site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10624 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Tucker Carlson appearing on Joe Rogan experience speculated that UAPs are real, but are not alien visitors from other planets but supernatural in origin and always has been here. More recently he claimed to have been mauled by a demon in his sleep, which resulted in physical marks (more probable culprit - one of four dogs in the room?). His suspected demonic activity today - the invention of nuclear weapons:

I have never met a person who can isolate the moment when nuclear technology became known to man. So, where did it come from exactly? ... it's very clear to me these are demonic.

Why are apparently kooky beliefs entertained by top influencers on the right? Cadence Owens also came out as dinosaur truther and flat-earth curious.

Is Tucker trying to become the next Alex Jones? Is this part of an op to associate historical revisionism and opposition to the ruling regime with insanity?

RationalWiki used to call this "crank magnetism": people who are receptive to one "crazy" opinion rarely limit themselves to just that. In other words, "don't be so open-minded your brain falls out". I'm not linking to RationalWiki, because it's RationalWiki.

Another way of framing it is that once you've established that conventional wisdom on some topic is wrong (perhaps even knowingly wrong i.e. the powers that be know what the truth is and are keeping it from you), it's only natural to wonder what other topics are so affected. To name but two people, Graham Linehan and Lionel Shriver have both admitted that realising the extent to which the mainstream lied to them about the transgender issue (as they see it) has made them sceptical about whether climate change is real.

Why are apparently cooky beliefs entertained by top influencers on the right?

Zvi calls this the Incorrect Anti-Narrative Contrarian Cluster, and he's had a post about it in IOU status for nearly three years.

Part of the answer has got to be "the right is highly suspicious of running sanity gatekeeping, because all the institutions which were supposed to do that went rogue and abused their power to shut the right out of the conversation".

(Also, you mean "kooky".)

I wonder if he got the idea from the Demon Core.

I have never met a person who can isolate the moment when nuclear technology became known to man.

I've never met Mr Carlson, but I could isolate several moments as potential candidates.

Candace Owens is into the weirder end of YEC. This is epicycles on an established set of beliefs that are mandatory among a particular subset of the population. Really, you’re surprised that YEC epicycle beliefs are common among far right pundits?

Claiming demonic experiences is also common-ish among very conservative Christians, so tucker getting into this stuff isn’t strange.

Candace Owens is into the weirder end of YEC.

I believe there's nothing genuine at all in Candace Owens' public persona, no genuine belief to analyze there at all.

She suddenly appeared as a "personality" during Gamergate when she tried to claim some ground on the anti-Gamergate side, found herself run out of it after encroaching on another leftist grifter's turf, realized that there's much more alpha in being a black woman right-winger, so after a week she came back as a pro-Gamergate grifter instead.

Someone genuinely moving from one side to the other is certainly possible, but I'm deeply suspicious one would do it within a week. It took me years. Hence since then I just dismiss her as an obvious grifter.

She made some high-commitment lifestyle changes since then, though. Someone in her position getting into YEC esoterica and Holocaust denial out of general historical revisionism is basically what I would expect if those changes were genuine. She’ll be tweeting about ancient Atlantean colonies on mars any day now.

She married a handsome Englishman with a big country house and a hundred million dollar inheritance coming down the pipeline. I suppose that counts as “high commitment”, but my guess is that both the before Candace and the after Candace would have taken that deal, politics aside. The Holocaust denial, YEC conspiracies and extreme esoteric weird online stuff seems more a consequence of being at home in a foreign country with a phone and babies for company; even her father in law denounced the antisemitism quite publicly, so I think it’s more on her than on her tradcath milieu for now.

The Holocaust denial, YEC conspiracies and extreme esoteric weird online stuff seems more a consequence of being at home in a foreign country with a phone and babies for company;

Man, when did kids go from asking why is the sky blue to "I don't get it, mama, how can you dispose of so many bodies in such short time? They didn't have enough crematoriums in Auschwitz, it makes no sense, mama!"?

Funny, but you know what I mean, she was already a clearly ultra-online person and in my experience new mothers at home with babies often go even deeper into whatever very online space they were in before they gave birth. Usually this is just celebrity gossip, astrology woo, fanfiction, a video game, whatever, but in Candace’s case it was clearly the schizo side of DR twitter (presumably she avoided the mainstream side because of racism) which intersects heavily with the Alex Jones verse, which itself intersects with YEC, David Ike lizard people, flat earth etc.

I totally believe this but she’s also buying into the kind of schizophrenia you get in the actual IRL tradcath esoteric paranoid schizo verse, very specifically.

Wait, you're telling me Cadence Owens is with the Schizocore Hyperboria video crowd now?

tradcath esoteric paranoid schizo verse

Any rec's on twitter accounts or blogs I can follow for lulz. This is kind of turning into my soap opera stand-in.

More comments

Funny, but you know what I mean,

Yes, but I like my version better.

