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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   32752 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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Today, Jesse Singal wrote an opinion for the New York Times where he argued that Trump defunding youth gender research was a bad thing, despite the terrible research coming out of that part of science. He thinks that reform is in order, not slash-and-burn practices. In my opinion, there is definitely enough research out there by now that you can confidently release something like a Cass Report without anything new. Certainly, funding bad actors makes no sense, but to me, reform is little gain, and even a good new study must follow around minors that have gone through the unethical transgender science grinder.

It reminds me of an (unpopular) opinion Trace shared the other day on Twitter regarding the axing of funds for museums and libraries. Even if anthropology is 99% leftist, well, the institutions belong to those who show up, so right wingers just need to get in there and fix it themselves. While I appreciated that stance as it related to conservative law organizations, and as it related to Twitter when left-wingers were leaving the site en masse, I find it pretty distasteful to give up anthropology to positive feedback loops, and let our history become a mockery when it is within one's power to just raze it.

Deus Ex took a look at this perspective. Spoilers for Deus Ex: General Carter, after the UNATCO plot is exposed, decides to stay within the organization, because institutions are only as good as the people that comprise them. Later in the game, you see him in the Vandenburg compound. He has given up on his idea of reform and joined the resistance.

I'm going to guess most of this forum disagrees with Trace and Jesse on this matter in pretty much the same way that I do. Can you name any areas in government or other organizations where you do agree with them?

It's Edmund Burke vs. Thomas Paine for the 50 millionth time. "Slowly and carefully prune away the rot" vs "Revolt and replace the institutions entirely". Jesse/Trace are advocating for the former, and interestingly enough much of the current conservative crop falls into the latter mindset, despite Burke being probably one of the most central figures to Anglosphere conservatism.

Not to go all Hlynka, but the modern right somewhat dovetails with the left in the sense that they have largely shifted from a Burkeian mindset to a Paine-like one overtime. I partially think this is the right seeing how successful revolutionary, scorched-earth tactics were on the left, and realising that advocating tactics characterised by stability and moderation don't work when you're fighting with people who really would like to (possibly violently) overhaul society. But more broadly, I think revolution is attractive to a general political coalition when they're heavily ousted from institutions and placed on the back foot, whereas gradual change that prioritises stability is preferred when these coalitions' beliefs are tolerated within said institutions - the risks and costs of overhauling the system in such a case just outweighs the potential benefit of marginal status gains. The likes of Trace are attempting to appeal to a gradualist version of conservatism that looks like a worse and worse value proposition as time goes on and the left's Long March through the institutions becomes increasingly apparent.

Personally, despite differing with conservatives on many things, I espouse a lot of heterodoxy that's anathema to progressives and would happily warm my hands on the embers of the torched institutions.

Personally, despite differing with conservatives on many things, I espouse a lot of heterodoxy that's anathema to progressives and would happily warm my hands on the embers of the torched institutions.

I'll just point out here that if you don't want to build a mountain of skulls, some of those institutions will need a replacement at least moderately close to ready before you torch them.

Of course; there are obviously many load-bearing institutions that can't be burned to the ground without many disastrous ripple effects. But there are also a great number of institutions and/or subfields - including many of the Truth-producing academic fields and news sources which are most crucial to the spread of the ideology - which are not hugely critical to baseline functioning, and are kept alive in part through public money that frankly shouldn't be going towards producing propaganda-disguised-as-science with infinite degrees of freedom. Arson of these institutions is a public good, in my opinion.

There is, indeed, a reason I said "some of those institutions".

I'll just point out here that if you don't want to build a mountain of skulls, some of those institutions will need a replacement at least moderately close to ready before you torch them.

How is torching these institutions going to produce a mountain of skulls?

There are certain institutions which, if removed for an extended period, will result in a modern society rapidly depopulating due to the heavy optimisation required to sustain modern population densities. Military, police, public utilities, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, plus the tax collection apparatus to fund some of these, and a pipeline to train people to do these things. I'm not saying you have to preserve the specific institutions that currently do these things, but "torch them all now and then start figuring out how to replace them" won't cut it. You cannot take them all offline for months without a mountain of skulls; it'd be the Great Leap Forward all over again.

Not coincidentally, most of the institutions you've mentioned are least-penetrated by wokeness. Police, particularly outside cities, are notoriously not woke. Burning down the police in cities gets you the 1980s back again... but so does letting the wokeness continue to spread. Public utilities and agriculture... not woke at all, so far as I know, except perhaps marketing departments. Burning down hospitals and pharmaceuticals gets you a small pile of mostly old skulls at worst. In pharma's case you probably just have to burn down the marketing department anyway.

Burning down pharmaceuticals means that a bunch of currently-negligible bacterial infections become big threats again, and illnesses mostly-eliminated by vaccination start to come back. The worst-case scenario is probably another plague epidemic with non-modern fatality rates (there is plague in the USA; it's just very treatable with antibiotics), although modern garbage disposal might be enough to keep that at bay (pneumonic plague does spread human -> human, though).

Do not underestimate their value just because you don't have to use them all that often; IRL, maintaining a good state can be really, really cheap compared to the bad state (see: iron lung argument).

And you do still need university-equivalents to train the chemists, although this is admittedly far less urgent.

I mean, there are definitely woke-captured institutions we cannot simply go without. Medical schools, for example.

The problem with “slow reform” as a process is that it rarely actually solves the problem. It’s failed often enough that I think once an institution reaches a certain point of brokenness that it’s probably better to slash burn and rebuild than to go slowly simply because going slowly often means those opposed have a chance to regroup and defend the rot in various ways. It’s why I think DOGE is absolutely brilliant— the axe is against the tree before anyone can figure out what is happening. Had it been the same sort of slo2 reform were used to — forming commissions, holding hearings, and going line by line, most of the problems— the bad science, the corruption, the waste, and the lucrative sinecures — would be quietly shuffled into other parts of the budget before DOGE could do anything. Move quickly and they cannot fight back.

Huh. If that's actually the case, I think the realignment might be painful in the short term but very good in the long term. The left has lately been the party of "incremental improvement isn't the way, tear it all down and replace it with something better", which is not a great philosophy when the left is the party which controls the institutions. If we could get a realignment to where the party that runs the institutions actually wants to preserve and improve those institutions, that'd be great.

Of course given that we live in the clown world, maybe the right will manage to actually take over our institutions over the long term while retaining a culture of fighting against "the deep state" (that is now their deep state).

Even if anthropology is 99% leftist, well, the institutions belong to those who show up, so right wingers just need to get in there and fix it themselves

A darkly amusing choice of subject considering the destruction of all (?) known ancient hominid fossils in Australia over the past couple weeks. His point isn't wrong, exactly, but I continue to think he underestimates the "long march" aspect and just how long showing up will take. Spending 30 years to get back into the institutions is not a plan for saving fossils that will be gone in a few months or a year at most.

As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, and the second best is now. We should be planting trees now, but (to extend the metaphor) stopping people from salting the ground is also useful.

ancient hominid fossils

This is news to me. And I'm unable to find a source on the search engines. Is this being reported anywhere?

Article

Willandra is therefore a pivotal place in human history. And yet, as you read this, those human fossils are being reburied. Mungo Man and Lady are already gone; around a hundred other remains are following. All are being destroyed, like medieval books burned in a pyre.

Why? Politics and guilt. At the behest of some Aboriginal groups, the precious bones of the ‘first peoples’ are being reburied. This is occurring in the traditional way and in secret. The locations will then be willingly forgotten. As one Aboriginal elder, Ivan Johnson, has put it: ‘It’s been a long wait: 50 years to bury our ancestors.’

the destruction of all (?) known ancient hominid fossils in Australia over the past couple weeks

What, what? Was this discussed here?

I assumed it was discussed here but maybe not! @Alabasata

Mungo Maniac on twitter has written a lot about it, and here's a brief Spectator article on the topic. His namesake, Mungo Man, seems to have been reburied back in 2022, but last week another 100+ fossils many of which were around 40K years old were reburied at an undisclosed location in the outback, in deference to Aboriginal control of the fossils and so that they couldn't be studied.

My tinfoil hat is tingling. I wonder if modern examination techniques would have shown something the powers that be didn’t want them to.

Specifically, they were likely to show that the current iteration of aboriginals weren’t the first people in Australia.

Is that at all likely though? I think it's pretty clear (if not talked about much) that this is the case in North America -- but I thought the original migration path for Abos was pretty well established? (and very old)

Why is that "likely"?

In my opinion, there is definitely enough research out there by now that you can confidently release something like a Cass Report without anything new.

The CASS report predominantly based its conclusions on the lack of high-quality research, a point it reiterates often, not on high-quality affirmative evidence against treatment. There is some such evidence - for instance see this Reddit comment I wrote about puberty blockers and the indications that they both lock children onto the transgender pathway and permanently damage brain development - but like all evidence on the issue it isn't very good. In the absence of evidence that a treatment is safe and effective, the burden is traditionally on those advocating for the treatment to prove that it is. However, even aside from new studies actually providing information, "gender-affirming care" now has both established practice and a political ideology behind it, so abolishing it in any sort of permanent and widespread way seems likely to require more evidence. Without new evidence you might see some governments abolish or discourage it specifically for children, but others will continue to feed a fraction of every new generation into the trans pipeline and even places that get rid of it could easily flip back in a generation. The medical consensus turning against it would be a much more effective and stable solution, and something like a high-quality randomized control trial showing gender transition failing to outperform the control group would be a big step in that direction.

If anything "lack of high-quality research" understates the case. There is not a single randomized control study of gender transition, in either children or adults. It's incredibly easy for non-RCTs to give false results even if you do a reasonably good job, and most don't do even that. Read through something like Scott's Alcoholics Anonymous post or his ivermectin post and imagine how much worse it would be if only the non-RCT subset of the studies he looks at were available. That's why fields like nutrition, where long-term randomized control trials are impractical, are so terrible despite far more quantity and quality of research than a small field like gender dysphoria.

As an example, here's an excerpt from the Cass Report I've looked into previously:

The systematic review on interventions to suppress puberty (Taylor et al: Puberty suppression) provides an update to the NICE review (2020a). It identified 50 studies looking at different aspects of gender-related, psychosocial, physiological and cognitive outcomes of puberty suppression. Quality was assessed on a standardised scale. There was one high quality study, 25 moderate quality studies and 24 low quality studies. The low quality studies were excluded from the synthesis of results.

Here is the meta-study being cited, the classification into high/moderate/low quality was not done by the Cass Report but by the meta-study. Note that many of the studies only looked at physical outcomes like "is puberty suppressed". At the time trans activists complained about the CASS report excluding a lot of studies, but among other things that includes studies that only investigated whether puberty blockers stop puberty and made no attempt to investigate whether stopping puberty provided any psychological benefit. This is the single supposed "high-quality" study. It isn't a randomized control study, it compares patients who have been given puberty blockers to ones who just started the assessment process. (It also compares to a "cisgender comparison group", such comparisons tend to be even more worthless.) Among other potential problems, this means the results are very plausibly just regression to the mean or benefits from the other mental-health care provided. If you think the parents of children with worse self-reported "internalizing, suicidality, and peer relations" are more likely to seek treatment than the parents of children who are currently doing fine, which the study itself shows, then improvement over time is the expected result even if you don't do anything. Plus they did do other things, it specifically mentions "the care provided in the present study also involved the offering of appropriate mental health care". It also mentions that the "control" group has an average age of 14.5 years and the treatment group 16.8 years. And that's the only "high-quality" study the meta-study could find on puberty blockers, here are the reasons given for why it considered the other studies to be even worse.

There is not a single randomized control study of gender transition, in either children or adults.

You're overstating the importance of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in medical research.

As a famous parody of your point, this 2003 study found that no RCTs had been done of parachute use when jumping out of airplanes and concluded that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that parachutes are effective. As a follow up, this 2018 study did implement a RCT for parachute use when jumping from airplanes and concluded that parachutes do not in fact prevent injury. (Participants jumped from an airplane on the ground.)

Less facetiously, we have no RCTs demonstrating that HIV causes AIDs, but we can still be pretty confident about the link between the virus and the disease. Recognizing this relationship has led to a lot of good medical progress both for the populationis affected by AIDs and those not affected by AIDs (by for example keeping HIV out of blood transfusions to prevent the spread of AIDs).

I happen to also be skeptical of the benefits of transition. But your explanation of the science is not good here and at best leading you to the "right belief for the wrong reason".

Without new evidence you might see some governments abolish or discourage it specifically for children, but others will continue to feed a fraction of every new generation into the trans pipeline and even places that get rid of it could easily flip back in a generation.

I don't think that this is going to happen. The progress can be slow at times but following evidence-based practice is not a partisan thing, it is just a way forward. Takes a lot of work, hard work assessing evidence, figuring it all out, learning who can you trust since no one person is able to do fully etc.

