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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29790 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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(I posted this in last week's thread in error, having forgotten that today was Monday. I've now reposted it in this week's thread.)

Nowadays, whenever I meet a woman or gay man who's millennial or younger, I'm counting the seconds until they ask me "so, what's your sign?" Among young Western women, belief in astrology seems to be right up there with an interest in true crime podcasts and Taylor Swift.

I have the impression that this is a fairly recent development, like in the last decade or so. When I was in secondary school I don't remember any of my female classmates expressing any interest in astrology, and I sort of remember the general opinion was that reading your horoscope in a tabloid was seen as a low-status spinster thing to do.

Three questions:

  1. Has there actually been a recent resurgence in interest in astrology? Or is my gut feeling actually mistaken, and interest in astrology has actually been constant over the past twenty years?

  2. If "yes" to the previous question, what are the underlying causes? If astrology underwent a resurgence in popularity over the last decade, why so? Is it a "god-shaped hole" effect (when people give up organised religion, they immediately start looking for something else to take its place)? I've heard that there was a lot of VC money floating around for astrology apps a few years ago, could that be behind it? Or is that an effect rather than a cause?

  3. Why is it such a gendered phenomenon? I literally don't think I've ever been sincerely asked what my sign is by a straight man - 100% of people who've asked me have been female (or far more rarely, gay/bi men). Is this true everywhere, or am I in a bubble and it's a less gendered phenomenon in other regions? I wonder how it ties into a tendency among women that they seem to enjoy the act of classifying people into "types": a few years ago when I was single, something like half of the dating app profiles I saw had their Myers-Briggs listed somewhere.

Pew Research Center did a comprehensive poll in 2023 on spirituality (aside from religion) in US, with intention to periodically repeat it. They say that there aren't any good longitudinal surveys on the subject.

Glancing through the breakdowns on spiritual beliefs, there are indeed some gender differences once we get past the stuff of organized religion, like:

  • 85% women / 77% men: "there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we cannot see it"

  • on the flip side, 12% women / 21% men: "the natural world is all there is"

  • 22% of Americans are "spiritual but not religious".Among those, 57% women / 42 % men.

Nowadays, whenever I meet a woman or gay man who's millennial or younger, I'm counting the seconds until they ask me "so, what's your sign?"

Could it be that you're being subtly hit on? Asking "what's your sign" is a low-stakes maybe-flirt, in my observation. It's asking something about you that you probably don't mind sharing, general time of year when you're born, and it's a starter to a conversation about you (or your interlocutor) that is mildly personal.

Unless the ladies are pulling out star charts. That would bust my hypothesis.

Could it be that you're being subtly hit on?

Potentially, but I've even had female colleagues who are happily co-habiting with their boyfriends and/or engaged ask me about my star sign.

I have seen nothing of that here in Sweden so perhaps you should restrict yourself to American women rather than western women?

That said, of the people reading horoscopes and pursuing things like alternative medicine it seems like the overwhelming majority is female. I would imagine this has to do with agreeableness. Agreeable is a short distance from impressionable and some % of people will be conned into astrology. Then, when you reach critical mass of followers then others will simply engage in the activity because others are doing it, especially those vulnerable to social contagion.

Men have other gender specific failure modes, like chronic contrarianism and overconfidence, leading to things like falling for crypto-scams.

Same in Finland.

Perhaps I'm just in some kind of anti-astrology bubble or what did you mean was the same in Finland? That astrology is or isn't rising among women?

Same as in I've seen nothing of the sort among young women.

perhaps you should restrict yourself to American women rather than western women?

I live in Ireland.

Anglo-sphere women then.

I. How does straight sex work?

Evolutionary psychology* tells us that women want to reproduce with the most fit man that she can find. This creates a situation where most men are outcompeted for reproduction by fitter men. For simplicity’s sake, from here on out I will refer to any male who is more fit as “alpha” and any less fit male as “beta.”** Non-monogamous societies are nearly always polygynous (one male with multiple wives) rather than polyandrous (one woman with multiple husbands.) Polyandry doesn’t generally happen because women simply choose the most fit male and the other men don’t really want to stick around having dick measuring contests with each other all day. Women are rewarded by going after higher quality mates while men are rewarded by going after a larger quantity of mates.***

Whenever more than one man is present, you can rank each man’s fitness as a sexual partner. The only thing that matters in this hierarchy is physical dominance. When judging the hierarchy between men, imagine them fighting. The one who would likely win in a physical fight is the alpha. To judge this we look at physical characteristics: Height, weight, muscularity, dick size, waist/hip ratio, meanness or neotony of face, baldness, and so on. Traits like intelligence, kindness, virtuosity, and so on, are important in other situations but not in sex. This hierarchy of men is so ingrained that we don’t realize it. When you walk around in crowds, smaller men move to the side for larger men. If you don’t, larger men get irritated at you. Smaller men often subtly bow and fawn to larger men. Once you notice this you won’t stop noticing it.

II. How does gay sex work?

Gay sex is downstream of straight sex. People imagine gay men to have a “female” and a “male” partner but that isn’t really accurate. When two men have sex, they are two men having sex. They are competing for the same roles. Most gay sex acts have a dominant and submissive position: In anal sex the bottom is submissive and the top is dominant, in oral sex the dick sucker is submissive and the oral top is dominant and so on. During gay sex you must sort out who is going to do what. Here are the ways that gay sex can happen, in order from most positive to least positive.

Positive gay sex experiences from your perspective:

  • You are both acting as alphas. You may not be perfectly matched on the hierarchy, but you both believe you are strong powerful men who are good choices for sexual mates. You lift each other up, the real alpha feels secure in his position lifting up the lesser alpha who feels like he is able to learn from and enjoy the other alpha’s sex. It is equally positive for both of you.
  • You’re the alpha and he’s the beta. You both know that you are a bit better than he is, but he accepts the role. You feel good because your dominance is respected and he helps support your ego.

Neutral gay sex experiences:

  • You’re the beta and he’s the alpha. This can be positive as well but is definitely ranked below the first scenario in that category. I rank this as neutral because if you aren’t trying to be the top you will feel on some level slightly melancholic about the experience afterwards, that you should have tried harder to push your desires further during sex. But it can also be positive especially if he is so attractive to you that you don’t mind playing the beta role. Many, many gay men seem stuck in this beta dynamic, it seems very stable but creates problems I’ll describe below.
  • You’re both acting as betas. Sometimes no sex will happen at all, it is the most neutral. As an aside, in prison dynamics, alphas will allow their betas to play with each other but not share betas with other alphas. I suspect it’s because the alphas imagine the betas to be having this sort of sex with each other, which is plausible but also may be more of an alpha/beta dynamic between the two betas (but the power dynamic is narrower than between the original prison alpha and beta.)

Negative gay sex experiences:

  • You’re the beta and he’s the alpha but you take advantage of him. Controversially, this could include rape or situations where you’re doing something he doesn’t like. This is neutral for you, because you don’t have the satisfaction of knowing you’re his superior which simultaneously makes him look weak and also makes you feel bad for taking advantage of him. I would not rank it as fully negative because you may get some pleasure believing you were his alpha in some way but you can’t fully convince yourself of it.
  • You’re the beta and he’s the alpha but he takes advantage of you. Of course no one likes to be raped or forced to do something you don’t want but it is still slightly less bad than if…
  • You’re the alpha and he’s the beta and he takes advantage of you. This is the perspective of your partner in scenario 1 under “Negative gay sex experiences” above. This is the worst situation because you will have to live with knowing that you didn’t defend yourself from someone smaller than you and were hurt because of it.

In the positive experiences, the most important aspect is respect, and mutual understanding. You both have to understand where the other person is in the hierarchy. The worst experiences are when one or both of you misjudge the situation and do something to upset the natural order. The best experiences are when you both see each other for who the other is and can have sex together while comforting the insecurities of the other and celebrating the others’ strengths as well. It is similar to a well played game of strategy or wrestling.

III. What makes a man gay?

I don’t know what makes a man gay. It has been shown that statistically a man is more likely to be gay if he has more older brothers. The cause of this is unknown but I wonder if part of it is a socialization, wherein younger boys surrounded by more dominant/aggressive males can not as easily adopt heterosexuality as the more alpha males around them. Speaking personally, I was raised by a rageful father and had a bullying brother and another older brother who was more neutral and an abusive stepfather all while I was young. It’s easy to imagine that these frightening males caused a fawning response in my adolescent brain that developed into homosexuality as I aged. Indeed I see a lot of fawning from gay men, especially younger gay men toward older gay men. I even catch myself fawning at stronger more dominant men though I feel some shade of disgust toward myself when I do this as it triggers memories of earlier years when I felt stuck as only a beta and primarily tried fawning at older men for affection/sex. That said it’s an effective strategy when a beta man fawns to you it’s very attractive but when an alpha fawns at you it’s rather irritating and awkward.

When analyzing why a man is gay we usually focus on the attraction to men but I think just as important is the lack of attraction to women. When I see women I imagine that they won’t love me. I find their ability to discriminate between men irritating and feel that it points to my lack of physical appeal and don’t want to suffer the indignity of not being attractive to them. I strangely have a habit of watching straight porn but I only look at the men who mostly behave confidently as alphas in straight porn, whereas in gay porn there is usually the alpha/beta dynamic and sometimes the real hierarchy is reversed (especially in commercial porn) which I find irritating and unrealistic. Relatedly, I once dated a bisexual man who said that he used to only be interested in women, and imagined that men would never be interested in him. But his male friend confessed his attraction to him, they started having sex and now he’s bisexual. I can imagine situations where if a woman was attracted to me and I really believed it, I could have sex with her, but it is basically not something I want to seek out because my attraction to men is so much greater.

IV. How does culture affect all this?

The Middle East is very interesting to me. Muslim countries have the reputation of being the most homophobic countries on earth. But in my (admittedly very short) experience in the Middle East, my experiences were very different. In fact I was hit on by men there constantly, and I am never hit on anywhere else. Never in the USA, once I was catcalled in Europe but I suspect they were making fun of me, and never in Asia. But in the Middle East I was overtly hit on by men everywhere I went. I don’t know if it’s because they see white men with blue eyes as so beta that they aren’t practically considered male, or that they believe every rich western country person is completely LGBT globohomo, or if they are all really horny all the time with each other and their homophobia is a ruse that they put up to keep everyone else from thinking they’re gay, but I suspect the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The Middle East is the most polygynous culture that I’m aware of- centuries of harems would naturally produce tons of alpha male offspring from relatively few men. In my opinion Middle Eastern men are very masculine, handsome, and alpha, more so than anywhere else in the world.

Speaking of the Middle East, most of the homosexual relationships between men that you’ll find there are intergenerational. It is nearly always an older man with a younger male. Anecdotally I think these are the strongest types of gay relationships that there can be. Increasingly as the older I get, the less I want to be with someone my own age. What would I as a full grown man want to do with another full grown man living in my house? It really doesn’t sound great, even as a homosexual. When I was young, under 25, I dated almost exclusively men in their 40s and 50s. I drew the line at a man who reminded me too much of my grandfather, but otherwise was happy to date men my father’s age. I suspect this also reflects some resentment toward my father which I didn’t recognize until after his passing as well but it’s hard to say.

Now, speaking on East Asia. I have spent at least a few months each in Thailand, South Korea and Japan. From my perspective, these cultures are very hierarchical. These countries are so ethnically homogeneous that everyone seems to be completely aware of their hierarchy and since social order and harmony are valued no one seems to step out of line or be uncomfortable with their place in the hierarchy. In Japan, the gay bathhouses have huge rooms full of mattresses where men sleep naked. Alphas approach betas and betas rarely ever refuse the alpha. I have seen betas sleeping or pretending to sleep be approached by alphas who have anal sex with the beta, all while the beta doesn’t open his eyes or move. This is not done outside of Asia. Men in Japan tend to be bottoms compared to South Korea where they are more conformist and competitive and have a more pressing military threat to the north. South Korean men seem more likely to try to be alphas than Japanese men, though they will still generally fawn to white men.

Gay dating today in America is pretty frustrating because the vast majority of men do not see themselves as alpha. It does not bother me just when American men are my alpha, it bothers me when they are my alpha but see themselves as not an alpha at all. This is really the worst because it puts us in the “neutral” or “negative” sex experience categories above. If you have sex with a man who is your superior but doesn’t act like it, you are either going to come away feeling like you’re taking advantage of him or no sex is going to happen at all. Imagine a younger boy who wants to play a game with a bigger boy, but the bigger boy is depressed or doesn’t feel like playing, either the younger boy irritates the bigger boy or they just don’t play a game at all and both parties are sad. This is what it’s like to try dating among men with low self esteem who don’t realize the position they hold. This is so common in America and Western Europe but so uncommon in the Middle East and Asia where men seem to be much more self aware of their masculine traits and comfortable with it and respect others’ traits as well.

V. Race and sex

So, if all men are judged on their physical characteristics and sexual fitness, how does this extend to race? Basically, some races are more physically dominant than others. If you charted all men, with physically dominant traits on the Y axis and nonphysically positive traits on the X axis, you would have most black men in the upper left and most East Asian men on the bottom right. (For example, black men are generally taller and more muscular and better at sports than other races- see NFL roster stats if you don’t believe me. Asian men are better at certain types of intelligence but are smaller and less physically aggressive than blacks. I realize this is a controversial portion of my thinking and can provide further evidence if needed.) White men would probably be broadly in the middle of the graph, with Latino men and Indian/South Asian men being somewhat closer to the origin of the graph, with Latino men being closer to white/black/ or Asian men depending on their specific admixture of white/black/native blood. (Mexicans/Peruvians are closer to Asians, while Cubans/Dominicans can be closer to whites/blacks etc.) Of course there are countless exceptions to all of this- a black midget would be to the bottom right of an Asian linebacker, and so on.

This graph would be a sort of reversal of the hierarchy of race in society today. Statistically blacks are the poorest and least educated, whites are richer and more educated while Asians are the richest and most educated populations in the USA. In this way I envision mainstream society as a sort of “losers hierarchy” situation wherein the sexual losers become society’s champions in a sort of David & Goliath inversion of base reality.

I should note that age somewhat complicates the entire hierarchy. Older men, up to around age 55, are perceived as more attractive to women and other younger men. It’s not hard to imagine that age can be an indicator of status and fertility among preindustrial societies and we seem to have kept the instinct today.

VI. Conclusions

Am I racist? I am making broad classifications of people based on their physical characteristics and their ancestry so I would probably fit someone’s definition of racist. But I do not see myself as racist. I love traveling abroad and do it every chance I get. I am genuinely repulsed when I see people treating other people poorly based on their race. I am not racist, really what I want is to harbor mutual respect between people, and immutably, race is one aspect of their person that can’t be avoided. When I am in Asia, people see me one way, because of their own experiences and backgrounds. When I am in the Middle East, people see me a totally different way because of their own experiences as well. And I see Asian people differently from Middle Eastern people, because we relate to each other in a different way. We are not all blank slate interchangeable human beings, and we should steer ourselves from thinking that way. Really what I want to propose is mutual respect, seeing each other for who we are as we are, and understanding that about each other. I think so much of modern society is dysfunctional because we are encouraged to ignore the physical characteristics of each other for the sake of social harmony, but it’s impossible because our physical characteristics are so much of who we are.

Relatedly, physical power is essential to understanding relationships between people. As I’ve grown older, my parents have naturally waned in their power over me and among the entire family. Of course when I was a child they were able to make all my decisions, and my independence grew over time. At some time in my early 30s, my father had a health problem, he became quite weak and frail, and I was his caretaker for a few months. He continued to treat me like I was a child, not respecting my adulthood and the power I held in the situation. I put up with it out of respect for him as my father, but at some point it became so degrading that I had to assert my power over him. He didn’t like it but after I stood up for myself he had more of a respect for me that I hadn’t been given previously. I had a similar experience with my mother a few years later. Relationships where someone is abusing the power of a stronger person really are toxic and it is up to the stronger person to assert their power in the situation if both parties want to come out with dignity. Similarly, men need to assert their power and strength, see themselves for who they are, respect themselves in their position in the world and respect those around them for who they are too.

I wanted to start my post with an introduction about who I am (a white American gay male in my mid 30s, average height, a bit overweight, and so on) but it’s rare on themotte and may have felt a bit too identity driven. I dislike identity politics as it’s defined by the left but on some level I find it to have a redeeming quality if it can enable mutual respect between people and understanding of where we fit with each other. I don’t need to be the most powerful strongest hottest person, I am happy being grateful for what power and strength and hotness I do have, and to have the opportunity to see others for the strengths and weaknesses that they have as well.

*Everything I know about evolutionary psychology I learned from Satoshi Kanazawa’s blog [ https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist?page=11 ] and otherwise assumed from my experiences with real people and watching straight porn. Feel free to tell me I’ve got it all wrong.

** I know these are loaded terms and probably carry connotations in the meme world that I’m unaware of but I think it is effective at illustrating my point.

*** Further reading: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200802/the-paradox-of-polygamy-i-why-most-americans-are

Edit: Formatting

You are both acting as alphas.

The term "power bottom" is such a cope.

Do you have experience with long term relationships? I know that gay men on average aren't known for being in monogamous long term relationships, and I don't think these dynamics really apply in long term relationships.

Also, anecdotally, I have an older sister and no older brothers and I'm still gay.

And in regards to anal, I enjoy masturbation and especially being the bottom, and I've never felt any pain. Here is a really detailed guide for it. It's not like it'll change your mind, but it might be interesting at least.

Do you have experience with long term relationships?

Not a huge amount but I have been in two longer term relationships. I disagree that the dynamics don't apply in long term relationships, when I think of my own relationships and those of friends, as well as non-romantic relationships, they all seem to fit the power dynamic I've outlined. Even relationships with friends, parents, other family members, and so on. I suspect if you don't see it you're shielding yourself from seeing it, I don't know if I would have believed any of it 10 or 15 years ago but once the pattern emerged I can't unsee it now.

I seem to recall there was a massively upvoted "Quality Contribution" here a while back, where a gay man wrote a similar post. Basically arguing that all gay sex was about these power dynamics. But then a bunch of other gay men clapped back at him and told him he's wrong, that's just one niche/stereotype, and there's lots of other gay men who are loving and equal. So I don't know what to think now.

That was me, I'm back. I would say on the one hand that I don't know how you can read my post and think that the entire point is that it's a one sided stereotypical power dynamic concept when really what I am trying to get at is the need for mutual respect between partners and how that happens. The fact that other gay men don't like to hear anything I have to say and "clap back" at me further illustrates the frustration I feel with gay men, I am not here to sugar coat the experience or present the mainstream homosexual view of love and relationships and sex but rather point out the difficult aspects that underlie the entire situation. Besides that my post isn't really about gay sex at all but rather I am using something I think about all the time that people here aren't as familiar with to make broader points about power and relationships.

Nice post, thanks.

The cause of this is unknown but I wonder if part of it is a socialization, wherein younger boys surrounded by more dominant/aggressive males can not as easily adopt heterosexuality as the more alpha males around them.

Interesting! And I wonder to what extent modern parenting & lifestyle - having few kids that don't spend as much time outside with other kids as in previous generations - is contributing to that. If you're used to unstructured play with kids of all ages, you adopt a wider variety of social roles than if you spend a lot of your "free" time at home with parents and older siblings.

Your terminology here seems a bit confusing.

You start out defining “alpha” and “beta” for the scope of this post as comparative terms based purely on fitness, which seems ambiguous... I guess that since reproductive “fitness” obviously isn't on the table, you mean rather health? Specifically strength and non-obesity?

For simplicity’s sake, from here on out I will refer to any male who is more fit[sic] as “alpha” and any less fit male as “beta.”

But then you imply that the comparison isn't between the partners, as you say that a relationship between two “alphas” would be positive... so I guess that you only mean that an “alpha” is fit relative to the population? Or at least relative to their own genetic and environmental potential?

I rank [a beta’s non-abusive relationship with an alpha] as neutral because if you [the beta] aren’t trying to be the top you will feel on some level slightly melancholic about the experience afterwards, that you should have tried harder to push your desires further during sex.

That seems weird. Surely a “beta” (unfit person) would feel even more melancholic after “trying to be the top”? Or would you consider that necessarily an attempt at “taking advantage of” a fit partner?

Gay dating today in America is pretty frustrating because the vast majority of men do not see themselves as alpha. It does not bother me just when American men are my alpha, it bothers me when they are my alpha but see themselves as not an alpha at all.

So, is whether someone is an “alpha” based on their fitness, or their mindset? If someone is “your” “alpha”, but they don't “see themselves” that way, and that's a significant and “frustrating” part of your experience of the world, why did it not factor into the model you introduced at the start of the post?

You enumerate out seven different prototypes of gay relationship:

  1. PoV “alpha” × “alpha”, no abuse
  2. PoV “alpha” × “beta”, no abuse
  3. PoV “beta” × “alpha”, no abuse
  4. PoV “beta” × “beta”, no abuse
  5. PoV “beta” × “alpha”, you abuse him
  6. PoV “beta” × “alpha”, you are abused
  7. PoV “alpha” × “beta”, you are abused

but you conspicuously leave off several possibilities from your enumeration:

  • PoV “beta” × “beta”, you abuse him
  • PoV “beta” × “beta”, you are abused
  • PoV “alpha” × “alpha”, you abuse him
  • PoV “alpha” × “alpha”, you are abused

are these just not relevant? Do you think they statistically don't occur that much versus the seven cases you highlighted? (The claim would seem astonishing to me that two fit men getting together in a healthy, mutually fulfilling relationship is more common than two unfit men getting together in an asymmetric, somewhat dysfunctional relationship...)

