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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10522 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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[Apologies in advance for bringing up an old story, but I couldn't find any record of discussion of it]

Deep downthread in the election megathread @Folamh3 linked to a wonderful article you might all enjoy, but that's really beside the point. I want to talk about something mentioned within the article, namely a commercial. I'll copy the article's description here:

Jennyfer Hatch, thirty-­seven, was euthanized in October 2022, having given up hope of resolving the chronic pain caused by Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. She told friends that she was “falling through the cracks,” unable to access the state support she needed in order to go on living. Her desperate choice to die was glorified in a glossy TV commercial titled “All Is Beauty,” produced by the Canadian fashion retailer Simons. “Last breaths are sacred,” says Hatch in the commercial, released on the day after her death.

Here is the commercial in question that seems to have been almost entirely scrubbed from Youtube.. This kicked off a series of only vaguely connected thoughts I lack the ability to synthesize, but perhaps you all can put it together more successfully than me.

Burgers?

Of course there's a certain element of "Burgers?" to a commercial about suicide for an upscale department store. But I feel a few other elements of the commercial are curious to me. Take this screenshot from the ad, does this not look like a scene from Midsommar? Why are all the participants women? Why are they all White? This seems to frame the euthanasia as some sort of White feminist religious ritual, possibly connected with nature worship.

Suicide Girls

I'll note that the euthanized woman was described as having Ehlers Danlos. Anyone that has casually explored "SickTok" in the past few years will have surely heard of this condition. While I'm sure it's a real disease in some cases, there is undeniably a trend among young women sharing this concept with each other. I actually first encountered this disease when exploring the twitter of a porn model (so sue me) at least a dozen or more years ago. It struck me at the time as an obviously invented attention-seeking condition that allowed her to post hospital selfies every few weeks and be continually weak and bedridden with no obvious externally visible symptoms.

My second encounter with this disease was my cousin. My cousin is a few years younger than me and fifteen years ago was a sufferer of gluten sensitivity of one form or another (when it was popular for everyone to be suffering from it). About three years ago I heard she was now suffering from Ehlers Danlos.

It strikes me as telling I first encountered this in a porn model as I now consider them to be sort of canaries-in-the-coalmine for female neuroses and social messaging, obviously being more susceptible than most to these things.

Appropriately I just saw this going viral on twitter yesterday with the infamous Taylor Lorenz catastrophizing about her long COVID

Antinatalism, Environmentalism, Suicidality and Leftism

Here I'm just going to wave my hands in the general direction of The Socialist Phenomenon with its lengthy sections relating the running theme of suicide pervading socialist movements (Christian and otherwise) throughout human history. If you ever visit the /r/antinatalism subreddit you'll notice the distinctly leftist and often environmentalist concerns of its posts. In contrast, as pessimistic and addicted-to-doomposting as the far right can be I've never detected a major suicidal or antinatalist current on /pol/ for example. As an aside, see the movie First Reformed, it's horrible.

So what to make of this? I don't know exactly how to piece it together but there is some common through-line that connects feminism, White people, desire to be ill, environmentalism and suicide. Just wanted to hear whatever thoughts this commercial might spark in you all, as I don't really know how to connect the dots myself in a satisfactory way. Apologies if this is not coherent or focused enough for a top-level post.

The desire to be ill connection is just women wanting a socially validated way to make others pay attention to them and take care of them. Imaginary gluten allergies or whatever other munchausen makes the group center your needs.

As far as the rest of it, far left ideas of the progressive variety are connected to suicide mostly because progressivism is basically about freedom from the things that make life meaningful. No God, no family, no role in society. All of these things are normie or conservative. And this sense of alienation is what causes suicide, over and over again. It’s simply inhuman to live without obligation, alone and unbound.

Why are all the participants women? Why are they all White? This seems to frame the euthanasia as some sort of White feminist religious ritual, possibly connected with nature worship.

Everyone's black in advert land, unless the advert is for suicide.

I saw a billboard the other day featuring a black woman with big hair and a giant, genuine white smile, eyes shut in pleasure brought about by her use of the product.

I've been seeing the same billboard for the last two decades. The product changes often. The model changes also. But it's always the same thing. The hair never changes. The facial expression never changes. The skin color never changes.

You'll see her everywhere too, now, if you hadn't before.

Take this screenshot from the ad, does this not look like a scene from Midsommar? Why are all the participants women? Why are they all White? This seems to frame the euthanasia as some sort of White feminist religious ritual, possibly connected with nature worship.

If someone showed me this ad context-free, I'd believe it if they told me that it's AI-generated right-wing propaganda intending to illustrate, in a Straussian manner, that white woman feminism is a cult that only leads to mass cultural and biological suicide (with Midsommar, Sphere, and Aniara somewhere in the prompt). There's even a random exposed tattoo parlor in the forest, with a woman getting her skin scribbled (the main character?).

This reminds me of a thread we had discussing an outdoor anti-natalist ad, where someone Noticed that, when it comes to anti-natalist messaging, the usually diversity-loving corporations, governments, NGOs, and activists are suddenly more than okay with only having white people depicted. It might had been the same thread where someone remarked that any messaging that contains just a single white man will typically be gay-related.