There has always been an element of the intelligence community plugged into weird supernaturalist subcultures involving UFOs and poltergeists and the like; some of you may remember Jason Jorjani and the attempt to legitimize (and co-opt) the derogatory term of the ‘alt-right’ pre-Charlottesville and its connection to Spencer, Bannon, and the like. The whole interesting part of that affair that many ignore would be the fact that Jorjani testifies to an MI-6 agent tied to Erik Prince originally roping him into that mess under the pretenses of being a “British member of the Vril Society” whose interests involved back-engineering Nazi time-travel tech. The field of UFOlogy speaks of rumors of high-ranking evangelical intelligence officials whose far-reaching and high-impact beliefs include the claims of UFOs being demons attempting to deceive the world into apostatizing from the true faith of Christ Jesus™ (Protestant Christianity), and Michael Flynn (the previous director of the DIA) being at least a certain type of person who gets power in those positions isn’t exactly lending any credence against opposing viewpoints.

Tucker might be an extension of the same belief system, insofar as this isn’t intended as some psychological operation on the part of whomever believes in the specific claims thereof (most Christians, like Tucker, believe in some version of them), but it might unintentionally act as one. That some intelligence operatives are using this to their betterment has no doubt, but that then goes to the general question of most psyop-based explanations for the current UFO craze: why? Why push demon-aliens in flying discs zapping people? It doesn’t make that much sense.

Many (most?) complex civilizations “believed in” personifications of bad behavioral inclinations and social forces, and they called them evil spirits or demons. IMO the utility of personifying invisible forces is that humans are excellent at memorizing characters with personalities, but not lists of assertions or principles. It’s easier to persuade oneself not to eat too much cake when it’s a question of obeying an ugly demon who tempts you with thoughts and who has tempted you before, versus some hazy self-negotiation involving delayed gratification and self-reward. Demons also center a person’s moral identity: your true identity always wants the longterm good, and the demons are what tempt you (not “another part of me wants…” which is sort of depersonalizing). If the intel community is religious and interested in civilization-crafting then maybe they want to bring back angels and demons? Linking UFOs to unknown forces takes the public’s interests away from futuristic cia crafts and onto spiritual concerns. Plausibly, the same org that is so high-tech that it can make UFOs is also so smart that they see no merit in a population overly concerned with mind-boggling military technology.

This is somewhat similar as a hypothesis to what’s been floated in terms of all these things being engineered to increase the religiosity of the nation in order to save as many souls as possible in the long-term (and also to defend against the ‘ultimate deception’ of the antichrist). Nick Redfern’s Final Events has a similar perspective to this in terms of being in contact with a group within the intelligence community that actually believes that this is the right thing to do, and what ought to happen, due to their belief that there actually does exist a real unexplainable phenomenon deemed to be “extraterrestrial” by the larger populace that is actually demonic in nature. Incidentally, the late Old Testament scholar Michael Heiser believed he had encountered the same group of intelligence officers going to various theologians and airing their conflicting feelings about what they had done in such an affair. Whatever’s happening, it’s probably at minimum as weird as Michael Flynn going on camera with his family saying the QAnon oath and never elaborating. (Based?)

This thread you started is fascinating btw, just thanking you.

Personally I'm starting to believe demons might actually exist. Who knows?

The space of possible minds is exceedingly large; the space of possible disembodied minds (if such a thing is granted as possible) seems much more vast than embodied minds purely mathematically given the limitations of the permutations of matter; if Yudkowsky is correct, the vast majority of mind-space is populated by hopelessly alien minds operating on opaque decision-theories; if Scott is correct, the vast majority of actualized civilizations taken randomly from the space of all possible minds fall victim to an inexorable entropic coordination problem which isn’t just limited to embodied minds, but also disembodied ones (cf. acausal trade); depending on your theory of anthropics, coordination problems in universes with vaster mind-spaces would be preferred over ones with smaller mind-spaces, etc.

You can also tie this into simulation arguments, extortion from counterfactual agents, or whatever else, to create whatever rational™ defense of “non-local molochian agents” you want, but if it walks like a demon and talks like a demon, it probably is a demon. Jonathan Pageau analogizes the EA metaphor for picking the right mind out of a vast mindspace of minds oriented towards the great-filter of Moloch (what Yudkowsky posits as “demon summoning”, which is much easier than “angel summoning”) as “Sauron building his body from the corruptive power of the ring” which isn’t that far off from the more recondite discussions of alignment I’ve seen.

Okay yes but they don't actually visit us. Even if this is all true, the people seeing demons in this worldline are still crazy.

If you’re interested in alien minds, you might want to investigate Catholic doctrines on the psychology of angels.

I don't normally post AI summaries, but this one is unsettling:

"Key aspects of angelic psychology in Catholic doctrine include:

"Intellect and Knowledge

  • Angels possess pure intellect without need for sensory input
  • They understand through direct intuition rather than reasoning from premises to conclusions
  • Their knowledge is innate rather than learned over time
  • They cannot change their minds once they've made a decision (hence the permanence of Lucifer's rebellion)

Time and Consciousness

  • Angels exist outside physical time but can interact with temporal events
  • Their consciousness is not sequential like human thought
  • They can apprehend multiple concepts simultaneously rather than sequentially

Would you like me to elaborate on any of these aspects? I find the medieval philosophical arguments about how pure intelligences might function to be particularly fascinating."