It is said that currently about 50% of medical practices are not strictly evidence based. It takes time to re-evaluate everything, do high quality studies and so on. Many doctors have their own biases and can be very resistant to change. Maybe it will never be that their recommendations are 100% or even 99% based on good evidence. But I expect that it will become better with time as it is much better than it was 50 or 100 years ago. Maybe there will be some temporary setbacks in some places. That is also expected and in a way it is also good as it will provide a control group :)

I harp on RCTs because most of the time I read non-RCTs (in fields like healthcare and sociology with complicated and frequently opaque mechanisms) they end up utterly failing to adequately compensate for their disadvantages. Though of course this is a biased sample, I'm generally not reading studies on obvious and non-controversial subjects. It's always stuff like "we controlled for X" where X is whatever arbitrary handful of factors the authors thought of (leaving whatever residue is left as the "effect", or conversely erasing the effect with Everest controls), or "we matched with a non-random pseudo control group" (like the puberty blockers study I discussed) where we're supposed to trust how well matched they really are and there's often obvious differences between the groups. It is with good reason that in applications like clinical trials where RCTs are possible, they are considered the "gold standard" and are often required for approval by organizations like the FDA.

It's bad enough that I think anyone trying to argue the contrary needs to very specifically justify why the non-RCTs in the case in question actually work, not vaguely gesture at the fact that sometimes we can gather adequate evidence without RCTs. Otherwise I think it is very easy for people, including medical professionals, to assume that (for instance) just because 50 studies on puberty blockers have been conducted and they have become established clinical practice we now know whether they are better or worse than nothing. Sorry, 5-HTTLPR and depression had 450 studies and turned out to be completely fake, you need the very highest quality of studies to know whether the thing you're talking about is even real. There are of course plenty of ways to mess up RCTs too, the replication crisis is filled with them, but my impression whenever I see RCTs on a subject compared with non-RCTs (as in Scott's posts I linked in the prior post) is of a huge and often unbridgeable difference in baseline reliability. Sometimes conducting RCTs really is impossible (and in those cases I expect our understanding of the issue to be much worse) but if they're possible then conducting a high-quality RCT is going to be my go-to recommendation for both understanding the issue and creating evidence compelling enough that it can potentially convince others.

Less facetiously, we have no RCTs demonstrating that HIV causes AIDs, but we can still be pretty confident about the link between the virus and the disease.

What do HIV and parachutes have in common? A much clearer mechanism of action. With gender dysphoria what we instead have is the murky waters of people creating narratives about their own subjective experiences based on whatever memes their culture has lying around, something people are terrible at doing accurately. Such introspection provides a wide range of insights: miracle supplements or faith-healing producing amazing boosts in well-being, subconscious reasons for your problems accessible through dream-analysis, neurasthensia, suppressed memories, etc. So yes, I'm sure you can make the case for HIV without a RCT, but that case would have to focus specifically on evidence particular to that case, my default without such evidence is to be skeptical of non-RCTs and look for the many ways they can go wrong.

All I'm trying to say is that your original post overemphasized the importance of RCTs in medicine.

By the way, based on you posting this in reply to someone else I think you mistook his posts for mine.

I am far too used to people using the parachute idea as justification to not do RCTs in places where an RCT would clearly be best practice. Most recently, involving COVID restrictions, which are assumed to work because "physics" or whatever but never get tested. We don't apply such flimsy reasoning elsewhere. Designer drugs have to go through trials despite being physics telling you they should work because they interact with the target molecule in models. If you can do an RCT, and choose not to, you better have a good reason to do so, and parachutes isn't a good enough reason.

Early parachute designs were actually tested. Nobody took the claims of their inventors at face value, they wanted evidence that they work, so their inventors tested them either personally or with objects/animals. That's why we don't need additional RCTs for the concept of parachutes, even though you could do one using animals. If they were invented for the first time tomorrow, you'd probably want to do something like an RCT:

  • Take 20 crash test dummies.

  • Randomly assign 10 to use the parachute, and 10 to not.

  • Simulate identical falls for all 20.

  • Hand the dummies to a blinded team of engineers who assess damage

  • Compare the results statistically to see if the safety intervention reduced injuries

I think it depends. To me, in anything science, RCT is the gold standard. There are workarounds that can be used when doing RCT is unethical due to the danger to the control group or in some cases the data is impossible to gather. In those cases other methods can work, though I generally take them to be low value and require a lot more of them done under lots of conditions before I accept the results.

The 2018 study did, as a matter of experimental design, include jumps from a plane in midflight. But the convenience sample of people willing to participate in an RCT of parachutes just happened to consist 100% of people asked while the plane was on the ground.

You're overstating the importance of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in medical research.

So does this mean Ivermectin was actually great, and all the critics were Ivermectinophobes? Or do we, in fact, have some ways to judge the quality of studies, and know for a fact that the absence of certain design features tends to mean a study's finding will tend to be overturned, if done properly?

So does this mean Ivermectin was actually great, and all the critics were Ivermectinophobes?

We will never know either way. One side is claiming ivermectin cures cancer and homosexuality and the other is claiming it has a high risk of causing death. Neither is willing to tell the truth.

Medicine is hard, and answers to important medical questions can't fit in the length of a tweet. I have a phd in machine learning, so I'm confident I could form an opinion on your questions if I tried really hard and read a bunch of papers and thought about the problem for a week. But I don't care to do that, and so at some point I have to trust other people's judgements.

that the absence of certain design features tends to mean a study's finding will tend to be overturned, if done properly?

Part of the parachute study's point is that RCTs are not enough! And you are placing too much faith in RCTs! It's very easy to design a RCT that "looks good from the outside" but has a fatal flaw that makes it not applicable to the real world. In the parachute example, the fatal flaw is that the plane was grounded the whole time. Downthread, people are pointing out a bunch of fatal flaws in hypothetical RCTs for gender transition that would undermine any possible conclusion.

No matter what the methods are of an experiment, you can't get around having to sit down carefully and examine all of the assumptions.

Medicine is hard, and answers to important medical questions can't fit in the length of a tweet. I have a phd in machine learning, so I'm confident I could form an opinion on your questions if I tried really hard and read a bunch of papers and thought about the problem for a week. But I don't care to do that, and so at some point I have to trust other people's judgements.

Well, we might run into a problem here, because I don't care much for credentials, but I respect a sincerely held belief. If you don't really want to put your name on the argument for puberty blockers, just poke holes in the arguments against them (but never, ever, for them), I don't know how far we're gonna get, but let's give it a go.

Part of the parachute study's point is that RCTs are not enough! And you are placing too much faith in RCTs! It's very easy to design a RCT that "looks good from the outside" but has a fatal flaw that makes it not applicable to the real world.

Right, but are you going to tell me that the absence of randomization in controls is going to make the exact same study better? Like, I get that RCT might not be the be-all end-all, or that in some context might not be practically achievable, but you can't beat down any and all skepticism with "the science is settled, chud" type arguments (which is exactly what was happening in the case of transgender care for many years, even if you weren't doing it personally), and retreat to "ho hum, it's so nuanced" when people point out the poor quality of your studies.

I keep linking to that old blogpost about prescribing Lupron to autists, because I never got a good answer for it. Somehow it was clear as day that it's quack medicine back in 2006, and only hardcore libertarians ever dreamt of arguing that maybe we should let people try it if they want, but now doctors are prescribing the same drug to the children of often unwilling parents, with absolutely no evidence (by their own admission), and we're supposed to just roll with it?

No matter what the methods are of an experiment, you can't get around having to sit down carefully and examine all of the assumptions.

I'm happy to, and I believe that if you do that, the entire edifice falls apart. Not just puberty blockers, but the entire concept of "gender dysphoria" as a diagnosis.

I'm happy to, and I believe that if you do that, the entire edifice falls apart. Not just puberty blockers, but the entire concept of "gender dysphoria" as a diagnosis.

All I'm trying to say is that your original post overemphasized the importance of RCTs in medicine. I'm not trying to make any claim about gender dysphoria or its treatment.

You are absolutely correct! But parachutes have been proven to work in practice, while everything about gender affirming surgery is left to the future, a la "they would killed themselves otherwise".

If Junior says he's Napoleon, he is clearly in need of help. But if he says he's Napoleonette, he's stunning and brave. Can he/she/they buy a pack of cigarettes?

Great post and actually reverses my opinion. You've Singal-pilled me. I don't understand how any of those studies can be taken seriously by anyone else, but I guess it is important we get anything at all to satiate the people pushing this before axing it. Though I will point out that there are still plenty of communists, even though the communist experiment has failed several times over now.

I guess I'm Singal-pilled in that I see the utility in continuing experiments. I don't actually care if they're government funded or not. Certainly, if I was cutting research, research into something I despise would be one of the first things I cut. But, more nuanced than what I thought, I guess.

I don't understand how any of those studies can be taken seriously by anyone else

Because it's not about the science (or even The Science). We've danced this dance before with Intelligent Design. It's about "we have these pre-existing conclusions on the question, now we're just digging around for 'facts' to support it and squash our opposition".

A large part of transphobia/the trans backlash/TERF or what you want to call the reactions of ordinary people is that the question has moved very quickly from "some people suffer from dysphoria and feel absolutely convinced they are born in the wrong body, should we not help them?" and the answer to that being fought over "is this a mental illness or not, meaning should we try to treat them so they stop thinking this or should we give them drugs and surgery?", which is a whole controversy on its own, to "well what is sex and gender anyway? gender roles are socially determined, gender is a binary, now sex itself is a binary, there is no such thing as 'male' or 'female', 'man' or 'woman', let's smash cisheretonormativity, you are a woman if you feel that you are a woman" which is a much wider and deeper question and does involve undermining and overthrowing long-held traditional notions of 'this is a man' and 'this is a woman' as part of the broader revolution of attitudes around sexuality.

And then you throw six year old children into the mix of that witches' brew.

One study showed that, on average, study participants reported their earliest memory of gender dysphoria between the ages of 4 and 6 years old. By the age of 7, most study participants could remember experiencing some feelings of gender dysphoria.

Or hey, Trust The Experts, if a two year old pulls the barrettes out of their hair, it is a very strong sign they are trans!

I’m director of mental health at a leading gender clinic in the US. Our clinic is a half-decade old – and in that short period the number of families coming to us with questions about their child’s gender has grown astronomically every month.

...These feelings can surface as early as the second year of life, when a girl toddler frantically pulls the fancy barrettes out of her hair or a boy toddler wraps his blanket around his head to create long, flowing hair. Or, they can show up much later. Children, like any human, are all different.

Ordinary people may be brought around to accept "adult person is now convinced he is she and wants to change their body to suit" with the approval of "here are serious and grave medical professionals who sign off on 'yes George is indeed Georgina'", but making it "here is Susie who hasn't changed one scrap of her appearance or behaviour except now she is claiming to be nonbinary 'they/them' and will fly off the handle into an absolute hysterical shrieking fit of rage if some poor passerby calls them 'she'" and "sure this may look like a guy, sound like a guy, and have raped two women violently as a guy, but now you must believe with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul that she is a real woman and should be put into a women's prison" is a step too far.

Except if you object to "yes but this is a guy, surely? isn't it dangerous to put a rapist in with women, you know?" then you are a wicked and violent transphobe who wants to ensure troubled trans kids commit suicide. Look at The Science! Trust The Science! and here those studies are pulled out to support the case.

Is it any wonder people eventually go "That makes me a transphobe? Okay, I'm a transphobe!" and the real suffering dysphoria people get thrown out with the bathwater?

We had a candidate for the Supreme Court dodging "what is a woman? well how can I possibly know, I'm not a biologist" and though I completely understand why she did it, as it was a 'gotcha' question, the fact remains: a woman can't dare to give an opinion on what is a woman. Had it been "what does it mean to be black (or Black, even)?" would she, as a black woman, have clammed up the same way? Would she be open to accusations of racism had she given an opinion on what it is to be black? See the difference there?

Three (rather hypocritical) cheers for actually going and looking at the evidence.

Trace doesn't mean to, but I see an invitation for conservatives to organize their own Long March. If he means to it is because he has no fear that conservatives have a chance to do this. If conservatives do capture the institutions, produce equivalent cultural output, then I am confident Trace would partly ask for cooperation rather than bark for an imaginary assault. Just based on what I have read from the guy.

If more conservatives became sociologists they would, at worst, complain less about it. At best, they may help to right the ship. There is no cost or effort on behalf of these institutions-- which are responsible for their standing, public facing reputation, and credibility. That's what good stewards inside an institution are meant to facilitate. They are a curator who considers and advocates for the institution. They protect it and enrich it. The institution forever remains larger than themselves and lasts longer than their lives. The mission was changed, the principles were subverted, and our institutions sought different kinds of stewards.

We can bicker over who to blame and why conservatives fell out, were pushed out, or lost interest in the humanities over the past 50 years. We might also consider whether the same conservative professors in 1960 can even be created anymore. This doesn't move us any closer to fixing them. Neither does standing high up in the fort to yell down "bring more men and a longer ladder!" Not when an apparent cannon is nearby and a fuse lit.

I like museums. I like libraries, too. Free children's books are amazing. We're keeping those, though. Personally, I don't care about a hypothetical target of 20-80 or 40-60 ideological split among librarians, anthropologists, or in psychology departments. We are so far beyond parity and so far off the ground that destruction feels better to many. This includes educated people here. I'd like the institutions be slanted in direction that I can easily (dis)miss. My tolerance for the slant is higher than Jim from North Carolina who, while uninterested 30 years ago, now has learned a stronger distaste for concepts like higher education. The value of a university education in these fields is objectively lower than the past. Beyond that, it is going to require change and effort for his son to return to his father's previously uninterested position.