I'll note that the euthanized woman was described as having Ehlers Danlos. Anyone that has casually explored "SickTok" in the past few years will have surely heard of this condition. While I'm sure it's a real disease in some cases, there is undeniably a trend among young women sharing this concept with each other. I actually first encountered this disease when exploring the twitter of a porn model (so sue me) at least a dozen or more years ago. It struck me at the time as an obviously invented attention-seeking condition that allowed her to post hospital selfies every few weeks and be continually weak and bedridden with no obvious externally visible symptoms.

Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is absolutely real, and monogenic in many cases which provides a clear, objective diagnosis. Then there is a bucket of patients with hypermobile joints, issues with their digestive tract and random pain/other things. That being said, seeing someone flex their pinky backwards past 90 degrees, or their thumb way down to their wrist is profoundly disconcerting and also somewhat objective.

You’ll forgive my skepticism if I say that this sounds like a fully generic set of symptoms for a disease spread by social contagion rather than by actually existing.

If you see someone on tiktok who never shows you concrete evidence of any of the symptoms above and claims to have EDS, be skeptical and say social contagion.

If I can show you that loss-of-function mutations in collagen or collagen-related genes lead to a syndrome characterized by defects in collagen (i.e. joint hypermobility, esophageal issues, frequent dislocations, weaker blood vessels and organ tearing) with a very high penetrance and that tracks in families, if I can compare mutant and wild-type forms of those proteins in in vitro functional assays and show a difference, if I can either knock those genes out or induce the same mutations in various animal models and show the same syndrome and you're still skeptical of the existence of EDS I'd say you're an [expletive redacted].

If I can't show you a genetic mutation for a subset of patients that still have many of the symptoms above, well, sure, some people may be lying. But...you understand this is true of many diseases, right? Like, do you not believe in lupus? Clinical depression? Rheumatoid arthritis? Many (possibly the majority, or all) diseases have extreme monogenic forms and milder polygenic (we assume) forms. Similar to Alzheimer's patients with mutations in PSEN, APP, etc. who get an aggressive, familial form of the disease in their 30s versus most Alzheimer's patients who show up ~60-75.

You should see my skin, i can do pretty good Dilophosaurus impression.

Both me and my mother have Ehler-Danlos but only I have had any (non-cosmetic)issues. Those have thankfully been pretty minor and have responded well to medication.

We used to have our more clinically-focused research meeting Monday mornings. Everyone would rotate through every few months, and people seemed to think the best way to show off the importance of their research was to present graphic images of their patients suffering. One doctor studied some immunodeficient patients, and insisted on showing this one woman's vagina exploding with genital herpes Every. Goddamn. Time.

The EDS guy always showed his patients bending their thumb down to touch their forearm, which was disquieting in it's own way.

Take this screenshot from the ad, does this not look like a scene from Midsommar? Why are all the participants women? Why are they all White?

Oh, where's that old SSC post about all the "weird" things that seem to disproportionately attract white people? Cycling, bird watching, cosplay, whatever the examples were. Special interests in general seem to be an inherently "white" thing.

The creativity of the European mind means it's also more creative in finding new ways to destroy itself. (Although of course the generalized culture of anti-whiteness we have in the West today isn't helping.)

Fittingly, the ad itself gives me strong Midjourney/Sora vibes. Lots of disjointed static shots with minimal action.

Isn't the through-line that connects these things together just good, old-fashioned Gnosticism? The religious view that the material world is evil and that the subjective relgious experience is primary is all that is needed for to connect propensity to suicide, disgust with the material world, obsession with purity and disease, and antinatalism.

There might be some psychological root to that as well, given that it seems to pop up many times through history, or some kind of philosophical prion that warps the perception of reality of anyone who comprehends it.

There's a reason that particular type of heresy keeps on appearing on Christianity.

I think it's down to the fact that Christianity lays out the right philosophical substrate for it by venerating the immaterial and rejecting material urges. And there's a set of mindsets and incentives that can make this grow quickly and escape control before it collapses in on itself.

All ideologies have failure modes like this, and a lot look like that kind of mass psychosis. Usually the long lasting ones have institutional mechanisms to prevent those failure modes from capturing people.

The thing is we don't really have those anymore.

I think it's down to the fact that Christianity lays out the right philosophical substrate for it by venerating the immaterial and rejecting material urges.

Wouldn't Buddhism be the motherlode of such ideas, then?

I think that the tendency you are describing has to go back at least to Plato, well before Christianity entered the scene. If anything, Christianity opposes that trend by making the bodily resurrection a key element of its theology and affirming that the material world was good when it was originally created. Of course many influential Christian theologians have been influenced by (neo-)Platonism, so there is plenty of Christian theology out there that is susceptible to this heresy, but I am pretty sure its origins in Western thought is Platonism rather than Christianity.

And within Christianity Gnosticism seems to always come from the east, with more platonic theology.

CS Lewis mentions the paradox of how Christianity is not only more spiritual than any Greek philosophy, it’s more carnal than any pagan religion: blood, perfectly pure God in farting, belching human flesh, a real human sacrifice to trade for your life, insistence that certain bodily acts stain the soul, and so on.

The Gnostics lose sight of the carnality of Christianity because of the ick factor, or as Lewis put it, “repellent doctrines.”

All ideologies have failure modes like this, and a lot look like that kind of mass psychosis. Usually the long lasting ones have institutional mechanisms to prevent those failure modes from capturing people.