Excuse me. I'm going to have to inspect my CUDA code for signs of the holy ghost.

The text above describes a mind eerily similar to the ones we summon transiently in LLM activations.

"Let's think step by step," the angel said dubiously.

I’m somewhat familiar with that from what I’ve read from St. Maximus and Fr. Lagrange; do you have any recommendations?

Commenting here so I can also get the recommendations.

(I love collecting somewhat strange books like this)

One of the most enduring constants in UFOlogy is that people who go down the UFO rabbit hole often find that it stares back (yeah yeah it's a horrible mixed metaphor.) I uh didn't realize that Erik Prince had been tied to back-engineering Nazi time-travel technology, though, so thanks for the spare link to peruse.

UFOs are very interesting because the intelligence agencies either have pretty hard proof or they don't, but I find it interesting that there does seem to be such an overlap within the intelligence community between people who are "into" UFOs and people who are "into" stuff like poltergeists. If you had e.g. satellite imagery of a UFO reentering the atmosphere, presumably you wouldn't connect that to woo stuff like remote viewing, but we live in a world with people like Hal Putoff and Lue Elizondo.

Makes you wonder what they know (Grush referred to UFOs as "inter-dimensional," which has been the conjecture of leading UFOlogists like Jacques Vallee – who of course has his own ties to intelligence agencies) – or if they don't know and it's just weird topics attract weird thinkers.

I suspect there's actually something to the weird, but I think it's also important to note that a good intelligence operative is probably very good at making connections between seemingly unrelated things. Seems quite likely that intelligence agencies are brim-full of people who are very good at reading a lot into very small amounts of data, which pays of spectacularly when they're right...and also when they're wrong.

What puts me off of UAPs and the idea that “they have proof” is just how little physical evidence of life, not intelligent life, just plain ordinary life, exists. The best the Pro-UAP can do is a plausible fossilized bacteria sample found on Mars. They have no ships, megastructures, signals, planets with obvious life-signs. It doesn’t surprise me that people into UAPs are into non physical phenomena as they need some plausible way to explain how these things exist without leaving physical proof.

I think the idea that UAP are necessarily connected to extraterrestrial lifeforms is wrong. We could have a ship full of dead bodies in a hangar at Area 51 and still have no proof of extraterrestrial life. Likewise, if we detect a megastructure around a nearby star that's the product of alien life, it doesn't prove anything about UAP.

The best theory continues being that the US government employs a lot of people and does not actually have very strong gatekeeping, so weirdos (of the type that would convince themselves that they have seen UFO evidence, or perhaps make up a story for grift/wishful thinking and come to believe it for real) can get in and thrive. Every time these characters (Lazar, Elizondo, Grusch...) are brought up, what jumps out at me is how obviously different their manner of speech and even their names sound from "serious" members of the US military that are quoted on "serious" topics - the Mearsheimers, Gradies and Saltzmans, inevitably of Jewish, Nordic or sometimes Irish extraction, patrician-sounding first names and middle initials. This alone suggests that there is some ethnic-cultural divide at play here, and the UFO crowd might be different enough from normal spokespeople that heuristics of trustworthiness and willingness to make stuff up which were trained on official communication would not actually be valid.

Christopher K. Mellon (former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Irish descent) doesn't just have a patrician-sounding first name and middle initial, he's a member of an old patrician family (the Mellons), and he's one of the main drivers on the UAP topic. John Ratcliffe (former Director of National Intelligence, English extraction I guess?), John Brennan (former Director of the CIA, Irish descent), H.R. McMaster (former National Security Advisor, Scottish extraction I presume), Avril Haines (Director of National Intelligence, Jewish on her mother's side), Mark A. Milley (Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Irish), Timothy Gallaudet (Rear Admiral US Navy, French extraction I guess?), and Harald Malmgren (senior aide to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Nordic) have all publicly indicated that they take the UAP issue seriously, although some of them, like Haines and Milley, might feel under pressure from Congress to do so.

From what I've seen, the ethno-cultural divide, if there is one, are that the ones that I would view as patrician-types are often more refined in their presentation. Mellon is careful about what he says, although he indicates that he thinks that UAP are real and a serious concern. Haines, Milley, and McMaster say things like "there are puzzling things out there that we don't understand and are hard to get to the bottom of," Ratcliffe and Gallaudet refer to having seen direct video/photographic evidence, Brennan circumspectly suggests that UAP might be a type of life, and Malmgren – who is now almost 90 – decided to go on Twitter and tell the world that he was told about "otherworld technologies" by Richard Bissel (of the CIA and NRO). Perhaps Malmgren behaves a bit differently because (he says) he was never under an official oath – Bissel spoke to him informally. But I'd be genuinely interested in which of the above people you classify as "serious" and which you don't – I'm very interested in American ethnography, and it would make my day if you did an assessment of them.