I'm not sure it matters if Trace means to tease conservatives to start their own Long March because he does not consider this possible, or if he really does want to egg more conservatives to bootstrap back into sociology departments. It is defensive rhetoric about preserving stuff he values, aimed at people who also value it, but not at people he believes should value them. If one were to genuinely try, then how does one convince someone who no longer is uninterested, but actively places negative value on your institution, that you are worth preserving?

To do so, we're looking at a project of a generation if we were to tear stuff down and start over. The destruction method, besides being an overstatement of what's occurring, would be quick and painful. Reform, on the other hand, might never happen. There needs to be outreach, invitations, scholarships, hard work, propaganda, genuine accounting, and a renewed interest in stewardship. Those could all be indicators of reform. It is a lot more than anyone offers. If people want change to occur as reform, then begin the reform! Start a new department. Aim it at undergrads from Missouri. Cut the Exceptional Black Lesbian Celebration exhibit from the Smithsonian. That one is easy.

A long view is good, but few are prepared to wait 40 years for enough conservatives to apply, enter, and manage to fix anthropology. Not when we can't be certain what higher education will look like in 20. Not when the cannon is right there, fuse lit.

The institutions should function in a way that they can manage their own reputation and credibility. If Trace wants anthropology saved rather than smashed, then anthropology's movers must move to facilitate this. If the nascent conservative friendly institutions mature and reproduce they may threaten the old regime and spur reform. Trump is doing some stuff, but Trump is gone in a few years. If he sticks to his guns, then 4 years is a good amount of time to change policy and stewardship. I doubt sociology will be saved in that time frame. I doubt it will even try to be saved ever. Museums might redirect. That's plenty of time to find better stewards, realign the mission, create some outreach, and start fixing the brand. 4 years isn't that long though. Easy to wait it out.

I wrote about the trans half, too. I have some questions about trans medicine and research. I'll save it for another time.

The Blue Tribe's Long March succeeded because the Red Tribe was either entirely unaware of it happening or assumed that it's politically irrelevant. It's never going to happen the other way around.

If one were to genuinely try, then how does one convince someone who no longer is uninterested, but actively places negative value on your institution, that you are worth preserving?

Let's say you're stuck on a deserted island with a small group and the only one of you who knows anything at all about food preparation is Sylvester Graham. Obviously, most of you are going to hate whatever Sylvester cooks (I'm assuming for the sake of argument that he can't be reasoned out of his position that spices are evil), so what then do you do? You could kill him in his sleep to rid the world of his bland slop, and you would be happy at first, but then you might all starve. Or you could ask him to teach you how to cook and try to figure out yourself which elements are intrinsic to the process and which are just his kooky ideology talking, all the while continuing to eat his terrible food.

For the latter course to be preferable at least two things have to be true: the activity in question must be intrinsically necessary or valuable in some way and the existing gatekeepers must possess some special knowledge that cannot be trivially rederived from first principles in the event that they all drop dead. In the case of Sylvester, perhaps some of you argue that since everyone eats it should be easy enough to figure out how to prepare food on your own, and others argue that only Sylvester knows which plants are safe to eat and which are poisonous and that this is information you can't afford to lose. In the case of the Academy, its defenders would have to make the case that America's economic prosperity is dependent on its activities and that the Trump administration's attacks will harm that capacity in some demonstrable way e.g. capricious defunding of federal grants leads to a mass exodus of scientists to Europe, causing the collapse of the American phamaceutical, chemical, energy, etc. industries because PhD's take years to train and cannot be replaced on a dime.

You’re assuming n this question that no one else can learn to cook. Or t go back to the original question, that no one other than trans-positive progressives can run museums. Libraries, or university departments. Which is not true. What is true is that through the selection process, open conservatives are weeded out, and that the constant DEI shibboleths mean that any conservatives are cowed into silence.

Destroy and rebuild works better simply because the people in power positions in those institutions have no intention of allowing anything to happen. Graham won’t be giving cooking lessons to his enemies. In those cases, it’s simply better to get rid of him and even if at first you burn the roast, you learn quickly, rather than suffer the harm while getting nothing from him.

Let's say you're stuck on a deserted island with a small group and the only one of you who knows anything at all about food preparation is Sylvester Graham.

First of all: lmao. I did not know the connection from Graham (crackers) to the rest of the cereal craze. Kellogg's Cereal Cure All Dietary Sanitorium was built on the pillars of greatness. Bedeviled spices be damned.

"Graham believed that adhering to such diet would prevent people from having impure thoughts and in turn would stop masturbation,"

I will think of Graham when I seasonally sully his crackers with delicious, sweetened cream cheese filling and fruit.

In the case of the Academy, its defenders would have to make the case that America's economic prosperity is dependent on its activities... e.g. capricious defunding of federal grants leads to a mass exodus of scientists to Europe, causing the collapse of the American phamaceutical, chemical, energy, etc. industries

Some areas can make the case better than others. Regardless, I don't believe this admin is committed to a root-and-stem method that leads to a mass exodus or a system collapse. It continues towards a (somehow) calculated oversight. The verdict is out for me as to whether they'll do a good (or any sort of lasting) job for the R&D parts. Social sciences, which I was thinking of, is another matter and mostly outside of the administration's reach for what they've shown.

If I'm picking up what you're laying down, then I'll say that "willing, interested, and put in the effort" is intrinsically valuable. Knowledge Producers do produce things I won't, can't, or don't want to. They do so as a privilege that society bestowed on them, sure. Is can't/won't/don't-want-to a skill issue? Also, yes. Some amateur historians do great work without institutional support. I bet there's a number of hobbyist anthropologists I find more interesting than esteemed academics in the field pushing the ideological laden theory of the day. I am no utilitybot. I don't want to kill all men who wear glasses. We can afford to pursue and enjoy things other than maximizing our chances to go to Mars. All men have a desire to know, and that's good. Knowledge Production is good. It can be boring, uninteresting, or stuffy, but it shouldn't be in a position to be scorned generally.

Reform, on the other hand, might never happen. There needs to be outreach, invitations, scholarships, hard work, propaganda, genuine accounting, and a renewed interest in stewardship. Those could all be indicators of reform. It is a lot more than anyone offers. If people want change to occur as reform, then begin the reform! Start a new department. Aim it at undergrads from Missouri. Cut the Exceptional Black Lesbian Celebration exhibit from the Smithsonian. That one is easy.

This is what Skibboleth rejects, "demanding liberals think conservative thoughts for them". It can't be conservatives doing this, after all, because the conservatives have been successfully removed from the positions where they could do so. OK, rejection noted. Bring on the cannon.

Couldn't Trump & al try forcing appointments, as the middle solution?

Trace highlighted the New College of Florida as a potential example. There's ways that's had an impact, but in turn it's increasingly obvious that this will only last just so long as DeSantis is willing to burn a lot of political capital on it. Not Republicans in general, given the recent immigration enforcement mess, but DeSantis specifically.

If the enemy is unwilling to cooperate why go for a middle solution that will let them try again when Conservatives fall out of power instead of a Final Solution?

As other people have said, I think appointing lots of qualified conservatives to tenured positions is more likely to help the conservative agenda weather another Democratic presidency than simply freezing everything. If you just fire people and lock down buildings, the Dems can just un-lock them and re-hire everyone. Harder to do that if the vacancies are filled.

but even if filled, the progs will do their march again, pushing conservatives out under false pretenses (be it #metoo2, racism accusations, or a new moral panic). And what I think the conversation is about razing the institution instead of freezzing it.

There's no such thing as "razing" an institution in a democracy that swings back and forth. Anything one party can slash by executive order, the other party can resurrect by executive order. It's either an actual bloody coup, or you accept that the best you're going to get is slowing down the other side's reconstruction when they're voted back in. Stopping it altogether is a fool's errand. With that in mind, I think appointments would be 'stickier', on top of being more pro-social.

around minors that have gone through the unethical transgender science grinder.

It's not a wonder you don't care about reforming the science to have evidence based results on if trans healthcare for minors has positive or negative results for patients if you've already made up your mind that it's unethical off other grounds.

Science should not be

Step 1: Have a view established off something else Step 2: Only accept evidence, research, and experts that agrees with the pre-established view and not the ones that disagree. Step 3: Declare the issue done with and stop further research.

Running these experiments is itself a violation of the ethics of human experimentation because, as detransitioners would be able to tell you, it can't be opted out of.

I think that there are plenty of medical interventions which can not be opted out after the fact.

A tonsillectomy can not be opted out after the fact, and yet it is regularly performed.

Generally, it is fine to study such interventions -- even randomized -- if you keep within the overton window of standard practices or have good reason to believe that your treatment will lead to a better outcome for patients. Nobody suggests rounding up kids and then randomly assigning them to the control or the puberty blocker / tonsillectomy group without any medical indication.

Also, a non-intervention can have just as severe consequences, and as a utilitarian, I do not believe that there is a fundamental moral difference between an act and an omission. Puberty blockers have permanent side effects, but so has going to puberty. In a world where the blockers exist, a doctor who withholds them is taking the responsibility for letting puberty happen -- just as a doctor who withholds antibiotics to let an infection kill a MAID patient is not very different from one who uses barbiturates instead.

Both puberty blockers and puberty have failure modes such as suicides. If and when they can be used to gain QALYs is an empirical question. Presumably, the path of expected best outcome depends a lot on the individual in question. A kid in 1980 whose reaction to growing breasts was to try to cut them off, and who attempted suicide over not being a boy might be different than a kid in 2025 who decided that they are non-binary after five others in their class already came out as non-cis.

I think that there are plenty of medical interventions which can not be opted out after the fact.

Sure. No one is saying you cannot do irreversible medical procedures, just that their effects have to be justified by the effects on the patient's health, and that the patient has to be aware of their irreversibility, and the effects. None of these conditions are met for puberty blockers. Their use was so far justified by their supposed reversibility, and sold as "buying time to think".

Generally, it is fine to study such interventions -- even randomized -- if you keep within the overton window of standard practices or have good reason to believe that your treatment will lead to a better outcome for patients.

I don't think "overton window" is a valid argument, it just means a bunch of people agreed it's a good idea. In my opinion they should have good reasons to think something is a good idea, so that leaves us only with the last criterion you cited, which currently is unfulfilled.

In a world where the blockers exist, a doctor who withholds them is taking the responsibility for letting puberty happen -- just as a doctor who withholds antibiotics to let an infection kill a MAID patient is not very different from one who uses barbiturates instead.

The difference here is that in the case of an infection, you're dealing with an unhealthy body, one that is veritably under assault by foreign organisms. In the case of puberty blockers you're intervening in a perfectly healthy body, hoping to achieve purely psychological benefits. I don't think we do that very often in medicine, especially for minors.

Both puberty blockers and puberty have failure modes such as suicides.

I don't think puberty causes suicide, and I'm pretty sure neither do puberty blockers for that matter.

If and when they can be used to gain QALYs is an empirical question

It was in this case as well, but somehow the doctor had his license suspended. None of the defenders of trans medicine were bothered, some even actively campaigned for it.

The same argument applies for signing up for experimental heart surgery.

Do we let people with a healthy heart sign up for experimental heart surgery?

The state of children transitioners is in my not so charitable opinion a giant Munchausen by proxy from the mothers being enabled by society. You don't get to consent to sex as a child, you shouldn't even have the concept of being the wrong gender/sex mix. If we could somehow blanket out from the children memeplex the concept of gender we could save them and ourselves so much grief.

You can't decide you should be a boy or a girl different from what you were born if you don't have the names for these concepts. At worst you could decide you're a tomboy or an effete guy.

Kids know what boys and girls are and the concept of boys becoming girls definitely occurs to them.

The state of children transitioners is in my not so charitable opinion a giant Munchausen by proxy from the mothers being enabled by society.

Some of them? Abso-fucking-lutely. Those mothers (and fathers, if there is a father in the mix) should be jumped on by CPS and charged with child abuse.

The problem is that there are kids with genuine problems, and parents genuinely trying to help them, and relying on medical professionals to guide them, and those professionals either being True Believers or terrified into 'if I oppose this I'll be charged with attempting conversion therapy which is illegal in this state' and going with the path of least resistance, which is to Affirm.

Some kids have mental health problems which need to be addressed. Some kids have problems with puberty (which is a confusing and often scary process) and need guidance around that. Some kids are genuinely trans, but how many and to what degree is what we are trying to figure out, as well as what is the best way to navigate that.

Unhappily it all gets thrown into the same basket, and the grifter adults take advantage of that.

The concept of changing genders is trivial to imagine without requiring people tell you about it, though?

If you're referring to the pseudosoul thing that Gender has become, fair enough. But children are capable-of going, "Hey, can boys turn into girls?" How disappointed / satisfied / excited / ambivalent any particular child would be to any particular response, IDK.

But yeah, the response to that question should not be "Ooh, come into this secret doctor's office and find out, and if your parents try to stop you, threaten to kill yourself."

This is a very stranger take. Children very much have a concept of being a boy or a girl, and are aware of grownups being men or women. Also, "minors" doesn't just mean hapless little six-year-olds who don't know about the birds and the bees. A fourteen or fifteen-year-old is a very different matter.

The state of children transitioners is in my not so charitable opinion a giant Munchausen by proxy from the mothers being enabled by society.

How do you square this with the erstwhile right-wing complaint that schools will encourage kids to transition while keeping it secret from their parents?

Munchausen by proxy doesn't have to come from the mother.

