vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
What gets me about it is that all of this, this entire culture war, just seems like such an utterly trivial thing to escalate into a shooting war. What are the issues really when you boil it down? Whether trans women should have access to female-only spaces or not? Whether immigration law should be enforced, and how much immigration should occur and how difficult it should be? What the limits of free speech are? How tough on crime people should be? These aren't issues that should be tearing nations apart. These should be normal political issues people can discuss civily and disagree on without thinking of themselves as soldiers in an apocalyptic all-consuming war for the soul of the West. If people could politely disagree on gay marriage they could certainly do it for any kind of trans issue, or so you'd think.
I agree with you wholeheartedly here. A lot of these issues are absolutely small potatoes.
I'm one of the Motte's more pro-trans people, and even I can admit that from a purely consequentialist perspective if the "victory" against trans people looks like the segregation of female-only bathrooms, prisons, and sports leagues and ID cards using biological sex markers, then that is less than ideal from my perspective, but it still leaves a ton of latitude for trans people to seek out their version of human flourishing as best they can according to their own lights in a liberal city somewhere. Private businesses that want to be inclusive can switch to unisex bathrooms if they want, sympathetic friends and family can still engage in pronoun hospitality, parents of trans children can home school or send them to progressive private schools (with concerned private donors helping families that might not otherwise be able to afford that option), and the Earth will keep turning.
But I think the algorithmic Web 2.0 sites that have swallowed the internet have turned everything into a supposedly life and death struggle. It can't just be that a group of people whose interests you care about will have lives that are about 90% as good as they might have in a counterfactual world where your political tribe got everything they wanted, you need to catastrophize about that missing 10% of well-being, and make up outrages and scandals to justify hating the opposing side. It's not very conducive to having nuanced societal debates, with respectful disagreement when you don't agree with someone else's stance.
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
I think this is a bit different, because left-wing ideology is, at least in all relevant practice, parasitic: the more radically conservative you are, the higher fertility you have; the more progressive you are, the less you have.
I'm not sure this is the fairest way to look at it.
I live in a blue city, and a lot of my friends are progressive and/or part of the LGBT community. And a lot of them were the black sheep in their family even at a young age. Things like a person who became vegetarian almost as soon as she could start thinking about things despite living in a conservative religious household (and who was the token liberal in her mostly conservative public school), or gay/bi people who were really messed up by their strict Mormon upbringing.
I've also heard similar things from people of different generations. A 60-something family friend whose son came out as a transwoman in his 40's, and who was bullied from a young age for being effeminate and found solace in theater in high school. (That last fact was one of the least surprising things I've ever heard - many of my LGBT friends were also part of theater.)
I strongly suspect that being "Bohemian" or a "black sheep" or a certain kind of "weird" is strongly correlated with certain kinds of bullying in middle and high school, and often leads to adopting a more liberal/progressive perspective later in life (probably through some combination of nature - their personalities start off off-putting to some portion of population, and nurture - the experience of being bullied leads them to seek out alternative family-like structures to make up for the ones that failed them in the first place.)
Now, the specific manifestation of this tendency resulting in left-wing politics in modern America is obviously not true at all times and all eras. But I think that calling left-wing politics parasitic might be the wrong framing. I think that the left serves a very similar function to early Christianity, by embracing the cast offs and rejects of the fertile majority, and offering an alternative family structure. For black sheep who become estranged from their family, this becomes deeply important to them.
(I'm mildly reminded of a brief encounter I had with some American Mormon missionaries in Slovakia. They happened to be on the same train I was, and asked to sit near me. And they were accompanied by a Slovakian woman with a disfiguring birth mark on her face. Obviously, one brief encounter is not enough to know for sure, but I wonder if that deformity wasn't somehow causally related to the fact that she became drawn to Mormonism as a Slovakian woman.)