On the UFO topic, I am inclined to agree that normal "heuristics of trustworthiness and willingness to make stuff up" don't apply. But I don't think that they apply to "serious" members of the US military on this topic either. People who are cleared into SAPs (special access programs) are, apparently, supposed to lie if directly asked about a SAP they are cleared into, and most of the people on the above list are or have been read into such programs. UFO fans often assume that this means that the people in the military who talk about UFOs are telling the truth and the people who are denying knowledge of them are lying, but I would remind people that the knife of deception may cut both ways.

Hm. Certainly cause for an update if accurate, but do these people make the same claims as the "little grey men" crowd around the people that I mentioned? My impression was that there was a separate push a few years ago around the "Tic Tac" videos, which was much more measured and ambiguous and had the vibes of some intel operation that is too 8D-chessy for me to understand, rather than actual hints of confirmed aliens. (Baiting someone into revealing or believing something? My favourite theory at the time was that some branch of the USG wanted to signal to the PRC that they may have developed tech for spoofing input to/coherently dazzling complex integrated sensor systems, by way of using it on their own during a training exercise) It makes sense that that sort of undertaking would get fire support from real top brass. Did any of the people you listed directly vouch for any member of the batch that I mentioned?

Off the top of my head (so I might get a few details wrong):

The Tic Tac videos were (essentially) an intel operation – it was Mellon, Elizondo and Company getting the UAP topic into the New York Times and into the public discourse. The actual incident had been publicly discussed (and IIRC even video footage released) well before it made it into the Times, but Team Mellon was able to get the footage released with a chain of custody and get their narrative into the big leagues. The goal of the operation (ostensibly) was to get people to take the UAP topic seriously. If there's a psyop, it seems to lead straight into the little grey men territory rather than just showing off advanced technology (although of course the US of A might want China to think it has a crashed flying saucer...)

  • Mellon wrote the forward to Lue's book. He's not necessarily vouching for all of the claims, but he seems to take them seriously. This is notable in my mind since he probably was behind the scenes helping write Congressional legislation around this stuff, and if you look at what Congress has been drafting it has, unironically, been stuff along the lines of "GIVE US THE ALIEN CRAFT."
  • Milley/Haines/McMaster/Brennan seem more to take e.g. the issue seriously, but haven't to my knowledge made claims along the lines of Grush or Elizondo. I believe Haines was open to the possibility of ET life being responsible for UAP sightings, and Brennan suggested UAP might be (or be the product of?) some form of life.
  • Ratcliffe basically said "we're picking up crazy signatures from classified intelligence capabilities" (I think he at least implied recon satellites, but he may have stated it outright.) I'm not as familiar with what Gallaudet said, but I think it was along similar lines – he had seen good footage or other evidence during his time in the navy. He might be open to the "little grey men" stuff but I don't think he claims to have firsthand experience.
  • I assume Malmgren used the term "otherworld technologies" on purpose. He said his informal briefing was "60+" years ago, so if there's an op to fool the PRC it's gone back decades (perhaps involving the 1952 UFO flap over D.C. and the 1971 treaty we signed with the USSR that mentions the risk from unidentified objects on early warning radars? Interestingly Nixon was president in '71, I wonder if Malmgren was involved in that treaty.) Note that Malmgren has said he has no firsthand experience, it seems like (he claims) Bissel informally brought him up to speed in case it ever came up. Which of course raises the possibility that Bissel was just lying (or of course that Malmgren is lying, but I dunno why he would bother).

I uh didn't realize that Erik Prince had been tied to back-engineering Nazi time-travel technology, though, so thanks for the spare link to peruse.

It’s pretty funny to word it that way, but you should also probably watch the opening segments of this new interview of Jorjani when you have the time even if a lot of the things said in it is batshit crazy. Any conspiracy you can imagine, he touches on; remote viewing, time-traveling Nazi breakaway-civilizations, crash-retrieval UFO programs, future unaligned ASI simulating our pasts, etc. are not spared. The crazy thing is the fact that this guy had Steve Bannon’s ear and was clearly involved in intelligence to the point where he got his blackmail telegraphed on the New York Times even as he was basically an unknown philosophy professor in the public eye beforehand.

Which raises the point of how there are intelligence operatives and contacts saying things like what Jorjani says without batting an eye. David Grusch was involved with briefing the NSC and the President on behalf of the NRO and then says the government has knowledge of the afterlife and interdimensional lifeforms. Whatever is going on, it’s not just your run-of-the-mill false flag.

Uh, it seems plausible to me that intelligence agencies actually select for the kinds of guys that wind up getting into this stuff. Like intelligence work is basically looking for a much more boring version.

I've theorized for some time that one reason why intelligence agency types and pilots tend to be so into UFO stuff and believe UFO lore explanations for potentially more mundane elements is precisely because that's the type of a profession you get into if you want to "learn the truth", make first contact, get into space to see the secret alien moonbase and so on. In intelligence agency types you get into more of an X-Files territory, in case of pilots it's more like getting into astronaut training and then enacting Rendezvous with Rama.

It’s not a coincidence that the CIA recruits a lot of Mormons from BYU, either, due to their lifestyle and loyalty choices; Mormons also coincidentally believe that there exists a race of infinitely many nordic-looking Supermen all living on their on planets, and that Joseph Smith upon receiving his first revelation from two of these beings was knocked effectively unconscious (not unlike many contactee experiences).