If you have sex with a man who is your [physical] superior but doesn’t act like it, you are either going to come away feeling like you’re taking advantage of him or no sex is going to happen at all. Imagine a younger boy who wants to play a game with a bigger boy, but the bigger boy is depressed or doesn’t feel like playing, either the younger boy irritates the bigger boy or they just don’t play a game at all and both parties are sad. This is what it’s like to try dating among men with low self esteem who don’t realize the position they hold. … in the Middle East I was overtly hit on by men everywhere I went … In my opinion Middle Eastern men are very masculine, handsome, and alpha, more so than anywhere else in the world.

Really, this feels like it could have been the whole post, and even it seems ultimately subjective — 3,200 words to ask “Why aren't there any REAL Man's Men / psychological tops in the United States?” — I dunno, maybe we like cuddling more than “acting like” the other's “superior”?

I dunno, maybe we like cuddling more than “acting like” the other's “superior”?

@aiislove To expand on that a bit: From my own perspective, a gay relationship is supposed to be a pleasant escape from the Red Queen’s Rat Race. As someone who doesn't seem to be eligible for the runner's high, strength training is fucking miserable; the only enjoyable part of strenuous exercise is being massaged while sore afterwards; why would I bother for anyone who isn't packing gametes capable of co-producing an actual child with mine?

Positive gay sex experience[:] You are both acting as alphas. You may not be perfectly matched on the hierarchy, but you both believe you are strong powerful men who are good choices for sexual mates. You lift each other up, the real alpha feels secure in his position lifting up the lesser alpha who feels like he is able to learn from and enjoy the other alpha’s sex. It is equally positive for both of you.

If you think that this relationship is really such an underrated delight, and vastly superior to the asymmetric relationship you're “frustrated” at seeing Americans, Western Europeans, and the Japanese bidding en masse for one particular side of, why not make the case for that per se, leaving out the speculative tangents about racial trends in sex roles and your own power struggles with your father?

It seems like the case would need to be made in 2 legs, which are separate and each quite a hard sell:

  • What the case is for being the “real alpha”, especially vs. just getting a wife who's into fitness plus making male friends who are into competitive sports
  • What the case is for being the “lesser alpha”, especially vs.* just being a regular “bottom”

most of the homosexual relationships between men that you’ll find [in the middle-east] are intergenerational. It is nearly always an older man with a younger male. Anecdotally I think these are the strongest types of gay relationships that there can be. Increasingly as the older I get, the less I want to be with someone my own age. What would I as a full grown man want to do with another full grown man living in my house? It really doesn’t sound great, even as a homosexual.

*So you might consider making a case against all the low-testosterone Americans, Western Europeans, and Japanese…

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/

I am probably one of the people Ozy calls “cis by default”. I obviously can’t be sure, but I feel like if I woke up tomorrow magically transformed into a (hetero) woman, my first [thought] would be “Huh, cool, this probably makes it much easier to find a mate” … then I’d get into some very rational comparisons to my personality, like … “Nice, now it’s attractive for me to project my standard vibe of passive lack of interest in my surroundings, instead of having to try to appear dominant and take-charge all the time.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20220813174845/https://zerohplovecraft.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/god-shaped-hole/

“I think it’s a really exciting new opportunity and a way to learn about sex that a lot of men never had before. The feeling of something bigger and stronger just overpowering you and doing whatever it wants. I love it.”

…and convincing them for, maybe, a renaissance of “real”, spiritually-charged, Greek-style homosexuality?

https://www.greek-love.com/general-non-fiction-pederasty/the-symposium-by-plato

“But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are boys, being slices of the original male, they are fond of men and enjoy going to bed with men and embracing them. These are the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature. Some indeed assert that they are shameless, but this is not true; for they do not act thus from any want of shame, but out of courage, manliness and masculinity, and they embrace that which is like themselves. And these when they grow up become our statesmen, and these only, which is a great proof of the truth of what I am saving. When they reach manhood they are lovers of boys, and are not naturally inclined to marry or beget children,—if at all, they do so only in obedience to custom; but they are satisfied if they may be allowed to live with one another unwedded.

“One of this nature is inclined to love boys or (as a boy) inclined to have a lover, always embracing that which is akin to him. And when a lover of boys or a lover of another sort meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and can hardly be induced to be out of one another's sight even for a moment. These are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they can not explain what they desire of one another. No one imagines the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other is simply the desire for sexual intercourse, or that sex is the reason why one gets such enormous pleasure out of the other's company. The soul of each evidently desires something else which it cannot express, and of which it has only a dark and doubtful presentiment.

“Suppose Hephaistos, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side by side and to say to them, 'What do you mortals want of one another?' they would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said: 'Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another's company? for if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live live a common life as if you were a single man, and, after your death, down in Hades, still be one departed soul instead of two—I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?'—there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need.

This seems to me a somewhat narrow view of gay sex.

For instance, you assume that to bottom is necessarily to be taken advantage of somehow. Just because you don't enjoy bottoming doesn't mean no one else does, or that it is only enjoyable in a psychological way. As evidence consider the market for anal sex toys and prostate massagers, many of which are advertised to straight men. Consider the endless stories of people needing to go to the hospital to remove large objects they've gotten stuck up their butts. These men were seeking a mechanical sort of gratification which may be correlated with submissiveness but which should be thought of as independent of it.

Maybe I'm just autistic or something but I've always thought that gay relationships and sex had a lot more opportunity for egalitarian bonds. To me it seems that in hetero relationships, no matter how loving, there is always the lingering tension of transaction and compromise, given that men and women generally have different needs and desires and often don't understand each other. But gay relationships don't require an asymmetry and can be closer to purely positive-sum, like friendship. Maybe that makes the relationship cheaper in some ways and more genuine in others.

Yeah, as before I'll caveat that this alpha top stuff, while a common kink, is far from a universal one. Even for people who do appreciate it, it's not always something you're gonna be feeling up for. Things like frotting, mutual masturbation, or some forms of oral don't really have top/bottom in the same sense, and there's a lot of times where providing oral to someone is fun because it's fun, not because you're submitting to them, especially with that whole oversensitivity deal you can kinda play with.

There is a lot of mechanical vulnerability to bottoming, even to women (arguably, because strapons give less feedback, more vulnerability), but being physically vulnerable isn't the same as being emotionally vulnerable, and it doesn't have to be tied into this framework of submitting to someone Better than you.

That said, I think there is a risk of romanticizing the unknown. There can be a lot of asymmetry in a lot of gay relationships: while there's less difference in sex drive on average, there's a lot more mechanical preparation to bottoming; where there's a lot fewer of the big gendered differences in expectations or interests, a lot of things that look gendered in het relationships are cultural or upraising in gay ones.

This seems to me a somewhat narrow view of gay sex.

These men were seeking a mechanical sort of gratification

On the contrary I think that to imagine sex between two human beings as "mechanical gratification" is the narrow view of sex. I personally don't mind being fingered or having small toys up my butt, I do think they feel good, but at the same time this is essentially a degrading act that you must accept or reject. A finger or object is entering your body, this can be violating, or if you have a respect for your partner it can be a positive experience.

Your last paragraph is interesting to me. In my opinion homosexuality is less egalitarian because when you are both the same thing you are inevitably hierarchically compared. One is bigger, one is smaller. With heterosexuality you have greater balance because you are both looking for something different and can offer your unique strengths to the other in a more naturally equal way.

The one who would likely win in a physical fight is the alpha.

Sorry, I stopped reading your wall of text here. Humans form alliances. We use these big calorie-hungry brains to navigate social systems. The winner in a fight is not the bigger, stronger man, but the one with the most allies.

Yeah. Charisma, Intelligence and Status are extremely important for female mate choice. If given the options, the average woman will almost always choose a popular CEO over even the most ripped man imaginable. Provided the CEO is barely taller than her, of course.

For a relationship, sure. For a one-night stand? I reckon the jacked dude is getting lucky. (The incel phrase "alpha fucks, beta bux" has something to it.)

A super-jacked dude is rare enough nowadays that he is reasonably high on the totem pole to reliably land one-nighters, yes, as long as he has some charisma to match.

But from my experience, CEOs and other high-status men are still higher even on this count.

Clumsily. (Like krogans.)

but I wonder if part of it is a socialization, wherein younger boys surrounded by more dominant/aggressive males can not as easily adopt heterosexuality as the more alpha males around them

Are women who are surrounded by more dominant/aggressive males straighter than the average? That would be a point in favor of that hypothesis, and if we assume women who return to physically abusive relationships for the stated reason of "because I still love him" are telling the truth (along with, uh, every dime-store romance novel out there that's literally just this), maybe it's a data point suggesting it's correct.

Gay dating today in America is pretty frustrating because the vast majority of men do not see themselves as alpha.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this is because very few people today have any experience in the exercise of power (along with the standard reactions to people misusing it- which I believe is far less prevalent than people say it is specifically because "saw it on TV/read it on the Internet"). Old people will complain about "kids these days not knowing how to do anything" but their failure to make ranks available and fucking delegate for once means men and women don't understand what it means to be in the middle of the dominance hierarchy. My father failed to do that, my bosses all failed to do that, my friends fail to do that (and it has a very obvious negative effect on their kids). Nobody over the age of 40 gets it.

Oh yeah, and then you have the general room temperature of "beta good alpha bad", which is

identity politics as it’s defined by the left

because women-as-statistical-distribution are betas and vice versa for men. Which combined with the above makes the problem even worse. You can tell people how to exercise power that way if they don't know it, but you can't talk about it if you don't know they don't know it. And when the people in power really don't want anyone to discuss it (i.e. they're all alpha-hating betas) that obviously gets harder.

I read a story once about how in (either WW1 or WW2, can't remember) one of the questions a potential officer had to answer to be considered for the position was how he answered how he'd dig a trench. The ones that failed would start talking about dimensions, how deep, tactical implications, etc. [as if they were going to do the work themselves]. The correct answer was, is, and always will be "Sergeant, build me a trench!".

And while one can argue "well you know it or you don't" that's a cope answer, and we'd be better off population-wise if everyone knew at least a little bit of how to do that. If you shun selfishness qua selfishness you won't know how to use it correctly, rationally, productively.

That said it’s an effective strategy when a beta man fawns to you it’s very attractive but when an alpha fawns at you it’s rather irritating and awkward.

I think betas call that Nice Guy Syndrome.

It is nearly always an older alpha with a younger beta. Anecdotally I think these are the strongest types of gay relationships that there can be.

Yeah, straight relationships work like that too. People who pretend they don't are usually betas who actively resent being assigned beta at birth.

meanness or neoteny of face

I find it extremely odd that most of the more "alpha" women I meet (as in, they might as well be gay men in thought/action/general attitude towards life) have higher than average facial neoteny. By contrast, most of the "forever a beta, and very angry about that" women have very masculine faces (the 'model' look). I've come to find that I care about that more than if it's a woman or a man (and I suspect is where the "traps are/n't gay" meme comes from people who have also noticed this about themselves).

Relationships where someone is abusing the power of a stronger person really are toxic and it is up to the stronger person to assert their power in the situation if both parties want to come out with dignity.

I find this to be true in employer-employee and friend-friend relationships too. I find it difficult to deal with a lot of the time; while I eventually figured out my proper role in these relationships it took me way longer than it should have.

Gay dating today in America is pretty frustrating because the vast majority of men do not see themselves as alpha

Is this where the desire for "straight acting" men comes from in the gay community, or is it orthogonal?

I guess, if you're a gay man who sees himself as a beta and imagines a man as "straight acting" then you're imagining a guy who is confident and secure in his masculinity and isn't effeminate. Effeminacy is a whole other thing that would take forever to unpack and it inevitably veers into trans/gender ideology which I just don't want to think about right now, not to mention that effeminacy is not limited to homosexual men really.

So, to try to parse your question, you're asking if the fact that most gay men do not see themselves as alpha that it makes them want straight acting men? Well, yes, because any gay man who is seeking an alpha has degraded himself as a beta on some level, he's not going to be "straight acting" enough to be someone else's alpha, and thus that's the problem, when he's inevitably surrounded by men more beta than he is who he can't provide love to because he doesn't have the love for himself he needs to give away. (It's getting late and I've sort of lost the plot, hopefully this makes sense.)

For example, black men are generally taller and more muscular and better at sports than other races- see NFL roster stats if you don’t believe me.

I don't believe you. Last time I checked black men are generally shorter and weaker*. Do you have any data here?

Re: NFL rosters there's a simple reason for that. A white man who could maybe go pro in football also probably has a lot of more-sane options compared to a black man of the same general physical capabilities. Getting into the NFL is astronomically unlikely even for very good players, careers are often short, and the physical punishment can easily haunt the player through the rest of his -- often short -- life. Someone who has better options is likely to take them. A class of people who can't do much else is more likely to angle for a position in the NFL to begin with, especially if they don't actually grasp how unlikely they are to succeed.

Similarly, I'd guess that whites who make it into the NFL disproportionately tend to come from lower-income backgrounds.

Put another way, my offhand guess is that black men are also disproportionately-represented among lottery winners.

EDIT: Checked, and,

According to the Lottery Advertising Association for Consumer Research or Cash 3, a staggering 63.9 percent of Blacks reported the highest rate of “ever playing” the lottery, significantly surpassing both Hispanics (43.8 percent) and whites (41.2 percent). The numbers speak volumes about the strong affinity that Black Americans have for the lottery, highlighting its unique appeal in these communities.

Source

Couldn't find sources on race of winners, but in the case of the lottery I'd be willing to bet that it probably tracks pretty closely with the race of the general player-base.

* I recall looking up average height and finding that whites are a bit taller on average but also that a lot of the numbers are skewed by groups like latinos and middle easterners being counted as 'white'. Also, re: strength, I once found a grip strength study which indicated this but haven't been able to find it since.

I remember ilforte of all people pushing back on the blacks vs whites argument that I tried putting forward a year or two ago. I don't know how to even respond to it really because in my experience black men are so obviously stronger and more dominant/aggressive than white men that I don't know what kind of evidence I could point to that would change your mind.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1167935/racial-diversity-nfl-players/

The stats are that 53% of NFL players are black while making up 15% of the American public. White men are only 24% of the players. Asians are 0.1% of NFL but 7.3% of the US population. This is all the evidence I need to reassert what anecdotally seems true in my experiences, maybe someone else can chime in.

Besides that I think white men were fine with the enslavement of black men because they perceived black men as physically dominant/superior in some way. They didn't enslave Asians or natives to any significant degree because enslaving someone smaller than you makes you look bad and doesn't jive as well with Christian theology (see David and Goliath, Nietzschean slave morality etc)

Besides that I think white men were fine with the enslavement of black men because they perceived black men as physically dominant/superior in some way. They didn't enslave Asians or natives to any significant degree because enslaving someone smaller than you makes you look bad and doesn't jive as well with Christian theology (see David and Goliath, Nietzschean slave morality etc)

Yeah, no. The nascent latifundia used unfree labor from white people (usually called "serfs" or, in the U.S., "indentured servants", or later "sharecroppers" or company-town folk), native americans (in latin america just look up the "encomienda" system and shudder in horror), and, when they started coming over, chinese immigrants (check out labor conditions on railway gangs in the 19th century) as long as they could; black people were just evolutionarily less likely to keel over dead of malaria (thanks to the sickle-cell mutation) and other tropical diseases than white people in the caribbean and/or US south, couldn't run away back to their tribes like indians, and in the 17th and 18th centuries were flooding the market thanks to very rich and aggressive slave-trading kingdoms on the west African coast. Notably, the places where there were a lot of native americans to enslave, like Mexico and points south in Spanish (as opposed to Portuguese) Central and South America tended to not see a big importation of black slaves and tend not to have large african-descended populations today; there was no need to go to the expense of shipping them in when other unfree labor sources were right there.

In that case, why am I (and I’d imagine, your average American citizen) not familiar with these terrible slave trades and exploitations of labor while I’m reminded of American black slavery nearly every day? If this was football, and your weak team had a miracle one year and beat the strong team in the next county, I imagine you’d be happier to recount the glories of beating the strong team while ignoring the glories of beating all the weaker teams. Similarly white Americans have had a history of making their enemies out to be strong, portraying the native Americans they conquered as powerful because if they portrayed them as weak it would make them look unchristian and evil and sadistic. My historic understanding of the facts in my other comment may have been incorrect but I think the broad philosophy behind it is sound

In that case, why am I (and I’d imagine, your average American citizen) not familiar with these terrible slave trades and exploitations of labor while I’m reminded of American black slavery nearly every day?

In part because we have a substantial black population that conceives of itself as needing to guilt benefits and sinecures from the hands of whites, while the hispanic and chinese populations do not do so, and the native americans were functionally destroyed aside from a few remnants. Thus, black slavery is politically useful in a way the rest is not, and most politics is whig history in service of contemporary political ends. And the rest is because we have terrible memories of our high school history curricula (or grew up in states without a significant history as part of spanish america. In California we learned all about the encomienda system as part of the Colombian exchange, and conditions in railroad gangs and early-industrial factories as part of early-20th century labor history. For the more advanced stuff you'd actually have to read some college-level scholarship (or just Scott's review of Albion's Seed), but it's not exactly hidden. This is all bog-standard 20th century progressive historiography that the elite are happy to teach to kids; it's hardly forbidden, red-pilled secrets.

If this was football, and your weak team had a miracle one year and beat the strong team in the next county, I imagine you’d be happier to recount the glories of beating the strong team while ignoring the glories of beating all the weaker teams.

Yes, but this is not football, and even if you were right and the metaphor holds, this rationale wouldn't have anything to do with why the actual slavery-supporting Americans imported black slaves because they were convinced that the black people, specifically, were physically superior. You've given a just-so reason for why such mythologies of physical dominance might spring up after the fact - i.e., for your own assumption.

Similarly white Americans have had a history of making their enemies out to be strong, portraying the native Americans they conquered as powerful because if they portrayed them as weak it would make them look unchristian and evil and sadistic.

A lot of the natives were very strong and impressive, for nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes. The white generals who fought them (Sherman, Sheridan, etc.) were quite open about the fact that yes, these impressive people were going to get steamrollered by industrial modernity, and that was sad, but such was the march of civilization. Not all christians believed that power = evil.

In that case, why am I (and I’d imagine, your average American citizen) not familiar with these terrible slave trades and exploitations of labor while I’m reminded of American black slavery nearly every day?

Because leftists in the press and academia remind you of American black slavery every day. Remember that the root of "slave" is the same as the root of "Slav". Serfdom was extremely common in Europe. Indians in what became the US tended to make lousy slaves because it was too easy for them to escape, but that the conquistadores enslaved the South American Indians is indisputable.

In that case, why am I (and I’d imagine, your average American citizen) not familiar with these terrible slave trades and exploitations of labor while I’m reminded of American black slavery nearly every day?

Because Chinese median income exceeds the white median income, and the black median income does not. Simple as.

My historic understanding of the facts in my other comment may have been incorrect but I think the broad philosophy behind it is sound

The philosophy is based on the facts, right? Otherwise you wouldn't need to mention them.

You're getting a lot of pushback, but frankly those people are gaslighting you.

NFL defenses are nearly 100% black for a reason. On average black men have higher testosterone, more fast twitch muscle, less body fat, larger hands, longer arms, thicker skin, and higher propensity for violence.

My guess is that a lot of people here have never played sports.

That may be so but it's also true that whites are taller and stronger, only those things do not matter as much (on their own anyway) for many popular sports.

What should be said is that fast twitch muscles are very important and west Africans have more fast twitch muscles.

I think is a miss reading of history. Africans where enslaved because they where the most convenient population available that European powers could enslave. Native populations where often enslaved first, but this wasn’t sustainable because there weren’t very many of them and they died very quickly from exposure to diseases from the old world. Asians where not enslaved because there wasn’t any short route to Asia and Asian polities where powerful enough to resist Europeans until the ~1850s.

I found this an interesting read, but I’m a little puzzled about the alpha vs. beta distinction you’re making. At the start, you make it sound like the alpha is just the bigger, taller, and more muscular partner, and the beta is the shorter and weaker one, but later on, you seem to be hinting at a psychological dimension as well. In day to day life, that would make sense. I’ve certainly known men who are physically not all that impressive but who exude confidence and authority, just as I’ve known men who could beat most people to a bloody pulp but who are nevertheless obvious betas (and there are plenty of men who are dominant in one social group and passive in another). Are you saying that in the gay dating world, the physically weak but self-confident and authoritative men should be submissive to anyone who’s physically stronger—that it just comes down to brute strength? And so the problem is just that too many physically imposing specimens are too meek for their own good? If so, how do you square that with younger men preferring an older partner, given that a 55-year-old is statistically quite likely to be weaker than a 25-year-old? (Also, surely that can’t actually be true, can it? “Older men, up to around age 55, are perceived as more attractive to… other younger men.” I was under the impression that youth is almost always the single most highly-prized characteristic among gay men. I swear I’ve heard that dating is almost impossible after 30 for most gay men, since everyone is always chasing the 20-year-olds.)

Also, with regard to the birth order effect,

The cause of this is unknown but I wonder if part of it is a socialization, wherein younger boys surrounded by more dominant/aggressive males can not as easily adopt heterosexuality as the more alpha males around them.

My understanding is that the effect holds true even when the younger brothers are raised apart (when, e.g., the youngest was adopted), which would point to a biological cause in utero, rather than anything from socialization.

Basically, you have to begin by squaring the physical situation between yourself and the other person. There is fundamentally a difference between any two men that is 100% in the physical world. In a fight between two men, one will win, or there will be a draw. If I met a guy a foot taller than me with fifty pounds more muscle who was super bad at playing Cooking Mama for Nintendo DS and I was super good at it, it doesn't make me his top, it makes me better at a little game than him. If we had sex and I was using my super good abillities at playing Cooking Mama over him to make him suck my dick, it would be humiliating for both of us. If he was using his foot of height and 50 pounds of muscle on me to make me suck his dick, it would not humiliate either of us, I would have respect for his physical state. Later on, if he wants to play Cooking Mama together and I beat him, then it will make me feel good because we are both seeing each other for who we are. He is physically superior to me but I have these other traits that he can admire in me, whether it's being good at Cooking Mama or being smarter or richer or whatever.