In the Middle Ages, it was supposedly not uncommon for rich people to spend the end of their lives in a small cell in a monastery, forgoing all Earthly pleasures for the promise of redemption.

And while there's probably not much loss to society in retiring a few old lions early, lots of young fertile people entered monasteries and convents, forgoing any chance of having a family line. These people didn't have any personal assets, but their institutions become incredibly wealthy. By the time of Henry VIII, the monasteries supposedly owned 1/3rd of the land in England. Shutting them down unlocked massive gains in prosperity.

And the priesthood likely acted as an IQ shedder as well.

The fact that Europe rose relentlessly despite a large percentage of its population being devoted to heavenly pursuits is really remarkable.

I suppose the problem with today's ascetics is they don't exist within the fabric of a vibrant, growing, pro-natal society.

An institution that collects knowledge and spurs technological growth but also hoards societal wealth and prevents all its high-IQ members from ever reproducing? We have that today, it’s called “Silicon Valley”

lots of young fertile people entered monasteries and convents

How many is "lots" here? We talk about this every so often here and I've never gotten a good idea.

I think estimates for the monastic population in Europe in the period 1200 to 1500 vary wildly by country, time and methodology (a lot of extrapolation from census estimates by historic demographers coupled with estimates of average monastic population multiplied by the total number of monasteries in a province, which were often somewhat well recorded). Figures online seem to cluster around the 0.4% to 2% range for the total of all clergy.

Thanks. That range seems high, higher than I assumed, but not high enough for many of the theories about the problems caused by their absence (e.g. monasteries as release valve/containment zone for autists and other types)

The fact that Europe rose relentlessly despite a large percentage of its population being devoted to heavenly pursuits is really remarkable.

I suppose the problem with today's ascetics is they don't exist within the fabric of a vibrant, growing, pro-natal society.

Is it possible that the two are related?

Cistercian monasteries spread new technologies through high and late medieval Europe much faster than the historical norm.

The wages of success are that people with no physical wants often find life unfulfilling. Some subset of those people will externalize that inner psychic pain as various vague illnesses or socially-advantageous identities, some will choose eschatological fantasies to give their nihilism meaning.

Global Warming hysteria is just christian The End Is Nigh catastrophizing with extra steps. The bitter middle-class spinsters that would have become religious nuns five hundred years ago are now "transmasc". The Jain invocation that the most moral thing you could do is starve yourself to death without producing children or harming even a gnat is funneled into dietary restrictions, assisted suicide, and various anti-fun groups. It's all luxury beliefs, and it's why poorer countries are often much happier than richer ones. Struggle gives meaning, need creates community, which gives meaning. Only in rich countries are we comfortable enough to pretend a disability.

Underlying it all is a fundamentally pessimistic worldview that sees existence as not being worth the trouble. "That burden my father gave to me, but which I gave to no man". You see this on the internet with people talking about how they didn't ask to be born etc.

Camus said the fundamental philosophical question was whether or not to keep living. I tend to agree.

I watched two close relatives die of dementia after long periods with the disease. They turned not merely into shells of themselves but into violent, nasty, angry, monsters who disgraced both memories of them in the eyes of others and the dignified and honorable lives they had led.

The great tragedy is that you don’t feel your own memory slipping away until you’re past the point where you can truly choose to die (you do feel it, and many dementia patients have early moments of extreme frustration as they feel their short and medium term memories vanishing). If I should be unlucky enough to have the same condition in my old age, should I make it that long, I want to be killed at the point shortly after my memory goes and I forget the everyday things necessary to lead life well. I want to be killed, I want it to be fast.

All I want is some kind of process whereby I can sign over my life to some moderately respectable panel of doctors who can choose to have me killed at that point. I am willing to accept the risks, I have seen too much to want otherwise.

I've never detected a major suicidal or antinatalist current on /pol/ for example

There’s r9k for that and plenty of overlap between posters on all major 4chan boards.

If I should be unlucky enough to have the same condition in my old age, should I make it that long, I want to be killed at the point shortly after my memory goes and I forget the everyday things necessary to lead life well. I want to be killed, I want it to be fast.

My plan, in younger years, was twenty pounds of dynamite on a 24-hour timer, secreted in the mattress under my pillow. The day I grew too far gone to remember to reset the timer would be the end of my troubles.

The people in the apartment next door must love you.

Maybe buy them a gigantic, ornate gong and insist they keep it just against that wall.

Solutions! ...But actually the plan was to be living as a hermit in the country by that point. I have a family now, so other solutions will need to be found. Maybe I'll take up wingsuiting.

My thoughts are that this stems directly from their view of the world. To them America and the West are a dystopian nightmare.

White Guilt, and present militarism

In Liberal circles, white people, and particularly white Americans, are racist, militaristic, and colonial. They also perceive that none of it is changing even a little bit. We support Israel which is racist and genocidal, we hold down minorities, and enrich ourselves at the expense of the non-whites of the world. And they see it as nobody aside from them actually caring.

Environment

Liberals believe that Earth will be literally uninhabitable within their lifetime. The air will be choked with pollution, the rivers poisoned, global warming creating deserts and rain forests and making things too hot. Nobody wants to do enough to fix it, and quite often want to go in the other direction. They see that nobody aside from them cares.

Capitalism

The rich run the world for the rich and everyone else suffers. Poverty is common, and all the things that should be free are instead not free. College costs too much. Health care costs too much. And again, none of this is noticed by anyone else, so nothing will change.