That’s a long-winded point to saying ‘you’re right’, by the by, but it’s just another piece of data that makes all these things weird (as the alien contactee experience, as independent from the causal influence of Mormonism, was something the IC legitimately investigated in the 50s.)

The CIA literally has an occult warfare division (MK OFTEN) and maintained specialized units of remote viewers for years. Some of the intelligence they provided was actually acted upon by the military in various conflicts: they found an American general kidnapped by Red Army Faction during the Years of Lead in Italy. They gave information about new types of Soviet nuclear submarines to the Navy. They identified locations of Iraqi surface to air missile sites during the Gulf War. Given all that I could see why someone who had ties to the intelligence community like Tucker Carlson might not immediately write off the existence of demons.

But did the intelligence really come from clairvoyants, or was that a cover to distract the enemy from trying to find which one of them was selling secrets to the Americans? I vaguely recall that the British laundered some of the ENIGMA decryptions via this method....

"has"? it was halted in 1973, unless you think the government is simply lying about everything and doing it secretly with no evidence.

“Dissolving” and reconstituting programs in a shell game to avoid oversight is an intelligence agency staple.

Woah how have I never heard of all this stuff before? Incredible.

Yeah I strongly believe that there's some ESP/magical stuff they found out and keep under wraps.

I don’t disagree with you. There is at least some overlap between the intelligence community’s contacts and superficial voices pushing the narrative of Havana Syndrome (i.e., microwave mind control weaponry) and the ones involved in the UFO field, too. The main pioneer of the aforementioned microwave weapons for the DIA (John Alexander) had his hand directly in the DoD’s parapsychological contractual studies before they were shut down, and these are the type of people Tucker would be aware of (and also wary of) in not only his skepticism of the IC but also his personal relation to it in his family.

Ultimately it’s about proximity to Pandora’s box.

Some people will gravitate towards it on the assumption that hope, too, lives within it–hope for a better understanding than what is available.

It’s natural that the chaotic nature of that source of knowledge will splinter into many different confusions, and to notice only the strangeness is to risk missing the point.

Is Pandora's box code for psychodelics or something?

Why are apparently cooky beliefs entertained by top influencers on the right?

Left-wing kooky beliefs aren't apparent, because it's the consensus narrative that supplies the "kooky" label, and they still maintain a nearly arbitrary degree of control over what the "consensus" is. "Men can be women" was an astonishingly kooky belief five minutes before you could get fired for disagreeing with it.

"Why is this thing I've been told I must laugh at so incredibly laughable?" Do you laugh at Simulation theory too?

EDITED FOR CLARITY.

I don't think anyone claims that 'men can be women' per se.

The left just happens to disagree with your assertion that 'anyone born with male parts is and will always be a man.' This is not saying 'men can be women' so much as 'you are wrong about who is a man and who is a woman.' The standard view on the left, as I understand it, is that if John Doe comes out as a transwoman (changing her name to Jane Doe), then Jane Doe was always a woman, and our (and her) previous belief that she was a man was an error of fact, and mutatis mutandis for transmen.

People who have Read The Sequences, on the other hand, hold that 'man' and 'woman' are an inaccurate map of a more complicated territory, and their definitions depend on which hidden inference one is asking about.

Trans rationale is just a rhetorical three cup trick where the desired outcome is slipped underneath whichever restlessly rotating definition suits the advocate. They'll say whatever improves their position. If it's "men can be women" that's what they'll say, and if you argue that men can't be women they'll slip the ball under a different cup. The left plays the role of the stooge, be that willing or unwillingly.

people who have Read The Sequences hold that 'man' and 'woman' are an inaccurate map of a more complicated territory

The left != people who have Read The Sequences. Also, I don't see how this idea is any less kooky.

I don't think anyone claims that 'men can be women' per se.

If I find examples of people who do appear to be claiming that men can be women per se, would you change your mind? For example, people who insist that someone who was universally regarded as a man ten years ago is in the present a woman, without qualifiers?

More generally, intellectual embroidery is, I think, how the transition from "kooky" to "consensus" is achieved. Reality contains infinite, fractal complexity; we emphasize or elide that infinite complexity as needed to conform what we see to what we think.

If I find examples of people who do appear to be claiming that men can be women per se, would you change your mind? For example, people who insist that someone who was universally regarded as a man ten years ago is in the present a woman

But this is arguing that "universal regard" is the definition of gender. Those sorts of assumptions are exactly what is being disagreed with. That's why there's "assigned gender at birth".

"Assigned gender at birth" can rescue you if you have a pre-transition person that already wants to change their gender, but it won't when "universally regarded" includes the person in question themselves. If they denied that men can be women, that would mean someone who changed their mind later on either has always been a woman, or that they're not a woman now, which pro-trans people don't believe.

I think the way to rescue this is to hold that a person has privileged insight into their own gender but can still be mistaken.

The existence of post-transition trans people who are by their account much less in conflict with their gender perception demonstrates that that there is sometimes privileged insight that is true, or at least beneficial to assume. The existence of trans people who detransition doesn't disprove the existence of those people, it merely establishes that the correlation isn't perfect.