Are you saying that in the gay dating world, the physically weak but self-confident and authoritative men should be submissive to anyone who’s physically stronger—that it just comes down to brute strength?

Well, I'm not saying that it "should" be that way as a prescriptive norm or something, I'm saying that basically you have to give credence to the brute strength between the two of you or it isn't going to work.

And so the problem is just that too many physically imposing specimens are too meek for their own good?

Yes, this is one of my frustrations with gay dating, that men who are physically superior to me don't see themselves as such. They compare themselves too much with men they imagine to be bigger or stronger than them and fail to respect themselves for the qualities they possess.

If so, how do you square that with younger men preferring an older partner, given that a 55-year-old is statistically quite likely to be weaker than a 25-year-old? (Also, surely that can’t actually be true, can it? “Older men, up to around age 55, are perceived as more attractive to… other younger men.” I was under the impression that youth is almost always the single most highly-prized characteristic among gay men. I swear I’ve heard that dating is almost impossible after 30 for most gay men, since everyone is always chasing the 20-year-olds.)

This sounds like a sort of dated concept, I do remember hearing this idea back in the early 00's or so but I really haven't heard gay men say this sort of thing in a long time. Anecdotally I am much more popular the older I get. I can imagine if a man wants to be a bottom that he is concerned he is getting too old and would have this perspective, but he really should just man up and be a top for the sake of everyone around him and his own dignity.

Also, with regard to the birth order effect,

That makes sense, it is my understanding as well that it is considered by science to have more of a biological cause but there is also a great bias against socialization related explanations of homosexuality so I wanted to present my theory from my own experiences.

So in the gay dating world, would it be fair to say that there is an element of—is coercion the right word?—when it comes to sex? Like in the ideal world, you’d wrestle and then the loser would have to pleasure the winner, rather like the loser when two boys wrestle might be forced to eat grass? If so, that is… rather different than what I would have expected. It sounds rather like the dynamic feminists imagine when they say that all sex/rape is just about power.

Also, though I’ve never considered it before, I think I see the cause of the problem right away. Presumably most gay men are gay because they enjoy being the receptive partner, leaving a dearth of men who enjoy being the active partner (possibly more of whom are bi than gay?). Is that a fair assessment?

No, it's not coercion. Ideally in the situation in your first paragraph, the boy who loses at wrestling is not being forced to pleasure the winner, he is pleasuring the winner because the winner deserves it. I do not want to pleasure a man who would coerce me into having sex, but I would respectfully pleasure him if I felt he deserved it.

In a way sex/rape IS just about power, but between two men you have the chance to respect the power or lack thereof between the two of you.

Presumably most gay men are gay because they enjoy being the receptive partner, leaving a dearth of men who enjoy being the active partner

No no no, well personally I don't find pleasure in being a receptive partner. (Granted, I particularly don't like being an anal bottom because it hurts me physically and feels degrading.) In romantic relationships I've had in the past where I've been the top, the bottom usually isn't that pleased with being a bottom either. He'll go along with it for a while if he really respects the top enough or disrespects himself too much. (This is where the age gap relationships comes into play, most adult men are ready to drop being a bottom in a relationship more quickly than younger men.) Most of my friends I've grown up with who were in long term gay relationships where both partners were in their 20s seem to break up when the bottom gets older and stops wanting to be the bottom.

Besides that, being a top is really more dangerous to the ego than being a bottom. The bottom gets to play a discriminatory role generally, and performing as a top is harder. Porn makes it look really easy but I'd say that topping anally is one of the most difficult things to do in sex- you have to stay hard for a long time, you have to find the hole, you have to do all these things, it's stressful and can be embarrassing. It takes a lot of confidence to feel like you deserve to top another guy. The problem is that today most men never achieve the confidence to top, even in oral sex.

Ideally in [your example], the boy who loses at wrestling is not being forced to pleasure the winner, he is pleasuring the winner because the winner deserves it. I do not want to pleasure a man who would coerce me into having sex, but I would respectfully pleasure him if I felt he deserved it. … In romantic relationships I've had in the past where I've been the top, the bottom usually isn't that pleased … He'll go along with it for a while if he really respects the top enough or disrespects himself too much … Most of my friends I've grown up with who were in long term gay relationships where both partners were in their 20s seem to break up when the bottom gets older and stops wanting to be the bottom. … It takes a lot of confidence to feel like you deserve to top another guy.

Based on what you've said, it sounds like you imagine that even in the ideal situation, a long-term gay relationship with partners in stable sex act roles isn't possible, or couldn't continue to be mutually beneficial?

Why is it that you (and apparently your past sexual partners) think someone has to "deserve" particular sex roles? How much of that is just contingent on you and them happening to physically not enjoy being the passive partner?

Basically I think men who see themselves as bottoms need to see themselves as tops to be happy and have healthy relationships with themselves and the people around them.

That seems like a very bold claim; I'd be interested to see you expand more specifically on why you think that is true.

Based on what you've said, it sounds like you imagine that even in the ideal situation, a long-term gay relationship with partners in stable sex act roles isn't possible, or couldn't continue to be mutually beneficial?

I am sort of agnostic on this point, if I had to tell you exactly what I believe, it is that it is possible to have a long term mutually respectful relationship between two men that is mutually beneficial, but it is very very rare and requires huge amounts of respect and humility from both partners who also understand the true dynamic of the relationship. And that this is not exclusive to homosexuality but really to all long term relationships.

Why is it that you (and apparently your past sexual partners) think someone has to "deserve" particular sex roles?

Because when you are doing sex acts with a partner, as two men, unless you are kissing or 69ing, there is fundamentally an alpha and a beta position. Because you have to, usually subconsciously and even unknowingly between the two of you, work out how the act is going to go, and to violate the order can hurt both of you if you don't understand that it's happening as a violation of the order between you two.

How much of that is just contingent on you and them happening to physically not enjoy being the passive partner?

As I've pointed at before I don't really "not enjoy being the passive partner" (aside from anal sex which I do not enjoy bottoming,) indeed I don't mind being a passive partner orally for either a man who is my top who I respect, or a bottom who I also respect and wants me to blow him.

That seems like a very bold claim; I'd be interested to see you expand more specifically on why you think that is true.

In seventh grade, I went on a trip with other seventh graders. There was this girl, let's call her Brooke. We were all like 13, Brooke was a skinny, hot, popular girl. But she went around all the time complaining about how fat and ugly she was. It drove the rest of us kids all crazy because we all thought she was hot and skinny, and if she was fat and ugly then that made us all obese and hideous. Dating today in the US is like meeting a million men who act like they're Brooke who thinks she's fat and ugly when really they're hot and nice and need to see themselves as hot and nice in order to share their hotness and niceness with the people around them who want to enjoy it as well, and this can't happen when they're stuck feeling badly about themselves. (And before someone accuses me of acting entitled to someone else's hotness or niceness or whatever, I try to practice what I preach and share my good traits with those around me too.) It's so elementary, read The Rainbow Fish if you don't believe me.

Because when you are doing sex acts with a partner, as two men, unless you are kissing or 69ing, there is fundamentally an alpha and a beta position. Because you have to, usually subconsciously and even unknowingly between the two of you, work out how the act is going to go, and to violate the order can hurt both of you if you don't understand that it's happening as a violation of the order between you two.

What “hurt” can come from “violat[ing] the order”?

You opened your original post up claiming that you only meant “alpha” and “beta” as referring to who'd win in a fight, saying that you didn't want to import the “connotations in the meme world”[sic] of those “loaded terms”, but that claim — that “hurt” can come if the “[physical superiority] order” is “violated” (whatever that means) — is not at all self-evident unless you're importing prison rape power dynamics, even if I grant* that there are certain pleasures available from physical and behavioral asymmetries in a same-sex relationship.

*And even this, I don't understand your position on so I'm not even sure if I'm granting exactly what you meant to communicate. If you think somehow acting in accord with the “order” of a same-sex relationship — which you define in relation to physical power / force — is so desirable, then why does your highest-ranked relationship prototype involving any serious power asymmetry between the partners have one leg ranked as not even “positive”?

I appreciate your bold desire to express your perspective from a clean slate, but that means that you need to specify your axioms. I see that you clarified in a later post that you think any kind of physical penetration is “essentially a degrading act that you must accept or reject”[sic], but why do you claim this? Do you claim it by analogy from the assumption that heterosexual penetration is “degrading”, or from some other line?

What exactly is wrong with a “beta” contributing a shy, smouldering consent & an “alpha” contributing a bright, doting energy into a bridal chamber of ecstasy, affection, non-judgement, and mutual trust that happens to include sex acts that violate your prescribed “order”?

If it's just not your cup of tea, and you would simply prefer to homoerotically wrestle out your unresolved parental conflicts with a self-confident middle-easterner who's approximately the same strength as you despite a sizeable age gap, then I'm glad you found something you like, but that doesn't seem to be any kind of “motte”.

It’s easy to imagine that these frightening males caused a fawning response in my adolescent brain that developed into homosexuality as I aged. Indeed I see a lot of fawning from gay men, especially younger gay men toward older gay men. I even catch myself fawning at stronger more dominant men though I feel some shade of disgust toward myself when I do this as it triggers memories of earlier years when I felt stuck as only a beta and primarily tried fawning at older men for affection/sex. That said it’s an effective strategy when a beta man fawns to you it’s very attractive but when an alpha fawns at you it’s rather irritating and awkward.

physical power is essential to understanding relationships between people. As I’ve grown older, my parents have naturally waned in their power over me and among the entire family. Of course when I was a child they were able to make all my decisions, … in my early 30s, my father had a health problem, he became quite weak and frail, and I was his caretaker … He continued to treat me like I was a child, not respecting my adulthood and the power I held in the situation. … at some point it became so degrading that I had to assert my power over him. He didn’t like it but after I stood up for myself he had more of a respect for me that I hadn’t been given previously. I had a similar experience with my mother a few years later. … men need to assert their power and strength, see themselves for who they are, respect themselves in their position in the world and respect those around them for who they are too.

very few people today have any experience in the exercise of power … My father failed to do that, my bosses all failed to do that, my friends fail to do that (and it has a very obvious negative effect on their kids). Nobody over the age of 40 gets it.

when I think of my own relationships and those of friends, as well as non-romantic relationships, they all seem to fit the power dynamic I've outlined. Even relationships with friends, parents, other family members, and so on. I suspect if you don't see it you're shielding yourself from seeing it, … once the pattern emerged I can't unsee it now.

Dating today in the US is like meeting a million men who act like they're Brooke who thinks she's fat and ugly when really they're hot and nice and need to see themselves as hot and nice in order to share their hotness and niceness with the people around them who want to enjoy it as well, and this can't happen when they're stuck feeling badly about themselves. (And before someone accuses me of acting entitled to someone else's hotness or niceness or whatever, I try to practice what I preach and share my good traits with those around me too.)

This complaint is completely comprehensible and I have no objections to it, but it seems almost totally orthogonal to your power dynamics model.

I could grant that the U.S. is full of neurotic bottoms who are refusing to accept themselves as sexually worthwhile, and grant that that's hamstringing them in their ability to “be happy and have healthy relationships with themselves and the people around them”[sic], without granting your much more specific claim that the cure for this is for them to “see themselves as tops”[sic].

The fact that other gay men don't like to hear anything I have to say and "clap back" at me further illustrates the frustration I feel with gay men, I am not here to sugar coat the experience or present the mainstream homosexual view of love and relationships and sex but rather point out the difficult aspects that underlie the entire situation. … my post isn't really about gay sex at all but rather I am using something I think about all the time … to make broader points about power and relationships.

If you're struggling with finding enjoyment and fulfillment while viewing gay relationships through this weird power dynamics lens and seeing recurrent “clap back” at your ideas whenever you verbalize them, the obvious implication (which might or might not be correct) is that the “difficult aspects” are actually with your perspective.

For what it's worth, I don't know that I “like” the limited preview of your model you've shared so far, but I do “wish” to see it explained in enough detail to be able to actually evaluate it.

No, it's not coercion.

I was responding to the “make him/me” in your previous comment. I think I sort of get where you’re coming from now, though it still seems like a much more power-focused dynamic than I’d have expected.

He'll go along with it for a while

Doesn’t this contradict your initial post (“Gay dating today in America is pretty frustrating because the vast majority of men do not see themselves as alpha”) and even the end of this last post (“The problem is that today most men never achieve the confidence to top”)? Or was I misreading you? I thought you were using “alpha” and “beta” as synonyms for “top/active” and “bottom/passive.”

Incidentally, I’d like to second doglatine. This isn’t a subject I would have guessed I’d have found interesting, but it turns out that I do. Kudos.

Err, no I don't think this contradicts it. Basically I think men who see themselves as bottoms need to see themselves as tops to be happy and have healthy relationships with themselves and the people around them.

Sorry the terminology is kind of convoluted. Broadly, alpha = top = active while beta = bottom = passive. I used alpha and beta because it's more relevant to straight people and carries less of a specific meaning than the other two sets of terms which might make people think top/bottom = anal sex only whereas I am trying to describe the relationships more broadly.

I'm glad you found my post interesting, thanks for engaging.

The only thing that matters in this hierarchy is physical dominance

Women would prefer a 90s-era Jude Law or a Timothee Chalamet over any MMA fighter. Most prime-fertility age heartthrobs are not physically imposing or good at fighting, but instead possess obvious indicators of health (which is a fitness) plus social grace (which is a fitness in civilization).

Just to say, this was the most interesting post I’ve read on the Motte for a long time, so thanks for sharing your experiences, very different from the typical fare here. In case anyone else is reading, I’d be similarly interested to hear from others whose identity and experiences give them insights that others may miss.

Thank you, I appreciate this comment a lot.

So, if all men are judged on their physical characteristics and sexual fitness, how does this extend to race? Basically, some races are more physically dominant than others. If you charted all men, with physically dominant traits on the Y axis and nonphysically positive traits on the X axis, you would have most black men in the upper left and most East Asian men on the bottom right. (For example, black men are generally taller and more muscular and better at sports than other races- see NFL roster stats if you don’t believe me. Asian men are better at certain types of intelligence but are smaller and less physically aggressive than blacks. I realize this is a controversial portion of my thinking and can provide further evidence if needed.) White men would probably be broadly in the middle of the graph, with Latino men and Indian/South Asian men being somewhat closer to the origin of the graph, with Latino men being closer to white/black/ or Asian men depending on their specific admixture of white/black/native blood. (Mexicans/Peruvians are closer to Asians, while Cubans/Dominicans can be closer to whites/blacks etc.) Of course there are countless exceptions to all of this- a black midget would be to the bottom right of an Asian linebacker, and so on.

Quite literally, this isn't true- interracial relationships are overwhelmingly white man/nonwhite woman(and the one exception is there are more black men in relationships with white women than white men in relationships with black women, but this is probably just obesity on the part of black women making them undesirable) and black men are on average shorter and in worse shape than other races. You see lots of them as football linebackers because no one cares if they get concussed, and outside of the NFL and NBA American sports are dominated by white men. Higher black partner count is probably due to lower average IQ's/impulse control combined with cultural views rewarding male promiscuity more strongly.

interracial relationships are overwhelmingly white man/nonwhite woman

I originally had a short paragraph about how the sexual graph for men is an inversion of the sexual graph for women- basically Asian and Latina women would easily outcompete white and black women which would explain this.

(and the one exception is there are more black men in relationships with white women than white men in relationships with black women, but this is probably just obesity on the part of black women making them undesirable)

I doubt it's just obesity making black women undesirable but rather their more masculine traits generally (Michelle Obama is a man, anecdotally, according to white men) and fewer desirable female traits

outside of the NFL and NBA American sports are dominated by white men

Because white men have the money and time to commit to sports

Baseball, soccer, hockey, etc are pretty widespread and have lots of public dollars behind them, similar to football and basketball. Still white and hispanic(many of whom are white).

And I mean, yes, obviously black women are seen widely as unattractive due to their features(kinky hair, african noses, etc), but it seems like the huge disparity between black women and men in ability to get interracial relationships has to be driven by something different between them- black features don't seem desirable on a man either- and the black female obesity rate is much higher than the black male rate.

black features don't seem desirable on a man either

AIUI women care less about facial features (on average), so even if the direction's the same, the strength of the effect on overall attractiveness might be less.

The one who would likely win in a physical fight is the alpha. To judge this we look at physical characteristics: ...dick size...

Count me skeptical that having a nice cock (bro) is an advantage in a fight.

I believe the actual explanation for this is that the nice cock is a reflection of less visible qualities. A person's digit ratio isn't going to have a direct impact on how aggressive they are, but they both reflect subtler processes and qualities that have an impact on both.

they both reflect subtler processes and qualities that have an impact on both.

This is assuming the conclusion.

Sorry for being unclear - I meant that I'm trying to model the thought process that leads to this belief. I'm not sure of the actual relationship/mechanisms behind cock size, but I am sure that a lot of people view it as a signal of virility/genetic quality.

Imagine a guy with a big dick and then imagine the same guy with a tiny dick. Which does your monkey brain pick as the winner instinctively? (You could say, well the bigger thing gives you more to attack, maybe it's a disadvantage, bla bla) but in this instance I'm purely talking about who in a split second decision is more physically intimidating to the viewer. I personally would give the edge to the bigger dick guy

I don't imagine there's any good evidence to support this claim but I believe it completely

What I'm saying is, I'm not sure that your imaginings of cocks and physiques actually has any bearing on reality.

If it's the same guy I don't think that there is anything to even discuss here.

What is the evidence?

what about a giant with a giant dick vs a human with a human dick, how does that change the calculus?

monkey brain

Most monkeys and apes have very small dicks.

Great point. Who would win in a fight, a silverback gorilla with his 1.25 inch (erect) micropenis or a human with a 6 inch monster cock?

The human, because we have weapons and advanced societies to coordinate effort and now have to make an actual effort not to incidentally kill all the gorillas.

A theoretical straight-up fight for dominance is a weird fake aberration; society with all its nuance is the state of Nature.

For similar reasons, weaker, smarter, more socially adept humans are fitter. That's why humans evolved to be so much weaker than other apes in the first place.

Is plastic surgery an essential medical procedure that a Department of Corrections must pay for, if a prisoner is sufficiently distressed about it? And if a M-to-F transwoman undergoes full reassignment surgery, will that prisoner be transferred to women's prison in due course?

A federal judge ruled the Indiana Department of Correction's ban on gender-affirming care is likely unconstitutional, and an inmate from Evansville is at the center of the lawsuit.

Source, archived version.

The prisoner (neé Jonathan Richardson, now Autumn Cordellioné) is serving a 55-year sentence for almost two decades for killing one's baby stepdaughter. The prisoner was diagnosed with gender dysphoria four years ago and put on testosterone blocker and female hormone.

While the medicine has helped, the lawsuit states Cordellioné continues to experience symptoms of gender dysphoria including depression and anxiety. [...] Cordellioné was on a wait list for evaluation for the surgery, but a new Indiana statute does not allow the DOC to provide or facilitate "sexual reassignment surgery." The ACLU [representing Cordellioné] argues in its suit that for some, the surgery is a medical necessity. In this case, Cordellioné is seeking a orchiectomy, which removes the testicles, and vaginoplasty, which is the construction of the vagina.

"By prohibiting the surgery, regardless of medical need, the statute mandates deliberate indifference to a serious medical need and therefore violates the Eighth Amendment," the suit states. "Additionally, the statute discriminates against Plaintiff and other transgender prisoners in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution."

The judge agreed, issued a preliminary injunction against the Indiana statute in question.

Here's a summary of the statute (HEA 1569, passed in 2023) that perplexity.ai provided:

It prohibits the Indiana Department of Corrections from performing certain surgical procedures for the purpose of altering the appearance or affirming an inmate's gender identity if it's inconsistent with their sex assigned at birth. Specifically, the law bans the following procedures [gives a list including castration and vaginoplasty, and in general removing healthy tissue or non-diseased body part].: The law does not define "gender" or "sex" but appears to use "sex" to refer to an individual's sex assigned at birth.

The law doesn't prohibit hormone therapy (which the prisoner got) or social transitioning:

The lawsuit states Cordellioné has lived as a woman to the "extent possible" while in a prison housing only men. She has been permitted gender-affirming items such as makeup and "form fitting clothing."

I will put aside for now how utterly annoying I find the assumption that, to be a woman, one wears makeup and form-fitting clothes. By all means fellas, go all 17th-century Versailles. My main question is this: if the Indiana Department of Corrections is required accommodate "gender-affirming" transitions, including the extreme surgeries of removing testicles and shaping the penis to look like a vagina, wouldn't the reasonable next step be to affirm the prisoner's womanhood by placing the prisoner in women's correctional facilities?

(My husband said that if he ever had to go to prison and there was an option to go to women's prison rather than men's, his only question is: what needs to be chopped off and how soon?)

Let me end on a controversial (for The Motte) note: maybe I simply shouldn't care. Cordellioné has been in prison since early 2000, which makes the person at least 40. So even if I don't see this person as a woman, this is a middle-aged male on testosterone blockers with some serious surgeries between his legs. How dangerous would he really be to the female prisoners, compared to other female prisoners already serving there?

I wonder though, can the legislature categorically decide what medical care is given prisoners consistent with the 8th/14th amendments? Seems like the answer is no, at least not in an unlimited sense.

In the specific case, I think obviously the plaintiff isn't entitled to the specific care requested. But I think that's a fact-specific thing that is subject to constitutional minimums

Yeah, there's a long line of recent caselaw holding some medical care is constitutionally required, under the 8th Amendment for convicted prisoners and under the 14th for pretrial jailed people. Was one of several matters of controversy back in the early Sovaldi days, among others. Unlike the NYT's panicked reporting then, the legal standard isn't 'standard of care', but it is pretty messy and vague.

