are not yet past their own abilities to master them, so they do not understand that total calamity that is possible, not from any particular fault of theirs - if they refused to play their role, others would be found by Darwinian force to do it eventually - but I do think it is interesting to see how the very people who are driving tech forward the most generally do not realize that what is happening is not that the geeks are finally winning... what is actually happening is that the geeks are just the instrument of a Nick Landian gigantic paradigm shift that cares nothing about the particular human beings that make up a part of its slow grasping forward. The "autists" are better able to be the inadvertent foot soldiers of all this because they are less affected by how being a human with emotions rubs up against the cold logic of power, they can compartmentalize it better than the average human can.
And so evolution grinds on. The good side of it is that living conditions for the average person in the West are much better than they were a few hundred years ago. It is much better to be a modern Westerner than to be some serf in the year 1200. That is a real phenomenon. The problem is that we're still going to die, so people still care about meaning, not just statistics. Knowing that you will die makes you want meaning, and meaning is something that software and geeks cannot deliver. Nor can Moloch. Indeed, Moloch is an antithesis of meaning. Western humanity marches forward to existences in which we are much physically safer than we were in the times of roving warlord gangs, which was the reality for most of human history. But that is perhaps little joy for an aware person in a world that is rushing by the cold calculus of Darwinian logic into a future in which the things that make being a human worthwhile are becoming less pragmatic.
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