I don't believe that men can be women either. I get where it comes from - the left believes in reality being socially constructed and in wise experts -, the more they freak out the normies the wiser. Trans stuff is amplified for depopulation purposes, to make money in the medical industrial complex, to give more power for government to intrude in the family, etc. Demons inventing nukes, now that's an interesting new delusion.

I don't believe that men can be women either

That's not an axiomatic belief, it's a derived belief based on your definitions of "man" and "woman," which in turn descend from your beliefs about the duties and privileges a society should afford to members of each sex, which in turn descend from your beliefs about the optimal way to organize society, which in turn descend from... and so on and so forth.

I hate to make this a bravery debate, but that statement doesn't actually convey anything concrete about your beliefs, it just marks you as part of a particular ingroup. If you taboo'd the words 'man,' 'woman,' 'male,' and 'female,' you could actually have a productive discussion with leftists about whether people should be empowerd to advertise their sexual preferences via their mode of dress... about how we should create divisions within sporting leagues to balance inter-competitor fairness, the enjoyment of the audience, the marketability of particular sports... about the minimum physical capabilities we want in our soldiers... and so on.

I doubt you'd change your mind, or the liberal's mind, but "men can't be women" and "everyone is valid" are both equivalently vacuous statements that boil down to, "my view on the ideal distribution of responsibility and privilege is correct."

That's not an axiomatic belief, it's a derived belief based on your definitions of "man" and "woman," which in turn descend from your beliefs about the duties and privileges a society should afford to members of each sex,

This is false. My definition of "man" and "woman" has nothing to do with duties and privileges a society should afford to members of each sex, and believing that it does already effectively means believing that men can be women relative to my definitions.

you could actually have a productive discussion with leftists about

To the extent you could have a reasonable exchange of ideas with a person like that, those ideas would not be representative of what is actually being pushed by their political establishment. This person would not acknowledge what the establishment is actually doing, instead they would constantly sane-wash it into something palatable. If you provide evidence that the sane-washed version ins't what's being pushed, and the version you're objecting to is, two things might happen depending on the temperament of the person: conversion ends, or they'll the thing they just swore isn't happening is actually good. I don't think that's a productive conversation.

You're assuming people here are siloed off in an echo-chamber. Please consider the possibility that we've been having these conversations for a long time, and what you claim simply does not fit our experience.

discussion with leftists

I doubt you'd change your mind, or the liberal's mind

Why are you conflating liberals with leftists?

That's a bunch of postmodern second-hand lesswrong rhetoric meant to let the camel's nose into the tent. Now the camel is halfway in and kids are being sterilised and/or taken away from parents who "don't affirm their gender". Let's get the camel back out.

I believe none of those are the reasons, though they're close.

for depopulation purposes

It's not "in order to depopulate", it's "because we don't hold population as a virtue, it fails to apply as an argument to prevent this".

to make money in the medical industry

You think the average leftist cares about making big medical companies money?

to give more power for government to intrude in the family

I think this is a general mistake with attributing intentions to other people. Leftists don't think trans is good because it lets them strengthen the government's intrusion, they think the government being able to intrude is good because it lets them support trans kids.

If X has the result of "Y", while you think "anti-Y", it's common to say "they're doing X to support Y." But those disagreements are very often a question of relative ranking of X and Y; it's usually "they think X is more important than Y, so that they will accept an anti-Y result to bolster X". Compare pro-life vs anti-life, pro-choice vs anti-choice.

There are both true believers and cynical actors pushing any particular policy, like bootleggers and baptists both being pro prohibition as a classical example.

Well sure, but it's still wrong to say that baptists are pro-smuggling.

Fundamentalist Christian memes being used as explanations by people who may not 100% practice fundamentalist Christianity is not that odd. These are elites but not part of respectable society, after all.

Again, do you laugh at Simulation Theory? It used to be a reasonably high-status talking point in the rationalist community.

No.

Probably 90% of people in America (and higher internationally) believe in the supernatural to some degree. And when a person (like Tucker Carlson) is on air for hours every week, they are going to end up saying some wild shit. You would too.

Republicans and Democrats are not any different when it comes to their propensity to hold magical beliefs.

Have you every spoken to a liberal woman about astrology?

By no means am I suggesting that libs by-and-large aren't nuts too.

Tucker Carlson appearing on Joe Rogan experience speculated that UAPs are real, but are not alien visitors from other planets but supernatural in origin and always has been here.

Honestly based.

Why are apparently cooky beliefs entertained by top influencers on the right?

The contemporary American right is an accident of history, an odd amalgamation of people that hold disparate and often mutually contradictory beliefs. So generalizing about them as a group is difficult. Nonetheless I speculate that there are (at least) two factors at play here:

  1. I believe there is a "religious temperament" that predisposes one to not only literal belief in the supernatural, but also anti-empiricism in general, more "speculative" modes of thinking, etc. An appreciable number of these people find themselves on the right for various reasons (the phrase "the religious right" exists for a reason).