Indeed. So Indiana has to lose on the legislative issue.

In a sane world, the plaintiff would have an uphill case to prove that the care given was so lacking as to be unconstitutional.

The issue here is that the government had abdicated the role of deciding what counts as "medically necessary treatment" to doctors. This probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but now we have reams and reams of court precident citing professional standards generated by private doctor's associations as evidence of medical nessesity, such that it now overrules state laws attempting to regulate medical care.

I think that probably is a good idea going forwards, in the sense that the legislatures are probably not the right body to be making that determination.

It is sad that the professional bodies are beholden to nonsense, but at least they have the capacity to know what they are talking about and make the evidence-based call.

Ultimately, it seems like a choice between those that don't know and those that know better.

make the evidence-based call.

It isn't always evidence that is the deciding factor. To point to another hot-button issue, I don't trust doctors to decide "when is abortion murder?", because it is more a question of moral philosophy than medicine.

because it is more a question of moral philosophy than medicine.

This conflation of "expertise in a given field" and "ability to make complex moral judgements", already far too common in PMC spaces, became turbocharged during Covid. It's baffling the number of people who seem to think that simply being extremely knowledgeable about epidemiology automatically makes you qualified to judge which civil liberties can be indefinitely suspended.

(It's easy to expose how facile this reasoning is: no one thinks extensive training in firearms automatically makes you qualified to make a moral judgement on how easy it should be to buy a gun.)

Complicating that is that Covid revealed a lot of those "experts" weren't extremely knowledgable about epidemiology either -- e.g. the charts coming from the Canadian CDC showing predicted rapid exponential growth in deaths in the short term, which kept not happening. Either these people were lying, or they were failures even in their own field.

Absolutely. I don't believe that even one of Neil Ferguson's enormously pessimistic projections came to pass, but for some reason he's still held up as some kind of guru.

Agreed, that's quite a different thing though.

I personally find the very notion rather crass. We are going to spend millions in taxpayers’ money to transition convicted felons while the people who will be paying for it can end up owing thousands of dollars because their insurance doesn’t cover 100% of their frivolous cancer treatments and heart surgeries and so on. The state doesn’t have infinite money to do everything it wants to do, and it seems that doing essentially cosmetic procedures on prisoners while other much more pressing issues cannot be dealt with due to lack of funds? If hormones plus surgery cost (totally made up number) 75,000 dollars a person, what are we no longer going to provide to pay for this?

I do personally find it a bit odd that he didn't seem to be suffering from much dysphoria before he decided to murder someone, and in fact for the first 16-18 years, he wasn’t really saying or doing much that indicates dysphoria. I’m not sure that he isn’t faking to some degree either as a “fuck the system” thing or as a way to get better treatment that he imagines he’d get as a female prisoner. In short I suspect he is playing a game here, and he’s trying to be manipulative.

Being fair to him, I don’t think he’s the danger here. Female gang members and murderers are tough and they aren’t going to take this lying down. These aren’t nice polite PTA wine moms he’s going to be housed with. They are highly likely to try to hurt him before he could try anything stupid.

On the first point, prison is already quite expensive. Even if a substantial number of prisoners would take advantage of this, it would probably make up less than 1% of the price of prison. And offering violent prisoners better conditions in exchange for castration actually seems like a good deal for everyone involved.

On the second, remember, crime doesn't pay, especially not random murder, so the average murderer is stupid, insane or emotionally disturbed (probably a combination, in fact). So he might be trying to game the system in a stupid way, or he might just be fucked up enough to believe it.

On the first point, prison is already quite expensive. Even if a substantial number of prisoners would take advantage of this, it would probably make up less than 1% of the price of prison.

I notice that this reasoning could be used to justify almost any frivolous expense. "Let's give every inmate a PS5 when they're successfully paroled." "Why?" "Who cares? It'll make up less than 1% of the price of prison."

The difference between gender-affirming care and other prison expenses is that the taxpayer actually gets something back from most of the other costs associated with prisons. Most prison funding goes towards line items which will prevent convicts from escaping (walls, bars, COs), thereby protecting the taxpayer in the short-term; or which are designed to rehabilitate convicts, protecting the taxpayer in the long-term (education, shop classes, anger management training). Of course you can interrogate whether any given line item actually accomplishes its stated goal or passes a cost-benefit analysis (maybe if you're serving a life sentence without possibility of parole, any attempt at rehabilitation is a waste of time and resources, except to protect the COs and fellow inmates from you; maybe art classes to teach inmates how to get in touch with their inner child and express themselves visually actually increase recidivism rates, who knows?), but that's generally how they're justified.

Gender-affirming care for inmates meets neither criterion: it only "benefits" the inmate. At a push there's an ancillary benefit in that an inmate who undergoes a vaginoplasty can no longer rape taxpayers with the penis he no longer has, but not every inmate who requests gender-affirming care has a history of sexual violence: if Bob already was at zero risk of committing a sex crime after release and requests a vaginoplasty, we've just spent $75k of the taxpayer's money and gotten nothing back to show for it.

Perhaps a doctor will argue that the entire reason for the inmates' history of criminality or violent behaviour was unresolved distress due to their gender dysphoria, so providing them with gender-affirming care will actually have a rehabilitative effect in the long run. I haven't yet seen anyone try to justify the policy on those grounds, however.

I don't think we disagree as much as you think; I also care very little about making prisoner's life nicer. I'm not really in favor of this policy so much as thinking that among the crazy stupid stuff we're doing, this one is pretty low on my list of priorities, and might even have some unintended benefits.

Gender-affirming care for inmates meets neither criterion: it only "benefits" the inmate. At a push there's an ancillary benefit in that an inmate who undergoes a vaginoplasty can no longer rape taxpayers with the penis he no longer has, but not every inmate who requests gender-affirming care has a history of sexual violence: if Bob already was at zero risk of committing a sex crime after release and requests a vaginoplasty, we've just spent $75k of the taxpayer's money and gotten nothing back to show for it.

This is what we disagree on, I guess. Testosterone is the primary driver of violence in general, not just of sexual nature. And castration is by far the most reliable way of reducing T-levels. Even historically it was regularly noted how tepid and submissive eunuchs tended to be; But you don't need to take their word for it, modern studies on this topic consistently find a very strong relationship between violence and T-levels as well. It's not super advertised since it leads to some conclusions that most people don't like thinking about, but in a field were many things don't replicate, this one does reliably.

On the other hand, consider this report (I've been linking to it a lot lately) which found no statistically significant differences in the rates of violent offending between males who had undergone gender reassignment surgery and the general male population.

This is quite interesting. I find no obvious problems with the design except the unavoidable (large CI, now randomisation, etc.), so it does move the needle quite a bit for me. The only possible issues I can see is that I'm not entirely convinced that criteria i) strictly requires an actual surgery to take place, that the large CI can still hold some surprises (0..3-2.1 ranges from "almost female-pattern criminality" to "holy shit even higher than male-pattern criminality") and the usual troubles with selection effects.

It's very weird that somehow FtMs have male-pattern criminality, while MtFs ... also have male-pattern criminality.

FtMs have male-pattern criminality

Is that true? I wasn't aware.

According to the paper the report is based on, yes. See there under "Results:Gender Differences".

More comments

I didn't look at those numbers, but someone compiled some stats showing it's actually higher:

https://x.com/eyeslasho/status/1831735103082410239#m

Our own @ymeskhout wrote an article arguing that the stats on which this graph is based are being misinterpreted: https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/contra-dolly-on-trans-criminality

Jonathan Richardson, now Autumn Cordellioné

This is a bit of a derail, but why is that kind of "flamboyant" self-appelation so common in the MtF trans demographic?

I know three people from college who have transitioned in their 30s. Their self-chosen names are:

  • Maeve
  • Celeste
  • Pandora

At first I thought it was some kind of drag queen schtick, but no, they're all legal names.

I met one renamed "Lilith".

Edit: Someone below also mentions Liliths. I didn't know that was a thing.

Lilith is an extremely common name for trans women, for whatever reason. (I'm very supportive of trans people and have several trans friends, and "Lilith" is a common joke/punchline in trans communities when discussing names due to how common yet silly it is.)

I think for most of them the name is a reference to Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Abrahamaic noncanon esoterica holds that Lilith was the first wife of Adam who was rejected before the fall and became a demon. It's a common self-appellation among eg self-declared witches as well because of the misperception that she was some kind of slutty proto-feminist temptress figure instead of a demon who tries to kill newborns and their mamas out of jealousy, as the legend actually says.

It's just cultural appropriation. Not really worth getting offended over but also highly stupid.

In (non-canonical) Judeo-Christian mythology, Lilith was the first wife of Adam (before Eve). In many depictions she's very similar to a succubus.

The traditional view of Lilith in esoterica was as a scorned woman who became/made a pact with a demon to try to kill women in childbirth and young babies out of jealousy, not as a temptress.

Its a low-key cultural "fuck you" aimed at conservative Christians. The message being that I know that you know that this is some sort of weird sex/fetish thing but I'm going to scream bloody murder and accuse you of being uncharitable if you try to point it out.

Based of them.

Probably to do with changing your name in general.

Honestly, if I ever went for a name change, even keeping my gender, I'd absolutely go for something awesome. Why wouldn't I? And I might even make "Danger" my legal middle name, while I'm at it.

An army of Liliths and Reubens.

(Also just goes to show how relative these things are: "Maeve" has been an extremely common name in Ireland for decades, and was even the 44th most popular name for baby girls last year.)

I should probably do an effort post on this at some point but the distribution of trans patients in general medical care (which aligns closeish with real life), primary psychiatric settings, and correctional/forensic settings are all wildly different.

This causes a number of headaches, since political leadership inside the prison system often has minimal experience with prison (to say nothing of more general political leadership). You might be a well meaning left leaning person, primarily interact with well meaning and convincing trans people, and assume that the prisoners are the same. They are not.

"Real" trans people exist. In say, a locked psychiatric inpatient unit (where everyone is by definition mentally ill) most of the trans people are psychotic patients or those with borderline personality disorder or some other process causing identity instability. Correctional settings has those, and also people malingering. And yes you have people malingering so hard they'll cut their dick off if given the option.

For the usual reasons of wokeism activists can't really admit these other types of trans people exist and causes all kinds of problems, although it can be darkly funny when physicians are involved.

Wokeism does not typically survive very long with day to day contact with the prison population, so you'll find staff (even doctors and social workers) are much more clear eyed about all this but they don't make the decisions. People with strong ego defenses can stay woke but they almost uniformly end up on therapy to do it, which is...worrying.

In my state (redacted) the "worst" prison doesn't have functional climate control in the high security unit because too much of the budget has been redirected towards gender affirming care.

And yes you have people malingering so hard they'll cut their dick off if given the option.

Maybe that's a win, in a sense. If a male with sufficient propensity for violence or anti-social behavior chooses to castrate himself, I'd be happy if that procedure was paid for with taxes. I would be OK with the additional tax burden there.

Hard to research but - not necessarily a good outcome, once the identity instability clears or the secondary gain abates the patient may have increased rage at the system, violent urges, etc.

People in prison almost never have the ability to accurately assign blame "I can't believe specific person/the system let me do that, I need revenge on them specifically or people in general."

Holding out women's prison as an incentive for male prisoners to request castration is a good deal for everyone except the women. It would be ideal if prisoners worked jobs while in prison to pay for their own castration. But it makes sense for the government to cover the cost, since society benefits from the reduced secretion of testosterone.

“I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.” - Gen. Ripper

If transferring a male convict to a women's prison was made conditional on their having undergone a penectomy/vaginoplasty, I imagine the policy would be much less controversial than it currently is, as it completely negates the possibility of the male in question raping a female inmate (possibly leading to pregnancy). In many jurisdictions, this isn't a condition of transfer at all: one must simply announce "I am a woman" and the transfer will be carried out, without even the most token effort at social transition.

However, even with his penis having been removed, if this convict is transferred to a women's prison, he will almost certainly be vastly stronger than all of his fellow inmates (even after having undergone hormone therapy). The female inmates might reasonably object to being placed in close proximity to a violent male who can overpower any of them with ease, even if the chances of him raping them are nil.

If transferring a male convict to a women's prison was made conditional on their having undergone a penectomy/vaginoplasty, I imagine the policy would be much less controversial than it currently is, as it completely negates the possibility of the male in question raping a female inmate (possibly leading to pregnancy)

This isn't true. It makes the possibility of pregnancy nil, though the hormone therapy probably already does this. They'd still have a strength advantage and could overpower and rape female inmates though. Just not with a penis, would have to use finger, fist, idk broomstick, etc. Honestly potentially more dangerous for the female.

Rape is generally defined as nonconsensual penetration with a penis. Forcibly penetrating someone with a finger or foreign object would fall under sexual assault.

Even the more strict definitions I'm familiar with usually just define it as forced penetration w/o a penis specifically mentioned. I still don't see why anyone would be relieved that male sexual deviants are forcibly fisting female inmates rather than traditional PIV though.

In the UK:

The legal definition of rape is when a person intentionally penetrates another's vagina, anus or mouth with a penis, without the other person's consent. Assault by penetration is when a person penetrates another person's vagina or anus with any part of the body other than a penis, or by using an object, without the person's consent.

Other jurisdictions use different definitions which include forcible penetration with a body part or object other than a penis.

I still don't see why anyone would be relieved that male sexual deviants are forcibly fisting female inmates rather than traditional PIV though.

While being forcibly penetrated with a fist is obviously intensely unpleasant, the chances of contracting an STD as a result are virtually nil and the chances of becoming pregnant are zero. This is why male-on-female sexual assault is qualitatively, categorically different to other kinds of sexual assault. Female inmates can and do sexually assault other female inmates, but the reduced risk of contracting an STD and the impossibility of being impregnated make it a very different risk calculus.

A male inmate who has undergone a penectomy absolutely can sexually assault (or rape, depending on definition) female inmates using objects or body parts other than the penis which he has had removed, and his physical strength will probably make it much easier for him to do so than a female inmate trying the same thing. But the impossibility of PiV changes the risk calculus significantly.

ah it's a US vs UK thing then

here its federally defined as:

Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.

if STDs were one of the main risks taken into consideration you'd think there would be more focus on male prison rape as male to male rape (anal) has a higher chance of spreading disease than PiV. Seems to me that here in the states the objections are more about putting people less able to defend themselves at risk of abuse.

I think the pregnancy thing is the main one, with STDs a distant second.

If transferring a male convict to a women's prison was made conditional on their having undergone a penectomy/vaginoplasty, I imagine the policy would be much less controversial than it currently is, as it completely negates the possibility of the male in question raping a female inmate (possibly leading to pregnancy).

I would support that. We already have various levels of security for male prisoners (minimum / maximum levels). We can adjust the women's prison to be the meek-and-weak prison. Women who demonstrate a history of attacking other inmates can be transferred to the minimum security prison.

Speak plainly, please.

Seems plain enough to me; he's saying that part of gender-affirming care for male-to-female transexuals in prison (which is the context here) should be to partially sever every muscle in the body, to make them weaker so they fit into the "meek-and-weak" prison.

I didn't find those caveats obvious. Perhaps they were intended, perhaps not. Either way, it makes for a convenient motte and bailey.

C.f. people who claim "kill all white men!" actually, in context, plainly means "politely ask a small subset of white men to voluntarily give up power."

Partial severing of every muscle in the body is just another way of saying "we should kill them" due to the combination of the hazards of the necessary surgeries and the fragility of a number of extremely important muscles (eg, the heart, diaphragm, and intestines).

Is that an oblique way to refer to the microtears that occur during hypertrophy (as an element of well-adjusted cis males’ and trans men’s “gender-affirming” lifestyle), or do you mean “severing” as part of a satirically proposed surgery to decrease over-all strength as part of an MtF transition — not as a genuine part of the personal expression project that is the medical sex/gender transition process, but as a security control, medical harm per se applied prophylactically to male prisoners seeking cross-sex asylum?

I assume they meant the latter, facetiously.

Reddit matters, unfortunately.

When reddit came out in 2006, I was instantly enthralled. I loved the branched conversation style over single-threaded forums like PHPBB that dominated the web before. It was a new architecture for conversation, a better one. Plus, it had a smart, techie community that was fun to discuss things with.

Fast forward to today, and the world loves reddit. It's ranked as a top-10 website by traffic. Reddit is the default place to find an intelligent discussion on any niche topic. Whenever I have a medical issue, or I want to explore a new piece of technology, I go to Reddit. When I want product reviews for a pair of leather boots, I go to Google search and type "Best men's leather boots reddit". The cutting edge LLMs are being trained on reddit content. It's an important piece of the foundation of web content.

Which is unfortunate that it's moderated so poorly, and that policy comes from the top down. You know what I mean. themotte.org is one of several diaspora communities that fled reddit due to its heavy-handed, leftist moderation.

It's incredibly frustrating to use. My politics are somewhat esoteric but definitely of the right. On an occasion I'm baited into a conversation with political valence and I'll state a right-wing argument, and more often than not my account gets banned. On X, I saw screenshots of an /r/askReddit post "Republicans, why are you voting for Kamala this time?" and it had had thousands of upvotes and comments. The equivalent self-post "Democrats, why are you voting for Trump?" was banned with zero comments. If a thread is allowed to live for a few hours that draws popular heterodox views, it results in the inevitable thread lock and thousands of deleted comments to prevent "hate"

From my memory, the leftward drift of reddit seems to have occurred over the last 10 years. It hit an inflection point with the election of Trump and the ban of /r/TheDonald. It accelerated again since 2020 with BLM. That was the year that the TERFs were banned en masse (a community that mattered to me, as it helped me get over my own trans-dreaming and be happy with my gender).

Reddit's politics reflect the fact that the company is based in San Francisco. But it is left of center for San Francisco, which puts it far, far to the left of the nation.

And it's a shame! I'd love a higher-quality general purpose discussion forum. The world needs it. When Elon liberated X, that provided an important venue for free speech. But X optimizes for a high-addiction feed of quick information bites. It doesn't allow for as in-depth discussion and community building.

What would such a forum look like? I have some ideas:

  1. It would maintain the threaded format beloved by so many

  2. It would be seeded by a high quality community, such as that found here or on LessWrong

  3. It would have some sort of governance body that would maintain high quality of moderation for the main subs

The easiest, but not cheapest way to liberate Reddit would be to find a billionaire backer to buy it. It's a public company and its marketcap is a hair under $10 billion. The other alternative would be to try to get an alternative off the ground, perhaps building on active and healthy diaspora communities. It would be possible, for example, to give new users credit for karma they have earned on themotte or LessWrong. Selfishly, I would love a forum where I could ask questions to the high-functioning on-the-spectrum folks that populate these places. Reddit without the bottom half of its IQ spectrum would be a superior place for discussing nootropics, health, AI, and similar topics.

I'm a computer programmer. I care about providing community discussion forums. I've spent a good chunk of my life on them. I'm kinda bored at my day job and looking for a new adventure. What do you think?

What do you think?

If you have a popular forum that is free to join then people are incentivized to push products and narratives because it creates a way for them to advertise for basically free. People are gaming the system with bots and other tactics.

I think Elon Musk came to realization that the only way to solve this issue on forums with anonymous users is to gate content creation behind a paywall.

If you're going to gate a forum behind a paywall it would probably need to have something else that is worth paying for that also attracts a community with shared values. Then the paywall gated forums are a bonus, instead of the main feature.

I'm not endorsing this, but https://petersonacademy.com/ is an example of a paywall gated social media platform.

I think Elon Musk came to realization that the only way to solve this issue on forums with anonymous users is to gate content creation behind a paywall.

The problem with that is that it won't be "anonymous" once the credit card payment info of all the users is stolen or leaked. Personally I will never give my credit card info to any forum where people talk about sex or politics.

I'm surprised Elon hasn't done anything with twitter. He's talked a lot about wanting to save free speech and keep the free marketplace of ideas going, except twitter's format is absolutely garbage for discussing and sharing ideas. From it's inception it was always more top down and geared towards established brands and personalities using it to soapbox or advertise. He spent all that money on the massive install base, but hasn't really done anything with it. Even for the people that have followings they tweet out to it's a chore. I occasionally will see for example that one motte user that quit and created the schism and now posts to twitter effortposting on there and they will have to break their posts up into multiple and rely on users knowing to use some 3rd party tool like threadreader to make it more legible.

You'd think it wouldn't cost that much to spin up some reddit clone but with alternative modding or some kind of free speech list of user's rights to balance mod power. Combine with twitter's userbase and now right wing people or even dissident left no longer need to ever frequent reddit.

You'd think it wouldn't cost that much to spin up some reddit clone but with alternative modding or some kind of free speech list of user's rights to balance mod power. Combine with twitter's userbase and now right wing people or even dissident left no longer need to ever frequent reddit.

It's simply too late for that - Twitter and its format have too much recognition. You can't guarantee people would stay on the new platform, and it wouldn't even make as much sense for governments and institutions use Twitter - a place to post updates about what is happening. Following the account of your representative makes sense, subscribing to a subreddit about them feels odd, at least to me.

I don't think Elon has any idea how to use Twitter for making free speech, er, freer. He does not strike me as the kind of person to have particularly nuanced thoughts about how to moderate speech to actually make for a better platform, he seems to have baby's first thought on free speech, "Oh, some people want me to ban others? I won't ban anyone they say!"

...instead just try to filter for the intelligent liberals and leftists.

I'd say that the Motte is full of '90s-style intelligent liberals. Old-school economic leftists aren't common but aren't totally unheard of, and social democrats are common enough to be unremarkable. We do lack for woke and woke-adjacent folks.

That said, I am quite conservative by Motte standards, so this is a view from the right.

I don't endorse Richard Hanania but I sympathize strongly with much of his recent writing on this topic.

I don't usually read Hanania, but he is sharp. Is there a post or two of his you would recommend on the issue?

But it was obvious to most at the time that the distribution would inevitably drift rightward, until you have what you have now.

The distribution drifts rightward because a huge portion of leftists will consider a site to be biased towards the right and full of fascists merely because the right is permitted to speak at all. If the site doesn't give in and censor the right, these intolerant leftists will flee, making the site drift rightwards.

I think Reddit is a more sophisticated psychological operation than is publicly known. There is compelling evidence that Ghislaine Maxwell ran one of the top moderator accounts. The account MaxwellHill was an influential power-mod on the default subs since Reddit took off and it posted almost nonstop since the early days of Reddit’s acquisition. The account shared common interests with Ghislaine Maxwell, was named after the nickname of Maxwell’s estate (Maxwell Hill), and randomly stopped posting the week Ghislaine was arrested. (Imagine possessing powerful influence over a community for more than a decade, spending about every day on it, and you randomly quit forever without any sign of discontent and no public comment.) Ghislaine on her Twitter (iirc) showed an early interest in forums and I think specifically mentioned Reddit. Ghislaine’s father Robert Maxwell was a media mogul who has been labeled “Israel’s Superspy”, and Ghislaine was partners with Jeffrey Epstein who is theorized to be an Israel-associated intelligence asset rather than a financier.

I also think that the Reddit feed structure betrays its utility as a psychological manipulation operation. There’s a community called “AmITheAsshole” which is inorganic. The top content often follows the same structure: “is [following tradition or conventional wisdom] and [having a special affinity to family] good, or does it make someone an asshole?” The answer is going to be that it makes you an asshole, a status which is to be deterred. This acts as psychological shaping for the Reddit user where he gradually learns that everything he has learned is wrong and can’t be trusted, and that he can only rely on Reddit for what is right. This is accomplished through dramatic and unusual social dilemmas. This cognitive habit is kept when the user consumes the rest of Reddit’s content which is commercial + political slop. Now the user is primed to assent to what is presented on Reddit, because he has previously learned that Reddit overrules everything he has understood before.

There is definitely room for a Reddit competitor and I think making one is one of the greatest moral acts a programmer can do today (unironically). If you’re serious about making one let us know because there’s a lot of psych wisdom that can be implemented to make it take off.

I’ve noted elsewhere the incredible coincidence that Maxwell’s father was the man ostensibly responsible for privatizing science journals, and reddit wunderkind programmer Aaron Swartz killed himself awaiting trial for trying to pirate all of JSTOR. I appear to be the only person who thinks this could be the seed of a conspiracy theory that /u/AaronSw was “convinced” to kill himself by /u/maxwellhill.

There is definitely room for a Reddit competitor and I think making one is one of the greatest moral acts a programmer can do today (unironically).

IMO we've reached a point in the technology adoption curve where the hard piece to build such a competitor is not programming. Acquiring and keeping a critical mass of users while dodging politically-charged lawfare (copyrighted content, criminal activity, pornography) seems like the real missing piece. And the users are probably more difficult than the lawfare.

Even people who use Reddit hate Reddit. “Redditor” is synonymous with loser online. Reddit clones have been terrible for a number of psychological reasons which are actually pretty easy to deal with.

Just thinking aloud here… This site is a Reddit clone of sorts. I don’t know if the current codebase would allow users to set up a second “sub” without requiring them to create new accounts, but let’s just say for the sake of argument that it does. From there, don’t you think the biggest obstacle preventing this site from becoming the next Reddit would be the userbase?

Userbase and moderation, yes. The_Donald branched out to be a multi-subreddit diaspora site, with KotakuInAction and the QAnon sub migrating there… along with genuine Nazis, genuine white supremacists, etc.

I know that you're not wrong but it never ceases to amaze me that genuine Nazis support a man who was literally Grand Marshal of the Salute to Israel.

IIRC, themotte.org is a stripped down version of rdrama.net, and they have subreddits holes. Creating a Reddit clone isn't a technical challenge anymore.

I feel like Reddit is mostly dead. Or at least in very heavy decline.

Whenever I look into a particular topic, there's a 80-90% chance the discussion is happening on twitter or discord. The big subreddits look alive but if you look carefully, you'll quickly realize they are incredibly heavily botted.

As far as smart people, there seems to be a very strong correlation between intelligence and intolerance towards censorship. Every worthwhile sub I can think of has moved elsewhere. There's a couple news-related ones I still glance at occasionally because reddit is good as a news aggregator but that's about it.

As far as useful information, you can simply ask an LLM. They've already been trained on everything reddit had to offer, and they can be as kind, patient and detailed as you want them to be. They'll never delete your question because it's a 'duplicate', they can provide sources and you only have to wait <1sec if you have anything urgent. They lie sometimes but so did people on reddit.

Even where not botted, they're... running into problems.

I'm sure some amount of /r/ffxiv is software talking to itself, but a wide variety of information has just moved elsewhere for other reasons -- if you want DPS guides, the Balance is better formatted than anything you can do in reddit; if you want raid strats, either youtube or thepfstrats are the only real options; if you want crafting stuff there's TeamCraft; if you're trying to learn about Baldesion Arsenal or Bozja you're pretty much stuck in Discords. Only some of it's explicitly censored (eg game modding for FFXIV is in a gray area, and corresponding has moved almost entirely to Discord and carrds), but a far greater part just found it better to use the reddit as a recruiting nexus and nothing more.

Similarly, there's a couple central FIRST reddits (/r/ftc and /r/frc), and they sometimes have news or useful questions, especially during their respective seasons proper. But almost every serious discussion happens in Discords or a classical forum (chiefdelphi) or a team-specific website.

I don’t think Reddit can be salvaged as unless you’re pretty far-left, there’s nothing really there for you. Even if you’re fairly middle of the road centrist, the pile on that comes from suggesting things that would be absolutely normal in the offline world is incredibly huge. And so if you try to simply allow crime think, not even supporting it, you’ll drive off the existing user base who think communist ideology and radical woke are normal discourse. So you’d buy it, make the changes, demod as necessary to allow freer discussion, and all the users flee to something that suits their tastes.

The other thing about fora that big is that it’s actually really hard to have a real discussion unless the topic is really niche. If you aren’t commenting on a popular topic within ten minutes of it being posted, save yourself the effort because nobody is going to read past the first 50, and you’re likely number 10,000. That’s not nearly as conducive to conversation as a place like this or other small fora where even if I come upon a thread I care about later, it’s still at least plausible that I can do something other than shout into the void.

Finally, outside of product reviews (which I suspect are likely bots anyway) most of the comments are just not that insightful. I attribute a lot of this to the speed necessary to get a post actually read. The time it takes to compose and edit a post to say something interesting means that you can get swamped out of the top 50-100 (the zone people will read) by the time you finish writing the post. This leads directly to a lot of stupid one-line “dad jokes” and puns, a ton of “this. Came here to say this, I agree with this,” threads that are just painful to read. Add in that the majority of the population of Reddit is college students who think they’re intellectuals, often with no real insight into anything they’re reading (and again, the speed of comment-writing necessary to actually be read at all means nobody actually reads the linked article) means that what you get is whatever you’d find in a freshman college course at best. No an interpretation, but actually pretty much what you’d find in a freshman class textbook with no understanding of what it means.

It's still alright for some small subs. That's the main thing for quality discussions on reddit (with the downside that you'll have to wait much longer for replies). As soon as the masses of idiots start piling in, it's over.

Even with small subs, they’re a bit better, except that for the most part, the population of Reddit is heavily skewed towards college-aged liberals who think they’re highly intelligent but in main are midwits who don’t understand the difference between their knowledge of a subject from their introduction to [subject] course and real knowledge.

On most subjects, I would absolutely advise against taking advice from Reddit unless you’re running it through an actual expert first, because most of them are basically wrong with great confidence on anything more complicated than the very basics. And the other thing is that people often misrepresent who they are. They’ll give legal advice like they’re a lawyer in legal threads and when you dig into their history they’re either 18-21 and in college, work in a completely unrelated field, or maybe don’t have a job at all. Most of the “tech” people are basically working the help desk, not high level security or programming or anything of the sort.

And this also comes with the problem that you have to find the extremely niche places on Reddit that aren’t full of bots, trolls and people fighting for credit.

They seem to think that acquiring some bits of knowledge has actually made them smarter than they were before. And they think that the confident reproduction of some knowledge, or the appearance of knowledge, will get them the status of an intellectual or professional. They fricking love confident-sounding posts. And it seems like the upvote/downvote system (with instantly visible vote counts in most subs) funnels a lot of activity into circle-jerks.

Maybe I've been lucky in that one of my main interests is hard to fake experience in, so the subs for it are kinda good most of the time.

But as a whole reddit has gone down the drain.

I don’t mind it much as a place to jack around. But all this concern about reclaiming Reddit seems to be based on the idea that there’s something inherently important about Reddit to save or reclaim. It just hasn’t been my experience with the site that it’s anything much more interesting than Tumblr except for left leaning college aged males. All of these places are essentially created as circle jerky places and really are easily taken by entryists.

I’m thinking it’s probably better to simply create a separate set of fora that speak to your interests than trying to save a site that doesn’t offer much value.

The most stunning revelation I have seen on the motte is the fact that people actually like and prefer reddit-style discussions

What style of discussions do you prefer?

Well, forums of course.

Can you explain why? In my opinion, forums only work for threads with single-digit active participants. Otherwise the discussion keeps derailing constantly, and people keep having conversations past each other, with new participants bringing up points made two pages previously.

I was part of a particularly active forum 20 years ago, and on active threads, moderators regularity had to remove comments by posting "No derailing! Open your own thread on that topic!" Which is trying to force the tree-style comment format onto a system that doesn't support it.

Tree-style comment threads pretty much solved that issue 15 years ago, and I never looked back. Introducing voting on comment quality might have been a mistake in general, but I maintain its a good idea for technical question threads - because it can get the objectively correct answer to the top quickly.

Reddit threading only works for 1-1 conversations. As soon as you add in a couple of responders, you're either having multiple separate convos or just ignoring a lot of responses.

Whenever I write a top level post here, I'm usually responding to two, maybe three people and leaving the rest unanswered, because there's no way to keep up with 20 different responses. Each response is isolated, likely ignoring the content of other people's replies and failing to generate any kind of group discussion. It's one of the big annoyances of reading the Motte, you often have an interesting OP, 50 replies, and then perhaps 1 or 2 more in-depth conversations as everyone is replying to one person and not to each other.

Contrast with a forum thread, as soon as a top level post is made you have a group conversation ongoing, with people engaging with multiple other responses and a lot more depth.

Reddit threading is good for Q&A style discussion, and it works a lot better for "megathreads" like this one, but in most cases a forum is simply superior

I think I pretty much agree with you. But unless you're in a thread with only a few other people, forums also never had the "group discussion" feeling, either. "Shouting at a riot" is more accurate.

you're either having multiple separate convos or just ignoring a lot of responses.

This is exactly what happens in an active linear thread, too, but now the separate convos become a lot less readable because they aren't organized by topic.

you often have an interesting OP, 50 replies, and then perhaps 1 or 2 more in-depth conversations as everyone is replying to one person and not to each other.

True, but again, that's just group size. Can you imagine a linear forum with a weekly discussion thread with 1500 replies? It would be unreadable. So each top level comment would need to be its own post with linear comments. This is how Elements and Slack handle replies to messages - you can start a thread from every message, but only once. No nested comment trees. I find it useful, but the way they do it can be just as confusing as tree-style, since the newest messages can suddenly appear far upstream.

Still, probably better group discourse than tree-style comments. 50 replies per week would still work nicely for linear comments. Maybe worth a try.

Forums definitely wouldn't work if you carried on with motte-style megathreads, you'd have to create a new topic for each culture war item.

Which is basically what DSL does, and I find it perfectly readable. You do lose the accessibility that megathreads have, hence why so many people stay here and don't go to DSL, a lot of more niche topics would never get any attention with individual posts.

It's interesting you bring up Slack and Elements, as they are basically the next stage in internet discussion - which is Discord. As reddit cannibalized forums, so discord is cannibalizing reddit. And yet, I think if you polled older internet users who had experienced all three, you would get majority agreement that forums > reddits > discord. Nonetheless, the internet inexorably moves towards the latter.

I'd be interested to see what an imageboard style cw thread would look like. >># links preserve structure without all the excess quoting needed to distinguish individual conversations within forum topics.

The only solution is congress to declare that all kind of communities above in which above x% of US citizens participates are public foras with some congress mandated minimum and maximum user rights in relation to 1A. Internet gravitates to winner takes all - it is so far impossible to prevent it, so we should to protect the ability of the people to participate.

I think the better approach is to give platforms the option. If you want to moderate based on content (meaning that you don’t allow perfectly legal things to be posted because you don’t agree with the content) then you’re liable for any copyright and trademark, or libel violation that occurs just like a magazine would be. If you’re a neutral carrier, then muc( like the telephone providers you are not responsible for the content of speech used by users. Let them choose.

The only solution is congress to declare that all kind of communities above in which above x% of US citizens participates are public foras with some congress mandated minimum and maximum user rights in relation to 1A.

Unless you chose a pretty small X, this is gonna cover at least the Catholic Church :-/

Catholic church online presence in the form of social network is pretty modest.

Who said anything about a social network, you just said any community with a large percentage of members.

If someone wants to make their own site to do that, they can go ahead,

Not easily. If the new site becomes popular or well-known in any way, the woke mob will go after it and try to get it shut down by the advertisers, payment processors, or Cloudflare. (Or the ultimately the government, which doesn't work in the US yet, but they're trying hard to change that.)

Have you come up with an argument for why this should not be done to you instead, since freedom of speech is "worthless at best"?
Why shouldn't anyone who finds you "harmful" or simply irritating get everyone like you kicked off the Internet or arrested? What principle do you have against it?

Btw, can you link the community you moderate, so we can see what your policies look like in practice?

But it is left of center for San Francisco, which puts it far, far to the left of the nation.

Why is "the nation" relevant? It's not too far to the left of the subset of Americans that are very online.

Another way to think about is that if you look at the crosstabs the last election by age and compare with the average demographic of Reddit's readership you'll get the idea.

The front page of Reddit is not representative of any group within the United States, even the extremely online.

It's evaporative distillation at its finest. Reddit leaned left from the beginning. Conservative views were downvoted. The conservatives left. Then centrist views got downvoted. The centrists left. Etc...

This is not just "young people". It's people who are at the tail end of a long selection process. It's actually similar to how the views of academics are so insane.

The entire internet leaned left from the beginning.

I think you’re right that in the decades hence, self-selection has narrowed and polarized it much further .

Erm, pardon me for quibbling, but my sense of the early internet was that it more consistently leaned libertarian, which is to say, pro-freedom, rather than straight left. The rise of social media in general and Facebook in particular is what made the move leftwards inevitable in my view, compounded by smartphones and the accompanying push notifications designed by the literal Devil himself.

It was libertarian and anti-authoritarian back when being pro-liberty was pro-left and back when the right had some semblance of power. Back then naughty song lyrics and books with gay themes were sticking it to the man, now the man twerks to it in the corporate gay pride parade.

You can pardon me then for being cynical, but it seems pretty clear that it wasn't the kind of principled David Frenchism. Or at least that the real internet libertarians were a small fraction of the populace.

that.dune.quote.jpg

The Ron Paul fanaticism on the internet of 15 years ago was real, not calculated.

Sure was. Just wasn't the majority or even plurality.

Why is "the nation" relevant?

Not just "the nation", the world. It's a global website.

It's not too far to the left of the subset of Americans that are very online.

After they've banned everyone that disagreed, they've found that everyone agrees... Not particularly surprising.

Another way to think about is that if you look at the crosstabs the last election by age and compare with the average demographic of Reddit's readership you'll get the idea.

What makes you think you've got the direction of the causality right here?

Well, I was confining myself to the anglosphere. I have no idea what the Chinese zoomers are doing on their social media (which isn't reddit anyway).

If you think there's a causal relationship here, millennials born in 85 were already 20 by the time Reddit launched. It seems much more parsimonious to explain their moderation policies as approximately reflecting the population-as-weighted-by-online-time than to claim that the moderation policies moved millions of people 1SD politically.

EDIT: I should add, the population-as-weighted-by-online time is not a uniform sample. The more well-adjusted aren't spending hours and hours online, especially not volunteering to moderate. It's a bit like Trace's wikipedia bit -- the platform belongs in a large sense to those willing to put in the work/effort.

Well, I was confining myself to the anglosphere. I have no idea what the Chinese zoomers are doing on their social media (which isn't reddit anyway).

The world consists of a bit more than the anglosphere and China, and even the anglosphere is not a monolithic blob.

It seems much more parsimonious to explain their moderation policies as approximately reflecting the population-as-weighted-by-online-time

I don't see how. Reddit literally bullied one of it's CEOs away from their position, for being too censorious, and even though the CEO left, the vibe shift she represented was still being cranked up. I've seen no evidence that their decisions were driven by popular demand of their userbase, and like I said the causality is just as likely (or more!) to be going in the opposite direction.

the platform belongs in a large sense to those willing to put in the work/effort.

Putting in the work/effort to become moderators and ban all opposition is not the same thing as being representative of population-as-weighted-by-online time.

I think you’re mixing up two things. I agree there wasn’t a lot of pro-moderation demand or sentiment. But most of the users were still left of the median Democrat and were mostly ok that the weird maga crowd got booted.

I never said anything about a pro-moderation sentiment, and I don't think I'm mixing up anything, one is just the explanatory mechanism for the other. The majority of Twitter was also left of the median Democrats, and were mostly ok with the weird maga crowd getting booted, until Musk unbooted them. The booting is how they become a majority.

The left-of-median-democrats were already a majority on Reddit/Twitter before the bookings.

That's kind of why the user base as a whole shrugged -- even though they wouldn't have agitated for ejecting anyone, they weren't going to get riled up over this particular instance.

even though they wouldn't have agitated for ejecting anyone, they weren't going to get riled up over this particular instance.

That doesn't make them left-of-median-democrats, that makes them apathetic, and yeah, this is exactly how it works, and it only proves my point.

And the point about Twitter is that isn't it funny how it doesn't feel so majority-left, the moment people got unbooted.

The other alternative would be to try to get an alternative off the ground, perhaps building on active and healthy diaspora communities.

The main problem with alternatives is that it only attracts people who even see the need for an alternative, people who consider Reddit being captured by one side of the culture war is a problem. That means you get for the most part people on the other side of the culture war (of which not all of them are high IQ either, that means you probably get flooded by people who just really want a place to spam the N-word) and the very rare few people who are on the side that captured Reddit but are actually principled enough to prefer a neutral platform. If you get a site whose members are all hyper aware of culture war topics, the best case scenario is that you get a website where culture war topics dominate (see: The Motte). Worst case scenario is something like poast.

Those you are missing out on is the large contingent of not terminally online people who don't care that much or are unaware of the culture war stuff online; a lot of my friends are like this. Those who don't see it as a problem that reddit is captured, because they still get enough engagement on their posts. While you might not care about their opinions on culture war topics, you might actually want to hear what they have to say about IT, about cars, about AI, about health, etc...

To make a viable alternative, you need normies too. Reddit is a natural Schelling point for communities on any topic, until you break that aspect of it. Either Reddit's reputation has to be ruined, or you have to offer something that's technically better that becomes the first place anyone interested on a community on any topic would check out (and not just terminally online contrarians).

I think the main problem actually is the government and advertisers enforces a certain level of censorship. Just look at the "shots fired" at the Telegram founder when he refued to play ball. So unless someone can answer how they will fund it, and how it will stay independent of government demand for "enough censorship"

Reddit when it started was not full of normies. It was full of tech nerds who had some, um, interesting characteristics. Remember, "le Reddit army", "narwhale bacon", "r/jailbait", etc... The site had a weird, fedora-wearing energy.

The normies showed up later. When the normies first arrived it was probably the golden age of Reddit, say 2012-2020. But after 2016 right wings views were censored and the site gradually descended into what it is today.

So I do think it's possible for a new site to start that appeals to a niche and then grows to include normies. But obviously the initial niche can't just be a right-wing witches.

Reddit when it started was not full of normies.

Yeah, but it was also technically superior to the incumbent (Digg) AND appeared at a time where the said incumbent had created a window of opportunity by going through a badly recieved overhaul (Digg 2.0).

If we assume the 90-9-1 rule is right (90 percent of people are only interested in lurking, 9 percent are "remixing", sharing or commenting, and 1 percent are creators), when Digg cratered, reddit almost immediately captured the 9%. It just turns out that until about the mid-2010s, that was mostly tech nerds, but as more and more normies became constantly online, that 9% started representing them. Normies were not participating in online communities on other websites than Reddit or Digg, they were not participating in online communities at all.

It just turns out that until about the mid-2010s

We have the iPhone to "thank" for that. The mobile VT-100 that a "smartphone" is becoming actually usable and cheap enough to be universal is what launched Reddit and Twitter (and to a point, Facebook) into the stratosphere. Phones before that were too slow, the screens were too small to sit in front of all day, and mobile data was too limited/expensive.

It's also why IRC had its resurgence [Discord is not meaningfully distinguishable from an IRCv3 implementation, complete with message persistence]- because you can be always online to answer questions in a way you actually had to be sitting at a computer to do before (which is why forums, then Digg/Reddit, took over from IRC in the late-'90s-early-'00s).

You can track the rise of the leftist moderator through that as well: if we assume that leftists are more likely to have fake office jobs, then the fact they're able to use their VT-100s at work bestows them a significant power advantage over rightists simply by being able to show up. Take that ability away and their advantage evaporates.

if we assume that leftists are more likely to have fake office job

If you look at the kind of people that moderate the top subreddits, I'd say the amount of work they'd have to put to keep track of everything would mean they have no jobs at all, or this is their job, and they probably glow in the dark.