Trump

You might not notice, but we elected Literally Hitler in November. He’s going to build work camps. He’s going to round people up and either imprison them or deport them. The Handmaid’s Tale is going to happen. Again, nobody notices or cares and worse, half the country likes it. Which proves that white people are evil.

All of this is a profoundly negative world view. Dystopian even. Everything is terrible, and at best going to stay terrible forever, and very likely to get worse. If this is how you really see the world, obviously that’s going to give you anxiety and depression, especially if you’re hanging around others who share this view, and have few or no outside interests.

I agree that liberals and the left fit into parts of what you describe above but there is also a part of the establishment left that is somewhat different.

We could consider the left to also include the:

Pro war left.

Pro Israel left.

Pro rich woke left. Indeed, rich people who want cheap labor might be more sympathetic to multiculturalism.

Pro technology under their control left.

Pro intelligence services/FBI left.

and a left that sees the current west and finds plenty to like in the status quo and desires to push things even further.

Kamala Harris actually gained voters from Biden with voters that had incomes above 100,000. This could include some of the above categories of voters.

Are they really anti militarism? They have fanatically cheered on WWIII in Ukraine with maximalist war aims and a black and white view of the war. Obama, Clinton and Biden have been long term enthusiasts of pretty much every neocolonial project. I would say their worldview is a crusader mentality in which the world can be divided up into believers and heathens and the believers have a duty to crusade against the believers. Their worldview seems to be that there will be heaven on Earth once the entire planet has been converted. Since the heathens are fighting against heaven on Earth they are fundamentally evil and have no legitimacy.

Spending 2 trillion on a crusade for feminism in Afghanistan was hardly western civilization, it was a crusade for an ideology deeply opposed to western values. The left was opposed to militarism when they saw the Soviet union as a better representative of woke than the US. Today Russia is an Orthodox christian fascist state stopping the values of Netflix from being the global religion.

They have fanatically cheered on WWIII in Ukraine with maximalist war aims

The left-liberals in the West are surely not pacifist, but those in charge like Biden have not "fanatically cheered on WWIII" and have, if anything, been criticized a fair bit recently for taking a long time to do things like allowing long-range missile strikes and other similar decisions by the actual war fanatics.

Letting Russia conquer Ukraine unopposed is pro-war, not anti-war.

NATO expansionism into every last corner of the map is pro-war. Russia wanted to negotiate over and over again. Zelensky's election platform wasn't that different than the Minsk agreements.

War is peace.

TIL being anti-war means you must instantly roll over for anyone.

In Us American writings about the Pacific War, the term "pro peace faction" is used to denote a clique of Japanese leaders who supported, after less than four years of war with the USA, terms of surrender much harsher than ones offered by Putin to Ukraine.

This term is also used as a label of the collaborationist faction (Wang Jingwe's regime) of Chinese during the Second Sino-Chinese War.

3 years is instantly? But I'll expand on my unnecessarily snarky comment.

Let's say you are anti-murder. Surely, a nice thing to be. But now you see someone about to blow up a bomb in a market so you shoot them dead. Are you still anti-murder? Probably yes, because you saved many people from being murdered at the cost of one.

Since you are a good utilitarian you decide, like Dexter, to start murdering serial killers. You kill 10 people who you are pretty sure would have killed more than 10 others. Are you still anti-murder? Probably... Except remember that time that Dexter killed an innocent person to keep from getting caught. You do it too. Are you you still anti-murder? After all, your expected value is still positive. At least, I think... What if you kill 5 people to save 6? What if you kill a guy who has a 20% chance of being a terrorist?

The point I'm trying to make is that politicians always try to justify the current war as an exception to the general principle of "no war". And these politicians are almost always wrong. Their complicated strategic calculations fall apart the instant they come into contact with reality. Simple heuristics are best. Military conflict begets more military conflict, and wars almost always cost more than people think (Hofstadler: this is true even when you take this into account).

When you're doing utilitarian calculations that involve the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, make sure your calculations are correct, and give yourself a wide latitude for the chance they might not be. While the initial defense of Ukraine was a good thing, continuing to spend the lives of innocent Ukrainian and Russian men in this conflict is not. And escalation is practically a crime against humanity.

If you want to wear the mantle of peace, you need to have a strong pro-peace bias, even if that means you aren't always a pacificist. And there is no way you could possibly characterize the actions of the U.S. blob in that light.

How about demanding a negotiated settlement instead of keeping the meat grinder going? Is that pro or anti?

Would Putin accept any settlement short of "I get some of what I want now, and come back for the rest later."?

If he wanted war why did he push for negotiations for 8 years after the coup? Even in 2022 the goal wasn't to take Ukraine, it was to get Ukraine to accept a peace agreament that was almost the same as Zelensky's election platform.

Are they really anti militarism? They have fanatically cheered on WWIII in Ukraine with maximalist war aims and a black and white view of the war.

There are still a substantial number of anti-war leftists. In any case those liberals who are pro-Ukraine see it more about funding the brave independent freedom fighters, the rebels, against the evil fascist Russian Empire that wants to occupy their land and destroy their culture. They map it onto the standard post/anti-colonialist framework in which they supported the natives against the French in Algeria, the natives against the Portuguese in Angola, the natives against the Dutch in Indonesia and so on, and in which they support them against the French in New Caledonia, against the whites in Hawaii etc. That the Ukrainian natives are huwhite doesn’t change that (even if the Russian army is more diverse) because Russia is fascist and evil blah blah blah.

So far as I'm aware, every prominent recent example of a person openly identifying as transracial or being exposed as a racial charlatan (in the sense of trying to pass themselves off as a member of an ethnic group they're not, by subterfuge) has been a white person. The canonical example is of a white female academic, activist or politician who presents herself as Latina, Native American or more rarely black, in order to secure a job which is explicitly or implicitly ringfenced for members of such groups. But they don't seem to be doing this cynically, as an expression of their contempt for subaltern ethnic groups. In essentially all cases of note, the person in question seems so socially progressive and steeped in post-colonial theory that they almost seem to wish they really were members of these ethnic groups, and so they're playing an elaborate game of Butlerian performative declaration (clap your hands if you believe): announcing that they are members of these ethnic groups makes them so.

Is there a corresponding trend, for non-white people to identify as white, or try to deceitfully pass themselves off as such? And I'm not talking about implicitly (e.g. Indian women using skin-lightening creams), but explicitly the way white progressives do.

It’s called ‘passing’ and it’s so unremarkable as to be cliche.

Bobby Fischer emphatically denied his own jewishness towards the end of his life, but he didn't get any financial benefit from doing that, it was done as a performative political gesture.

Mindy Kaling’s brother (Tamil) famously passed himself off as black when applying for college iirc.

I initially thought this might not actually be a lie in the strict sense, because Kaling’s family may have lived in East Africa prior to immigrating (like the family of Rishi Sunak, for instance). This would make Kaling and her brother “African-American” in the same sense as Elon Musk.

But nope, turns out the Chokalingams came straight to America from India, no politically-expedient stopover in Africa involved. Which makes Mindy’s brother an out-and-out liar.

Back in the 19th century, it wasn't uncommon for a black person, or especially a mixed person, to try to pass as white.

There's also the classic Eddie Murphy SNL skit where he goes about a day of his life in whiteface (White Like Me), though viewers seeing it as absurdist might be taken as a sign that it wasn't common.

Yes, I'm familiar with the phenomenon you're describing, and the fact that at least some white people in certain industries think their careers would stand to benefit by attempting to pass themselves off as non-white people shows how far the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. More recently, Philip Roth wrote a novel about a black man whose career in academia can be at least partly attributed to successfully passing himself off as Jewish, which was widely (and apparently erroneously) believed to have been inspired by Anatole Broyard, a mixed-race writer and critic who died in 1990 and who passed himself off as white.

I'm curious if the phenomenon still exists in the "non-white -> white" direction, as opposed to its modern incarnation of "white -> non-white". Given the online circles in which I move, I hear about just about every example of a white academic or activist who gets exposed for pretending to be non-white, or a white teenager who "identifies as" trans-Korean or similar. It's possible that the reverse case may be equally common, but I just haven't heard of it because I'm in an echo chamber.

Skin-lightening products are a gigantic industry. Just who do you think is buying them(well, yes, women, but what kind of woman)?

The politician Geert Wilders in the Netherlands is actually 1/4-Indonesian but dyes his hair blonde and wears blue contacts in order to be a credible anti-immigration candidate. (I don't really think rounding up 75% to 100% is that big a deal but the aesthetics of looking dutch are probably pretty important to him.)

Fascinating, I always thought his skin tone was noticeably darker than the typical Dutchman.

"Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man" by James Weldon Johnson is a great book-length example of that.

See this Quillette article on how the symptoms of "long Covid" are so variegated that people who claim(ed) to have been suffering from it may have simply been using a topical buzzword to describe the ordinary ennui, malaise, tedium and frustration attendant to modern life. It has not escaped my notice that the demographics most likely to claim to suffer from long Covid are the same demographics most likely to

  • claim to suffer from all manner of contested illnesses
  • earnestly support "self-diagnosis" as a concept
  • claim to suffer from vague mental illnesses such as anxiety, depression and/or "trauma"

Moreover, he notes that a survey produced by Body Politic Covid-19 Support Group, a prominent driver of the Long COVID idea, indicates that “many of the survey respondents who attributed their symptoms to the aftermath of a COVID-19 infection likely never had the virus in the first place. Of those who self-identified as having persistent symptoms attributed to COVID and responded to the first survey, not even a quarter had tested positive for the virus. Nearly half (47.8%) never had testing and 27.5% tested negative for COVID-19. Body Politic publicized the results of a larger, second survey in December 2020. Of the 3,762 respondents, a mere 600, or 15.9%, had tested positive for the virus at any time.”

I'm being a bit cheeky here, because on both occasions I had Covid, I uncontroversially had long Covid symptoms: in the first instance a persistent sore throat, in the second instance an extremely phlegmy cough, both of which persisted for months after the acute symptoms went away. But the key differences are a) my initial dose of Covid (and I think also my second) was confirmed via antigen test; b) the symptoms I was reporting were extremely specific (as opposed to impossibly vague constructions like "fatigue") and c) the second instance of long Covid went away after a GP prescribed me an inhaler and a course of antibiotics.

in the second instance an extremely phlegmy cough, both of which persisted for months after the acute symptoms went away.

I had a persistent (dry) cough for half a year after a non-COVID respiratory illness, and such a thing was never too uncommon among people I knew as they grew older. If after COVID this counts as "long COVID", then long COVID is not as unique or novel a threat as it is made out to be.

I don't think there's anything remotely unique, novel or threatening about long Covid. Sequelae for the flu were known to be a thing for decades before Covid. It's just a rhetorical tool pro-lockdowners only invoke while moving the goalposts when the more relevant metrics aren't producing the desired results.

It's one thing that really annoyed me when arguing with people who were in favour of prolonging lockdowns indefinitely. When Covid death rates started to decline, pro-lockdowners would inevitably resort to "but what about muh long Covid???"

Having gone through it twice now, my response to that is "yeah, it's a bit annoying. Is preventing it worth shutting down the entire country and throwing thousands of people out of work indefinitely? No, obviously not."

My perception was that people thought that the fairly severe post viral disorders that we already know can occur after infections might have had a higher incidence rate for Covid, especially pre-omicron, but the definition got so ridiculously widened so that it included pretty much every person with any kind of lingering effect, if thats a cough, lessened smell or being so debilitated that they can't stand up.

This lead to sinulatanous claims of long covid occuring after something like 5-40% of COVID infections and that it's extremely severe, when in reality it's only that severe in some fraction of a percent of cases and likely isn't meaningfully more common than for other viral infections or the flu.

So did COVID cause a higher rate of post viral disorders or not? Was there anything novel about those disorders? Did some variants cause more severe issues than others? We have fucking idea because all the stats are so thoroughly contaminated that you can't discern anything at all with them being close to 100% noise.

Interesting choice to reference Lorenz here, since she is against assisted suicide and its legalization, and has been posting a fair bit in Twitter (and presumably Bluesky) about the recent British legalization of assisted suicide (see eg. this tweet and this tweet).

Of course, this isn't particularly surprising if you consider that both Lorenz's COVID diehard soapboxing and this sort of opposition to assisted suicide spring from same source, or are at least justified with references to same rhetoric - disability activism and ableism. There's been quite a fracas in left-wing Twitter generally since the election about whether left-wing movements should continue with COVID precautions like masking (see comments and retweets to this tweet, for instance), with the masking advocates (who are considerably in the minority, to be noted) primarily justifying the practice as a way of solidarity towards disabled people and COVID risk groups.

The same anti-ableism advocates have been also generally very critical of euthanasia and the burgeoning euthanasia culture including, presumably, ads like the one linked. This is probably a large reason why the recently passed assisted British law had a considerable contigent of left-wingers voting against it in the Parliament (147 against 234 within Labour), with - as far as I know - specifically the left wing of Labour being more likely to vote against it.

There's been quite a fracas in left-wing Twitter generally since the election about whether left-wing movements should continue with COVID precautions like masking

Ah, so that’s why covidian lol cows have been getting retweeted into my feed.

Perhaps related, the NHS reports that the two demographics most likely to present with Munchausen's syndrome are women aged 20-40 (often with a background in healthcare) and unmarried men aged 30-50: https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/munchausen-syndrome/overview/

WebMD reports that it's more common in men than women, but doesn't provide a source: https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/munchausen-syndrome

An interesting journal article about malingering, Munchausen's syndrome, Munchausen's by proxy and Munchausen's by internet: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3510683/

women aged 20-40 (often with a background in healthcare) and unmarried men aged 30-50

I can't help but notice that these are roughly the ages when women and men (respectively) would be married and raising their children, in a society where such things haven't fallen out of favour.

Searching for meaning indeed.

Well, do these stats break out into Munchausens and Munchausen's by proxy? Because you might have it exactly backwards, and the reason it's so common in these groups is that they're doing it to their children.

The NHS have a separate article about Munchausen's by proxy (here referred to as "fabricated or induced illness"): https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/fabricated-or-induced-illness/overview/

I wonder if this has anything to do with slave morality as described by Scott: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean

If Scott is correct that slave morality ultimately derives from Christianity, then perhaps the phenomena you're describing (pathological guilt, scrupulosity, fetishization of victimhood) are common to any culture in which Christianity is or was the dominant ideology for some sufficiently long period of time. This would have predictable effects: maybe if we compare countries which were forcibly converted to Christianity within the last two hundred years vs. countries which have been Christian for over five hundred years, we would see higher support for antinatalism, higher support for radical environmentalism, higher incidence of "contested illnesses" like Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic Lyme disease and similar.

From a cursory inspection, most of the countries in which literal self-flagellation is still practised seem to be in Asia, regardless of whether the practitioners are Christian or Muslim. This suggests that local factors (i.e. culture-bound syndromes) might play a larger role than religion.

First Reformed was brilliant.

I enjoyed it immensely as well. Glad to see others defending it.

The through-line is the conception of guilt and the utility of victimhood.

Only white people are sincerely interested in whether they are or are not 'guilty', whether their actions are 'just' in some universal sense. The Mongols don't torture themselves over Genghis Khan, the Turks take the attitude of 'it never happened and it was good that it did, Armenians are scum' when it comes to their misdeeds. Arabs will complain about the West but happily smash the Kurds. They don't think there was anything wrong with going around raiding and brutally enslaving southern Europeans, they haven't apologized for it. There's a reason Slav and Slave sound so similar - Turkey is sublimely indifferent to their role in the slave trade. Only whites think they have some need to correct for past wrongs they've inflicted on other peoples. So in our culture being wronged can be helpful, victimhood can be a useful status.

By and large, all other populations are immersed in Schmittian friend-enemy logic. It's still pretty hard to coax apologies and guilt out of Japan and they've been heavily immersed in white culture and norms for many years now. And before we messed with Japan, they were totally Schmitt-pilled, they were the archetypal 'white people are terrible oppressors and we're liberators (We shall do worse)' faction.

Environmentalism is another angle of being guilty, this time in crimes against the planet.

Antinatalism is an expression of an overwhelming sense of guilt. 'Being ill' is a way of being a victim and getting sympathy from others.

Feminism requires a sense of guilt and restraint in men to have much relevance. Afghan women might be super-feminist, that doesn't change their conditions. It's a little like anti-colonialism in that it requires the occupying power to feel ashamed and hold back their full power. The British could have (and did) smash colonial uprisings in Malaya and elsewhere - even then they reserved their full energy for killing Germans. If the British decided that they weren't going to give up India or Africa, there's nothing their subjects could've done against the enormous fleets, bomber wings, toxic gas and tanks (foreign intervention complicates this but it would mainly be an expression of broader white opinion)... But instead there were 'winds of change'.

Likewise, if men wanted it, feminism would be gone tomorrow. And so we see feminism has its fullest expression in white countries, followed by countries heavily influenced by whites.

That’s absurd.

Every major belief system uses guilt as its feedback mechanism. The unusual thing about white people is that we’re running a system derived from Christianity. That tells us to feel guilty about a broader circle of concern. But if all the Christian guilt in the world circa 1700 didn’t stop white people from dominating, it can’t be the deciding factor now. Something else has changed the cost/benefit analysis.

IMO, what changed is anti-colonialism, enabled by increased European weakness after they got themselves into two unnecessary massive wars from which the Americans had to rescue them and into which they dragged, well, the world.

Europe basically destroyed itself, and because it became weak, it was unable to culturally or militarily resist anti-colonial actions. The US pushed that process along by endorsing anti-colonialism.

To maintain relations with the now fracturing empires, upon which they were economically dependent, Europeans were forced to become apologetic and humble. And like the Japanese after WWII, they complied with this necessity.

So then generations of European elites were raised in a milleu of anti-colonial apology, which destroyed any sense among Europeans that they were good, or moral, or valuable, or net-positive in the world, unless they were steadfastly repentant and self-abnegating.

And because American elites have always obsessed with being accepted by Europeans (who look down on them), where European elites go, American elites follow. This has only somewhat reversed with American social leftism being exported to Europe, but Europe was already fertile ground for such things and the critical and postmodern theories that enabled their rise in the academy originated in continental philosophy. People, including themselves, like to see the postmodernists as these great contrarian rebels, but really they were just providing intellectual explanations of the prevailing social winds on the continent the same way medieval theologians were providing intellectual explanations of the teachings of the Church.

I'm of the opinion that Adolf Hitler was the worst thing to happen to Europe since the plague. The death of half the population would have been less terrible than the humiliation they've undergone.

Something like that, yeah.

Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.

The Industrial Revolution gave unprecedented firepower to European empires. As it continued, that power was steadily diluted to their subjects. By WWII’s end, we’ve got the Maxim gun, but they have, too, not to mention the improvised explosives. The balance tips. Maintaining a garrison rapidly gets more expensive. Colonial policy has to tread ever more carefully. At a certain point, it’s no longer cost-effective to play at empire. Only the biggest can keep trying, and they’re usually pretty unhappy with the process.

So yeah, social pressure shies away from traditional colonialism. It’s expensive and keeps generating ugly pictures for our mass media. Every time someone bucks the trend, they take a bunch of casualties and then get accused of being fascists. Far better to find a reason to give up that imperial ambition.

Turks take the attitude of 'it never happened and it was good that it did, Armenians are scum' when it comes to their misdeeds.

If you have to claim it never happened I think it does demonstrate that on some level you're either aware it's morally indefensible and do feel guilty over it, or you at least know it would look really bad if you tried to defend it as justified. Even if in the next breath you go on to imply the targeted group were scum who would've deserved it anyway, people are quite capable of this sort of doublethink. I definitely think this is what's happening in most cases of people denying atrocities, whether it be the Holocaust, Holodomor, Armenian genocide or Japanese war crimes: they know they can't defend those things so they deny or downplay them instead. Obviously you have some non-white/Western examples there.

So, I don't think it's true that non-white people just don't care about whether they're morally culpable for various atrocities groups they identify with have committed, because if they didn't care they wouldn't feel the need to deny or downplay them. They would either defend them or simply shrug.

If you have to claim it never happened I think it does demonstrate that on some level you're either aware it's morally indefensible and do feel guilty over it, or you at least know it would look really bad if you tried to defend it as justified.

As long as they're not firmly on the other side of the friend-enemy divide to the West they do need a fig leaf, as flimsy as it is, so that it doesn't become untenable for the West to be on friendly term with them, especially since it was sold to the western public after WW2 that a country committing a genocide or other atrocities is all you need to justify war with them. (I mean, there were complex reasons for WW2, but if you asked the average person, they'll say it's because of the genocide, even if it doesn't make sense chronologically).

Wikipedia:

Turkey's official denial of the Armenian genocide continues to rely on the CUP's justification of its actions. The Turkish government maintains that the mass deportation of Armenians was a legitimate action to combat an existential threat to the empire, but that there was no intention to exterminate the Armenian people

That's basically 'it never happened and it was good that it did'.

I'm surprised that the Turkish foreign ministry can't string together an English sentence but this does seem like an official website: https://www.mfa.gov.tr/the-armenian-allegation-of-genocide-the-issue-and-the-facts.en.mfa

FACT 1: Demographic studies prove that prior to World War I, fewer than 1.5 million Armenians lived in the entire Ottoman Empire. Thus, allegations that more than 1.5 million Armenians from eastern Anatolia died must be false.

FACT 2: Armenian losses were few in comparison to the over 2.5 million Muslim dead from the same period.

FACT 3: Certain oft-cited Armenian evidence is of diminished value, having been derived from dubious and prejudicial sources.

FACT 4: The Armenian deaths do not constitute genocide.

FACT 5: The British convened the Malta Tribunals to try Ottoman officials for crimes against Armenians. All of the accused were acquitted.

FACT 6: Despite the verdicts of the Malta Tribunals, Armenian terrorists have engaged in a vigilante war that continues today.

FACT 7: The archives of many nations ought to be carefully and thoughtfully examined before concluding whether genocide occurred.

They're just playing games, if you try hard enough you can produce mountains of proof in favour of the most ridiculous nonsense. As long as big players care about right and wrong, countries will produce all kinds of arguments for why they're in the right. And everyone does this stuff for propaganda reasons anyway.

Furthermore, unlike with the Holocaust, Turkey isn't going to apologize. They won't pay reparations. They won't write it in their textbooks that this was a terrible shame on their civilization - they say that patriotic Turks need to be vigilant against all national security threats. There is no 'never again'. Only whites do this. The substantive differences are more important than the rhetorical differences. Talk is cheap, actions are costly. And it's only white countries that take costly actions to uphold concepts of guilt and moral virtue - consider the British anti-slavery work amongst other things. Nobody else would even consider 'giving back' the Elgin Marbles.

I'm not saying that all genocides and atrocities are committed by non-whites, it's that only whites show any significant guilt or shame.

Only some whites do this.

I wasn't accusing you of saying all atrocities are committed by non-whites. Anyway, fair, there is a distinction in how white/Western countries respond to accusations of having committed atrocities and how non-white/Western countries do, whether that be due to the influence of the Enlightenment or Christianity or post-WWII guilt or whatever it may be, and it does have important implications for culture and politics.

I still think the distinction isn't a result of non-whites not feeling guilty over their actions, though, it's just a different and more covert way of dealing with guilt. Rather than accept the framing of these actions as evil and apologise, sometimes to the point of exaggerating the harm or self-flagellating, non-white countries engage in downplaying and denials, and the fact they do this indicates they do feel their actions are difficult to morally defend. If Japan for example said the Rape of Nanjing did happen and comfort women were coerced and abused, just the way Western or Chinese historians claim, but that it was either good or at least justified in service to the larger national wartime goals, this would indicate a genuine lack of guilt and shame.

When they instead deflect and say Nanjing was exaggerated, or the atrocities weren't authorised, and anyway the other armies were just as bad, and the comfort women were mostly just normal prostitutes, it shows they know they can't convincingly claim those events as described by mainstream historians were morally acceptable, so they have to twist and distort the facts. Unless it were the case that the Japanese accounts were actually more accurate, I suppose.

It would be interesting to see diagnoses of munchausen syndrome over time against the backdrop of the rise of social media. It wouldn't surprise me if this syndrome was also somehow related to the need to identify as a minority for certain types of people.

There's also been a fair bit of speculation that munchausen by proxy could be contributing to the increased prevalence of trans and non-binary identification of children by their parents.

I'm sick > attention is kind of wired into us all to a greater or lesser degree since we were babies. Not sure what the answer is, but trying to take the attention away is a bit like putting the genie back into the bottle at this stage.

I actually first encountered this disease when exploring the twitter of a porn model (so sue me) at least a dozen or more years ago.

Was it Larkin Love?

ETA: FWIW, I did know someone online about as long ago, who did have EDS, and she was wheelchair-bound, and she could do that eyebrow-raising hyperextension it apparently causes.

Now that's a blast from the past.

Holy shit, it wasn’t So this goes even deeper than I imagined. How many are there?

Edit: Upon reflection the naming of “Suicide Girls” is just too wonderful and appropriate to my post. God smiles on me

some common through-line that connects feminism, White people, desire to be ill, environmentalism and suicide

Christian folkways, especially of the New England Puritan kind? It's all there: the meddling, purity spirals and slave morality, the ethnic association, the extending circles of care, the glorification of restraint, acts of penitence and self-denial. Christian devotional hypochondria has a long tradition, and if you go further back there is plenty of antinatalism (monks) and suicide-adjacent practices (martyrs, anchorites) only tempered by a prohibition against explicit suicide.

Non-Extremely Online person here; is “SickTok” at all related to Spoonerspoonie-ism? (It’s all a lack of pies, I tell you)

More online than I'd like but not up to date with the latest online trends here - sick-tock is probably people moaning about their illnesses, largely for grift or attention, on the popular zoomer media platform ticktock.

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