  2. Leftism is the socially dominant ideology in elite culture, so the right naturally attracts contrarians who are attracted to odd ideas for their own sake.

anti-empiricism

What is "anti-empiricism"? And is this an example of it?

(If I can get some sleep and five goddamn minutes of peace, I'm still hoping to get some replies written to your recent posts on art, BTW. Keep up the great work.)

What is "anti-empiricism"?

It's a bit difficult to define, because the idea I had in mind is a loose federation of beliefs and attitudes, and doesn't really have any specific criteria. In terms of concrete beliefs though, I would say that the core of it would be something like an openness to entities and propositions that we don't (or can't) have direct empirical confirmation of, like God, souls, ghosts, UFOs, etc. In more rarefied territory, it would be an affinity for philosophical positions like: hostility to logical positivism, belief in abstract (non-spatiotemporal) objects, belief in non-naturalistic moral facts. But independent of any concrete beliefs about the existence or non-existence of specific entities, I think it's also a psychological disposition to see things as being suffused with meaning and significance.

And is this an example of it?

Not really. Lots of people are recalcitrant in the face of new evidence when it contradicts their deeply held beliefs. That's more of a human trait than a left-right trait. But, if someone just has an overriding commitment to making sure that children have access to puberty blockers for some reason, I don't think there's anything metaphysically there that doesn't fit into a purely materialist/naturalist worldview.

"Anti-empiricism" is in no way intended to be an insult of course. I personally have a strong anti-empirical streak.

I'm still hoping to get some replies written to your recent posts on art, BTW. Keep up the great work.

Thank you! I really appreciate that.

What is a "non-naturalistic moral fact"? Like categorical imperatives that aren't related to facts of the world?

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-naturalism/

Most often, ‘non-naturalism’ denotes the metaphysical thesis that moral properties exist and are not identical with or reducible to any natural property or properties in some interesting sense of ‘natural’.

As much as Kamala Harris was criticized for not going on podcasts or sitting for interviews, stuff like this makes it clear that it was probably the right decision. Dealing with such criticism is probably better than dealing with the fallout of an unexpected gaffe. Trump can get away with this, because he's already demonstrated that nothing he says will faze his supporters, but conventional politicians don't have that luxury. Hell, Vance only has that luxury because he's joined at the hip with Trump. Doing the podcast circuit is the kind of thing fringe candidates like Andrew Yang do because it gets them airtime they don't have to pay for, and the exposure is worth the gaffe potential. Once you've already made major candidate status there's little upside and huge downside to going on a freewheeling 3-hour podcast where the conversation could go in any direction. Tucker Carlson can say shit like this because he isn't running for anything and nobody is poring over his every word looking for ammunition against him. Imagine what would happen if Tim Walz went on Rogan and said the same thing.

Reality caught up to his brand of professional counterculture. Now he’s got to keep chasing the dragon.

Also, people will pay him for it.

“Influencers” are the natural consequence of applying Tumblr-style incentives to legacy media personalities. Balkanization encourages specialization, and Tucker is sliding towards a passionate, dedicated, decoupled-from-reality audience.

Seems relevant that Tucker is a true believing Christian. UAPs being supernatural rather than extra-terrestrial, and demonic mauling/nuclear activity seems parsimonious with that.

Carlson isn’t particularly religious by conservative pundit standards. He’s a WASP Episcopalian who rarely if ever attends church.

I wouldn’t put Tucker in that bin. He said he bought after the demon attack a bible to read it (very slowly in a year) but that he is not coming from a tradition of faith and dislikes pastors.

Fair enough, my mistake.

I think these people have been in the spotlight for so long, mouthing other peoples opinions or regurgitating talking points, that when they are finally allowed to be themselves they don't know where and when to stop. They already stepped over the line to follow their convictions. That line was much clearer and held more immediate consequences than belief in flat earth Satan bigfoot or whatever.

If everyone gave an earnest list of views they hold or are curious about or share any sort of odd thing that gave them an emotion that they felt was worth exploring the umpteenth time they have to fill 30 minutes of dead air I think there is not a single interesting person left that doesn't hold to some odd belief. Hell, most people are so uninteresting that they would never get to a point of being a political talking head in the first place.

On the flipside, the lunacy people believe on 'the left' is no different. As an example: most people believe in a theory of human evolution that's much dumber, consequential and more immediately and obviously wrong than flat earth.

But more directly to Tucker, it feels like he's throwing away a sort of sacred status he built for himself. He could always present himself as kind of untouchable. From a persona perspective it's like he decided to give himself a weakspot. Feels like an odd thing to do for a man like him but, barring it being a conspiracy by TPTB to weaken a persona that's becoming too powerful, it's just a whatever.

As an example: most people believe in a theory of human evolution that's much dumber, consequential and more immediately and obviously wrong than flat earth.

I get that its fashionable in this space to dunk on the "blank slatists" but this is a pretty dumb take that seriously oversells the rigor or "hardness" of fields like psychology and anthropology while underselling the significance of things like basic navigation, land surveys, and wireless communications to modern society, or the disciplines of physics and astronomy historically.