Either Reddit's reputation has to be ruined, or you have to offer something that's technically better that becomes the first place anyone interested on a community on any topic would check out (and not just terminally online contrarians).

Technically, there is a third option, the one that's deployed frequently by SJ - "destroy Reddit's technical capability to function, such that people can't use it anymore". It's just that that's really hard for such a large platform that doesn't have many external dependencies.

I would love a new and better Reddit.

The problem with Reddit is that it is so incredibly easy to game and astroturf. /r/thedonald did it in 2016 and they were wildly successful. Then the admins put their fingers on the scale and banned them. Today, left wing shitlibs are doing all the same stuff but get away with it. The front page is all just low rent political memes now.

Major subreddits that used to have milquetoast funny content are just left-wing bot farms now: https://old.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/

And leftist activists have taken over abandoned subreddits and then game the rules to get their posts on the front page. One trick: if a subreddit has a post with an outsized number of upvotes it gets promoted. So, if a sub with only 10,000 users has a sub with 10,000 upvotes, the algo sees it as a valuable post. This must be the most important post in the history of this subreddit! Except it's just some Kamala is Brat meme on a subreddit supposedly about economics.

In any case, there are good subs out there. Slatestarcodex is still decent. Redscarepod is good. But mostly it's a wasteland. Bots and activists rule the day. It's a tragedy that anyone is exposed to this stuff.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/

I don't have the stomach to open these, but I can't get over how much text there is on the thumbnails.

Just living up to the stereotype that leftist memes are giant walls of text (that also utterly fail as memes).

I'm old enough to remember when Stephen Colbert was funny and it was the right-wing's attempts at humor that were cringe.

So add that to the party realignment I guess.

Those are decoy memes. The real ones are the successful ones that everyone believes, like "ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN Trustworthy, Fox bogus". Or "climate change means we have to do everything the left wants", "inequality", "the rich are that way because they take from the poor" etc.

Sure, leftists control nearly every aspect of society. But can they add text to an image and make it funny? No, they cannot.

Reddit's politics reflect the fact that the company is based in San Francisco. But it is left of center for San Francisco, which puts it far, far to the left of the nation.

This doesn't get the causality right in my opinion. When you look at the big censorious changes that happened on Reddit, they were usually demanded by the volunteer moderators, not by the paid admins. Mods going on strike is what caused Reddit to ban /r/NoNewNormal just days after the the CEO posted a poorly-recieved announcement defending free speech and debate. Mods also whined for years about "brigading" by /r/TheDonald. What they were really upset about was that TheDonald was attracting a right-wing userbase.

This is part of why it was such a big deal when Reddit decided to steamroll the mods on the unpopular API changes last summer. They had literally never done that before. They always caved.

Reddit banning /r/NoNewNormal happened in a context where the US Government was pressuring other social media sites to ban covid dissidents, vaccine mandates were increasingly criminalizing everyday life for dissidents, and on the streets of much of the rest of the world, police were beating the shit out of them when they protested. If anything Reddit's mere banning of a single subreddit was relatively moderate compared to what everywhere else was doing, both online and off.

(1) It would maintain the threaded format beloved by so many

The threaded format does not allow a comment to have multiple parents (forcing a person who wants to reply to multiple comments simultaneously to use username alerts instead), and is not compatible with chronological viewing (forcing a person who wants to view all comments chronologically to open a separate chronological view, sometimes called "firehose"). For that reason, I prefer the imageboard (4chan) style.

It's more a BBS format than an imageboard format.

I loved the branched conversation style over single-threaded forums like PHPBB that dominated the web before.

It's funny you say that, because I honestly really miss forums, and how they've been completely displaced by Reddit and Discord.

4chan/imageboard style threads have been my favorite for a while, especially ever since you could load the replies in a little preview window by mousing over them.

Reddit won because it's a better system. The old school forums without threading are really painful to use. DataSecretsLox gets 1/3rd of the traffic that themotte does for example. And the posts are lower quality, imo.

I'm old enough to remember when old school forums were the ones with threading, and engines like PHPBB were accused of wasting their traffic by the old guard.

Less of this, please.

I also very much prefer the forum format - Reddit's thread structure feels more like a comment section, to me. It makes it easier for comments to be lost, and much harder to search for past posts as well.

Suppose there is a person who is very concerned with social justice. They believe that racism and sexism are among the most serious problems facing our society, they are deeply committed to battling the kyriarchy hydra. They are interested in cultural critique, in sociopolitical theory, and have educated themselves extensively on these subjects. In my experience, such people are not particularly rare, and probably most people commenting here will have encountered several of them.

Based on you experience, how likely is such a person to be familiar with and use the term "late stage capitalism"? My experience would be that it is very likely; does yours differ?

If they do use that term, what do they mean by it?

Why does the kyriarchy hydra in the linked comic have a "class" head, and why is that head resolved into "economics" in the last panel? What sort of economics do you suppose the author intended?

That comic is from the website everydayfeminism. If I search that website for references to "capitalism", I get many, many hits. How many of those hits do you suppose involve discussion of Capitalism as a positive force in the world, versus a negative force? Why should that be?

....I've just searched "Patriarchy and late stage capitalism".

Having previously identified the socialization and naturalization of inequalities, we now look at the influence of capitalism. Although patriarchy pre-existed it - many societies were already characterized by a sexual division of labour, gender-based violence, or gender norms often privileging the male - the specific contribution of capitalism was undoubtedly the institutionalization of the devaluation of women and their work. The devalued or even unpaid domestic work, the concept of the “housewife” that accompanies it, as well as professional segregation, have their origins in the era when capitalism gradually replaced the medieval feudal system. They are thus not, as we often hear, the remnants of a dark and barbaric medieval era, but rather constitutive of the first phase of capitalist accumulation which, as we shall see, led to a phenomenal regression in the status of women.

Judging by this excerpt (or the article as a whole, I'm not your dad), what general branch of political philosophy do you think has formed the author's worldview?

The dominance approach to feminist theory arises out of a Marxian background that models gender difference on class relations. The relation between manager and worker is not just one of “difference.” The manager and worker are situated within a system of social relations that unequally distributes money, power, status, etc. Likewise, men and women aren’t just “different,” but are categories of persons – like manager and worker – that are defined in terms of social relations that position them in a complex class/race/sex hierarchy. Given this background to the dominance approach, it is useful to consider a bit of the history of the relation between Marxism and feminism.

What do you think the author means when she says that "the dominance approach to feminist theory arises out of a Marxian background"? What does it mean to "model gender differences on class relations?" Why do you suppose the author spends so much of their paper discussing Marx? Why does she believe that "Socialist feminism involves a commitment to “the practical unity of the struggle against capitalism and the struggle for women’s liberation." Why is she interested in a struggle against Capitalism, and where does Marx come in to this struggle?

This article argues that modern imagery of the Black female body exists in opposition to sexual health and sexual rights by focusing on existing representations of Black female eroticism as a legacy of colonialism. It addresses Black feminist thought on the history and contemporary use of the Black female body and offers a human rights perspective on uses of the Black female body within patriarchal capitalism.

Where is this idea of "Patriarchal Capitalism" coming from? Do you think the author developed it herself? If not, how did she come by it?

Contemporary feminism is currently at a crossroads, facing a concerted onslaught from both neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies. While these ideologies are inherently different—neoliberalism often appropriates feminist language to serve capitalist ends, and neoconservatism typically attacks feminist principles—they similarly reinforce the traditional role of families as providers of welfare. This crisis of alienation in feminism is characterized by three key factors: the gender divisions brought about by feminism’s shift to identity politics, the obscuring of feminist critique of capitalism by the spread of commercialization, and the instrumentalization of feminism in politics. These challenges have resulted in increased class antagonism and the further marginalization of lower-income women, reinforcing one another. To address this multifaceted crisis, a return to Marxist thought is deemed necessary for women’s liberation.

How can Feminism "return" to Marxism, when it never had anything to do with Marxism in the first place?

Anxiety disorders are one of the most prevalent mental disorders globally, and 63% of those diagnoses are of women. Although widely acknowledged across health disciplines and news and social media outlets, the majority of attention has left assumptions underlying women's anxiety in the twenty-first century unquestioned. Drawing on my own experiences of anxiety, I will the explore both concept and diagnosis in the Western world. Reflecting on my own experiences through a critical feminist lens, I will investigate the construction of anxiety as mental disorder in the context of neoliberal late-stage capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and biomedical psychiatry.

Where does the idea of "Late-stage Capitalism" come from? What are the other stages?

The term “late capitalism” regained relevance in 1991 when Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson published Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Drawing on Mandel’s idea that capitalism has sped up and gone global, Jameson expanded his analysis to the cultural realm. His argument was that late capitalist societies have lost their connection with history and are defined by a fascination with the present. In Jameson’s account, late capitalism is characterized by a globalized, post-industrial economy, where everything – not just material resources and products but also immaterial dimensions, such as the arts and lifestyle activities – becomes commodified and consumable. In this capitalist stage, we see innovation for the sake of innovation, a superficial projected image of self via celebrities or “influencers” channeled through social media, and so on. In this time, whatever societal changes that emerge are quickly transformed into products for exchange. Unlike those who celebrate postmodernism as replete with irony and transgression, Jameson considers it to be a non-threatening feature of the capitalist system in contemporary societies.

How can Marxist analysis "expand into the cultural realm"? If the term "late stage capitalism" were related to attempts to expand Marxist analysis in this fashion, would the prevalence of the term be some level of evidence for the memetic spread of this expansion?

...In my younger days, this is the point where I would drink several cups of coffee and spend the next twelve hours pasting the first paragraph and a few pertinent questions for every one of the first five hundred search results in the fifteenth tab in my brave window and then wrap it up with six solid pages-worth of compact, four-letter obscenities, but I'm older and I have kids now and my back hurts, so let's not do that.

It seems obvious to me that the various branches of Social Justice theory are, to a first approximation, direct descendants of Marxism. It seems obvious to me that a supermajority of the people promulgating Social Justice theory believe that they are performing some combination of extending, expanding, or (for the truly arrogant) correcting Marxism, quite explicitly. I think the above position can be defended unassailably by looking at the academic output that constitutes the headwaters of the Social Justice movement. I think that those who argue that the obvious, inescapable ties between Social Justice theory and Marxism are some sort of hallucination or sloppy categorization are either woefully uninformed or actively dishonest. To those who have advanced such arguments in the thread on the subject below, I offer an invitation: assuming the above examples are insufficient, what level of evidence would satisfy you? How many papers from how many journals do you need to see? How many quotes from how many prominent figures within the modern social justice movement, and the people who taught them, and the people who taught them, and so on? How far back do we need to go to satisfy you? How deep do we need to dig to bring this question to a conclusion?

Or maybe I'm totally wrong. Let's run with that. If I'm wrong, if the above is the wrong approach, why is it wrong and what would be better?

You're not wrong that the left-progressive memeplex draws a lot from Marx. However, as someone with some training in intellectual history, I would insist that really modern progressives have a pretty-attenuated relationship with Marx. They tend to directly interface more with more recent thinkers who have fairly radically-expanded the Marxian canon from its original roots: e.g. the Critical Theorists and Fanon incorporated Freud, Friere incorporated both Fanon and Rousseau/Dewey, all incorporated their own original insights, and so on. So yes, its "Marxist"...but there's an awful lot of elaboration in there, to the point that it's really unclear what Marx himself would think of it, or whether he would even recognize it if you could unearth and revive him. One analogy might be that modern progressivism is Marxist in the sense the orthodox Marxists were Hegelian. Like, where's the Marxism in the proliferation of radically-divergent sexual mores among the professional classes and capital-owning bourgeois classes? I could buy it if you were talking about the broader left-socialist tradition, referencing important contemporaries of Marx who time has rendered more obscure like Fourier and Robert Owen, but not Marx. In a lot of ways, modern leftists insist they are in a Marxian tradition as much to gain the cachet associated with asserting a famous genealogy than they do because they really care about and have deeply drawn from Kapital etc.

But all this wrangling over the intellectual history (which is incredibly rich and complicated and admittedly fun to wrangle over) aside, if you're seeking to understand and grok modern leftism you're not going to do it just by looking at Marx. And if you want to combat modern leftism you're not going to get very far just by calling it "Marxist." I don't think modern progressivism is an intellectual movement; not really. It, at least as it manifests in its politically-relevant common outbreaks is a morality, a teleology, an zeitgeist; a system of unfalsifiable, unquestioned assumptions about virtue and value that people feel more as vibes, aesthetics, and a priori interpretive lenses than they do as rational arguments for any particular falsifiable theory. It's not any rational system of thought that turns a completely normal list of basic life tasks...and turns it into icky ragebait with the addition of "...for a husband and family" to the end of each of them. Marx is a lot of things, but he's not that, and to the extent his thought has been absorbed into it, it's part of a lot richer inheritance including deracinated, desacralized protestantism, and the same leveller impulse that even appears in some of the wilder parts of the Christian tradition (such as, famously, Christ's admonition to forsake family and wealth to follow Him, the Diggers, Waldensians, early-church communes described in parts of the Book of Acts, and a lot of the religious movements Engels was banging on about in "The Peasant's War in Germany"). And if you want to address it, you need to do so on its own level - catechism of the young, and evangelization (or de-conversion) of adults where possible.

Marxist in the sense the orthodox Marxists were Hegelian

Except in the sense that Hegelianism means something more specific that Marxism isn't, a lot of what's wrong with Marc absolutely comes from an over reliance on Hegel. Marx was just another German working in a tradition of German historicism, but he took on a particularly Hegelian form of historicism that turned out to be congenial with generating evil outcomes.

When asked for his thoughts on Hegel, Wittgenstein replied, "Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different". There is of course a time and a place for both. But my preferences lean towards the latter.

Certainly, the popularity of anti-capitalist rhetoric in woke circles gives it a superficial similarity to Marxism proper. Certain people in those circles may even profess to be Marxist. But we can't always take what people say at face value. It's more important to analyze what they actually think and do. Conveniently, Marx himself provides an example that can be used as an analogy. He and many of his immediate intellectual descendants said that Marxism was "scientific". Is Marxism actually a science? They certainly called it one. They certainly wanted it to be one, since the name "science" bestows a veneer of intellectual respectability upon whatever it adorns. It's easy to find certain similarities between what Marx did and what scientists do; to at least some degree he engaged in a process of hypothesis formation and attempted to measure those hypotheses against empirical evidence. He revised his thinking as new data came in. But in spite of all this, Marxism is still not a science, because in its essential properties it differs from what makes a science actually be a science. The whole enterprise is crucially dependent on ethical and non-empirical propositions.

My position is that you simply have to examine individual leftists on a case by case basis to determine if they're actually Marxist or not; it can't be assumed just because of their adherence to feminism or anti-racism or any other leftist position. There are undoubtedly some genuine Marxists among today's leftists today, but I'm quite convinced that they're a minority. If, after a careful accounting of someone's politics, their revealed preference is for a world that is essentially similar to what we have now, except with more women CEOs and more government financial assistance for non-whites, that's not Marxism. That's liberal capitalism with some of the money shuffled around.

As a general note, I find considerations regarding provenance and genealogy to be largely irrelevant to this debate. It has been sometimes argued that Western science grew in some essential manner out of Christianity; science as beginning with the conviction that the divine creation was imbued with a rational order that was intelligible to man. Supposing that were true, does that mean that science is Christian in some essential sense? It seems plain to me that science is neither Christian nor non-Christian, regardless of its origins. Origins certainly can be relevant, but not in every case.

He and many of his immediate intellectual descendants said that Marxism was "scientific". Is Marxism actually a science? They certainly called it one. They certainly wanted it to be one, since the name "science" bestows a veneer of intellectual respectability upon whatever it adorns.

Marxism would have been a science by the standards of the 1800s because the standards of the 1800s were pretty sloppy. It's not until you get to Karl Popper's idea of Falsification in the 1930s that we get the more rigorous definition of science we have today. And then Popper quickly applied the idea of falsification to Marx (among others) to distinguish his pseudoscience from the actually useful science being done in other fields like Physics.

It's easy to find certain similarities between what Marx did and what scientists do; to at least some degree he engaged in a process of hypothesis formation and attempted to measure those hypotheses against empirical evidence. He revised his thinking as new data came in. But in spite of all this, Marxism is still not a science, because in its essential properties it differs from what makes a science actually be a science. The whole enterprise is crucially dependent on ethical and non-empirical propositions.

As bad as the naming of "exploitation" is in Marxism, it's still a theory derived from earlier economic theories, that predicts that removing capitalists will result in workers being better off via keeping their "surplus value" that capitalists were taking from them. But it wasn't the result of empirical observation. It was a logical deduction from the Labour Theory of Value, but LTV was disproved towards the end of Marx's career. Similar happened to Marx's theory of history. The failure of Marxists to respond to empirical evidence, by ignoring it, adding epicycles, or abandoning any pretext of caring about empirical evidence by switching to ideas like critical theory, is why it became a pseudoscience.

Ok, but, seriously what's the point? I mean yes this is an obscure internet forum on which people advance their technical theories about political topics for no reason beyond being right on the internet and if that's the case then you can stop reading here...

On a bigger scale though when I see this argument employed on the internet in general it seems like proponents of the theory seem to think of it as some kind of "gotcha". I just don't really see it. If the woke or critical theorists all threw up their hands and said, "you got us, we are cultural marxists and will go by this term form now on," what do you expect to change? Socialism polls higher among 18-30 year olds than Capitalism. They're the main group that the woke try to persuade and recruit from. The red scare is a distant memory at this point. The woke didn't rise to power in the USSR or China, if anything these places seem resilient to their influence. They came to power in turbo USA, the most capitalist country ever finally ridden of it's cold war rival. You could make an argument that capitalism is just using cultural marxism and regardless of their roots they are just useful idiots (and many old left types do).

At best you're achieving some weak guilt by association, mostly that will work on people over the age of 65, at worst you're actually making woke sound cooler to younger generations. Just attacking how irrational woke ideology is seems far more effective than all the ink spilled over the cultural marxist label. Pointing out that the woke has its roots in marxism, and then just assuming that people associate marxism with bad and capitalism with good seems intellectually lazy. If conservatives want to win people over they need to be better about pointing out both the flaws in communism and admitting and fixing the flaws in capitalism otherwise at the current rate it seems like both communists and capitalists will be relegated to some stupidpol type forum where they complain about how both the actually relevant political parties aren't "true" left or right.

If anything the failures of both systems seem eerily similar. Focus on material gains neglecting cultural or spiritual growth and interests, using stats on increases in material wealth to hand wave away deep dissatisfaction and malaise. Focus on equality as a selling point (meritocracy in which all people can advance is implicitly part of the western social contract) motivating both groups into ridiculous beliefs, lamarckism for the USSR, blank slatism and "magic soil" in the west. Increasingly centralized power to increase efficiency and productivity, resulting in swaths of people losing agency and corrupt out of touch power centers. I guess i'm not a paleocon at all and more of a post liberal or something so i'm not typical right wing, but the boomer right wing type people need to fix these issues if they want people to just reflexively like capitalism and dislike marxism again.

Ok, but, seriously what's the point?

First, naming the beast. Second, denying dishonest actors the rhetorical victory of obfuscating the beast's name.

What is the utility of 'naming the beast'?

The pages linked in the top-level post openly use words like 'socialist', and denounce 'capitalism' without a moment's hesitation. They don't seem to be hiding their agenda. What is revealed about them by using an alternative name?

I think remzem's point holds up - if you or we want to combat them, they need to make a substantive cae against socialism as such, and a substantive case for capitalism (or better yet, for capitalism as a component of some more integrated political vision). If you got everyone to call all left-wing politics Marxism, then people are just going to shrug and say, "Okay, I like Marxism". There's no substitute for actually convincing people.

From the old country, worth linking to.

Occasionally, I find myself listing out all the different things that people use the words "capitalism" or "capitalist" to mean. I think I need to add a couple.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/artngn/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_february_18/eh74d2h/

That website is using the "state of alienation, strife, and scarcity; considered as a moral and natural evil" meaning.

I don't think you are wrong though but orthodox marxism can be overstated as part of all modern woke types and helps woke capitalists get away with it. I do agree that cultural marxism has expanded from class towards the cultural realm. We should just not underestimate Woke capitalists who are also for cultural marxism and moreover Cultural Marxism is compatible with some version of managed capitalism that accepts its ideology.

For example BLM, a black marxist group created by a Jewish marxist who was part of the weatherman underground group, managed to get enough capitalists to support its agenda to hire non whites over whites.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-equal-opportunity-corporate-diversity/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-09-26/corporate-america-kept-its-promise-to-hire-more-people-of-color

So capitalists actually collaborated with a marxist group. Which is why you aren't wrong, it is just the issue that we shouldn't forget the cultural Marxists who also see their version of capitalism as helpful to their project.

There is a certain woke, pro capitalist in theory who opposes OG marxism, at least in theory but they still have the cultural marxist agenda. Of course, in reality they compromise with a movement which has included plenty of marxists among it. But this exists. The compromise with marxist organisations does undermine some of their anti marxist credentials.

Are these people cultural marxists? Of course, even someone who isn't orthodox marxist, can be a cultural marxism by applying the marxist logic without prioritizing class.

The activist groups and movements that rose in the 20th century in the USA especially are very important parts of it. But of course such movements had plenty of Marxists involved too. Cultural marxism does come from the original left and original marxism had those elements too, and that is why opponents of it also raised some of the same concerns.

Someone who is a marxist in general can be a cultural marxist too. There are plenty of those who also argue that redistribution in the cultural marxist arena is anti capitalist and a fulfillment of Marxism. Kendi IIRC is one of those types. This is indeed a very important element of it. But cultural Marxists are not about prioritizing the working class but primarily about favoring in western societies progressive identity groups like women, Jews, Blacks, migrants, Muslims, Indians, etc, and against right wing, white, conservative, nationalist, men. And also adopt the ideology of the diffusion of national, conservative, and gender roles and values of groups, especially of their outgroup.