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
But Kash says he'll see him there, implying that Kash is going to Valhalla as well. Really, I don't think Kash meant it literally at all. It was just a fancy way of saying, 'I see you as a fallen warrior for our side, and I will keep up the good fight, and metaphorically warrant a place by your side in Valhalla.'
But also when a Hindu (Kash Patel) tells a Protestant (Charlie Kirk) "I’ll see you in Valhalla" it is somehow even more incoherent.
I mean, that would have still made sense coming from a protestant. Kash Patel is trying to say Charlie Kirk was a warrior for his side, who died a warrior's death. Whether it landed or not is a separate issue.
How can/should Hindus appeal to the divine and the afterlife in public pleasantries like this? Should they invoke their own religious mythos? Or should they just appeal to "God" even though they are not talking about the same literary figure(s) as everyone else? Should/are they all going to convert to Christianity? Seems unlikely. They should probably just avoid this trap altogether although that's difficult to do for a Conservative constituency.
I feel like this issue already played out in the Greater Indian sphere, with the end result being that Muslims in that sphere grudgingly accepted Hindus as People of the Book. You can see this today in the weird Islamicized version of Hinduism supposedly practiced in Bali.
Granted, that's a slightly easier posture to adopt in Islam, where the Quran says God has sent prophets to every nation. If you already accept that Judaism and Christianity are corrupted forms of Islam (with mainstream Christianity even having polytheism/shirk from an Islamic perspective), why not accept that Hinduism is a super corrupted form of a true revelation sent from God?
From an orthodox Christian perspective, Hinduism is demon worship writ large. And while the British were practical enough to not actually convert the Indian subcontinent to Christianity, it sits uneasily in the Christian sphere.
I think a compromise invocation of "God" probably works okay (since there are monotheistic sects of Hinduism, and the nature of logical identity is that if there is a God, they're all the same god), but things get dicier when you start to get to the exact specifics of what state Charlie Kirk's soul is in from a Hindu perspective. (He presumably hasn't achieved Moksha or some other higher spiritual state, so he's still part of Samsara, and thus reincarnated based on his karma.) I think referring to secular legacy elements might be the safest compromise. Something like, "You'll live on in our hearts and minds, and in the amazing legacy you've left behind for all of us, but especially for your wife and two kids."
vorpa-glavo
7d ago
Yeah, saw several Tumblr reactions today, and while it is perfectly predictable, I'm saddened how many people are celebrating political violence against a non-politician on there. There's a lot of people who don't have any sense of decorum, or respect for people with opposing viewpoints.
vorpa-glavo
10d ago
I thought you might be interested in this. I was listening through the backlog of the Voluminous podcast, which reads a letter of H.P. Lovecraft's every episode, followed by the hosts commenting on it. And in episode 62 H.P Lovecraft talks a bit about The Worm Ouroboros.
If you're of the right or alt-right persuasion, you might want to skip the commentary afterwards, since the hosts are classic American progressives, but the readings of the letters at the start of every episode are often quite enjoyable.
vorpa-glavo
10d ago
Did you read the rest of my comment? I'm not using "violence" in a pejorative sense here, I'm using it because within the linguistic resources of English it is the most general word available, unless I am very much mistaken.
Do you have a better word for that category of human activity that is more neutral? Because I personally don't think the neutral use of the word "violence" should be considered an attempt to try to sway an argument one way or another, because there are many instances where "violence" is morally acceptable and justified, maybe even necessary for the functioning of society.
vorpa-glavo
10d ago
Isn't using men with guns to do something part of the standard definition of violence? How do illegal immigrants get removed from the country?
I'm actually a little surprised by the people pushing back on this one, as I don't consider it a "leftist framing." It's certainly compatible with a libertarian analysis as well.
Except for literal pacifists, basically every person on Earth agrees violence is acceptable under at least some circumstances, whether it be self-defense, carrying out a just/honorable war, defending ones property or whatever. The police and federal agents use violence to enforce the rule of law in society. I think the vast majority of ordinary people consider ordinary instances of police force/violence to be completely justified and necessary. Without that, you don't have the rule of law at all, you just have a bunch of suggestions and no means of enforcing them.
I agree that walls are not violence, though. But I don't think physical barriers are the primary way we prevent people from getting into or out of the country, or get rid of them once they get here.
vorpa-glavo
17d ago
I read The Worm Ouroboros a while back and really enjoyed it. Obviously haven't had a chance to reread it yet, but maybe this post is a good excuse to do so!
I've sometimes toyed with the idea of turning the setting into a tabletop RPG. The only issue comes in how to depict the various ethnic groups on Mercury. I might be misremembering, but it really seemed like they're all essentially human beings, despite names like "demons", "pixies", "goblins", "witches", etc.
There's a lot of great sections, like the Sending (which was awesomely described), the manticore (especially loved the brief lapse into even more archaic language for its description), and the moment when one of the characters insults another by "thou"-ing them instead of "you"-ing them.
You mentioned people being confused by the Olympian gods being on Mercury, but I found it delightful. I was especially enchanted by the concept of a "fosterling of the gods", since I feel like it has a lot of storytelling potential in itself.
I also think that all the names of characters and places have a certain charm to them, even if they're clearly a little more haphazard than, say, Tolkien's names.
vorpa-glavo
24d ago
Who on earth liked the Force witches or whatever the hell these things are supposed to be? (Just a hint here, if you're doing a sacred mystic ritual, try not to have it look like an am-dram society pretending to have epileptic seizures).
Didn't watch the Acolyte, but it is sad to see them botch the Force witches so bad. I like the concept of there being non-Jed/Sith force traditions out there, and I think with the right approach they could absolutely make them feel distinct and interesting. Too bad Disney doesn't know how to do that.
I thought there was some scholarly hypothesis that the Philistines were Mycenean Greeks, which helps explain certain things like Samson being a more Herakles-type hero, instead of the more typical "Mouthpiece of God" prophet in the Old Testament.
I suppose that it is possible that the Philistines or their descendants Arabized, but I'd want to see the account of that survival since the connection seems a little dubious to me.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
My take is that there is no such thing as a "free" market, just like there is no such thing as objective absolute individual liberty. "Free" tends to be defined by whoever happens to be winning the market at that point in time.
I certainly accept a weaker version of this claim.
We could talk about "really existing free markets" if you want, in opposition to the made up models of economists. Even so, my assessment is that above a certain threshold of "freeness", really existing free markets tend to do better than centralized or relatively unfree markets.
are we going to ignore things like cartels and monopolies that exist in absence of regulations and laws? I'm willing to cede that there are bad actors who rent seek through regulatory capture, but are you willing to cede that there are bad actors that rent seek through market capture?
I'm not an anarchist - I don't think we should have no laws.
Ideally, I think we should have the minimum number of regulations and laws necessary to prop up a functioning and trustworthy market, along with things like pigouvian taxes and legal nudges to help the market avoid market failures.
I do think a lot of cartels and monopolies are only able to exist because they're propped up by government in various ways (i.e. drug cartels can often only exist because drugs are illegal, American tech monopolies in Europe are given a boost by EU regulations being so onerous it is hard for a small European tech company to comply, etc.) But I'll grant that some forms of these are not directly or indirectly propped up by government, and I'm not against light touch, effective regulation that minimizes the damage to society without radically limiting the speed of growth and innovation.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
FWIW, the opposite extreme ideology is easily dismantled as well: that the West in perfectly meritocratic and there is no need to study or even acknowledge power structures that affect and influence socioeconomic conditions. I suppose I could call this "right-wokism" and attack it as a strawman.
I know you said it is a straw man, but does anyone on the right actually believe approximately this? I feel like it would be more common on the other side to believe that the West was meritocratic, and should be meritocratic, but that overt and covert affirmative action is distorting things and making it harder for truly meritorious people to rise to their rightful place at the top.
My personal take, before anyone tries to paint me as a believer of a specific ideology, is not necessarily that government needs to play the role of dismantler of those power structures, but that it definitely should not continue to enable them to fester as open wounds in the social fabric of our society. E.g. don't test nuclear bombs near the indigenous peoples, but maybe also don't shoehorn social justice concepts into every bit of middle school curricula (just read a link from the Freddie de Boer post linked downthread).
I actually think that United States has already hitched itself to an economic system (capitalism) and a political system (classical liberalism) that by their nature tear down power just by existing.
In a truly free market capitalist system, a tiny start up can eventually topple a huge, established company. Competition and firms going out of business makes the system as a whole resilient, but at the cost of the fragility of individual firms. Just look at what the discovery of FM radio technology did to the AM radio giants of old.
That's incredibly upsetting if you're at the top, and don't want to eventually have your firm go out of business. This is why so many firms try to kick down the ladder, and eliminate fair competition through regulations and laws that make it harder for a new competitor to enter the fray and take them down.
I think that the hard part is getting all strata of society to embrace the creative destruction of capitalism. Most people are economically illiterate, and easy targets for bad economic thinking.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
There have been various attempts at defining "wokism", but for me the distinguishing characteristic is the set of tactics it employs and not just its goals.
Standard "wokism" is progressive or left-wing politics (often, but not always identitarian) plus anti-liberal tactics like deplatforming, ostracism, cancelling, refusing to explain oneself or try to convince one's opponents, etc.
There's two issues with this definition.
The first, is that certain woke tactics are technically within the realm of acceptable behavior. I dislike the tendency of "woke" people to break up friendships when they learn someone is a Trump supporter, but I also think people should be free to associate or not associate with whoever they want to, so I can't really point to them doing anything exactly wrong when they do that.
The second, is that such tactics aren't unique to progressives or the left. That's why I've seen a few failed attempts to rebrand some aspects of Trumpism as "right-wing wokism." Certainly, I'm no fan of Trumpism, and some of it is that it is not the committed, little-l liberal alternative to wokism, but just another anti-liberal form of identitarianism.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I think those kind of scenarios are actually rarer than people think. It almost codes to me that your college GF was not the same race/ethnicity as you because of that kind of gap.
She was white-passing Hispanic. She had a scholarship, and was living for free in the house of a Christian couple that let underprivileged youth sleep in their spare rooms while she went to school. Her parents were working, but were too far away from the school and not in a financial position to really help her pay for things.
To be fair to her, I don't think she literally thought my childhood house was a mansion. I just think that she went from a precarious lower middle class in a cramped one-story house, to basically homeless, and something about the "unfairness" of that hit her when she saw the way I grew up.
I'm sure you're right that it is relatively rare, but my stint working as a home caregiver for the eldery also showed me a lot of sad tales. Old people with mobility issues or parkinson's who don't really have a lot going for them: They can't do their hobbies because of their broken bodies and deteriorating minds, their kids or grandkids have often cut them off and live far away, and they just get ferried from doctor's appointments to physical therapy until they die a slow, sad lingering death. It is hard when you're someone's only lifeline, and you're only there because you're being paid far too little for the amount of shit you're putting up with.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
It may be simulating a character, but I'm not sure if the current generation of AI partners is ready for prime time for most femcels. Just going off of vibes, Grok Companion feels like something that will appeal far more to male gooners, since the pretty rudimentary animations and voice quality seems good enough to be a porn fantasy, but not really good enough to be a full character.
The gameified lovemeter of Grok Companion seems male-gooner-coded and not "character simulacrum for femcel" coded.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I wonder if some of the rise in transmen isn't mediated by trying to find a secular alternative to this phenomenon.
Maybe autistic girls who really have trouble succeeding as women, find it far easier to be a short guy than to continue living with the weight of expectations of womanhood. The fact that surgeries and hormones "destroy their body" ends up being a benefit, not a drawback.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
The people who think those on benefits have it easy have never had to live in poverty.
Yeah, as a child of upper middle class parents, it was a bit of a system shock years ago when I truly grokked that people had radically different backgrounds.
My college girlfriend broke down crying when she first saw my childhood home, because I "lived in a mansion" (I didn't) while her parents had been forced to sell her childhood home because they couldn't afford it, and one of the members of my Esperanto club was the first disabled man I ever interacted with at length and it was kind of heartbreaking seeing the squalor a person my age could live in even with supportive friends and family and disability payments.
She correctly perceives that when people (well, men, at least) think about men, the properties they notice in order of salience are "web developer, white, middle class, male, father...", something like that. But when people think about her, the ordering is "woman, web developer, white, middle class...". Her body is what people want, it's what they're seeking; or at least, this is always necessarily a lurking suspicion.
I agree with some of your points, but I'm not sure if I fully agree here.
While the idea that "men do, women are" is accepted as a truism in some online circles, and I even think there are probably evopsych forces pushing in that direction, I think there are plenty of women who find fulfilling communities, hobbies, etc. where the fact that they are the "scarce resource" in reproduction isn't really that relevant one way or another.
Consider Youtube channels like this one for scrapbooking, or this one for miniatures. Both women are just disembodied hands, and yet I know people like my mom (who does scrapbooking and homemade cards) and an older family friend of ours (who made elaborate miniature dollhouses when her health was better) love these kinds of channels, watching them obsessively for ideas to try out.
I also have several lesbian friends, and they tend to have crafty hobbies that they love. One (whose day job is as a web developer) is an amazing seamstress, and has won cosplay contest awards for historical accuracy (due to her obsessively deep diving into Chinese clothing history for a costume she did.) One loves crochet and once made dozens of crochet stuffed animals (including several quite large ones) to give away for a party. Both of them seem to be pretty satisfied with their lot in life, most of the time, and neither their professions nor their hobbies seem to be affected very much by the fact that they're the scarce resource biologically.
Now, I grant that all of these are female-dominated hobbies that probably appeal to a "people-oriented" personality more, but it really isn't that hard in the modern day to have a friend group consisting of almost no straight guys, which has the practical effect of reducing the salience of being the scarce resource biologically to practically zero.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I second /u/orangecat. I truly appreciate this forum, and all the work you mods put into it.
There really isn't anywhere quite like the Motte.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
The Secretary of State, Attorney-General, Secretary of Homeland Security, Director of National Intelligence, SEC chairman, Secretary of Treasury, both WH chiefs of staff and much else besides, all were Jewish. The President wasn't even mentally there most of the time. I'd challenge that as a matter of fact, the US government was run by Jews during that period. Who else was controlling it if not these people?
There is a difference between "The people in power are Jews" and "Jews are the people in power." One is the Motte, one is the Bailey.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
So, to be clear, I don't think that a liberaltarian state will be "naturally" diverse, and I don't necessarily think libertarian states are locked into racism.
I think the two most important facts about human nature for this discussion are:
- Humans are social animals, but due to Dunbar's number we are probably naturally limited to social networks of around 150 people.
- Humans have had societies much larger than 150 people for at least 10,000 years based on archaeological evidence.
I think this is a mystery that needs to be explained. My preferred explanation is that we've created social technologies over the years that get us to larger societies. Think about how the Roman legions were structured, or a modern military. The chain of command limits the number of people you directly interact with most of the time, and allows for better organization and coordination.
I don't think humans are naturally "racist", but I do think we are naturally tribal. Racism is one form of social technology that gets us to a Super-Dunbar Society (at the cost of creating a racial underclass), but there are many other social technologies along these lines: Religion, Nationalism, Communism, Neoliberal Capitalism, Imperialism, etc.
My problem is a lack of imagination on some level. From a traditional libertarian perspective, I don't get how you get from a society that is using racialized thinking as one of its Super-Dunbar social technologies, to using a different basis that is more compatible with libertarianism.
I suppose it would be possible to switch to religion in principle, but I think that most universalist faiths push against libertarianism on a number of points, and any sufficiently secularized form of religion which doesn't probably isn't strong enough to actually unite a society into a libertarian arrangement. Most of the others just fail right out of the gate. The most potent forms of nationalism are off limits to the libertarian, communism contradicts it, imperialism violates the NAP, etc.
I think strict libertarianism by default kind of stalls out around the Dunbar level in most cases. Maybe with the right social technology it gets to city-state size, and can still be worthy of the name "libertarianism." But I think that at that size, in a world of non-libertarian countries the libertarian city state is in an incredibly precarious position. If they try to stay an open society, and let people think for themselves, then people are going to be exposed to the imperialist, religious and nationalist thinking of their neighbors, and I think there will always be a temptation to swap out the libertarian-compatible social technologies for something more potent.
My issue is not that I think that libertarianism is naturally racist. I think that if a libertarian city-state was using racism as one of its Super-Dunbar social technologies (perhaps as a way to avoid corruption by outside ideologies), it would be hard to switch it to something else using libertarian means.
By contrast, I think that liberaltarianism is more willing to make compromises with social technologies that actually enable Super-Dunbar numbers that allow for something bigger than a city state, while still retaining most of the benefits of libertarianism. The main one is imperialism - which allows liberaltarianism to reproduce itself generation after generation by forcibly brainwashing the populace to be as libertarian as possible, and thus somewhat avoiding the siren's song of other Super-Dunbar social technologies like Racism.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I think flatter hierarchies might be less likely to benefit from diversity/greater "foreign" populations.
The state as conceived by a libertarian is likely to be "small" and less populated, due to less government capacity for intervention. The liberaltarian state is big, but tries to find a balance with a bigger hierarchy and larger population.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I suppose humans are more fundamentally hierarchical than they are tribalist/racist.
As long as the person or people on the top stand to benefit from greater numbers of workers, and they don't personally suffer negative effects from things like immigration and ethnic diversity it is in their interest to encourage it. They command the people below them, who are also made better off in a number of ways from the increased number of workers, and on down through the system.
In this way, you only need a system where diverse races are in the rational self-interest of a smaller group of people at the top, and then they can use men with guns to force a culture that is conducive to their rational self-interest, which works because the hierarchy-minded people below them don't rebel enough to make that entirely untenable. There are going to be limits pushing against these things in various directions, and there's probably a Goldilock's zone where all of these varying aspects of human nature (rational self interest, hierarchy and tribalism) are balanced against each other and you have a relatively functional society. Outside of that Goldilock's zone, either people's tribalism overwhelms their hierarchical social instincts, or it starts to be in the rational self interest of the ruler to care only about the people tribally similar to themselves.
Yeah, I should have probably brought up this disanalogy somehow, since people here have brought up that Christians had a high TFR compared to other Romans before.
However, my main point is that while Leftists grow memetically, it might not quite be correct to call it "parasitically."
Like, putting aside their high TFR, when Christians showed compassion and charity to lepers, Roman tax collectors and ex-prostitutes, they weren't being "parasitic" on all those groups.
And in the modern day, when mentally ill black sheep move away from home, and find the LGBT community or progressivism waiting there to embrace them and all of their messiness, I don't think it is correct to call it "parasitism." Those communities are taking the cast offs that the families with lots of kids didn't want in the end.
Like, I get why some people on The Motte have a natural aesthetic distaste for the way the progressive left seems to embrace weakness, mental illness and ugliness. But you can't cultivate an attitude like that, and then be surprised when a leper colony has formed behind your back, and become part of a larger coalition opposing you.
I have seen so many broken people "bloom" for lack of a better word when they became a part of the LGBT community in my city. They went from struggling people with no friends, and painful family connections to people who could embrace being the weird black sheep that they were, becoming more confident and emotionally stable in the process. How is that parasitic? Especially when the "solution" to that supposed parasitism for the other political tribe is one they will never realistically embrace.
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