guesswho
8mo ago
I mean, I grew up before 'progressive' was a commonly-used political term. My dad was certainly a good feminist role model, I guess that would be the analogy from the time period, and we had several family friends who also would have served.
But I mean, like, Mr Rogers? Bob Ross? David Bowie? Steve Irwin? None of these people are, like, explicitly virulently feminist, they're just normal men who don't exhibit most of the 'toxic masculinity' traits that the left finds fault with on some male role models.
That's really all we're asking for here, I think, role models who demonstrate a successful life and way of interacting with the world that doesn't rely on those 'toxic' behaviors and traits.
I think the idea of 'explicitly politically-motivated role models' is a dead end here. A role model that progressives can embrace is not the same as a loudly progressive role model.
guesswho
8mo ago
See discussion here, the whole point is that hatred and endorsing name-calling are not necessary for your policy stance to be 'fuck them' in consequentialist terms.
Ans, yes, there are plenty of non-ideological ways to arrive at a conclusion like black people have lower IQ, or that most trans people are pedophiles, or that immigrants are dangerous and disgenic, or that feminists have gone too far, or etc.
But if you believe all of them at once, I'm not wrong to notice the correlation between that and one of the two dominant ideologies that define most political discussion in the english-speaking world, and guess that your bottom line is being written by a cultural affiliation, rather than the arguments above it.
Hlynka was at least interesting in being both anti-progressive and anti-HBD. Yo need to actually think about things for yourself to find yourself in that position.
That's more interesting than me, and most of the people here. Which makes it valuable to the discourse, right or wrong.
guesswho
8mo ago
I neither said excluding me, nor consciously endorse, nor that no one can be persuaded, nor that I'm not learning anything myself.
Also, flagging @somedude and @sjet79, this is an immediate example of what I'm talking about. I don't thin this user is dishonestly putting words in my mouth to avoid the question, or w/e you were saying Hlynka did, but they sure are assigning beliefs and characteristics to me that I never said and don't follow from what I wrote.
Like I said to both of you, I think this is an honest mistake that happens when people talk across an inferential gap, and it gets noticed when the miscommunication is of a type that looks like hostility or strategy. But it happens all the time and just sometimes gives that appearance.
guesswho
8mo ago
Would like to hear more, at least the framing that you're interpreting that into.
They certainly do a lot of telling. Not sure if you mean they're bad at getting men to listen, or point out the wrong things, or are too vague, or what.
guesswho
8mo ago
... They have a lot of difficulty producing positive role models for boys, from the perspective of progressives.
A disagreement about what traits are 'positive' is the entire crux of the issue, here.
Yes, conservatives have had more time to put their systems in pace than progressives, that's pretty much definitional to the words 'conservative' and 'progressive'.
It's always the case that progressives are trying something new, and you can always walk in on that first-draft process and point out mistakes and absurdities, and feel superior.
Lets check back in 30 years to see how it went.
guesswho
8mo ago
Consequentialist 'fuck everyone else', not deontological 'fuck everyone else'.
(which is to say, if that wasn't clear: part of the entire functional purpose of a political ideology is to come up with an intellectual and narrative framework in which you can advocate of policies and ideas which advantage you and disadvantage your enemies, without ever descending into negative-valence emotions or traits. EG, coming up with arguments for why the policies that favor you and hurt your opponents are actually best for everyone 'in the long run' or are morally correct, without relying on having to say that you selfishly want things that benefit you or vengefully want things that hurt your opponents. Coming up with rational scientific matter-of-fact reasons why people like you are better than people like your opponents, and why that means society will be better served by people like you having more power and privilege. etc.
The fact that you honestly feel no explicit hostility or superiority towards the people who are screwed over by the things you are advocating, and would never dream of being directly rude to those people and telling them to go fuck themselves, is not impressive, even if it's 100% sincere. The whole point of ideology is to construct teh narratives and dialogues which allow you to do that while still taking the side that favors yourself and your team.
That's why a consequentialist looks at the slate of policies/stances a person or group takes and goes 'cui bono?' Everyone thinks their beliefs are dispassionate truths, if the set of dispassionate truths you believe all add up to obviously rationally objectively point towards policies that fuck over group X, that's the same as you just saying 'Fuck group X' in terms of consequences
See The bottom Line for why you look at the consequences rather than the justifications in cases like this).
guesswho
8mo ago
You could basically guarantee that if he wrote anything about race, half a dozen users would show up to fight, and vice versa.
Half a dozen kids beating up another kid in the playground. Happens every day for two weeks. Principle decides that they can stop all of these disturbances by just dispelling the one kid getting beat up. After all, that's less disruptive than dispelling six kids, or seven.
If you're aware of the pattern and the community it leaves you with after pursuing it iteratively for years, and are accepting that intentionally as still the best solution to a hard problem, fine.
If you're not aware of it and the community it produces, you kind of need to be.
guesswho
8mo ago
They aren't allowed to put words in other's mouths. Accuse people of beliefs they don't hold with little or no evidence/discussion.
People do this to me (I'm guessing) 70% of the times I post here.
I don't think it's malice, I think it's the inferential gap. When someone from outside your local hivemind cluster reads your post, they don't take away from it the same things you put in. So their response often assumes a lot of things about you that are not present in the post and are dead wrong.
I could report every time that happens to me, but it would be counter-productive. I think it's a symptom of people with different contexts finding an area where they both have something to learn, and should be explored rather than punished.
(which I don't always have the emotional energy for, but, you know. In theory.)
guesswho
8mo ago
even though ideological disagreements are very much commonplace.
In the '50 Stalins' sense, maybe. Or in the sense of the Emo Philips joke.
But it definitely looks to me like most posts agree with each other in terms of valence on most of the issues that come up here, and directional disagreements are rare.
(directional disagreements being 'trans women are women vs men who think they're women are delusional,' rather than disagreements of the form 'are men who think they're women sad victims of social contagion, or are they dangerous predators trying to groom children?' I would not say the latter two people have an ideological disagreement, at all.)
guesswho
8mo ago
People do this to me almost literally every time I post.
I think what you are referring to is the inferential gap, not malice. People from a different hivemind than yours will have so much different context than you that the words you write won't mean the same things when they read them. Replies will look bizarre and non-sequitur and like they're ignoring things you already said.
You just have to have faith and be charitable in assuming that people are trying to make constructive replies and the inferential gap is making the two of you talk past each other, and try to work it out using smaller words. If your response to someone making a bizarre reply that seems to miss the point is to say 'that person is being dishonest', then you'll preferentially disregard all communications from people outside your filter bubble until you eventually can't even talk to anyone who doesn't already agree with you.
'polite' being the code word doing a lot of work, here.
You can say that black people are stupid and trans people are deluded pedophiles every day for years, as long as you maintain decorum. That's still 'polite'.
But if someones recognizes that what you're saying there is 'fuck everyone not like me' and responds with 'hey, fuck you too', that person is not being polite and must be eliminated.
Hlynka wasn't interested in maintaining decorum when it was an obvious papering over disrespectful or violent thoughts. I admired how long he was able to act on that disinterest without getting permabanned.
Personally, the masquerade is getting boring for me too. But out of respect for mod wishes, I'll try to fade out rather than flame out if it becomes too annoying to bother with.
It is interesting to note that there is an increasing shift towards talking about "role models" for young men and boys as a means of cooling the gender kerfuffle, rather than by repeating feminist talking points at males until they concede as was the case when I was a teenager.
There's been a fair amount of discourse in lefty spaces over the last 2-4 years about how feminist/progressive ideology is good at telling men what things to stop doing but bad at teaching boys what they should do instead, leaving a lot of young men who want to be progressive without a reliable script to follow. Presenting and promoting role models is the solution, that project is very much in early days and not going to be very good at first, but in the long term it's the only way to stabilize a new normal.
These men are either fake or literal one percenters whose lifestyle an average young man has no hope of to attaining.
I mean if you ask anyone to name some role models off the top of their head, those people are going to be very famous and therefore almost-by-necessity rich or fake, almost by definition. A non-famous role model isn't necessarily a contradiction in terms, but it wouldn't be the first example most people think of. And it's hard to be famous in a positive way without being rich or fake these days.
But there are plenty of viable non-famous candidates that the community is growing and embracing on its own in the normal, market-driven, organic way. Just like I've never heard of Hamza, I'm guessing you've never heard of FD Signifier, but he's an example of an organically-grown explicitly leftist microceleb who can serve as a good role model for young black men. And of course there are plenty of creators who aren't explicitly politically aligned but exhibit the virtues of non-problematic masculinity and are popular with younger boys, like Markiplier or SuperEyepatchWolf or etc.
guesswho
8mo ago
I really don't understand any of the lines you're drawing between excerpts here.
On the one hand, we have statistical data about low desistance and high satisfaction. On the other hand, we have anecdotes about patients trusting their doctors and not being medical experts themselves (scandal!) and anecdotes about patients angling for the care they want instead of giving the doctor extra information because they are correctly scared of political manipulations interfering with their care.
And your claim is that the latter somehow disputes the former? How so?
guesswho
8mo ago
Rich people and major celebrities getting harassment and flack has always been the norm. Whether or not that's morally 'ok' is a complicated and long-argued question, but 'they can cry themselves to sleep on their piles of money' feels like it has been the general consensus going back at least to the 80s (probably earlier, I just wouldn't be aware of it before then).
GG offended sensibilities by applying the same level of catastrophic scrutiny to folks that most would consider 'normal people', names you've never heard of who don't own a vacation home and don't have much real-world influence.
guesswho
8mo ago
You're saying it was stochastic terrorism, and can't be held against any group or movement?
That's cool with me, but keep in mind I'm going to say the same thing about BLM and the distinction between protestors and rioters/looters.
guesswho
8mo ago
What I'm getting from this is that you agree this pattern of abuse exists and that it plays the causal role I'm talking about, but would also like to criticize the left for attacking a person and then not banning people over that?
My response I guess would be that there's some ways in which the situations are different and some ways in which that's real hypocrisy, but bleh. That's a boring conversation, the same one we have every day about everything.
I'm just making a point about what it would take for this to explode the way past instances have.
guesswho
8mo ago
Whereas I would say it's missing the primary ingredient that precedes and causes the bans: a specific victim.
If the community picks out one specific woman who works at SBI and decides to make a hate circle around her, publish her home address and start SWATing her residence, make hundreds of hour-long hate videos directed at her with lots of focus on her appearance and personal life, build a mythology around her supposed criminal activities and personal failings, send mountains of rape and death threats, etc., then we will start to get the ban waves you talk about, and then it will turn into a big war again.
guesswho
8mo ago
I think Hlynka is hard to interpret because he's actually not just backing one of the sides, he has an idiosyncratic personal position on the matter that's complex and detailed and includes many points that would piss off either side.
guesswho
8mo ago
I more-or-less agree with all of those. Maybe we disagree in terms of extremity on some, but not obviously so from this post.
guesswho
8mo ago
Agreed that 'what are the real harms beyond overdoses' is the important question here.
And I think it has to be a lot more nuanced than 'making it legal means more'. I think in a sense that's true, sure, but it overlooks usage dynamics.
Like, if you legalized fentanyl and nothing else, sure more people will use fentanyl. But fentanyl is 'popular' right now because it is more addictive and cheaper to produce than other drugs, drug dealers prefer to push it on clients and mix small amounts of it into other drugs to increase their potency and addictiveness, it's not popular primarily because people are freely choosing it over other alternatives on a free market.
If you legalize fentanyl and oxycodone and hydrocodone and opium and heroin and extasy and lsd and shrooms, and you get corporations to make them so they're pure and clearly labelled and have warning labels about their addictiveness and risks, and they're all mas produced commodities with reasonably comparable prices, do you still have the same level of fentanyl epidemic?
I do believe you get 'more' drug use, but I'd expect it to fall more to less harmful drugs, and less destructive patterns of use. I'd expect more people to be getting clear guidance and feedback from friends and family to slow the rate at which they increase their dosage, keeping them less messed up for longer. I'd expect commercial drugs to be less expensive in ways that limit how much people have to sell everything they own and turn to crime ot afford their fix. I'd expect it to be harder to fund an addiction with criminal activities when you're buying from a respectable businesss with security cameras and transaction records the police can subpoena and corporate liability to watch out for, instead of from another criminal off the books.
Etc.
Basically, I think the generic 'amount' of drugs used doesn't correlate that much with the amount of harm caused, compared to the effect of changing the social and legal regime in which that use happens.
guesswho
8mo ago
A straight-up moral prohibition of adultery leads to less adultery than "well, do whatever maximizes pleasure," I would think, even if the latter should come to the same conclusion once you consider second-order effects. It's just too easy to do motivated reasoning.
So I am honestly making the maybe-crazy prediction that no, the average utilitarian will actually commit less adultery than the average person who follows a religion that says 'though shalt not commit adultery' or the average person with some type of deontology/virtue ethics which strongly says 'cheating is bad'. I'm not insanely confident about this or anything, could easily be wrong, but I'd bet $50 on it (if I were talking to someone at a bar I mean, I'm not going to go to the hassle of setting up an anonymous online exchange for that amount).
Now, caveats.
First, what do we mean by 'adultery', I do think that utilitarians are more likely to negotiate open relationships/polyamory, which I don't consider adulterous. I really mean cheating, in the sense of violating explicit or very obviously implied agreements about the nature of the relationship. If utilitarians have an advantage of more permissive relationships, I consider that a fairly won victory.
Second, 'average person'. I'm counting everyone who would say that they are Christian (or other religions with similar prohibitions) regardless of how devout or observant they are. I'm counting everyone who would say 'yeah adultery/cheating is obviously bad/wrong/evil' but doesn't give an explicitly utilitarian accounting of why that is. I do think this means that the average person in that group will be less interested in moral quandries and less thoughtful about moral issues and less concerned with matching their morals to their actions than the average utilitarian. I again consider that a fairly won victory, because utilitarianism involves learning to make those judgements for yourself instead of relying on handed-down maxims or simplistic rules, so I think that higher level of average observance is part of its strength. But you could argue that it's popular among academic weirdos who are a better starting stock, and therefore not a fair comparison group, if you wanted to.
guesswho
8mo ago
Ok, but again, I don't actually think that non-utilitarians are better about avoiding 'unthinkable trade-offs'.
Like, some number of christians or deontologist or virtue ethicists or whatever will in practice, in real life, trade some lives for others, either implicitly through policy or explicitly when faces with the rare real-world situations where that decision comes up.
Like, they don't actually just halt, stop, and catch fire in those situations when they encounter something their morality says is 'unthinkable', they just sort of make a decision, like everyone does, like normal.
And in those types of situations, I would expect utilitarians to mostly make better decisions and better trades, because they're allowed to think about and consider and make plans for those situations before encountering them, and just generally because of the habit of thinking about when and how to make moral tradeoffs.
I don't know if you have a more concrete real-world example you'd like to frame this under, I'm kind of at a loss for thinking of real-world instances besides things like 'risk your platoon to save one wounded soldier', which a. I don't know if that ever actually happens outside movies, b. I don't know what normal people actually do in that situation statistically, and c. I expect utilitarians to have no trouble applying hueristics like 'having faith in your comrades every day is more valuable than protecting the platoon the once every 20 years this actually comes up' or w/e.
guesswho
8mo ago
This sort of reminds me of teh debate over statistical trends right after somewhere legalizes prostitution.
I'll say the same thing I have there: the long-term new status quo of a dramatic policy change is hard to deduce from the short-term reactions, and the trends in a world where something is legal everywhere are different from the trends where it's illegal everywhere except for one place.
Of course it would be better for the legalization argument if the day after everything was legalized, overdose deaths dropped 50% and never went up again. But that was probably never realistic...
The long-term vision is that we move to a model of treatment rather than criminalization, and lifting stigmas and fear of arrest makes it easier for people to find treatment or be targeted for it. But was a comprehensive and experienced treatment infrastructure deployed on the same day that the measure took effect? Did insurance start covering such treatment? Was the social stigma immediately lifted?
The long-term vision under legalization is that reputable, regulated corporations can start selling safe versions of drugs, complete with doctor-approved dosing instructions and Surgeon's general warnings and hotlines to call for help on the side of the package, instead of people getting unsafe street drug fro dealers that are incentivized to push them into more and more addictive shit. But did the measure even make it legal for corporations to operate in such a way, let alone have they actually started doing so?
The long-term vision is that people growing up under legalization can seek treatment and talk to people about the problems early in the process, and be less stigmatized and less pushed into a criminal part of society, and therefore make better decision and have better average outcomes. But what we're seeing today is mostly existing long-term heavy addicts suddenly having an easier time getting their fix, not anything about long-term trends for people growing up in the system.
And, of course, if a particular vice is legal one place and illegal everywhere surrounding it, lots of 'enthusiasts' will travel/move there to indulge, tainting the statistics.
Again, obviously this data is not good for the legalization argument, it is in fact evidence against it. But there's lots of reasons to expect short-term reactions to be bad in a way that the long-term equilibrium might not be. Especially in the case where you want to replace a bad solution to a problem with a good solution to a problem, but have so far only taken the step of removing the bad solution, which is mostly what I think is happening here.
I'm still optimistic about long-term trends, particularly if people actually devote the resources and effort into installing the new solution.
I feel like this story is really at odds with capitalism?
People really want to get laid, they'll spend a lot of money on it. If you can offer good advice, they'll pay you a lot more than the cost of having them be good competitors with you, especially if they live in a different state. So I don't think such a 'veil of bad advice' could be maintained against defectors looking to make money.
I think the actual problem has to be dumber and more organic than that, like 'bad advice on how to be a man is more appealing to many people than good advice'. That's a credible problems for lots of advice - good advice is constrained by being good, bad advice can focus entirely on being appealing to the receiver, so it has a huge memetic advantage.
More options
Context Copy link