Business owners can share this agenda and agree with it ideologically, and some do this also in part due to a profit motive. For example, they benefit from a system where the goverment pays for welfare, and support the importation of cheap labor. They can agree with the cultural marxist, and general marxist agenda of the idea of dissolution of gender roles, tradition, native nation, because they prefer so much so for women to work over being mothers, even if that would harm society and lead to unsustainable low fertility rates. Or they are part of the DEI industry and there is an obvious profit motive there.

There can also be a resistance to some elements of cultural marxism that partly has some economic leftist elements which show some nationalism, even though cultural marxism comes usually with an economically leftist redistributist package. There have been some leftists who opposed open borders and high numbers of migration on basis of prioritizing the well being of their own working class. Usually they did this while also expressing that they have solidarity with foreign working classes. More of the left pushed the opposite agenda and even most of those who opposed it have went along and changed their tune. Still this has existed.

Cultural revolution in favor of an economic model as the priority can coexist with both communists and people who want to promote their more capitalist economic system, although they too as we observe tend to be ideologically aligning with the idea of screwing "oppressor" groups in favor of "oppressed" and playing motte and bailey games between economy as only allowed concern for the outgroup and then accepting as legitimate concerns of the cultural marxist sort.

The idea of an utopia coming out of destroying the distinctions, or the actual nations, racial, property rights, classes, borders, religions, nuclear family, gender roles, usually with some groups and categorizations targeted as reactionaries than others can exist also among woke capitalists, who are cultural Marxists and have definitely been influenced by the intellectual legacy of Marxism and share elements with OG marxism. And I do agree that actual self identified Marxists have been influential in the cultural marxist movements.

Just adding some of the nuances of the issue, so we don't let woke capitalists get forgotten as part of the issue of Cultural Marxism.

Coming from a Christian mindset, social justice is simply one of the many things Jesus would engage in during his time here on earth. People want to appropriate social justice to whatever philosophical ideology suits their worldview, and I just don't understand it. "Do the needful" comes to mind.

Im afraid i have to disagree. Partially for the reasons @ThisIsSin describes below, but more so because the entire theory and praxis of "Social Justice" revolves around tearing people down and promulgating individual injustices in the name of some greater good. I do not get the impression that Jesus would've been down with that at all.

Jesus explictly tells us that he doesn't hang out with whores, sinners, and tax-collectors (ie those who collaborate with the occupying regime) because he thinks that it is totes ok to be whorish, sinful, or a collaborator. He does it because it is the sick who need a doctor the most.

Im afraid i have to disagree. Partially for the reasons @ThisIsSin describes below, but more so because the entire theory and praxis of "Social Justice" revolves around tearing people down and promulgating individual injustices in the name of some greater good. I do not get the impression that Jesus would've been down with that at all.

Would you say that ending police brutality fits into this praxis? Would you say that ensuring low or no-cost healthcare for everyone fits into that praxis? Wouldn't these issues be something where Jesus would take the side of minority group?

Jesus explictly tells us that he doesn't hang out with whores, sinners, and tax-collectors (ie those who collaborate with the occupying regime) because he thinks that it is totes ok to be whorish, sinful, or a collaborator. He does it because it is the sick who need a doctor the most.

Yes, and I would consider that to be an example of intersectionality. He's bringing everyone in from all walks of life and instructing them on not only how to become better people, but to follow Him in all that they do.

The theory is "reducing police brutality" the praxis is replacing the brutality of the police with the brutality of the mob.

Social justice warriors do not seek to reduce or mitigate the violence inherent in the system (just the opposite in fact) they seek to redistribute it.

social justice is simply one of the many things Jesus would engage in during his time here on earth

The more I think about this the more I fundamentally disagree with this. Jesus accommodated every social standard of the day except for the ones he was explicitly sent to overturn [almost like trying to overturn others would be counterproductive in this regard]. You can see that by how He talks to women at fountains; but in other instances interacts and employs other women very, very differently (which then creates problems because you get selfish traditionalists going "haha Jesus patrolled thots lmao, I'll do the same thing to women I meet and claim it's correct because Jesus", and then 20 years later wonder why they can't get young families to come to their Church any more).

People want to appropriate Christianity to whatever philosophical ideology suits their worldview

Yes. If Christianity isn't social justice enough, then social justice can/will be added to Christianity to fill that void if the Church isn't prepared to deal with that. This is why young men went tradcath; they perceive (correctly) that Catholicism is the most alien to their sociopolitical adversaries and this is just a reaction to social [in]justice that targets them (for the same reasons that everyone on the losing side of oppression seems to become Christian for some reason, almost like that's by design; despite what Medieval mythology might have you believe Christianity really isn't meant for people who see themselves as winners, and those young men are eventually going to leave the Church because of that- it's exactly the same thing where [young women] SJWs are burning down their own churches in its name and forcing everyone out, as they simply want to win harder as is human nature to do).

and I just don't understand it

Moral superiority is one of the rungs of Maslow's Hierarchy (usually labelled as "security"). It's a thing most human beings have a psychological need for; evidenced by the emotion of disgust being universal to all cultures.

Some people are moral mutants and don't need that to function correctly (and can do things like answer "no" when the question of "aren't you just violating moral X for selfish reasons?" comes up, and be autistically/childishly 100% honest when doing so), but those mutants tend to fail to understand that moralfaggotry [I don't have a better word for this, sorry] is of vital importance for everyone else. This is part of the "struggle" that some philosophers and political thinkers talk about; I think one of them wrote a book with that title. It's a biological holdover, and you need some of it for social cohesion; most of what we see as traditional Christian morality is just playing to biological strengths anyway, so it makes having those morals both easy and as productive as you could make an emotion whose purpose is fundamentally destructive/self-preservatory.

[No, I haven't actually read the Screwtape Letters yet.]

Where you start to get problems is basically just the midwit meme where they're able to recognize "wait, all this moralfaggotry is fake!" (usually accompanied by "only God can judge me"/"in this moment, I am euphoric, ...enlightened by my own intelligence", which is why everyone else thinks [and 99% of the time, correctly] it's just people doing it for selfish reasons) but not capable of recognizing why it exists, or who it exists for, in the first place.

Jesus accommodated every social standard of the day except for the ones he was explicitly sent to overturn [almost like trying to overturn others would be counterproductive in this regard]. You can see that by how He talks to women at fountains;

Interesting. What do you think of the times that he heals people -- people he knows to be sinners, unclean, or undesirable -- or when he calls Matthew, a tax collector, someone who at the time people viewed as an "elite" to follow him?

Jesus healed sinners and the demon-possessed with the instruction to sin no more. His miracles weren’t meant to be a blank check to go out to continue to sin. (“A wicked generation looks for a sign”, says Jesus from Matthew 16.) That’s a big difference. Today’s social justice calls on people to tolerate and not change their ways, but Jesus calls on people to be loving. And sometimes being loving means calling on people to repent of evil and change from their sinful behaviors. God does not tolerate evil. He patiently waits, but there will come a day of the Lord where He will no longer wait.

As for Matthew the tax collector, he was by no means an elite. He may have gotten rich but only by cooperating with the Romans against his own people, much like the Jewish Councils in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere occupied by the Nazis. There was no mistaking who the ruling class was at those times; the film The Pianist also depicts them a little bit.

SJWs also call on people to repent of evil and change their ways; they just have a different idea of what constitutes evil. Transphobes, homophobes, xenophobes, racists, sexists, capitalists, Republican voters, gun owners, climate change denialists, etc. are all being asked to “go forth and sin no more” by abandoning their previous beliefs and behaviors and becoming SJWs themselves. By 2020, BLM activists thought the day of reckoning had finally arrived, and they declared, “We are done waiting.” (PDF)

Basically, I think you’re missing that SJW’s tolerance only extends to the in-group, which in some ways is not totally far off from Jesus’ own teachings. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” vs. “You brood of vipers,” and so forth.

Jesus healed sinners and the demon-possessed with the instruction to sin no more. His miracles weren’t meant to be a blank check to go out to continue to sin.

I certainly agree with that. But the issue then, as with many others in the Christian ethos, is what does constitute sin? A traditionalist perspective is going to pull from orthodox teachings about sin, whereas a more liberal approach would involve understanding and analyzing the cultural context of the scripture that proports to declare something is a sin, and also through the lens that the Bible is the inspired word of God, written by people who were imperfect and may have embellished, editorialized, or understood God in a different perspective, while still viewing it in an overall authoritative light.

Re Matthew: this is an excellent and often unapprecied point.

The reason being a "tax collector" was seen as dirty/dishonorable job was that it often meant that you would be working against your own friends, family, community, etc... on the behalf of a distant and foreign power. It's only natural for people to have an issue with that and view you with suspicion as a result.

his is why young men went tradcath; they perceive (correctly) that Catholicism is the most alien to their sociopolitical adversaries and this is just a reaction to social [in]justice that targets them

One of these days I'm going to effortpost on anthropology of actual rad trads(who are not a very online demographic, and may have local gender skews but on the whole don't have a particularly cartoonish split- and who also exist within an existing framework of conservative and self-consciously orthodox Catholic movements) and compare to DR twitterati tradcaths(who it seems are mostly trad Catholic in the sense that the church to which they do not go is in Latin). But for now- these are two different demographics(not to say no overlap) and I suspect the DR twitterati tradcaths aren't so much lashing out at liberalism as they are attracted to something(probably very obviously western, growing, and real world reactionaries with a white majority who are also very cool looking and sounding with all the incense and chanting and whatnot) and just not sold on having to change their lifestyle. I think a tell tale of these being largely different groups of people is that the twitterati tradcaths are so likely to be sedevacantists, which is a fringey position viewed by most actual irl rad trads as a collection of cults with serious skeletons in their closets led by madmen with possibly-invalid sacraments(IRL sedevacantists are not a very large number of people, and nor are Williamson's followers. Reactionary families attending SSPX or fully regular Latin masses will happily associate with each other, but shun sedevacantists/followers of Richard Williamson).

What I find really hilarious about a lot of replies to both this thread and the original one is how many people seem determined to defend the honor of Karl Marx, as if it pains them to see people “misrepresent” his views.

You have me and FC and Arjin pointing out very specific quotes by people who are deeply immersed in Marxist discourse, who have studied the massive corpus of theory and commentary and praxis that have sprung up in the two centuries since Marx was writing (the kind of stuff you can find on marxists.org, for example), and who lay out very sophisticated explanations for why their work is a valid and important extension of Marx’s work, and people here are basically just saying, “Nope, you’re wrong, you don’t know what you’re doing. I know what Marx wanted better than you do.” It’s very reminiscent of the New Atheist era, where atheists would quote scripture at Christians and say, “I know your Bible better than you do. Jesus would hate you.”

Marxism has been an evolving umbrella of thought for a long time. Marxists, for all of their flaws, really do think very deeply about this stuff and talk about it, out in the open. I compared it to Christianity earlier, with the many splits and theological developments and infighting that has taken place within Christian thought, and nobody seems to have a good explanation for why this is not a valid comparison. There are plenty of individuals today who see themselves as church authorities, and who believe they are qualified to interpret, expand upon, and even advance Christ’s statements. It’s very possible that if Jesus were here right now to speak to us, he would set the record straight that some or all of those guys are wrong! But he’s not, so we’re stuck doing the best we can to figure out how to apply his ideas to a modern world that is profoundly different from the one in which Jesus lived. (What would Jesus say about artificial intelligence, or nuclear weaponry? We can only try our best to reason it out.) Marxists are doing the same thing with applying Marx’s ideas to a very different paradigm. Why is this so difficult for some people to accept? Why is it so important to you to maintain the belief that Marx only cared about economics?

Why is this so difficult for some people to accept?

Socialists argue strenuously on this point primarily for one of three reasons:

A. Cognitive dissonance. One of the central tenets of the socialist religion is the claim that they and only they, by definition, have the nous. Similarly, all others, by definition, lack the nous. Therefore, a socialist literally cannot process a situation where a non-socialist presents facts about socialism because a non-socialist cannot, by definition, have that knowledge. Hence we recently saw:

I'm a Marxist. If [Cultural Marxism] were real I would have heard of it. The first time I heard of it was from ultra-right wing extremely online types. And they continue to be the only ones that talk about it. This leads to at least one of two conclusions

I am in on the conspiracy. And I am lying to you.

Somehow, you and a bunch of other online fascist adjacent types understand Marxism better than me.

In the years I have argued Marx and Socialist stuff I have pretty much never encountered an anti-Marxist that really knew much of anything about Marxism. It really is kind of astounding how ignorant anti-Marxists are about the ideology they profess to hate, actually.

B. Purity spiral. As a rule, there can only be one true socialism, and true socialists are duty-bound to eliminate all pretenders, or else their project will never be completed. Thus, some reactions against the idea are just socialists doing their usual infighting.

C. PR. Since ancient times, literally in the original 'mysteries', socialists have sought absolute message control about themselves and seek to eliminate disfavorable facts. Some socialists view a connection between modern, cultural Marxism and doctrinaire, Marx-and-Engels Marxism as a potential vulnerability, and so attack the association wherever it appears.

An additional reason is that wokism and such has to this point "won" the culture war. Marxists are not the only ideologs who seek to take credit for social justice as a successor movement to liberalism, you see this with Christians (particularly in some denominations such as Methodists), capitalists (there's decades of writing about how responsible capitalism requires this sort of thing culminating in ESG), and especially neoliberals. It's natural that older, more dysfunctional intellectual traditions would try to extend claims over their successor movements.

I don't disagree with you, but I just want to point to a better analogy for SJW in the Marxist paradigm.

Specifically, it's gnosticism. The wokes are cathars. Literally etymologically comparable- gnosticism comes from gnosis, meaning (hidden)knowledge, while woke refers to being awoken and realizing truths that most are blind to. But also just fundamentally- woke ideas are pretty far from orthodox Marxism(which is pretty clear about cultural ideas being of secondary importance/solved by economic ideas) and I have a post below about how you can square the circle with their obvious descent by realizing the woke view of the kyriarchy is as an opiate of the masses. A demiurge deceiving the masses, if you will. I had this realization reading your post and it's kind of blowing my mind right now. Wokes have cathari initiates who help allies advance through no personal effort(seriously, there's a pretty big division in SJW culture as to how much effort is expected from people who agree with them).

History never repeats, but it does rhyme.

Right, yesterday I referenced James Lindsay, who goes into great depth pointing out the explicit parallels between modern post-Marxism/“woke”/critical theory on the one hand, and Gnosticism on the other. I think the influences and similarities are unimpeachably obvious. Wokes very much do treat “society” as a demiurge to be defeated by an initiated majority of ensouled, elected individuals who have achieved varying levels of gnosis. The end goal being to reclaim Eden - an anarchoprimitivist, purely-egalitarian utopia.

(this comment is equally relevant to @hydroacetylene and @ChickenOverlord)

There is a surprising amount of literature out there showing the direct, continuous relationship between the modern socialist religion and the ancient one. You can see a previous comment of mine for a partial summary of The Socialist Phenomenon, which discusses the continuity of practice and belief through ancient and medieval groups. There are plenty of more modern, academically rigorous sources (e.g, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition by Magee; Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern times by van den Broek and Hanegraaff; etc.)

I wish I could make people read that fucking book (or any of those books). Even just the people here. If I could send mottizens copies without anyone breaking opsec, I would do so free of charge.

I'm not a theist but our society is clearly locked in a religious, spiritual conflict with the latest flavor of that most despicable and ancient of Mesopotamian religions. This conflict has material harms, but they cant be addressed until people recognize it for what it is. I wish there were a way to communicate this fact to the average person but I don't think anyone has cracked the code yet.

The oldest of the Mesopotamian religions is either Judaism or Zoroastrianism, which, disagree with them though I might, are clearly less harmful than Islam.

Mediterranean may have been a better word.

In any event, I think the socialist religion pre-dates Judaism. I refer to the religious socialists as the Identicals; as the core purpose of their faith is to make everything (thought, matter, etc.) identical, not just with eachother, but with god. The Identicals can be traced before 500BCE, with clearly developed religious and philosophical currents in the OG "mysteries," Thales of Miletus, and also in the century or two after, in Pythagoreanism, general mysticism/syncretism/esotericism in the eastern half of the Med, Gnosticism, early Hermetic writings, etc.

Judaism on the other hand, is just a bit later, but not by much. Somewhere after 500BCE, Yahwism becomes monotheistic and then becomes Second Temple Judaism. However, certain currents of Judaism I think are rather indistinguishable from the Identicals. The more I understand the history of Kabbalah, the less distinction I see between it and any of the other esotericism and gnosticism of the same time and place.

Taking a bit of a tangent, I would like to ask your input on the most effective name for this religion. Socialism? the Identicals? Gnostic Praxis? Political Gnosticism? 'Oh my god, those Egyptian Hermeticists really were up to something!'?

My biggest qualm with folks claiming that Wokism and Gnosticism are the same/similar ideologies is that the Gnostics despised the body (and material reality generally). Woke types tend to be obsessed with this material reality only (and most don't believe that there is anything outside of this life/material existence).

To add to @Hoffmeister25, I know absolutely nothing of gnosticism and had a hard time parsing this post since despising material reality is to me one of progressive's defining qualities. They're frequently hardcore constructivists who'll outright deny the existence of an objective reality altogether.

The truly committed wokes do despise the body and material reality. What do you think transgender stuff is? The critical fat studies people are the same - you see a lot of talk about “life in a fat, marginalized body.” Like yeah, there’s some tension there with the “fat acceptance”/“healthy at any size” stuff, but the latter is basically the short-term stopgap solution (reducing/eliminating feelings of shame and otherness as a result of living in a disfavored corporeal form) but the transhumanism is the long-term vision. The abolishment of unchosen bonds includes unchosen bodies.

I think you kind of miss the point. The people arguing that modern SJW ideology is descended from Marxism aren't wrong, but they are wrong when they think it's a direct and coherent lineage, and especially when some people seem to think that it's part of some grand master plan laid out by Gramsci and the Frankfurt school. (Or, going deeper down certain rabbit holes, a grand master plan by George Soros and Da Jooooooos!) Frankly, I think it is all fundamentally about resentment of the have nots against the haves, and this is essentially a parallel development. Marx built an entire economic theory around it, but without Marx, we'd still have people agitating for redistributive efforts and cutting down the tall poppies; they'd just use different labels.

Thus, arguing about whether "Cultural Marxism" is a thing or whether it's "really" Marxism seems pointless to me. Yes, "cultural Marxism" is a thing whether you call it that or something else; are "Cultural Marxists" actually trying to bring about a revolution of the proleteriat and the True Communism That Has Never Been Tried? Mostly not.

Most people (rightists and leftists) don't actually think about this very deeply the way us Motteian nerds do. The average SJW, including, I would wager, the chick who drew that "Kyriarchy" cartoon @FCfromSSC linked to, and the average right-winger railing about "cultural Marxism," cannot actually articulate what Marx espoused except in very general terms. The New Atheist/Christian analogy is apt; you're right that New Atheists smugly declaring they know the Bible better than the Christians they're arguing with were very obnoxious, but they were frequently correct.

The problem with the "Cultural Marxist" label is that it just reads as a cheap low-effort pejorative. "Commie" is still a dirty word in America, and calling SJWs "Cultural Marxists" reads as "Hurr hurr you commie!" It reminds me of right-wingers claiming every Democratic president ever was actually a communist.

There is of course a visible shift happening now where the left is using the same tactics to call every conservative "far right" and every Republican a "fascist." Boomerang back to conservatives claiming Nazis were actually leftists.

It's sloppy thinking all around, and while @FCfromSSC wrote a very thoughtful post tracing the lineage from Marx to Everyday Feminism, most critics don't and can't. (Freddie DeBoer, everyone's favorite anti-woke actual Marxist, is constantly driving himself crazy(er) trying to explain how everyone on the right and the left is Wrong About Everything.)

Yes, "cultural Marxism" is a thing whether you call it that or something else; are "Cultural Marxists" actually trying to bring about a revolution of the proleteriat and the True Communism That Has Never Been Tried? Mostly not.

The people who fit this description in the strongest sense believe that the Cultural aspect has superseded the OG economic analysis of Marx; mostly they probably don't think about that at all, or maybe endorse some sort of MMT in which debt doesn't matter and therefore needn't stand in their way. Not sure how much they think about their desired end-state either, but my impression is that it looks less like a dictatorship of the proletariat and more like a dictatorship of them personally -- maybe we can switch the name to "Cultural Stalinism"?

plan

What of the march through the institutions, the endless attempts at entryism?

Frankly, I think it is all fundamentally about resentment of the have nots against the haves, and this is essentially a parallel development.

The Frankfurt school brings a memeplex that the solution is obvious, and those in-the-know just have to keep reiterating why the problem is bad until people come around.

But it's also postmodern and Gnostic. The one unifying agreement is that everything is white cis-hetero patriarchal capitalist—our modern Yaldabaoth. That Everyday Feminism comic is reminding you that even if you think that you have gained knowledge and escaped, you probably haven't. There's always more work to do.

but they are wrong when they think it's a direct and coherent lineage

What exactly do you mean by this? If there isn't a direct and coherent lineage, why can I literally draw a straight line from Marx to Gramsci to the Frankfurt School to people who self-labelled as Cultural Marxist to Critical Theory to all the stuff that people complain about when they talk about SJWs? If that's not a direct and coherent lineage, what is?

The problem with the "Cultural Marxist" label is that it just reads as a cheap low-effort pejorative.

How is that my problem? Maybe they should have picked a better name?

https://music.ishkur.com

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music discusses various ways that music genres grab ideas from other music genres. Or enthusiasts take a particular element from one genre and put it front-and-center into new tracks, making it distinctive enough to be its own genre. Calling this process "direct and coherent" would overstate things.

Same process here.

(I suppose that "Cultural Marxism" is roughly equivalent to the hearing "Oh, you listen to disco?", back in the day.)

(I suppose that "Cultural Marxism" is roughly equivalent to the hearing "Oh, you listen to disco?", back in the day.)

In another comment, somewhat to my surprise actually, I've found and linked that a woman who was unironically using the term "cultural marxism" to describe her own ideas back in the '80s, has recently published a book about Critical Pedagogy. If you follow the likes of Chris Rufo and James Lindsay, you'll see that Critical Pedagogy is a decent chunk of what they're raging against. I don't know about you, but "written by literally the same people" is hard to beat in terms of "direct and coherent lineage" in my book.

I'm saying the average SJW/woke posting BLM flags and talking about trans rights is not a "cultural Marxist" in a coherent manner and literally wouldn't know what you mean by calling them a Marxist (or they'd laugh at you because they kind of know what Marxism is and don't consider themselves to be one). You can argue their ideas are influenced by Marxism, which is true, but true in the same way we all swim downstream of Marxism, Christianity, and all the other memeplexes in our culture. I'm saying calling them "Cultural Marxists" is only very vaguely accurate and not very useful except as a boo word. (And of course boo words are pretty useful as rhetorical devices, but annoying to people who actually pick apart what words mean.)

How is that my problem? Maybe they should have picked a better name?

If by "they" you mean the people who actually call themselves Cultural Marxists, obviously they wouldn't contest the label, but they are a small percentage of the people you typically attach it to.

I'm saying the average SJW/woke posting BLM flags and talking about trans rights is not a "cultural Marxist" in a coherent manner and literally wouldn't know what you mean by calling them a Marxist (or they'd laugh at you because they kind of know what Marxism is and don't consider themselves to be one).

What do you mean by "lineage" then? I'd say that by definition it must include people from who woke SJW BLM-flag-posters derived their beliefs.

If by "they" you mean the people who actually call themselves Cultural Marxists, obviously they wouldn't contest the label, but they are a small percentage of the people you typically attach it to.

I mean people who used to call themselves Cultural Marxists. Some of them still hold on to the label, others seem to have moved on. In any case a lineage, the way I understand the term, exists, and is direct and coherent.

What do you mean by "lineage" then? I'd say that by definition it must include people from who woke SJW BLM-flag-posters derived their beliefs.

Maybe it's my bubble, but most of the SJW BLM-flag-posters I know are liberal Christians/former Christians, the sort who if they go to church at all anymore go to one with rainbow flags, or a UU congregation. They would argue passionately that their beliefs are derived from Christianity and what Jesus taught, and I don't think that is less accurate than saying their beliefs are derived from Marx. (There has long been a strain of liberal Christianity arguing that what Jesus preached was in fact a sort of proto-Marxism.) That many traditional Christians would vehemently argue otherwise is no more relevant than Freddie DeBoer saying they aren't "really" Marxists.

My point here is that calling a woke trans rights activist a "Cultural Marxist" is not much different than calling a MAGA a fascist.

I mean people who used to call themselves Cultural Marxists. Some of them still hold to the label, others seem to have moved on. In any case a lineage, the way I understand the term, exists, and is direct and coherent.

Are you talking about individual people who literally called themselves Cultural Marxists, or are you claiming the entire movement (for some value of "movement") used to call itself Cultural Marxism? Because there might be some of the former, though I don't know who you are referring to, but if you mean the latter, no, I don't think there is some single coherent movement that used to be known as "Cultural Marxism" and has now relabeled itself BLM, woke, trans rights, etc.

My point here is that calling a woke trans rights activist a "Cultural Marxist" is not much different than calling a MAGA a fascist.

Well, this is getting a bit confusing because when 4bpp tried conflating "wokness" / Cultural Marxism with LGBT rights, I was the one that had to point out he's making a mistake. So I'm not sure why this point is directed at people who want to use the term "Cultural Marxism" rather than the people who are dissuading from it's use.

I hold that trans activism is Cultural-Marxism-agnostic, but that there is a strand inside it, that traces it's lineage to Cultural Marxism. Or are you saying that when the WPATH name drops "intersectionality", "power and privilege", or "minority stress", those ideas are derived from Christianity?

but if you mean the latter, no, I don't think there is some single coherent movement that used to be known as "Cultural Marxism" and has now relabeled itself BLM, woke, trans rights, etc.

Trans rights is a broader term that includes non-Cultural-Marxism-derived ideas, but if we go with Queer Theory, BLM, and "woke", all of it sprouts from "Critical Theory" which is the politically correct (for now) term for what was once known as Cultural Marxism. If you don't want to call it Cultural Marxism anymore, I'm ok with that, but the idea that there isn't a direct and coherent lineage from ideas commonly known as "woke" to Critical Theory and from there to Cultural Marxism seems just flatly wrong to me. I'd even be willing to bet that even your friends who swear they got those ideas directly from Jesus, took some kind of a Critical Theory course at some point in their lives.

many people seem determined to defend the honor of Karl Marx

As I laid out in the last paragraphs of this reply, my main concern in this discussion is that the right not recapitulate the type of sloppy thinking that I find so obnoxious about the left. I raised two issues regarding what I see as fallacious thinking:

  1. The tendency to refer to every idea on the left as "Marxist" seems to me to be analogous to the left's tendency to call everything they don't like "fascism". Describing every non-leftist position as fascist is simply incorrect; and it is similarly incorrect to describe all leftism as Marxism. Let me put it this way: can someone subscribe to a typical woke agenda (trans surgeries for minors, mandatory racial diversity quotas, the need to overthrow the patriarchy and empower women, etc) and not be a Marxist? Or has (what is alleged to be) the historical provenance of those ideas made them intrinsically and permanently Marxist?

  2. I believe that the right's preoccupation with "cultural Marxism" carries with it an implicit assumption that without Karl Marx, none of this would be happening. If we just didn't have those darn radical Marxist professors who were giving our kids bad ideas, then men would still be men and women would still be women, racial minorities would be at peace, Jesus would reign and everyone would be happy. And I think that assumption is simply based on mistaken models of history, psychology, and politics. It's the right's version of "if only Trump supporters weren't brainwashed by Russian bots, then they would see that Trump is a threat to democracy just like we do". It fails to take seriously the notion that different people really do just think fundamentally different than you, and that their ideas aren't just random bullshit, but are instead a response to actual real conditions. Woke ideas wouldn't be as popular as they are if people didn't find them genuinely appealing, independent of whatever authority figures endorse them.

Let me put it this way: can someone subscribe to a typical woke agenda (trans surgeries for minors, mandatory racial diversity quotas, the need to overthrow the patriarchy and empower women, etc) and not be a Marxist?

Oh, certainly! The trans surgeries for minors things seems more driven by the medical establishment’s desire to make huge amounts of money off of trans people - and to a lesser extent by transhumanists using trans surgeries as a foot in the door to different types of alterations of the human form - than it does by Marxism. Racial diversity quotas are isomorphic to the kinds of ethnic spoils systems that have existed in tons of multiethnic/multiracial empires throughout history. And the shattering of patriarchy and empowerment of women has been a recurring strain of thought in several religious traditions - for example, Baha’i - and liberal philosophical movements. However, I would say that the specific framing that sees sex relations as an explicit dialectical class conflict between two competing groups is distinctly Marxist.

Or has (what is alleged to be) the historical provenance of those ideas made them intrinsically and permanently Marxist?

I think it’s plainly true that the vast majority of the people who actually achieved the real-world implementation of these ideas, whether in the U.S., Europe, Latin America, or Asia, were Marxists and were doing so because they were Marxist. It’s true that they also could have arrived at these ideas by other paths - they just didn’t. Martin Luther King was a closeted communist, and his speeches were likely ghostwritten by Stanley Levison, his handler and fundraiser, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. These activists were overwhelmingly motivated by an explicit commitment to Marxism. That doesn’t even mean all of their ideas were wrong! I don’t think Marxists are wrong about everything! It’s just an accurate description of the provenance of their ideas.

I believe that the right's preoccupation with "cultural Marxism" carries with it an implicit assumption that without Karl Marx, none of this would be happening.

Right, so to a large extent I agree with this whole paragraph. If it hadn’t been Karl Marx developing these ideas, it would have been someone else. Hell, Marx was only one of a number of commentators writing about similar ideas at the time, reacting to the same influences and in discussion with each other. MLK and the other major figures behind the Civil Rights movement were communists, but they clearly won by appealing to pre-existing moral sentiments and vulnerabilities present among liberal Christians. Magnus Hirschfeld, one of the seminal figures in early gay right activism and the man who founded the medical institute that performed the first sex-reassignment surgeries in history, was a socialist, and Harry Hay, a very influential American gay rights activist, was a long-time member of the Communist Party. However, these men were building on, and in ongoing dialogue with, thinkers who were coming from totally different and non-Marxist philosophical backgrounds. Many of these movements are natural extensions of ideas contained within the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.

I think it’s important to tease out the provenance of these ideas very carefully and to find a way to rescue what’s good about them while discarding all of the Marxist class-struggle garbage that accumulated around them. That requires being very honest about not only the fact that it was Marxists leading the way on most of them, but also why that was the case and how to wrest control of them away from Marxists moving forward.

but they clearly won by appealing to pre-existing moral sentiments and vulnerabilities present among liberal Christians.

In an American context referring to 'liberal Christianity' pre-Roe v Wade ranges on a narrow spectrum from potentially misleading to flat out false. The clearest throughline is from churches opposed to eugenics and churches teaching socially conservative doctrines today, and these weren't particularly present on the segregationist side- indeed, the largest, the Roman Catholic Church, excommunicated members who engaged in segregationist advocacy.

It's better to say that Christianity's discomfort with racial inferiority aligned with liberal activists. There were Christians on both sides, but the civil rights movement was much more religious than the segregationists- and it's notable that many of the segregationists had a change of heart when they found Jesus later on in life(yes, racism was now deeply unfashionable, but Christianity coincided with repudiation of racism in most of these cases).

Much of this discussion about historical uses of "cultural Marxism" in the literature is irrelevant, or at least to me. If the name had never been used before and was invented yesterday, then I would think it a very good description of the ideology that we might clumsily refer to as wokism, critical theory, SJWism, etc. I suspect that the name has likely been reinvented multiple times by different people with no idea of its historical use, because it succinctly captures the basic idea--Marxist style analyses but with economic categories substituted with cultural categories. No other name is so accurate while also being easily understood.

It helps that most cultural Marxists are also, at least implicitly or vaguely, economic Marxists. They seem to assume that something approximating economic Marxism will be the downstream consequence of their cultural Marxist project, though they don't forefront it in their rhetoric. More concretely, cultural Marxists are anti-capitalist, at least in principle, even while often living comfortably within a quasi-capitalist system. Their general idea seem to be something like using capitalism to destroy capitalism from the inside, and a big part of that is pushing cultural Marxism to undermine the foundations of capitalism. The "late stage capitalism" talk is related.

Orthodox Marxists seem to regard this as folly. In their view, the cultural Marxists have been captured by and are now unwittingly serving their enemies. They may talk in Marxist-like rhetoric and language, but they divide the people and strengthen capital with their frivolous social status games.

The name "cultural Marxist" is a really good name. I don't care if orthodox Marxists like that association.

I think the problem is that the meme of calling things "cultural Marxism", while useful in persuading some people, is also a bit of a self-own by right-wingers because it can turn off people who care about a higher level of intellectual rigor than calling their opponents names. The term is historically imprecise. Leftism, feminism, the struggle for racial equality, blank slatism, and so on all pre-date Marx and would exist even if Marx had never existed, and I see no reason to think that without Marx, they would not eventually have developed militant dogmatic offshoots that are similar to today's SJW ideology. You can already see a large fraction of the modern leftist ideology in the French Revolution, thirty years before Marx was born. Marxism is a specific type of leftism. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that 99% of the people who use the term "cultural Marxism" have never read a page of Marx. So why use this term? Why not come up with an equally potent one, but one that is also more accurate, so that it does not seem weird to people who know a lot about history?

Now it is true that much of the modern left in the West, in its specific form, derives from the New Left of the 1960s, which was in many ways a reaction by actual American Marxists to the traumatic realization that Stalin's USSR was a horrific society that practiced atrocities on a mass scale, and was also maybe in some ways a reaction to the realization that economic leftism had little chance of succeeding in America's prosperous society - hence, as a consequence, the left shifted to emphasizing the struggle of the Third World against imperialism, of black people against oppression in the US, of women against oppression by men, and so on. But this shift happened almost 70 years ago. I am not sure that today's SJWs can really be described as Marxist in any other than a tangential way. There are still genuine Marxists around... there are entire subreddits full of them... but they make up a pretty small fraction of modern Western leftists.

was also maybe in some ways a reaction to the realization that economic leftism had little chance of succeeding in America's prosperous society

This was far more of a factor than any shock about Stalin. Remember, they switched to supporting mao and the Khmer Rouge right after, so it's not like a few famines and executions upset them.
The whole point of third world maoist new leftism was that the working class of Western countries had betrayed the revolution and were now class enemies just like the capitalists. The French like Sartre and Fanon* made this explicit, the weathermen and the rest of the "days of rage" gang followed, and ultimately we got "Settlers: the myth of the white proletariat" calling for the extermination of oppressor races.

This is also the answer to the question "why do they love Haitians so much", which I've been meaning to post cites for.

Leftists sneering at people for noticing this while they literally have "read Settlers!!!" in their twitter bios is one reason I've moved from thinking debate is possible and healthy to a completely exterminationist stance.

* "Sartre began to argue that the European working classes were too apolitical to carry out the revolution predicated by Marx, and influenced by Frantz Fanon started to argue it was the impoverished masses of the Third World, the "real damned of the earth", who would carry out the revolution"

90% familiar with (it's hard to escape when you have any interaction at all with left-leaning meme groups), maybe 15% an unironic user, 30% were an unironic user at some point in the past. This might be because most of the SJWs I know are ones who "made it" - they have tenure or at least are so embedded in the community that it would cause a scandal among their allies if they did not get it, or well-paying and stable admin jobs, or work as some form or another of creative consultant.

In my impression that term is mostly popular with 20-30somethings going through a phase of post-leaving-the-nest poverty, where the necessity to pay for Netflix premium, takeout and instagrammable experiences leaves them somewhat squeezed on the housing side; as such, it is tightly associated with violent fantasies towards landlords. Those who largely get their college life arranged and paid for don't use it unless they need to fit into some poorer crowd. Every time I see it on my Boomerbook wall, I have to fight the urge to respond with something like "what if I told you that this is actually still only the early stage".

Wait, was this meant to be a reply to something in the "Cultural Marxism" thread a couple of top-level posts down?

It seems obvious to me that a supermajority of the people promulgating Social Justice theory believe that they are performing some combination of extending, expanding, or (for the truly arrogant) correcting Marxism, quite explicitly

I really doubt this. Well, I doubt the explicitly part.

The median SJW(let’s use a simple descriptor instead of a politically correct neologism) does not know about his(ok, her, but I’m going to start making a point of using the generic masculine) ideology’s descent from Marxism. And usually doesn’t care to. SJW complaints have little upfront economic class valence; race gender and sexuality are prima facia, and any characterization of their opponents as wealthy is a) not that different from republicans calling their opponents elite and b) usually wrapped up in some alternative descriptor, like ‘white’ or ‘male’. And while lots of SJW ideologies are realistically better modeled as class interest movements- mainstream feminism in particular resolves a lot of its internal contradictions out once you realize that it’s specifically a movement in favor of educated, urban girl bosses, and has little to offer(and doesn’t want more)for poor women, rural woman, housewives, etc- the main contribution of Marxism to SJW thought is the ability to rationalize opposition.

See, Marx was a theorist of economics. His economic ideas are wrong, obviously- see holodomor, the, great leap forwards, the, cultural Revolution, the, people’s republic of Cambodia, the, etc, etc- but his critical insight was that economic interests influence historical processes more than individual great men, and so it follows that if you understand economic interest well enough you can derive psychohistory from it, Hari Seldon style.

Obviously this is stupid but it’s like crack to ivory tower academics. Fortunately Marx provides epicycles upon epicycles for when this psychohistory is fake. And SJW thought is, in a lot of cases, derived from pounding a square peg of something that actually exists(yes, there is such a thing as patriarchy, and yes, there’s plenty of people who view blacks poorly) into the round hole necessary for it to be a Marxist epicycle. But the median SJW doesn’t know or care about the kyriarchy being a Marxian concept of the opiate of the masses- I mean the kyriarchy is also fake, but that’s besides the point.

Based on you experience, how likely is such a person to be familiar with and use the term "late stage capitalism"? My experience would be that it is very likely; does yours differ?

My experience does not differ.

If they do use that term, what do they mean by it?

It comes from Orthodox Marxism, which predicts that humanity progresses through different "modes of production", one of which is Capitalism, which will inevitably be replaced by Socialism and then Communism. "Late Stage Capitalism" is basically just hyping up the inevitably end of capitalism that Marxists believe will occur, because they're alleging that we're already past the early and middle and thus are in the "late" part of it.

It's pretty much the commie version of the Millenarian Christian "End Times". One says we're living in Late Capitalism because they're prophesizing the second coming of Communism. The other says we're living in the End Times because they're prophesizing the second coming of Jesus.

I will investigate the construction of anxiety as mental disorder in the context of neoliberal late-stage capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and biomedical psychiatry.

Worth adding that "neoliberal" here is effectively a meaningless snarl word when used by these groups, used to refer not just to something like Milton Friedman's beliefs, but to pretty much anything they dislike including, in one thing I read, String Theory. You can mentally replace it with "nasty" and no information will be lost. Or more precisely, they end up calling random stuff neoliberal because they believe all not-explicitly-Marxisdt scientific theories produced under our current culture is just discourse serving power.

It seems obvious to me that the various branches of Social Justice theory are, to a first approximation, direct descendants of Marxism. It seems obvious to me that a supermajority of the people promulgating Social Justice theory believe that they are performing some combination of extending, expanding, or (for the truly arrogant) correcting Marxism, quite explicitly.

Many of them, yes. But some of the rest ascribe to what Marx would have called "Utopian Socialism" which can be summarised as dood, what if like, we were all equal and shit. With no further theory. In other words they just don't like capitalism but have no ideology which they want to replace it with.

Since you've mentioned feminism so much, a useful distinction is that some Social Justice advocates who are into feminism are not Marxist Feminists, but instead Radical Feminists (which confusingly are two different things). The former is more popular in the US while the latter is more popular in the UK. Marxist feminists believe oppression of women is due to capitalism while Radical feminists believe it is due to gender roles imposed by men. And the former seeks to resolve it by abolishing capitalism while the latter want to abolish gender roles. This is basically the cause of the TERF wars. the Radical Feminist desire to abolish gender roles conflicts with the desire of trans people to uphold them, if not outright making trans people worse than the general population out of some sense that they are traitors, or even more entrenched in gender roles than anyone else. Hence TERF is a bit of a redundant term - it is incoherent to be RF and not also TE, and the self-proclaimed RFs that are pro-trans are only so as a consequence of something between burying their head in the sand and being bullied into silence. The Marxist feminists don't have that same ideological incompatibility, more likely to see Trans people as allies because they can rally them to the overthrow capitalism cause.

On the one hand, there is a faction of people who are doctrinaire Marxists, who consider themselves to be committed adherents to the cause and who are constantly overhauling their propaganda in pursuit of the same goal they've always hand - the formation of a permanent communist society. Sometimes this means playing the poor against the rich, sometimes the blacks against the whites, etc. I won't argue with that, I think it's true.

But in addition to that group, I think that anyone who thinks even slightly about society realises at some point that you have to start talking about groups and group interests. And it was Marx who formulated the great original theory of group interests. In that way I think Marx is to societal organisation what Nietzsche is to moral philosophy - he dominates the topic such that anyone who approaches that topic finds themselves discussing it in his terms. So feminists want to talk about the different and sometimes conflicting interests of men and women, and they cast around for suitable language to think about the problem in, and Marx's class conflict ideas come readily to hand. Likewise disabled people who want to talk about the deaf vs. the hearing find themselves thinking in terms of class and oppression. Or trans people talking about themselves in the language of gay liberation, despite the obvious conflicts - that language was in the water.

I've noted before that when the modern-day dissident right want to talk about the cultural dominance of the left, they often do so in leftist terms, talking about narratives and simulacra and manufacturing consent. Same thing. Those formulations come easily to mind because the left happened to be talking about them first. When I want to talk about nationalism and belonging, I end up with things like 'blood and soil' because that's the first place the mind goes and it's a good phrase.

I think if you're not careful, or if you're committed to the formalism that academia forces on you, this causes you to tangle up your original thoughts with previous movements. For example if you're an early feminist and you want to make waves, and you're already thinking in somewhat Marxist terms for the reasons given above, you're probably going to publish your articles in Marxist journals. They already exist, and they have a good readership, and your ideas are pretty compatible with the stuff they already want to take about. And this association keeps strengthening, and it becomes very difficult to find feminists who aren't Marxists, or so heavily associated with Marxists that it's hard to tell them apart. If you liked, perhaps you could think of this as 'directed' and 'grassroots' or something.

On a separate note, I heard somewhere that late stage capitalism referred to capitalism that has moved on from building things in factories to an economy that trades primarily in ideas and financial derivates. No idea if that's true or not.

Where does the idea of "Late-stage Capitalism" come from? What are the other stages?

I don't know for certain since I don't have the time nor resources to verify, but I do believe the ideas are a continuation from Deleuzes Societies of Control. The general idea late-stage capitalism is that capitalism controls us through various means, and there is some truth to that because of corporations we can't have any discussion we want on Reddit for example. The problem is the parasitic ideas of neomarxism has tagged along with it.


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