The spherical nature of the Earth along with its approximate circumference has been widely known in the western world since classical antiquity, and to the degree that flat-eartherism exists today outside of a "birds aren't real"-esque joke it seems most prevalent amongst PMC types who, interacting with the world chiefly through screens, seem to have difficulty thinking in three dimensions.

Contra the popular meme, 15th century sceptics weren't expecting Columbus to literally "sail off the edge of the earth" they were expecting him to run out of food and potable water before he even got a third of the way as the approximate latitude and longitude of the spice islands he was trying to reach had already been well established. Furthermore the sceptics were entirely correct in that it was essentially blind luck that Columbus stumbled upon the hear-to undiscovered island chain of the Bahamas just as his supplies were running low.

I think you are misrepresenting where people get their beliefs from. Most people don't look at any evidence for or against in some rational vacuum. We're just told what is and what isn't. Most of the time in a setting where we are completely incapable to question what's being said. This is true for the roundness of the earth and the 'leftist' theory of evolution. To compare and contrast two narratives that are believed in the same way on a basis that's irrelevant to why they were believed in the first place is missing the point of the comparison.

I think that's a big part of why flat earth guys can exist in the first place. Most people have no idea why they believe the earth is round and are completely incapable of defending their belief without appealing to a higher power. Same for the 'leftist' theory of evolution.

Outside of that, I'd argue that population differences are much more immediately obvious, like I said in my comment. It's very hard to get a good first hand look at the roundness of the earth or experience the curvature in action. But it's very easy to notice different phenotypic differences between population groups.

Fact of the matter is that population differences are just as real as the roundness of the earth. There is no wiggle room or 'softness' to this fact.

and to the degree that flat-eartherism exists today outside of a "birds aren't real"-esque joke it seems most prevalent amongst PMC types who, interacting with the world chiefly through screens, seem to have difficulty thinking in three dimensions.

This runs contrary to my experience, though brief, running through flat earth circles and debates. I found the most common character type to be working class dudes used to relying on their own senses and to a lesser extent belligerent basement dwellers. I'd find it very interesting if PMC types were going in on flat earth.

The spherical nature of the Earth has been widely understood in the western world since classical antiquity, and to the degree that flat-eartherism exists today outside of a "birds aren't real"-esque joke it seems most prevalent amongst PMC types who, interacting with the world chiefly through screens, seem to have difficulty thinking in three dimensions.

IME Unironic flat eartherism is somewhat common among irreligious, generationally poor men. Usually as part of a complex of inconsistent theories and ideas.

to the degree that flat-eartherism exists today outside of a "birds aren't real"-esque joke it seems most prevalent amongst PMC types who, interacting with the world chiefly through screens, seem to have difficulty thinking in three dimensions.

This is not my experience at all. Aside from the vanishingly small minority that is flat-earth for religious reasons, most of the flat earth people very much do not seem like PMC types, they're fiercely independent, self-reliant men with libertarian leanings who don't like appeals to authority and believe in seeing things for themselves before they're satisfied.

In other words, I think it's much more likely we'd see a flat earther here on the motte than in any PMC office, even if everyone made their beliefs completely transparent.

In my experience unironic flat-earthers fall into two broad catagories, schitzophrenic nuerologically-diverse lumpenprole, and upper-middle class contrarians who latched onto it as a part of a part wider suite of conspiracy theories and new age woo. Astrology, Homeopathy, Crystal Healing, Second Shooter on the Grassy Knoll, Q-Anon, etc...

Meanwhile I've found that most of the "fiercely independent libertarians who believe in seeing things for themselves" who aren't also well to the left of Charles Murray's bell curve tend to work it out on thier own as they also tend to be travelers and consequentially end up having ties to the crunchier sides of the hiking, sailing, and general aviation communities.

In any case i think my point stands, as concepts go a flat vs spherical Earth has far more wide-reaching, and immediately observiable consequences than evolution vs young earth creationism, and that's well before we begin to consider specific claims about aryans' and indo-europeans' role in the bronze age collapse.

Agreed. The typical flat earth believer is very low in socioeconomic status, bordering on underclass, doesn’t believe what he’s told just in general, and winds up with a web or conspiracy theories which might contradict each other. He(and it’s a he) is about equally likely to be white or black(I’m not sure if this means blacks are overrepresented once you adjust for the very low socioeconomic status involved) and whether or not he claims to be a believer he never goes to church or prays, nor does he let Christianity influence his ethics or spirituality if he even has any. He’s deeply cynical about human relationships- in every sense of the term- and might use this to justify some mildly unethical behavior. He didn’t do well in school, even when you adjust for IQ, for the same reason his boss doesn’t like him now, and he tends to go from job to job without settling in a career. He believes a complex and often contradictory tangle of health/scientific, historical, economic, and possibly legal and supernatural-ish woo woo crap, but it’s not all natural or traditional. He might be a bit racist, but he hates rich people and authorities more. The police are out to get him(and it’s possible that they actually are), and he doesn’t connect this to his own bad behavior. He doesn’t vote, doesn’t know who he would vote for, and is mad at both parties when he thinks about politics.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats