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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   36510 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

it may interest you that your appeal to the "courage (…) to stand up and speak the truth when it is dangerous" got me to register so I could post this reply.

Awesome! I'm flattered.

I do, as a matter of fact, believe in the objective reality of human-caused climate change and the effectiveness of most vaccines. I believe - as a non-exhaustive list, presented in no particular order - in the moral abhorrence of racism, in every human being's inalienable right to shelter and healthcare, and in the moral imperative of LGBTQ rights and acceptance.

To be frank with you, I think most of these are truisms, behind which thornier propositions are hiding. The thorny propositions mostly involve the use of violence or threats of violence against our neighbors, to compel them to behave ways that we believe are beneficial. You and I do not necessarily disagree about what is beneficial. What I suspect we disagree about is the intrinsic harm in using threats of force, including government force, against fellow human beings. For example,

  • The question is not whether human-caused climate change is real, but what its future trajectory is under different scenarios, and exactly how much the government should force its citizens to do about it.
  • The question is not whether most vaccines are effective, but whether people to be required by force to take particular vaccines under particular circumstances.
  • The living question is not whether racism is wrong, but what to do next about it -- and in particular whether the remedy to past racism is any degree of current racism in the other direction. What exactly do you propose?
  • With regard to every human being's inalienable right to shelter and healthcare, the question is not whether it would be nice for everyone to have those things, but whether that alleged right entitles me to force other people to pay for it, against their will, at the point of a (government) gun. What policy do you propose?
  • The question of LGBTQ rights and acceptance, in practice, is not whether I should be allowed to infringe on their negative human rights to safety and property, or even whether it is socially acceptable ostracize someone who is gay or trans -- but whether I should be pressured, or even forced, to use the language they prefer, etc. What policy change do you propose (or what controversial status quo policy do you endorse)?

by all means feel free to simultaneously attack cancel culture and trans rights, but don't bother to claim that you're fighting wokeness as opposed to extreme progressivism.

I'm not attacking anyone at the moment. I disagree with progressivism, while I have disdain and enmity for wokeness. For example, I probably disagree with your position on "trans rights", and on most of the topics you mentioned -- but I presume you hold those positions with an eye toward the benefit of humanity at large, that you are open to changing your mind, and that you are interested in calmly listening to counterarguments. I also presume you hold those positions in good faith, and would continue to hold them even if it cost you something.

I do not make those same presumptions about people who have shown themselves to be woke authoritarians. What distinguishes them is a feeling of being entitled to be agreed with and obeyed, concomitant resistance to dialog, and a penchant for obsequious, opportunistic bandwagoning for social and material gain.

Thank you in turn for this reply.

As I've now told others in this thread, my intent with this comment was not to launch into object-level debates on the progressive 'articles of faith' I listed. It's certainly not to rehash the Root Question of Libertarianism, interesting though I find it. It was specifically to hash out whether you genuinely thought extreme progressivism could be separated from wokeness, and whether you genuinely thought the latter a more pressing enemy to defeat than the former - in which case, again, I would recommend making sure to distinguish the ends and the means more carefully than you had done in the OP. Your last two paragraphs lay it out quite nicely.

That being said, wading into a few of these questions without quite diving head-first into them, I also doubt that my disagreements with most conservatives boil down to my being less of a libertarian than they are. Some sort of Rand-by-way-of-Kant view that climate change may very plausibly cause human extinction within a few decades; but that's still no excuse to resort to forced taxation, and if we die because the funds couldn't be raised any other way, so be it,…… is not a take I've very often encountered in the wild, I'll say that much.

And indeed, with regards to policy hot-takes on trans rights, my leeriness of state violence is essential to one of the "controversial status quo policy [I] endorse": i.e. I think trans women criminals should, in fact, go to women's prisons if they want, if we are to have gender-segregated prisons at all. "We can't do that," you cry: "they'll rape the cis female inmates". The common riposte from trans advocates is "how dare you suggest a trans woman could be a rapist", of course, but I think that misses the point by a country mile.

No - I regard the prevalence of that objection as a scathing indictment of the entire American prison system, one which calls into question its very legitimacy as an arm of the justice system. If the State is going to commit such a direct violation of the personal freedom of its citizens as "locking them in little grey rooms for years at a time", I consider "guaranteeing that more vulnerable inmates will not be raped while in custody" to be a pretty low bar to clear before I'll even entertain the possibility that such actions are morally justifiable for the greater good of society. If female prisoners truly are so totally at the mercy of a trans inmate, then they are also at the mercy of a lesbian rapist who works out, and that is flatly unacceptable. Society should fix that. Imperatively. And once it is fixed, the objection against putting trans prisoners where they want to go dissolves.

To round back to my original point, as you can see, I hold this position very strongly, and I hold it as an extension of underlying moral principles on which it seems you can find common ground. So you can probably imagine how jarring it was to see it listed quite casually in a list of "crazy ideas" which no non-mind-virus-infected progressive could possibly hold in good faith.

I would recommend making sure to distinguish the ends and the means more carefully than you had done in the OP. Your last two paragraphs lay it out quite nicely.

Sorry I haven't had time to respond to this thoroughly yet. However, I have rewritten my private copy of the original post, with your feedback in mind, and I think it is clearer in the new draft that my fight is not with progressivism/liberalism/leftism (though I don't want to heavily edit the original draft on the Motte, because that would make it less clear what people are responding to in some cases). Here are the relevant excerpts from the latest draft:

  • America, and with it all of Western civilization, is now embroiled in a culture war. This war is often cast as a struggle of left vs. right. Indeed, corporate media pundits male their living peddling the left vs. right drama in the style of a pro-wrestling show. But the fact is that, in a sane world, conservatives and progressives are not enemies. They are people of different temperaments, who tend to have different blind spots, and therefore tend to make different sorts of mistakes -- and who need each other's input to see into those blind spots and to temper those mistakes. Of course conservatives and progressives often hold different opinions about how to achieve their common objectives, but that is not what makes people enemies. My wife and I often hold different opinions about how to achieve our common objectives, but that certainly doesn't make us enemies. At the end of the day it makes us a better team, when we can put our egos aside and work together.
  • But I do not think of wokeness as "the left". Wokeness is not progressivism -- or at least any sane form of progressivism -- and it certainly is not a movement for civil rights. Wokeness is to the civil rights movement what communism is to liberalism, and what the inquisition was to Christianity: it is a warlike tyranny, masking itself as a civil rights movement -- which has infected the progressive parties of the West, and is in transforming them into something unrecognizable to their well-meaning forebears.
  • In the long run, the real culture war is not against the left or the right, but against fundamentalism -- aka radicalism, aka extremism, aka supremacist movements -- of all forms. Basically, a fundamentalists are those demonizes their ideological opposition for personal or political gain. The fact is, tempting as it is to feel otherwise, there is some good and some bad on both sides of every argument and every conflict. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart. But fundamentalists are those who have rejected Solzhenitsyn's maxim, and, in their minds, redrawn the line between good and evil to lie between their people and certain other people.
  • Whether it wears the mask of the political left, the political right, or fundamentalist religion, fundamentalism has certain distinguishing hallmarks: the fangs that peek out from under its sheep's clothing. First, because fundamentalists vest ultimate moral authority in people (their people) rather than principles, they tend to abandon the precepts of the ideology they claim to uphold. So, if you watch a fundamentalist movement closely, you will notice that the things they do often predictably lead to the opposite of what they say they want (know them by their fruits). Second, fundamentalists feel entitled to suppress the speech of their ideological adversaries, as well as to forcibly control their behavior, seize their property, and target them for oppression of any sort they can get away with -- not as punishment for particular crimes they have committed as individuals, not even exactly because they are bad people, but because they are the wrong kind of people. The wrong kind of people could be Jews, heretics, the "bourgeoisie", or even straight white men -- whomever the regime finds it expedient to portray as a historical class enemy, and blame for all the world's ills.
  • Finally, a resurgence of wokeism is not the only ideological shift that we have to fear. While wokeism is the most visible threat today, in the long run we are also in danger of a pendulum-swing toward totalitarianism of a right-wing variety. Recall that in depression-era Germany, Nazism grew in just 20 years (approximately 1915 to 1935) from an obscure fringe movement to national dominance -- largely as a backlash against the very real and radical leftist threats of communist revolution and libertine excess. Such a quick swing from one form of extremism to the other may seem puzzling to those who view the culture war in terms of left and right, but it makes sense if we consider that fundamentalist regimes of the left and right are essentially more alike than different, and both grow in the same soil of moral decay.
  • Even if my theory of how and why is all wrong, the fact is that quick swings from one form of extremism to another taken place before, and not just in Germany. Russia was a Tsarist autocracy in 1900, and by 1920 it was a Communist police state. France had a populist left wing revolution in 1789, and then welcomed Napoleon in as a military dictator in 1804. It is true that woke leftists have a habit of gratuitously labeling people who disagree with them as white supremacists, Fascists, and Nazis -- but is also true that there exist actual white supremacist, Fascists, and Nazis, who love to see that name calling go on, because the fog of crying wolf gives them a smoke screen behind which to operate and gather power. "It can't happen here" are the famous last words of many a nation through history.

Below is a link to the updated draft in my Google docs. If you have time to look it over, I would welcome further comments.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_d0pip_lYB5utNiyHA3mJfmQWo8isSUzBECjyf1FyxU/edit?usp=sharing

NR

Ah, this is an unexpected and welcome surprise! I will try to review this over the week-end. Thanks for letting me know.

Some sort of Rand-by-way-of-Kant view that climate change may very plausibly cause human extinction within a few decades; but that's still no excuse to resort to forced taxation, and if we die because the funds couldn't be raised any other way, so be it,…… is not a take I've very often encountered in the wild, I'll say that much.

I accept it is plausible that climate change will cause human extinction within a few decades. The same is plausible for nuclear war, an asteroid impact, a superbug, a super-volcano, renegade AI, et. al. If there were a policy on the table, with good evidence suggested would mitigate one of those, at reasonable cost, without being liable to cause greater harm of some sort, I would be all ears. Do you know of one? Absent that, I don't think this is relevant unless it is just a thought experiment. If it is a thought experiment, and you are asking hypothetically what I'd say if there were such a policy, I might be open to it -- but everything depends on the details, costs, and consequences, because...

We can't spend 20% of GDP mitigating climate change, 20% mitigating nuclear war, 20% mitigating an asteroid impact, 20% mitigating superbugs, 20% mitigating super-volcanoes, and 20% mitigating runaway AI -- because that adds up to 120%. Would you spend 10% on each one? I bet I can name four more plausible humanity-ending disasters before you post your answer. There is an interminable list of national and global disasters that are plausible within a few decades, and from that I infer that paying heavy costs to mitigate merely-plausible disasters is bad for our health and welfare -- unless some particular disaster is particularly plausible, and some particular plan can be shown to mitigate it without doing more harm than good.

I think trans women criminals should, in fact, go to women's prisons if they want... So you can probably imagine how jarring it was to see it listed quite casually in a list of "crazy ideas" which no non-mind-virus-infected progressive could possibly hold in good faith.

To the object-level point, if we had a crystal ball and a magic genie, we could house all inmates safely and humanely... No, wait, there wouldn't be any inmates, because there wouldn't be any crime, because we'd all be drinking free soda pop and eating rainbow stew for every meal. But, since we don't have a crystal ball or a magic genie, some things can be achieved in a shorter time frame than others. The policy of (1) not housing trans women sex offenders in women's prisons is an issue of living debate which is short-term achievable, while the policy of (2) having a humane prison system is not. If you push for (1) before you can achieve (2), then in the real world you are advocating for what you know, or ought to know, will make prison more dangerous for women. Sometimes you have to break some eggs to make an omelet, but that's not an egg I'm willing to break.

To the meta-level point, I don't have data for the US, but in the UK only about 15% of people firmly believe that trans women sex offenders with penises should be housed in women's prisons [source]. That is about the same as the percentage of Americans who believed that Elvis might still be alive in 2017 [source]. I don't have anything against either the trans-women-are-women crowd or the Elvis-is-alive crowd, but I also don't think I am obliged to consider their beliefs morally tenable or epistemically plausible. If I am talking directly with someone who believes a certain thing, I would politely entertain that thing -- but I can't entertain everything all the time just because somebody somewhere believes it. Some of my beliefs are out of the picture for other people, and vice versa, and I am OK with that. What I'm saying is that some charity is warranted here -- and I think your life would be better if you relax and stop being jarred when people, who are not speaking to you directly, are dismissive of things you believe, especially when you know to be on the fringe. Maybe you're right, even though almost everyone laughs off your theory, like Nikola Tesla or Alfred Wegener -- but even if you're right, it doesn't pay to get wound up about it.

I accept it is plausible that climate change will cause human extinction within a few decades. The same is plausible for nuclear war, an asteroid impact, a superbug, a super-volcano, renegade AI, et. al.

Nuclear war: no, there's no mechanism that lets you get to extinction. Nuclear winter is literally a hoax, blast/heat/local fallout are too localised, and global fallout's too weak (I ran the numbers on Cold War arsenals and those weren't nearly enough). It could get to #2 on the list of "disasters in history by %humanity killed", but #1 is dubious, let alone X.

Supervolcano: another Yellowstone wouldn't do it (this is known fact; humanity already survived Yellowstone three times before we even tamed dogs). Another Siberian Traps might, admittedly.

Climate change/superbug: not in the normal senses. A normal pandemic can't get everyone because R drops below 1 before #humans reaches 0. The only "superbug" (i.e. infectious agent) that could get actual everyone is a full-blown insect-zombifier-for-humans where victims actively and intelligently attempt to infect others (rabies and toxoplasma are nowhere near precise enough), and that's highly implausible without intelligent design (there's nothing with this level of precision in any mammal, and it's generally thought to get harder with brain size). For climate change to get us would require, well, another Siberian Traps, or a Chicxulub+ impact (another Chicxulub wouldn't do it, due to preppers if nothing else), or some omnicidal maniac deliberately manufacturing and releasing millions of tonnes of fluorocarbons; I'm specifically not including "some idiot blocked out the Sun with a solar shade" because people would notice that and destroy it (with massive casualties, but not X).

Asteroid impact: technically no (at least not without terrorist redirection), but in practice I'll grant this one (we've found all the Earth-crossing asteroids of sufficient size and ruled out collisions, but comets are harder to predict). Low probability, though, particularly given the requirement for a Chicxulub+ one.

AI can do it. Life 2.0 can do it (here I'm thinking of things like a non-digestible alga that doesn't need phosphate and has better-than-RuBisCO photosynthesis, not a pathogen - an independent lifeform that terraforms the planet in ways that are incompatible with human survival, in this case by causing a superglaciation plus total failure of open-air crops). New physics catastrophes and terrorist geoengineering might do it, although I'd be more concerned about those on the scale of centuries rather than decades. And obviously there's the "unknown unknown" term which is unknowable by definition. But AI and Life 2.0 are the known X-risks that scare me. (Obviously there are GCRs that are significantly more likely than any X-risk. Nuclear war's highly likely to occur sometime this century if we don't get X first; I just expect not only people to survive but myself to survive.)

If it is a thought experiment, and you are asking hypothetically what I'd say if there were such a policy, I might be open to it -- but everything depends on the details, costs, and consequences, because...

It was a thought experiment, yes. I'm not particularly concerned about short-term human extinction from climate change myself - my irritation with right-wingers' tendency to hedge and obfuscate on whether it's real at all has more in common with HBD types' very understandable annoyance with progressives who try to change the subject or discredit the science, rather than bite the bullet of "yes, the science says what you think it says, but your idea of what to do about it is still bad". My position on climate change, roughly expressed, is that it is obviously real bad, and obviously a very worrying crisis even in cautious estimates of how bad it will get; but, equally obviously, that private individuals' behavior, especially in the West, is a drop in the bucket, to the extent that it is a waste of energy - pun surprisingly not intended - to guilt-trip them about their personal carbon footprint or whatever. I would like more right-wingers to say this head-on and stop with the bullshit about "well, maybe it isn't completely human-caused, who's to say". It's not the point. I'm not accusing you of that particular epistemological sin but I see it a lot, and conversely I see a lot of, to my mind, completely unwarranted "har, har, woke buzzword, brainwashed morons" sneering whenever someone acknowledges man-made climate change as A Bad, Obviously Real Thing That Is Happening, whatever policies they recommend.

But as for everything after your "but", well… insert the Winston Churchill joke about haggling and prostitution. It seems there are crises of sufficient urgency that you are willing to entertain the validity of government action funded by taxation, provided the policy looks promising. Why is the death of humanity by hypothetical runaway climate change on that list, but not the preventable deaths of thousands of private citizens for lack of affordable healthcare? And either way, haven't we already gotten rather afield from a clean position where our disagreement is not on the facts, but on what it is morally acceptable for the government to do about the facts? There seem to be several points of confusion here.

To the object-level point, if we had a crystal ball and a magic genie, we could house all inmates safely and humanely... …If you push for (1) before you can achieve (2), then in the real world you are advocating for what you know, or ought to know, will make prison more dangerous for women

If you like.

I don't think you actually need a magic genie to prevent 99% of prison rapes. You may or may not need a kind of a crystal ball, but it's a kind we know how to make! It's not a uniquely hard problem - it is a problem that there has been very little political will to solve because a lot of people not-so-secretly want prisoners to suffer above and beyond being deprived of their liberty, and a lot more people don't really care about prisoners' welfare very much compared to other issues even if they'd marginally support improvements to their condition. I don't think it's remotely fair to compare the problem of "stop prison rape" to the problem of "stop all crime everywhere": the whole point of prison is that it is a controlled, tightly-monitored closed-system.

Yes, creating "a humane prison system" in all respects is a taller order, but rapes are the one thing that the presence or absence of trans inmates has an influence on. I would be happy with first solving the narrow problem of stopping the rapes, then allowing trans women into female prisons, then going back to the drawing board to draft a more ambitious, wholesale prison reform. And I reckon you could achieve the first two simultaneously, as two clauses of the same bill. Hell, if you wanted to be really kludgy about it, you could even set up special security measures for trans women inmates, without yet tackling the broader problem of prison rape, to guarantee that the addition of the trans women doesn't move the needle. Why not?

But also… even if you couldn't - even if it turns out that, in terms of practical implementation, the only sane way to get trans women in prison to work is ten years down the line after we complete wholesale prison reform - surely I'm allowed to state what my endgame is? When I say everyone should have guaranteed healthcare, I don't expect to snap my fingers and make it happen overnight. All sorts of things need to be thought through and organized, all sorts of sub-reforms and necessary steps introduced into law, before we get where we're going. I understand that, you understand that I understand that. I'm still allowed to say I "support universal healthcare". Why shouldn't I say, in general terms, that I "support trans women being allowed into women's prisons" even if I acknowledge, or acknowledge the possibility, that this aim can only be reached after other reforms I also want go through?

EDIT: this has no bearing on the meta argument(s) but I also remembered that there is another prong to the ethical cost-benefit analysis here, which I elided in my first message on the topic because unlike the "the state shouldn't be throwing its hands up and saying 'rapists gonna rape' in the first place" thing, it has nothing to do with my feelings on the government's right to inflict violence on its citizens. Namely: aren't trans women - commonly regarded as highly effeminate men - very likely to be raped themselves in men's prisons? Doesn't it at least seem worth investigating that, in expectation, all else being equal, putting a trans woman in a men's prison might be more likely to result in rape than putting her in a women's prison - because the trans woman in the women's prison may or may not be interested in raping women, but it is all but guaranteed that at least one man in the men's prison will be interested in raping a sissy?

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