The "social transitioning" (ie teachers and staff hiding from the parents whats going on) is also an absolute shit show and a major own goal by the coalition of the ascendant.

Yeah, I think what he's talking about also happens, but is obviously not the whole picture.

Do people undergo experimental heart surgery because they don't like how their heart looks?

If there was an experimental heart surgery which changed the color of a patients heart from vaguely red to bright pink, I wouldn't support people doing it. I definitely wouldn't support impressionable teenagers who read about this on the internet doing it.

Oh, then you'll love the whole question of "people who want to be amputees" piggybacking off the trans movement, which in turn piggybacked off the gay rights movement. Welcome to the transableism community, and BIID (Body Integrity Identity Disorder).

One large reason this whole topic is a giant steaming mess is the over-reaction to "it's all personal autonomy, my body my choice, medical gatekeeping" push for absolute liberty on the part of the person seeking such radical changes. "It's not mental illness, it's my life!"

Except then that becomes the rationale for the craziness to seep in as well. If it's fine to seek radical surgery to change your body to fit with your mental model of what it should be like, why not people who feel deeply distressed by having an arm or a leg they want removed?

We need to get back to a common sense model, but unhappily nobody can agree what common sense looks like at this date. The success of having homosexuality removed as mental illness from the DSM meant that now all kinds of what can be described as 'alternate sexualities/orientations' cannot be called mental illness, and so the worst fringe cases get free rein. If we had the courage to say "no, this is insanity and not simply an unconventional lifestyle choice" we might cut the Gordian knot.

Your last paragraph doesn't follow from the rest of your post - indeed, it seems at odds with it. The transableism guys are claiming they deserve accommodation because their wacky desire is a mental condition isomorphic to gender dysphoria. The problem very much isn't that we've become unwilling to call these things mental illness! I say that neither should be classified as mental illness. Gender reassignment should be classified as elective plastic surgery, not treatment for an illness. This is what a principled stance for personal autonomy should yield, and cuts through all the bullshitting about suicide risks.

The model of transsexuals is exactly that. It’s medical, social and even political accommodation to a reality that exists only in a person’s brain. There is nothing physical about being a transsexual. If no biological or social intervention happens, a trans woman will develop into a man from the baby boy he was born as. A trans abled person is in exactly that position of wanting society and especially the medical establishment to not only accept them, but work to make the vision of themselves a reality in the real world.

My question is with so many of these issues — where and how do you stop the creeping of the concept into more related concepts? If we accept transgender, and force everyone to play along and force doctors to do surgery and insurance companies to cover it, why not trans-canines who want a tail, why not the trans-abled who want the doctor to cut off their legs? Why not allow for transracial people to live as their desired race?

I think a good working model of mental illness must naturally include deviation from observed reality, and the best option for treatment shouter accepting the reality that exists. I am not a Korean in a white American body. I can have all the surgery and act as Korean as I want. I’m still not Korean. And if I persist in that delusion then the problem lies between my ears, not with the reality that made me German American.

why not trans-canines who want a tail, why not the trans-abled who want the doctor to cut off their legs?

Why not indeed? I don't think you understood my position, which is happy with neither the mainstream trans or anti-trans positions. I'm a transhumanist, I have libertarian leanings on at least this particular issue, and I do in fact consider it a grown man's right to get an artificial tail if he wants, just as much as artificial breasts or a nose piercing. Or some sort of melanin injection that changes your skin color, if it existed. Bodily autonomy means bodily autonomy. I fully bite that bullet.

However, treating all these things as personal desires should also logically mean that we stop medicalizing them. I think it's disingenuous of the trans movement that they simultaneously go for the bodily-autonomy line, which I respect, and want to keep "gender dysphoria" classified as a mental illness. You really can't have both. Wanting-sex-reassigment-surgery should not be classified as a mental illness any more than wanting-a-tattoo-really-bad. (You could certainly find biological women with self-image issues who were suicidal before getting cosmetic plastic surgery, but that doesn't make the surgery a medical intervention then, just an expense she has decided on of her own free will in pursuit of her happiness. We shouldn't treat the matter any differently if it's a biological man who elects to get the same procedure.)

There is, of course, a separate conversation about whether someone who makes himself disabled on purpose should get the same unemployment benefits etc. as someone who lost an arm by accident. But if a millionaire wants to cripple himself at his own expense, and can demonstrate that he's making that choice of his own free will after careful consideration, rather than in a fit of psychosis - then I don't see why that should be a crime. Hella weird, but it's not my business.

The problem very much isn't that we've become unwilling to call these things mental illness! I say that neither should be classified as mental illness.

You have four healthy limbs. You feel really, really sad about that and believe you should only have three. Yes, that is mental illness, every bit as much as if you believed your neighbours were breaking into your house to smear shit on the kitchen walls.

You have healthy external and internal sexual characteristics. You feel really, really sad about that and want to undergo surgery to change what can be changed to those of the opposite sex. The only difference I see is that so far we have agreed to go along with the latter and not the former, as yet, though I wonder how long that distinction will hold. Somebody is going to do "limb reassignment surgery" (and apparently already has), there will be a movement and activism, there will be "studies show that after getting the amputation suicidality goes down and self-reported happiness goes up", there will be "what harm does it do? besides, it doesn't affect you anyway" and the rest of it.

Mental health is a part of medicine. The treatments we have in this area are less effective, less evidence-based, even controversial but part of current medicine nevertheless.

Some issues are clearly related to biologic disorders like autism or schizophrenia. Sometimes we are not even sure what it is.

You're a biological woman. You have healthy but pretty small breasts. You feel really, really sad about that and want to undergo surgery to make them larger. Is that mental illness?

I don't think desires should be pathologized, except in extremely rare cases. My belief is that legal adults should be able to get whatever elective surgery they damn well want, so long as they demonstrate informed, lasting consent. If it's kosher for a cis woman to get breast enhancements if she sees fit, I see no reason why the same right shouldn't apply to a biological male. Contrariwise, if we recognize that a woman who gets plastic surgery (or her ears carved to look pointy, or whatever non-gendered body modification) is just exercising her rights as a free individual, not responding to some all-important mental illness which it would obviously make her suicidal to deny - then the current classification of "gender dysphoria" as a mental illness becomes obviously nonsensical. It becomes a cheap and dirty hack to convince people to support transition, in minors and others, Because Psychiatrists Say So Suicide Risk Suicide Risk Suicide Risk Do You Want Their Deaths On Your Conscience. I think that is the great lie of the trans movement, and while I understand how they got there, I would like them to get rid of it and revert to a principled stance of "people can do what they want".

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I'd be a tad bit concerned if my heart was, for example, a shade of blue. I'm not quite sure how I'd find out in the normal course of things, but it can happen, and represents a rather concerning situation.

Note that I'm objecting to the standards being used by the person I was replying to. I'm not a fan of gender reassignment surgery, or hormones, or putting on a dress.

I'm not a fan of gender reassignment surgery, or hormones, or putting on a dress.

I'm actually kind of surprised by that. As a transhumanist, I would've thought you were all in support of gender reassignment surgery (since it fits in nicely with the idea of breaking out of the limitations of the meat body one was born with). Can you expand on your thinking there?

You're in luck, because just a day or so ago I went into a lengthy explanation of why I'm not an advocate of gender reassignment surgery, and why transhumanism is as distinct from trans ideology as cats are from dogs:

https://www.themotte.org/post/1794/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/311661?context=8#context

When I want to be a 6'9" muscular 420 IQ uber-mensch, I want that to be a fact about physical reality. There shouldn't be any dispute about that, no more than anyone wants to dispute the fact that I have black hair right now.

I do not think that putting on high heels and bribing my way into Mensa achieves my goal. I do not just want to turn around and say that because I identify as a posthuman deity, that I am one and you need to acknowledge that fact.

This explains why I have repeatedly pointed out that while I have no objection to trans people wanting to be the opposite sex, that they need to understand the limitations of current technology. I would have hoped that was obvious, why else would I pull terms like ersatz or facsimile out of my handy Thesaurus?

As one tanshumanist to another, my problem with this is that it seems like a very limited view of transhumanism. What I'm rooting for here is a future where I get to be some sort of shapeshifting consciousness which only occasionally reverts to humanoid form for old time's sake; not just "a 6'9" muscular 420 IQ uber-mensch". And if we get that, surely, surely you see that only joyless luddites would keep objecting to calling someone who's manifesting as a clearly-feminine angelic metaverse hologram "she", just because she doesn't have any biological female characteristics. (Because, you know, she wouldn't have any biological characteristics anymore.) Gendered language would only be based on presentation. And if Utopia involves calling people "she" even if they have no XX chromosomes if that's how they present themselves, it seems clearly morally correct to me that we should call a female-presenting person "she" even stuck as we are in flesh bodies that occasionally have spurious XY chromosomes.

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Gotcha. So it's not that you're opposed to those things per se, but that you're opposed to pretending like they are reaching the goal (when in fact they aren't).

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https://www.themotte.org/post/1794/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/311661?context=8#context

TL;DR we aren’t there yet, but once we are, he’s not going to complain.

I'd be a tad bit concerned if my heart was, for example, a shade of blue.

I'm lost in the analogy now. What?

I was being literal, sufficiently bad cyanotic heart disease can literally make your heart blue. You'd have more pressing concerns at that point other than the color.

Didn’t think about that! (That said I’ve not seen basically anything about early developmental disorders since medical school)

Would be rather odd for it to suddenly happen to an adult though

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I'm pretty sure he's referring to a heart attack, and I'm guessing the analogy refers to that "not liking how something looks" can reflect a more serious underlying cause than pure aesthetic distaste.

No one, and I mean absolutely no one, among trans activists believes there is an underlying issue with a trans person's endocrine system, genitals, or breasts. If for no other reason, then because it could be used for diagnosis and gatekeeping.

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I feel like there's a 'gonna die if you don't, gonna die if it doesn't work, not gonna die if it does' unstated exception to that particular tenet of the Nuremberg code.

Honestly, this is one of the situations where I say "fuck it"; the amount of trans surgeries from doing the RCT, assuming it finds that they're bad, will be lower than the amount from not doing it (in contrast to the usual case), so I'm not seeing the "do no harm" issue.

The bigger issue is that trans activists will attempt to defy you and transition the control group anyway. I don't see a way to get around that that isn't either "deploy the counterterrorism apparatus in full to prevent such attempts" or "ban transition as a whole in order to saturate the trans movement's covert-ops resources and draw them away from the trial". These are both pretty drastic actions, with significant PR costs even if you personally aren't bothered by using that level of force.

Honestly, this is one of the situations where I say "fuck it";

Yeah, I haven't settled on an opinion, but I feel you. There is currently some brouhaha about an NHS puberty blocker trial, with the anti-trans side arguing that it shouldn't be done because we already have the evidence (they also have other criticisms, but that tends to be the opener). A part of me feels like the political capital would be better spent saying "Oh, you want a trial? Fine, we'll do a trial, but we're doing this one properly", but I've been wrong on political tactics before (I was against blanket bans, until Alabama and Tennessee did them, and ACLU in their infinite wisdom decided to sue them, which allowed WPATH's internal docs to go into discovery).

The bigger issue is honestly the difficulty of actually running the trial successfully; trans activists have a lot of resources and will attempt to circumvent the prohibition on the control group transitioning (via paying for medical tourism, or if the parents are unwilling arranging for the kids to "self-extract"), at which point there's an obvious hole in your RCT due to either counting transitioned kids in the "untransitioned" group (when they're not) or not counting them (and removing the randomness).

When I was reading the papers on chemical castration, I think one of them said you can detect non-compliance with a blood test (though it may have been about taking counter-measures, instead of unauthorized taking of chemical castration / puberty blockers).

Oh, it's easy enough to tell if somebody's been taking hormones against your instructions. That just doesn't solve the problem.

  1. If you count defiant transitioners as part of your control group, it biases your study in favour of transition, because defiant transitioners amount to "transition with a bunch of extra annoyance" and as such are near-guaranteed to do worse than the transition group regardless of how good or bad transition is.

  2. If you kick defiant transitioners out of the control group, it biases your study against transition, because desisters will stop trying to defy you at some point, and as such success stories will make up a larger chunk of your control group than they would have if you'd successfully prevented the defiant transitioners from transitioning.

If the trans activists manage to subvert enough of your control group (which is pretty likely without the extreme measures I mentioned), these two effects will destroy the study's value; it will give the "do transitions!" answer with one set of rules and the "don't do transitions!" answer with the other. Whoops, looks like the clear liquid you poured on that fire was petrol instead of water.

Oh, and this is assuming that you picked outcome measures that don't allow for easy lying; it's not like people can't go on Twitter and yell "hey everybody, put down that you're ecstatic if you were in the transition group and suicidal if in the control group; it's for the sake of all the other transfolk". As Scott said, "sometimes people might just be actively working to corrupt your data".

Your overall point is correct, but:

If you count defiant transitioners as part of your control group, it biases your study in favour of transition, because defiant transitioners amount to "transition with a bunch of extra annoyance" and as such are near-guaranteed to do worse than the transition group regardless of how good or bad transition is.

That's not necessarily true: suppose transition, even with transition-with-extra-annoyance, always leads to strictly better outcomes. The control group will then have better outcomes if the defiant transitioners are counted than if they aren't, possibly on par with transitioners within margins of error depending on how many there are and how much the extra annoyance impacts outcomes.

This point aside, I also think any study of this sort would need extremely careful design to separate the effects of social transition vs the actual puberty blockers. I think you'd need two control groups: one where the kids socially transition but don't take puberty blockers, and one where they don't transition either way. And while it's very easy to tell if somebody's been taking unsanctioned hormones, it's rather harder to tell if they switched pronouns among friends, so you really couldn't run a study like that with participants who don't play fair.

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What if it's a surgery that doesn't solve a life-threatening problem, but holds the possibility of significantly improving quality of life? There are no end of heart conditions that won't kill you, but will make you miserable and make a normal life hard.

Why did we decide to stop (most) further study of lobotomies? The inventors of the procedure won a Nobel Prize for it! At some point it seems we decided that it wasn't actually worth it, as far as I can tell.

I think it's a hard question, honestly, even before the pediatric ethics complications. How do we decide what experiments are reasonable to run on people? Definitionally, sometimes experiments find negative outcomes, and if we never run such experiments, we never find ways to make things better. To me, at least, there needs to be some level of reasonable confidence on the theory for why a potentially-harmful, irreversible experiment would be likely to succeed, and clear consent to participate.

Medicine isn't my wheelhouse, but the repeated failure to turn what should be lots of test data into verifiable claims of strong evidence suggests that the evidence isn't as glowing as the rhetoric would require. Which colors me cynical about much of the whole movement, but that's just my opinion.

The main reason is that we invented neuroleptic drugs that worked. It's cheaper and easier to treat a raving, flagrantly psychotic schizophrenic with antipsychotics instead of surgery, and you don't have to cause nearly as much collateral damage.

At some point it seems we decided that it wasn't actually worth it, as far as I can tell.

They made violently mad lunatics docile. While risking destroying higher cognition, being dangerous surgery, and so on. The drugs sometimes suck donkey cock, but they're better than that. Lobotomies were also often used for people who weren't violent lunatics, just to make them easier to handle, which certainly didn't help their reputation.

These days, in rare cases, we perform surgeries like stereotactic cingulotomy, which is a far more targeted technique of cutting or destroying aberrant parts of the brain. Same theory as lobotomy, if you squint, but nowhere near as messy. Works okay, if nothing else does.

Medicine isn't my wheelhouse, but the repeated failure to turn what should be lots of test data into verifiable claims of strong evidence suggests that the evidence isn't as glowing as the rhetoric would require. Which colors me cynical about much of the whole movement, but that's just my opinion.

I happen to share that opinion, presuming you're talking about gender affirming/reassignment care.

To make the analogy work, the heart would have to be perfectly healthy, and the benefits of the surgery would have to be purely psychological*. "Oh no, your girlfriend broke up with you? You must be brokenhearted! Here, have a heart transplant!". This is about as much sense as gender affirming care makes.

*) If you want the analogy to be even more accurate, the surgery would have to have fairly massive, well-known, and acknowledged by everyone downsides, it's just that they are deemed to be a price worth paying for the psychological benefits.

Looking back, I didn't even mean it as an analogy. I sought to show that the standard he was advancing ruled out something considered benign or noble. It's the equivalent of someone pointing out that a No Parking prohibition on a street should make allowances for emergencies or an ambulance.

Hence that if you want to condemn such a procedure, you need different considerations. Which there are, which I haven't denied.

Posts get pretty bloated if you want to say something snappy but then also have to put in every single thing wrong with gender changing operations. I see this as a point where pretty much everyone knew what hydroacetylene was getting at, but more... analytical? minded people could want to demonstrate that that argument alone is bad. I suppose he should have written it better. I've always gotten annoyed at the "I know what you meant but let's argue out the phrasing" types.

I am fairly sure experimental heart surgery isn't conducted on children without their parent's informed consent, and a refusal to subject children to experimental heart surgery isn't a basis for taking children away from the parents.

That is an entirely different objection, and at least in the UK, doctors have the ability to override parental decisions if deemed in the best interest of parents, especially if the child agrees. And the definition of child here is 16 and below, no line in the sand, as long as the doctors think they're able to understand the risks and benefits.

In less politicized contexts, if not heart surgery, kids can be taken away if their parents are doing an egregiously bad job at handling their health.

This is all true, and for all the many failings of British governance, things seem to work fine here.

I make no comment on whether or not gender affirming care is something that should be treated in this manner, only that the previous standard suggested was poorly formed.

Indeed, in the UK we admit that capability to make informed decisions does not start at some arbitrary birthday but is more fluid and depends on maturity of a person. This is mostly about some minor treatments such as morning-after-pill or HPV vaccine which is for their own benefit. I expect that a healthcare professional would be more strict in cases when a minor is asking for treatment that has great potential of harm. Then it would go to the court and the court most likely would say that wanting a treatment that harms is the evidence that the person does not have the capability to make an informed decision or something like that :)

And your analogy for it being poorly formed was poor.

Most analogies are imperfect, few things are perfectly isomorphic to other things. I stand by mine as relevant and useful.

I'll bite that bullet - my opposition to gender transitioning prepubescent children does not hinge on science and I would not be convinced by studies that purported to show that it's actually very good for children. Many questions are good questions to apply the scientific method to and I don't think this is one of them.

Good news, with your attitude, you are not alone.

  • Jehova's Witnesses believe are opposed to blood transfusion for reasons which are orthogonal to the experimental method.
  • Many religions are opposed to most forms of sexuality and/or contraception without any evidence that it leads to bad outcomes.
  • Likewise, dietary restrictions.
  • Some people believe that various forms of genital mutilation are beneficial or required not as a matter of empirical evidence, but for inscrutable cultural reasons.

Of course, if you want to convince the grey tribe specifically, just stating that obviously blood is sacred or puberty blockers are evil or pigs should not be eaten is not going to convince anyone.

Edit: I wrote that taking "gender transitioning prepubescent children" as a straw man for puberty blockers, but on further reflection I think that I would even cover gender affirming surgery. Sure, I think that operating on the genitals of ten-year-olds is a terrible idea, but that is contingent on empirical observations about the state of medicine, and if our tech level was higher, I would be open to evidence that it is beneficial for kids to change their gender a few time, or that placing a brain in a robot body increases QALYs for that matter.

Let's borrow from Heidt for a second.

A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.

[...]

Julie and Mark, who are sister and brother, are traveling together in France. They are both on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie is already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy it, but they decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret between them, which makes them feel even closer to each other.

As designed, harm has not occurred in these situations. Do you feel like the people (who indeed are numerous) who feel something morally reprehensible has occurred in both are engaged in silly superstition, or are you willing to concede that morality has more dimensions than the singular concern for harm reduction?

This is a sidebar from a debate on the medical merits of the Dutch protocol, but the idea that you can't object to such things on metaphysical grounds seems silly to me given the arguments in favor of transgenderism as a theory of GD are also on the level of metaphysics.

Presumably a chicken bought in a supermarket is already very dead. The only ethical question this raises for me is the buying of a chicken corpse produced for human consumption -- which would probably depend on if it is free range or factory farmed.

Likewise, plenty of people have sex in circumstances where a resulting baby would have plenty of genetic, developmental, or social disadvantages. Drug addictions, chemotherapy (?), parental genetic disadvantage, parents not invested in a relationship, parents who were exposed to ionizing radiation and so on. This is fine as long as they use appropriate contraceptives and ideally have a firm commitment not to bring any fetus to term, but often people are very negligent over these things. Granted, the disadvantage of a baby born from a union of first-degree relatives would be much larger than that of a baby from a random drunken hookup, but Julie and Mark are extra responsible with birth control, so I don't see an issue.

Let us try two more scenarios:

A and B are two adult males of sound mind who have sex. They were tested for STI before, use condoms and are not in other sexual relationships with anyone.

C is a 30 year old woman who works as an elementary school teacher. One Saturday, she goes to a shopping mall. She is wearing a blouse which shows a bit of cleavage and a skirt which goes to her knees, as well as some makeup. The shoes she wears leave her ankles clearly visible to the public, and she makes no effort to cover her hair. She is not accompanied by a male relative.

To quote you:

As designed, harm has not occurred in these situations. Do you feel like the people (who indeed are numerous) who feel something morally reprehensible has occurred in both are engaged in silly superstition, or are you willing to concede that morality has more dimensions than the singular concern for harm reduction?

I think it is hard to argue that billions of people recognize some moral truth when they react with disgust to your examples while also claiming that the billions of people who react with disgust to my examples are just engaging in silly superstition.

This is a sidebar from a debate on the medical merits of the Dutch protocol, but the idea that you can't object to such things on metaphysical grounds seems silly to me given the arguments in favor of transgenderism as a theory of GD are also on the level of metaphysics.

I firmly believe that we should see gender interventions only through the lenses of patient autonomy (which we generally deny minors, rightly or wrongly) and outcomes.

If someone argues "woo, gender is just a social construct, so it is fine to raise your XX child as a boy", I would be just as opposed to that.

I think it is hard to argue that billions of people recognize some moral truth when they react with disgust to your examples while also claiming that the billions of people who react with disgust to my examples are just engaging in silly superstition.

I happen to recognize the legitimacy of Abrahamism as the moral doctrine of at least three distinct human civilizations, so I don't find any difficulty there, both sodomy and dressing provocatively are "sins" in those places for reasons that are both practical and internally consistent.

If anything it's precisely my criticism that modern Western Liberal morality has become incapable of characterizing the issue with such behaviors at all which makes mitigating them totally impossible. And heralds the return of more barbaric solutions down the line, which I resent.

I firmly believe that we should see gender interventions only through the lenses of patient autonomy

I want to say that my Hoppean heart has no quarrel with that in practice so long as I don't have to get involved, but that's not advancing the discussion at all, and I do think that a moral standard that is solely based on consent is blind.

Mental illness is a millstone for the Liberal ethic because it is fundamentally irrational, so it destroys the base assumption that allows consent to ground judgement. People don't always want what's good for them, let alone what's right for them.

And you must recognize this because that is indeed why we deny children autonomy. Why then not do it for the mentally ill?

I could understand being afraid of people using "sluggish schizophrenia" and the like against political opponents, but insofar as one recognizes that delusions are a thing, you need to confront the fact that consent is an ill suited tool to attack this moral issue. Otherwise you end up assenting to people hacking their limbs off on whims, which is not right.

I happen to recognize the legitimacy of Abrahamism as the moral doctrine of at least three distinct human civilizations, so I don't find any difficulty there, both sodomy and dressing provocatively are "sins" in those places for reasons that are both practical and internally consistent.

This sounds like moral relativism to me: dress according to your religious community standards (whether it is a burka or just non-provocative western clothing), follow your community's sexual norms (whether you have three wives or one, and how old they have to be when you marry them), follow your religious communities dietary restrictions (especially regarding pigs, cows, humans, shellfish) and so on.

And you must recognize this because that is indeed why we deny children autonomy. Why then not do it for the mentally ill?

[...] insofar as one recognizes that delusions are a thing, you need to confront the fact that consent is an ill suited tool to attack this moral issue.

The fact of the matter is that humans did not evolve to be perfectly rational agents. As the sequences teach us, we are all loaded with our own biases. We treat the median adult as sane not because they are a rational actor whose map matches the territory who try to maximize some utility function, but merely because all the systems which did not engage in the polite fiction that people are sane have had much worse outcomes as the people who would take paternalistic charge of mankind are not sane themselves.

That being said, while I might deny that there are sane people, I will concede that some are way more insane than others. A demented person starving while wandering through the woods is likely lacking the coherence that we can apply the fiction of sanity, and we should institutionalize or MAID them per their living will.

Young people have two handicaps: first, their map is often even less accurate than that of adults simply because they lack experience, and second they are probably even more impulsive. As a crutch, societies have decided to lock certain autonomy behind age limits. This is manifestly unjust -- a tenth percentile 20 yo is likely less sane than a 80th percentile 10 yo, and yet the former can vote, consent to sex, enlist in the military, take on debt, immigrate to Saudi Arabia and so on. But until we find something better, age is a Chesterton's fence we should keep.

Still, I think that recognizing that our system is somewhat arbitrary and unfair, we should try to respect the choices of those whom we deny autonomy whenever their choices seem sane.

  • An 8 yo who wants to wear a red t-shirt instead of a blue one should get their wish, all things being equal.
  • A 10 yo who wants to get a facial tattoo should be denied -- presumably, there is a broad consensus among adults that they would have regretted getting such a tattoo at that age.
  • A 14 yo who wants to enter a relationship with a sugar daddy should likewise be denied, as there is a broad consensus that this will be harmful to their development.
  • A 14 yo who wants to quit school and live in the woods should be denied, but if they want to quit school to start a trade apprenticeship that is a different matter.

As a moral toy model, give the minor a minority of votes over their life and distribute the rest to adult society. At a very young age, they have little voting power, and only get autonomy to do stuff which a majority of society supports. At age 18 (or 21 or whatever), they gain majority, and have 51% of the votes, which means that they can do whatever they want, no matter how ill advised. Morally if not legally, it would make sense to have a continuous increase of their voting power in between these two points. Perhaps at age 17, they have 40% of the votes, so they get to do whatever at least 1/6th of the adults considers age-appropriate. Just because we don't give them full autonomy, we should not disregard their opinion entirely.

Likewise, mentally ill adults. Generally, I am against involuntary commitment of anyone who has not run afoul of the law (otherwise, sentence them normally, then give them the option to serve their time in a ward instead) unless it is very likely that they will die on the outside within a year. Plenty of people locked up in psych wards object to being locked up for entirely rational reasons orthogonal to any mental illness they might have.

I could understand being afraid of people using "sluggish schizophrenia" and the like against political opponents

I think there was recently some MAGA legislation trying to make Trump Derangement Syndrome and official medical diagnosis.

This sounds like moral relativism to me:

It is in that sense, I am not a universalist. I believe morality is meme evolved by and suited to a particular ethnocultural substrate.

merely because all the systems which did not engage in the polite fiction that people are sane have had much worse outcomes as the people who would take paternalistic charge of mankind are not sane themselves

I disagree that this is true and regard modern societies as much worse for human flourishing than their pre modern counterparts, despite recognizing the advantages of modernity.

Trump Derangement Syndrome

That's obviously crossing the line, but I'm tempted to still consider the idea given how demented I've seen people I know become from 2016 onwards. There's something to the idea that his smashing of post-Obama bourgeois certainties shattered the psyche of some people. Sam Harris never recovered from it.

The most intuitive explanation is that the feeling of disgust at the above scenarios is an evolutionarily useful heuristic against deviancy.

It's already known that most mental illnesses are varyingly comorbid, so it's not a stretch to conjecture that even benign sexual deviancy suggests more serious malfunction. Thus, the disgust response should be treated as an update torwards moral suspicion, but not full condemnation in of itself.

This is Heidt's opinion too as I recall.

But the point of the questions is to evidence the fact that some people are quite literally incapable of feeling that disgust response or connecting it to moral condemnation.

Then they end up writing books about the "authoritarian personality" thinking it can be eradicated as a mere cultural quirk, and always catastrophically fail because it's eugenic and human nature asserts the advantage.

Julie and Mark, who are sister and brother...

Replace this with "Julie and Mark went drunk driving. Nobody was hurt and they got home safely and sooner than they would have if they had to walk".

The fact that a dangerous activity sometimes works out doesn't make it a good idea. In order for this to prove what it's supposed to prove, the hypothetical would have to be "Julie and Mark committed incest, it all worked out, and they had good reason in advance to think it would work out". This hypothetical is impossible unless 1) it's a limited cultural practice that doesn't favor incest in general or 2) Julie and Mark are not human.

The point is precisely to show that care/harm doesn't take those two caveats into account.

Sufficiently sophisticated utilitarianism is indistinguishable from deontology. And vice versa.

Oh yay... another chance for me to share this gem of a paper.

Maybe it is the other way around – deontology is a veiled utilitarianism when precise evidence is hard to get or understand. :)

Which part of "and vice versa" was unclear?

"It is risky behavior that often, but not always, causes harm" is basically an objection about harm.

This is not so obvious with the incest example but it's very obvious about drunk driving. People don't have some independent moral aversion to drunk driving that is unrelated to the chance of harming someone. Harm need not happen 100% of the time for the objection to be properly characterized as harm-based.

Hey, look, you’ve rederived the categorical imperative.

As designed, harm has not occurred in these situations. Do you feel like the people (who indeed are numerous) who feel something morally reprehensible has occurred in both are engaged in silly superstition, or are you willing to concede that morality has more dimensions than the singular concern for harm reduction?

I always used to be confused why people considered this a gotcha or a particularly interesting question, cuz I thought it was obvious that there was absolutely no moral impropriety in either case, that only people who held on to silly superstitions would think otherwise, and I thought that this was basically the the position of most Democrats/liberals.

Now I understand that I was the weird/foolish one for actually believing people when they said that they were liberal.

It's still silly superstition, though.

Most humans are not WEIRD, you can call them what you like to cope with this reality, but that's not going to change because the Liberal ethic is unsustainable on its own.

Liberals used to understand this when they invented Liberalism.

Yes, those are also examples of positions that people hold that empirical evidence won't move them off of. Some of that may be because they don't think the evidence is compelling, but most of it is that these just aren't questions that are amenable to rigorous testing.

I think there are good non-empirical arguments for why transing children is a terrible idea (and people have made them in this thread) but I don't expect them to be compelling to strict utilitarians, particularly the utilitarians that are credulous about any institution that cloaks itself in the aesthetics of science. If my position depended on whether some shoddy, non-replicating study is consistent with it or not, I think that would be much thinner than reaching conclusions from considering the situation with the context of history and human nature.

My point was purely meta, I am absolutely fine with the argument "in the current political climate and given the replication crisis, it seems likely that the people who devote their lives to studying the outcome of gender interventions are more motivated by activism than by genuine scientific curiosity, and that a lot of them have already written the bottom line when the study starts. Then, they engage in cargo cult science to find the argument leading to their preferred conclusion. As the activists outnumber the scientists, they can use the mechanisms of peer review and grant-making to sideline authors with a lesser or opposite bias. Thus, all their studies are to considered unreliable and we should default to our priors regarding the benefits of gender interventions in minors."

I might have some disagreements with the argument (especially with its sibling being applied to climate science), but these would mostly boil down to object level questions about reality (including institutions) which are at least in principle fathomable by the scientific method.

It is the difference between Kelvin boldly stating:

I need scarcely say that the beginning and maintenance of life on earth is absolutely and infinitely beyond the range of sound speculation in dynamical science.

and a more modest:

Explaining life is currently very much beyond physics, and we lack a paradigm to even make progress on that question. It might be different in a hundred or a thousand years, or it might remain thus forever.

Good news, with your attitude, you are not alone.

Sure, because this includes most people. Pretty sure it even includes you (I dunno, would you teach your children to be transphobic if someone came up with some galaxy-brained study that it adds a few QALYs to their life?).

Of course, if you want to convince the grey tribe specifically, just stating that obviously blood is sacred or puberty blockers are evil.

Funnily enough, it's the pro trans side that fits better with the groups you mentioned. They have - by their own admission - no evidence that puberty blockers improve the outcomes for children / adolescents.

my opposition to gender transitioning prepubescent children does not hinge on science and I would not be convinced by studies that purported to show that it's actually very good for children

What is it based on?

Morality, presumably. Ought, not is.

We already have evidence based results for trans healthcare. That's why I brought up the Cass Review. Jesse Singal himself is good at actually looking at the studies themselves.

But I mean, yes, there are other reasons to oppose it, which have been brought up on this site many, many times, such as allowing children to consent to permanent side-effects like infertility from puberty blockers. Your three steps become a lot more understandable when it's about lobotomies and someone says "you've got all this positive research for this procedure, but you're still drilling people's fuckin' personalities out of their brains."

And there are other medical organizations and groups that reached a different finding. Clearly there's a disagreement and we need more high quality research to settle things. And if people are going to be doing something anyway, why not study them?

And there are other medical organizations and groups that reached a different finding.

Anyone you have in mind? As far as I can tell the organizations can be roughly divided into:

  • Ones who did do a systematic review and came to roughly the same conclusions
  • Ones who did not do one, and therefore can't really be said to have come to any conclusions
  • Ones who did do a systematic review, and decided to hide the results from the public, and made researchers sign a pledge of loyalty to only publish results that will be good for the transgender movement.

Clearly there's a disagreement and we need more high quality research to settle things

Can we at least agree that no one from the third group belongs anywhere near said research?

SEGFAULT. Replied to the wrong comment

I think you replied to the wrong comment (at least, I see you replying to yourself).

Thanks for the heads up!

I'm an American and I care, but I am assuming that like always, people will take what they want from Europe and sneer at the stuff they don't like. That goes for both sides. One side sneers at TERF Island but praises the public healthcare that it has (such as it is), one side praises the lockdown pullbacks and other Covid studies from Scandinavia but sneers at their high tax rate and large safety net. Seems like the good-science-enthusiasts have been getting Ws out of the area, though.

Edit: The comment got deleted. It asked something about whether Americans care about what happens in Europe, mentioning the Cass Report and the slow pullback of gender affirming care for minors across the continent.

It's not a wonder you don't care about reforming the science to have evidence based results on if trans healthcare for minors has positive or negative results for patients if you've already made up your mind that it's unethical off other grounds.

Do you think the science of treating autists with Lupron just needed reform, or is it better that it was axed?

Science should not be

Step 1: Have a view established off something else Step 2: Only accept evidence, research, and experts that agrees with the pre-established view and not the ones that disagree. Step 3: Declare the issue done with and stop further research.

Funny you say that, because this is exactly what trans medicine has been so far.

Has the buried systemic review from your second link been unearthed?

Never heard of it going public, but I didn't go looking either. Might take stab at it later.

It's not just one review they're sitting on, by the way, I don't remember the number, but I think it's about a dozen (or half-dozen? I seem to remember the word "dozen" appearing somewhere in the context).

@magic9mushroom, ah, there we go

C. WPATH Hindered Publication of Evidence Reviews.

Though the SOC-8 authors and their advocacy allies didn’t seem to have much use for them,132 the Johns Hopkins evidence review team “completed and submitted reports of reviews (dozens!) to WPATH” for SOC-8.133 The results were concerning. In August 2020, the head of the team, Dr. Robinson, wrote to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality at HHS about their research into “multiple types of interventions (surgical, hormone, voice therapy…).”134 She reported: “[W]e found little to no evidence about children and adolescents.”135 HHS wrote back: “Knowing that there is little/no evidence about children and adolescents is helpful.”136

All the references are to the Boe v. Marshall case from the second link (which also contains a direct link to the evidence from the case).

The "there we go" is in regard to the "dozen", not the buried reviews?

Correct, still didin't look if I'll find the reviews (and am leaning pessimistic, I'm guessing Alabama's AG who wrote that document would already have them, if they were uncoverable). Sorry if there was any confusion.

Do you think the science of treating autists with Lupron just needed reform, or is it better that it was axed?

Was there a bunch of consenting autistic people begging to be given lupron? I think there are different standards between "studies of medicine forced on someone without their permission" and "studies of medicine done with the consent of both child and parent"

Funny you say that, because this is exactly what trans medicine has been so far.

Ah I wasn't aware two wrongs made a right. I guess the Whataboutists had the best idea after all.

  • -10

Was there a bunch of consenting autistic people begging to be given lupron?

Since we're talking about children, they can't consent directly (and since we're talking autism, it's possible they could have been non-verbal anyway), so the relevant question would be about the parents. Yes, there were parents begging for it, that's why they went to a doctor offering it.

I think there are different standards between "studies of medicine forced on someone without their permission" and "studies of medicine done with the consent of both child and parent"

No one was forcing the parents, and if your entire objection rests on children "consenting", it's pretty trivial to manipulate them into wanting it (which is exactly what happened with trans care).

And if you're still not convinced I can give you more examples where the patients were begging for quack therapy, and it got shut down by the authorities. Burzynski's antineoplaston therapy, off the top of my head.

Ah I wasn't aware two wrongs made a right. I guess the Whataboutists had the best idea after all.

It's not whataboutism to want to defund corrupt research, and if you only criticize the defunders, you don't really believe it's "two wrongs".

A return to 2000s norms on this is hardly a wrong. The only reason we're here at all is due to about a decade of Overton window pushing. When these studies and techniques are the best they've got to offer on a fight they picked, it's a moral imperative to just kill it without even asking anymore.

I find it pretty distasteful to give up anthropology to positive feedback loops, and let our history become a mockery when it is within one's power to just raze it.

The fundamental problem the Red Tribe/American conservatism faces is a culture of proud, resentful ignorance. They can't or won't produce knowledge and they distrust anyone who does. They don't want to become librarians or museum curators or anthropologists. The best they can manage is the occasional court historian or renegade economist, chosen more for partisan loyalty than academic achievement and quite likely to be a defector. The effect is this bizarre arrangement where rather than produce conservative thought, they are demanding liberals think conservative thoughts for them.

Occasionally rightists will plead weakness to rationalize their lack of intellectual productivity, but this is nonsense. They have had plenty of money, plenty of political power, and a broad base of support. Unless we accept the Trace-Hanania thesis that they literally just lack human capital, we're left with the conclusion that the right-wing withdrawal from intellectual spaces is a sort of distributed choice. Razing institutions because you can't be bothered to make your case is just barbarism.

They don't want to become librarians or museum curators or anthropologists.

I did want to become a librarian. It wasn't open to me due to lack of money and other reasons. Today, I think if I did train as a librarian (and depending what country you are in), there might or might not be the push to be progressive, but I think it's very likely that the education will be on the liberal side, and to get your qualification you will have to (1) genuinely agree and be converted to The Right Side Of History (2) pretend to agree to pass and hide your real opinions (3) openly disagree and be failed by your professors.

(1) means changing to the Blue Tribe side so you are no longer counted as Red Tribe (so people like you can then go on to sneer about the ignorant Reds because look, all the educated people are Blues in thought and behaviour). (2) means always have to be 'just following orders' or else your career is over, which again hobbles the chance for expression of conservative values. And (3) of course means you never get to be a librarian or museum curator or anthropologist, which again enables the sneers about "see how dumb and arrogantly ignorant the Reds are?"

means changing to the Blue Tribe side so you are no longer counted as Red Tribe (so people like you can then go on to sneer about the ignorant Reds because look, all the educated people are Blues in thought and behaviour).

It's a lot harder to switch than this though. If you grew up rurally with a family with a pick up truck watching NASCAR then you are almost certainly Red Tribe and will remain so even if you change political views. Becoming Blue Tribe would mean rewriting not just your political views (there are after all Red Tribe Democrats and Blue Tribe Republicans) but also your preferences for food and entertainment and dress. And not just at the surface level (that would just be "passing") but at the level where you actually preferred football ("soccer") to NASCAR and a hybrid compact to a truck and avocado toast to a steak and so on and so forth.

Red Tribe and Blue Tribe are cultural groups that overlap heavily with political groups but the Tribal markers remain, absent significant effort to remove them.

I've tried to get Violet Tribe (as the equivalent to Grey Tribe) adopted for that exact thing - grew up Red, had or adopted Blue tastes.

In fact I do have Blue Tribe preferences in (some) food and dress and (much more) entertainment. But I don't like the very progressive "we must have Representation which means Black Romans in Britain" style attitudes, so I guess I remain Red in some things (though since I'm not American, NASCAR doesn't apply to me. But plenty of liberals in my own country like to sneer at the bogtrotters, so the attitudes remain recognisable and relatable).

Is Vance, for example, Red or Blue? He seems more Violet to me, but of course the Blues very much want him to be a redneck (literally). Same with Ross Douthat and some others. That is what is meant to be the alchemy of higher education - it takes the base material of the Red young adult and refines it in the crucible so that the end product is flawlessly Blue and the dross of the old attitudes have been purged away. And if you come out the other end Blue to the core, then of course you no longer count as a Red, and hence "Reds don't care about education or learning" is propagated.

But it was my rural and working class family which always went "education is no burden". Yes, often it was because of the same push to go to college because "college educated earn more" and not for disinterested love of learning, but in general they are ambitious for their children to do better than they did, and not have to engage in hard manual labour. But if you can be a successful small businessman without going to college, or at least not for a degree in Queer Gender Glaciers, then is that "not interested in education"?

I think there are a lot of Blues also not interested in education qua education, but more "now we can set out to decolonise geology" and such agendas.

Right, one of the issues with keeping the Red Tribe going is they are (or were) supporters of their kids going to college. I've mentioned before how miners and steel workers in small town America don't necessarily want their kids to do those jobs because they know how dangerous and back breaking they can be. Now I think they're more interested in the perceived benefits of getting a degree (better, easier, less body destroying jobs) but they are to sn extent the architect of their own destruction, by buying into that part of the American dream. If you send your kids off to college in bigger towns and cities, some of them will get assimilated, and stay and some will choose to stay for those better jobs. So even before neoliberalism crushed the steel and mining sectors, they were on a slow steady road to decline.

Yes, unfortunately Scott’s original anthropological definition has gotten filed off over the years and it’s just used as a shorthand for Republican and Democrat. If we’re using the term correctly, almost everyone on this board is Blue Tribe, even the most right wing among us.

Yeah, and it is a useful distinction, even if its not a perfect set of descriptors. Which is why I often try and oush back towards Scott's formulation. Even if that is a losing battle.

And there's nothing wrong with being a Blue Tribe conservative, but in general that conservatism is not exactky like Red Tribe conservatism so we're missing a pretty important part of America's "voice".

I have it on very good authority that I'm conservative, and I would probably be a physicist or an archivist in a world where that were really on offer. I used to think I was progressive. For me, university and after was a process of learning that wasn't the case. So here we are.

It looks a little late to go back from where I'm standing—but who knows? You changed my mind once. Maybe you'll manage it twice in one life.

In my experience studying physics at a German university, there was little in the way of ideological purity required.

Generally, STEM seems a useful niche for contrarians. While subjects such as art, literature, history, law, medicine, sociology, psychology, economics all include things on which the predominant ideology has an opinion about -- you can not really use colonialism to explain the behavior of bacteria, or blank-slatism to design a more efficient motor, or Marxism to explain semiconductors, or social darwinism to prove a theorem, or religion to predict the movements of planets. Sure, the Nazis tried to establish a non-Jewish German physics, but that attempt did not even last as long as their "thousand-year" empire did. The woke ideology can mostly be seen on a meta level, by asserting that institutional sexism is the only possible explanation to a skewed gender ratio. This certainly can be a problem if you apply for a professorship, but not on the levels below that.

Of course, German universities are likely a bit different from US ones. Basically, what was required of us was passing exams and taking a few lab courses. Granted, visiting the lectures and studying with others helped, but I did not see a lot in the way of mobbing -- people who did not like you generally just left you alone. Few people had the time for an outrage campaign in any case. In general, nobody cared much what you did outside university.

From my understanding, it is common for students to live on the campus in the US, which makes the university much more central in the life of the students and (presumably) enforces greater conformity.

This certainly can be a problem if you apply for a professorship, but not on the levels below that.

Unfortunately academia in the US is pretty precarious below tenure level. And despite nominally opposing that state of affairs, the "progressive" crowd have always been happy to settle intraparty scores permanently.

It was safer to go somewhere entirely else than to be always almost (not quite) a friend. That "ally" just means "enemy" with extra steps.

Unless we accept the Trace-Hanania thesis that they literally just lack human capital

I don't like this post of course, but I have to upvote you for it because as far as turns of phrase that advance your argument go, this one deserves a chef's kiss. Sincerely it's beautifully executed.

Ignorant of what, exactly? The intellectual fashions and constantly evolving terminology of the left? The revisionism of the entire school of leftist history? The activism of the professorial-activist class?

99% of the intellectual output of the social sciences is essentially Blue Tribe navel-gazing. (The pHD dissertation on the colonialism bias of the smell of Indians is beyond parody.) Civilized societies throw their scholars to the fire every so often: Qin Shi Huang was arguably too merciful.

The pHD dissertation on the colonialism bias of the smell of Indians is beyond parody

Got a link? I need to read this

This just seems incorrect given it's the most hard sciences that trend most conservative to my knowledge. It seems the other way around, where progressives prize subjects more where nothing ever needs to be proven and it's all just theories.

it's the most hard sciences that trend most conservative to my knowledge.

Looking at donations amongst professors, if there's an effect, it's very small.

That only works if the right-wing barbarian agrees that there is any value left in those institutions. I’m not sure modern anthropology departments or modern hollywood clear that bar.

Empty museums are depressing. Close most of them, sell all the old coins, keep the mona lisa. If the people then clamor for more museums, just buy the stuff back. And if these so-called ‘public goods’ are only enjoyed by the rich, , like opera, let them pay. The rich and cultured get a perverse kick out of having the poor pay for the very class markers used to exclude them.

Opera! Now this is in my wheelhouse. Your aside is ill informed.

If you’re an American, public/government funding for opera is truly negligible. There is significant state funding for opera in Europe. But Verdi is to Italy what Havel is to the Czech Republic what Yeats is to Ireland, and what rather tragically Wagner was to the Reich, so there’s more of a cultural cause for continued funding. Gershwin, Glass and Adams, for all their merits, aren’t exactly important to our nation-state the way Thomas Paine was.

Opera was a popular art form heading into the middle of the 20th Century, and experienced a commercial boom in America coming out of WW2. But by the 1960s there were warnings that ticket revenues wouldn’t cover expenses. Now, here in the States, it’s about 50/50 on tickets versus philanthropy, with a sliver of NEA money and the like tossed in.

The poor are not paying for opera in America. The truly rich are picking up half the tab for the middle and upper-middle class. And this is after the culling and consolidation of operas and symphonies in America that started in the 1990s, and was twice accelerated by the housing crisis and pandemic lockdowns.

Every opera company in America, sans one, uses the more economical stagione system, staging one, discrete production at a time. Only the Met in New York has the financial capital to operate as a repertory company, with concurrent productions, whereas this is far more common in the state-funded companies of Europe. That NYC is America’s financial capitol is not coincidence.

Now, if I may gripe as a Conservative, because the art form is so dependent on philanthropy — contrasted against that the Magic Flute was a blasphemous production sung in German as opposed to the proper Italian and staged in a common theater, and the Golden Age and Dark Age of opera both refer to its commercial heyday in Italy where there was so much demand that mounds of forgotten schlock was produced — in America today it’s MFA holders who control commissions and grants, and they award these to fellow MFA holders who know how to write for MFA holders, and the art form is now trapped in an artistic ghetto. A beautiful melody, or asks of virtuosity are deemed common and vulgar by MFA holders, and thus they further confine opera to a commercial decline.

I’ve made converts of friends and acquaintances with recordings of Pavarotti‘s Nessun Dorma, and YouTube clips of Donizetti‘s Cheti, Cheti/Aspetta duet. Anything current? Sadly, no.

the Magic Flute was a blasphemous production sung in German as opposed to the proper Italian

Mozart genuinely was a genius, as he made sung German tolerable to listen to 😁 For more converting people, Soave sia il vento, no matter what production design shenanigans, is ethereally beautiful.

And Dante wrote The Divine Comedy in the common Italian of his time, not in proper Latin. "High culture" often only becomes "high" after gently marinating for a couple of centuries.

Terry Pratchett in his novel Maskerade made the point that if you want to make money out of people standing around on stage singing, you write musicals. Opera is a machine for turning money into beautiful music and nothing else. That's why it will always need funding, either public, private, or a mix of both. Unhappily as with all high art, the 'you need to be Educated to Appreciate it' has taken over so, as you say, public taste diverges from what the authorities deem correct, and it falls even more out of favour and needs even more propping up by donations instead of generating revenue (I have tried, and failed, to listen to an entire opera by Harrison Birtwistle).

EDIT: An online acquaintance introduced me to this 17th century piece which sounds surprisingly modern (I can see what Birtwistle is trying to do by comparison but this is more listenable) - the Cold Song from "King Arthur".

…no matter what production design shenanigans…

Way back, there was an Onion headline to the effect of, “Avant-Garde Director Shocks Audiences With In-Period Staging.”

The recontextualization can occasionally be done well. I enjoyed the 2022 Salzburg Festival’s production of the Magic Flute as bedtime story come to life.

the Magic Flute was a blasphemous production sung in German as opposed to the proper Italian and staged in a common theater

I would love to read your review of Death in Venice.

I’m laying it on a bit thick there and I hope the above came across; it is a good thing that one of the most-enduring and well-loved operas being performed today occurred because… Mozart needed money, and outside of any commission, wrote an opera with the aim of it being a popular, commercial success. As soon as my daughter is old enough and possesses the patience to sit through it, I can’t wait to take her to see the Met’s annual abridged, English-language production it puts on every December that is designed to be child-friendly.

I read Death in Venice as an undergrad, and I wasn’t a great student, so I’m certain I procrastinated, rushed through it, and now don’t have much recall of it — broad strokes of industriousness versus leisure, the love drive versus the death drive, how our base desires conflict with good manners?

Maybe I'm a philistine but I found the music boring and my takeaway was that Britton was doing a poor retelling of Nabokov.

Opera at its best involves a dramatic heightening of human emotion. Small children often sing to themselves when playing to achieve just this. It is intrinsically in us; part of our souls. If a particular work doesn’t move you in this manner, feel no shame in casting it aside.

There is Britten I love — The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra - — and Britten I like — The Turn of the Screw — but if Death in Venice doesn’t resonate in your heart, then go with your heart.

I’ve made converts of friends and acquaintances with recordings of Pavarotti‘s Nessun Dorma, and YouTube clips of Donizetti‘s Cheti, Cheti/Aspetta duet.

Your post intrigues me, and I'd be interested in watching/listening to any specific links you'd care to share. (High) Opera has never been a particular interest of mine, but I do enjoy musical theatre and the occasional Gilbert and Sullivan, so it seems like something I might like with the right introduction.

Seconded. Please make a top-level post about this, @UnopenedEnvilope!

I'll start with the two mentioned.

A quick setup for what is going on in Nessun Dorma. There is a beautiful princess (Turandot) and the king, her father, does not have a male heir; whoever marries her gets a gorgeous wife and a kingdom. The princess does not want to get married, and especially not to a foreigner because of some past trauma in her family line. So, whomever asks for her hand has to successfully answer a series of riddles. If they succeed: gorgeous wife and a kingdom. If they fail: decapitation. A young unknown prince is travelling, incognito, through this kingdom. He sees the decapitated heads of failed suitors perched atop spikes on the outside of the city walls. But then he sees the princess, and falls head over heels. He successfully answers the riddles, and the princess is distraught at the prospect of actually getting married. So moved by love, he gives the princess a riddle. If she can guess his name by sunrise, he gets decapitated, but if not, she has to willingly(!) marry him. The princess charges all her servants with discovering the prince's name before sunrise, on penalty of death for failing to do so.

In Nessun Dorma (No One Sleeps), we hear both the prince's aria, giving his internal monologue, and in the background the chorus of the princess' servants. Some info on the composition of operas. Almost all begin with a libretto, a kind of poem, to which the composer then sets the music. The supermajority of operas have a different librettist and composer. The composer has great if not total license as to which lines and words within the libretto to emphasize and to repeat. The prince wills the night stars to set. And, when Puccini composed this aria, it was his choice to repeat the last word, thrice, to shape it -- victory... victory... victory!

This is an excellent live recording of Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma and you can use the closed caption option in YouTube to get English subtitles in case you aren't fluent in Italian. I think sports are a helpful comparison when discussing opera singers. There are different kinds of forwards in soccer, quarterbacks in football, etc. And, there are different kinds of basses, baritones, tenors, altos and sopranos. Roles are written for certain subtypes. Pavarotti is a great fit for this particular part because he is both more than a credible lyric and spinto tenor; he's capable of the warmth needed for most of the aria and as a huge-chested man, the power to drive its finale.

Setup for the duet I mentioned: Don Pasquale is a comic opera and if you like a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan this should feel familiar and fun. Pasquale, himself, is the buffoon of the opera, and he's taken a young wife far too pretty for him, and after forbidding his nephew, who is his ward, to marry her even though the latter pair are in love. He is (rightly) suspicious she's still in love with his nephew, and he enlists Dr. Malatesta to help him try and catch the two out. Unbeknownst to Pasquale, Malatesta is on the side of the young lovers, and the small plot he proposes is a setup within a larger plot. Donizetti wrote a duet between Pasquale and Malatesta where both switch between addressing each other and making asides to the audience as the tempo keeps accelerating, ending with both talking over and past one another at breakneck speed.

This is a favorite comic opera of mine but not as famous as many so the recordings on YouTube are a bit limited in terms of quality. Here is one that I quite like, by Hampson and Pisaroni who have great comedic chemistry with one another.

There's a lot appealing about opera if you geek out about it. There's history in it: Verdi's Nabucco, to avoid censorship, smuggled a call for a unified Italian nation state within a biblical story, and Va Pensiero was the unification movement's unofficial anthem. Wagner drew inspiration from the same Nordic myths that Tolkien did, and his works are so dense with symbolism he's been claimed by all different types. Obviously the Reich's interest was horrid, and Wagner was certainly antisemitic, but as an example, prior to WW2, he was a darling of the Marxists (clearly Gotterdammerung, the Twilight of the Gods, was about the death of nobility and feudalism, only to be replaced by capitalism, and Das Rheingold, a symbol of capital itself that allows the industrialist Alberich to oppress the proletariat, Nibelungen).

And there's also at the highest levels stunning virtuosity. Mozart wrote his Queen of the Night Aria for his sister-in-law who was a virtuosic soprano. When testing the upper limits of a singer's vocal rage, taking small steps up to the highest pitch makes hitting those highest notes much, much easier. So, Mozart arpeggiates the approach when he writes this aria, making it brutally difficult to sing. If you see it somewhere other than at one of the major opera houses, there is serious tension in the audience, as everyone waits to see if the soprano singing it will hit her high F in tune. On the other end of things, here is a professional opera singer turned vocal coach breaking down how a truly elite soprano deals with signing the role.

I’ve made converts of friends and acquaintances with recordings of Pavarotti‘s Nessun Dorma, and YouTube clips of Donizetti‘s Cheti, Cheti/Aspetta duet. Anything current? Sadly, no.

Funny enough I became a fan of opera for almost precisely this reason. I credit Tom Cruise and "Rogue Nation" for introducing me to Turandot and went to see it performed live at the MET a few years back.

My mother took us to the theater, orchestra and opera as children. The use of Beethoven’s Ninth in Die Hard sparked my love of these arts (and gave me an appreciation for what she was in process of trying to impart). The four-minute highlight edit from the end credits, specifically.

The fundamental problem the Red Tribe/American conservatism faces is a culture of proud, resentful ignorance.

This is fundamentally untrue I think and close to boo outgroup (Edit - I think you explain below what you mean somewhat better). Red Tribers have a great deal of use for knowledge. It's just usually directly applicable knowledge. Half my family are redneck equivalents and they prize knowledge. The type of practical knowledge that lets them run a successful farm or build houses. My uncle has forgotten more about small hold farming than I ever knew. My grandfather could eke a living out of poor soil and hilly terrain with a knowledge of local weather and rainfall patterns that rivaled anything the Met Office can put out. They possess a great deal of knowledge in the Red Tribe. I lived in a small Red town in the US for a number of years and this is just not a good description of Red Tribe folk even at the most general level.

It's true they don't generally want to become an anthropologist or what have you, but academia is only a subset of knowledge generation. An important one! But not the only one by far.

What is true I think is that almost definitionally Red Tribers in general don't want to sit in offices and decide on funding for hypothetical research, which means it is going to be up to the small number of conservative Blue Tribers to do that. It also explains why so often Republican politicians are more left then their base. Because they are usually Blue Tribers who are conservative, again because almost definitionally Red Tribers don't want to live in a big city and sit in meetings and give speeches for a living. But Blue Tribe conservatives are not identical to Red Tribe conservatives, we can see the spat with Musk and Vivek about H-1B visas as an example.

I don't think the Red Tribe could ever be 50% of academia there simply not enough of them who would want to do that. The whole point of different tribes is they do have different values and preferences. Just like farmers or lumberjacks or oil workers are never going to be 50% Blue Tribe.

For the Red Tribe to pull its weight in academia or politics you have to convince salt of the earth people like my uncle to go and sit in meetings and give speeches or go to school for 4 years so he can get a degree, and then teach people or research at a university, when that is the last thing he wants to do. He would rather be out in his fields.

But don't think that means he is ignorant. He knows exactly how to skin and butcher a carcass, he knows what his fields need and can diagnose a multitude of livestock illnesses. He also knows exactly what the price of feed and crops need to be before he breaks even. All without finishing school at all.

I think Red's do undervalue the kind of academic knowledge that can be transformative, but equally I think Blue's do undervalue practical day to day useful knowledge. We need both in order for societies to advance.

Red Tribers have a great deal of use for knowledge. It's just usually directly applicable knowledge.

This is my point. I want to reiterate: I am not saying that Red Tribers are stupid or have no skills. I am saying they have a general disdain for knowledge production. Which, bluntly, the rest of your comment and my own personal experience does not dispute. Knowledge is either inherited or received from trusted community members, and updated only slowly. It's not just that they don't want to personally do academic research, they don't trust the entire process because it's not part of their epistemological paradigm.

I lived in a small Red town in the US for a number of years

So did I. I've lived in Red America in one form or another (it's important to note that "red tribe" != rural) for most of my life. I went to private evangelical schools until I left for college (to my original point, my high school's college counselor advised against going to any but a select list of private Evangelical colleges). Most of my extended family is from the rural Midwest. My perspective on this is personal, not sociological.

(Something I find deeply frustrating about this forum is that it is taken as a given that criticism of the Red Tribe or Red Tribe-adjacent things are coming from a distance)

I think you explained better here and in other posts, what you meant, but I think using resentful and ignorant was probably a poor choice, because it's not exactly what you seem to be saying.

I think we are largely on the same page aside from that. Given the ideological skew of this place, Making sure you are signaling that you do indeed know what you are talking about is going to be useful, for example when talking about atheism, I now make a point to say that I was in fact raised in a Christian household and was Christian until I became an atheist, which is helpful in that it means we can skip the "Do you really know what Christianity is" and similar tangents. So probably making sure to highlight your direct experience with the Red Tribe (as I did also) up front will be helpful here.

The frustration I think everyone's feeling with this discussion is that while what you're saying is true in a certain way and for certain sample of people, it applies to almost no one here. A bad faith poster in this forum may cherrypick sources and cite only the studies already favorable the their viewpoint, but they're still citing and searching for and reading [abstracts of] studies - which puts them miles ahead of a median person, who gets their entire memeplex wholesale from a medium of their choice.

Now I'll give you, this leaves "regular" red tribers in a worse position - Fox et al just has a worse quality of journalism than NYT or WaPo, or whatever you thing the "default" blue tv station is. Or so I've heard, I'm not an American and I've seen <15m of Fox News material in my life (I try to never watch it, just so I can angle-shoot someone who would accuse me of getting my viewpoints from there).

But yeah, if I may be a bit self-indulgent, you arrive at a space where people are in the top ~5-2% of striving to be up to date on the news and research, and proclaim that a core tenet of their affiliates is "proud, resentful ignorance". People are taking it personally, even if they probably shouldn't.

A perfect microcosm of different faction's approach to knowledge would be 2020. In the beginning, you get grays and "high reds" freaking out about approaching epidemic, while the mainstream and progs are mocking them for being weird techbros, telling people to celebrate freely in the streets, and "justtheflu"ing it. Then the epidemic arrives, and suddenly everyone's got an opinion. The reds get locked in the "low" mode, so they inherit the "just the flu, bro" position and insist on folk medicine, evidence be damned. This is the source of the supposed March-April switch of the positions - there was hardly a switch, it's mainly different demographics. The blues find themselves in a more truth-aligned position, until they too err catastrophically for ideological reasons (telling people to go out and protest in June).

tl;dr As i/o on twitter put it, the worst of the right are retarded, the worst of the left are mentally ill.

The frustration I think everyone's feeling with this discussion is that while what you're saying is true in a certain way and for certain sample of people, it applies to almost no one here.

Because most people here are not actually Red Tribe conservatives. We're mostly Blue Tribers and Blue Tribe dissidents (or Grey Tribe). Hlynka's conservatism was closer to the Red Tribe people I know in person than to most of the conservatives we have here I think, (particularly in being hostile to HBD), but he was pretty unusual compared to the median Motte poster.

Conservatives I know in person are not hostile per se to HBD, but definitely would see 'blacks less intelligent' as a significantly overrated factor compared to bad culture, and may not want to focus on it to begin with. For lots of them it comes off as pointlessly offensive even if true, like calling someone 'fatso' instead of 'heavyset'.

Besides, blacks can marry their babymamas, work hard, etc, but they can't very well become smarter.

And therein lies their downfall. Because once you eliminate every other factor and blacks are still less likely, you're caught between the claims of double-secret discrimination and HBD. Make HBD anathema, and yep, it's The Man up to his old tricks again.

You haven't eliminated every other factor. Blacks do have a bad culture. Go listen to pop country vs hip hop.

Now if you convinced blacks overnight to adopt a much better culture wholesale the gap wouldn't disappear but I don't think most red tribers are firmly committed to the equality of races in natural giftedness. It just seems pointless, from a red tribe perspective, to focus on the unfixable parts of problems when there's just so so much that can be fixed.

So you're suggesting that a culture exemplified by a man who talked about a Hobbes-shaped hole in discourse is somehow so anti-intellectual that Skibboleth is right?

Hmm, No, as I don't think he was a perfect exemplar, just the closest we have here in a specifically online unusual space. Just because most Blues don't want to farm, doesn't mean none of them do, they are still Blues even if unusual.

None of my neighbors have ever mentioned Hobbes for example. But their fundamental ideas seem to match his reasonably well even if he backs his up with more of a philosophical bent.

You don't have to know anything about Hobbes to have ideas that match. Whether it's because you worked it out yourself or the culture you were brought up in taught you something similar without ever talking about Enlightenment philosophy specifically. I don't know that many Blues outside of academia would know much about Mill either.

My grandfather didn't know Hobbes from Paine from Locke but his thoughts on human nature and people being selfish and violent if not restrained mesh pretty well.

Philosophers do not have exclusivity on making observations about people. They just write about it more. As opposed to my grandfather who kept a shotgun under his bed and wrote very little that wasn't accounting for his farm.

He'd probably have thought Hobbes should have got a real job, and that he was making basic observations sound fancier than they were. But he would roughly have agreed about the fundamental nature of men.

Having said that, he wasn't against learning. He asked my father who was a maths teacher to help him with his books and towards the end of his life, investments because he said an educated man doesn't have to break his back. He left money to help pay for my kids to go to university. He valued useful knowledge.

I don't know if I would call it anti-intellectual as much as pro-practical. And of course generalizing elides that people are varied even between cultures or tribes.

Does that make more sense?

Knowledge is either inherited or received from trusted community members, and updated only slowly. It's not just that they don't want to personally do academic research, they don't trust the entire process because it's not part of their epistemological paradigm.

That is true, but that is because academia has abandoned the scientific method. And we know this is the case because the more a discipline retains the scientific method, the more conservative it is. And the further away from the scientific method it got, the more conservatives stayed away.

Conservatives like to be certain before they make declarations about reality because they don't want to break society, whereas progressives prefer moving fast and fixing anything they break. Both perspectives have merit imo, but academia disagrees, so of course conservatives don't want to be a part of it. Say it was possible, would you want to build a lifelong career around being a primary antagonist on the motte? Would you expect your friends and family to?

I agree with monzer, nobody is necessarily to blame for it, it's perverse incentives and cognitive biases on both sides. Having control over academia however, does mean progressives are more responsible for the current dismal state of things imo, because even before you start conspiracy theorising, more access to academia means they have fewer excuses for not recognising the biases and incentives.

Red tribers mostly respect discoveries in eg hard mathematics, chemistry, archeology, etc. But generally not philosophical theorizing, or gender studies, or what have you. So yes it's writing off entire fields but it's because they think the answers are so obvious/already known(there are two genders, you can figure out which one you are by dropping your pants in front of a mirror) that the field in question consists of making yourself stupid to avoid them.

History. Red tribe loves studying history.

And entering some of these fields feels like the equivalent of 'Feel like you disagree with the tenets of Islam? Become a Koranic scholar and argue with Muftis all day' in which the consensus and shared assumptions that fields like Gender Research are built on essentially originate from a series of value judgements than underpin all contemplation.

I have spent my entire adult life, and even before that, with the knowledge that if I ever spoke my true political/social views I would instantly torpedo my entire career and social standing forever. I have been living under a censorious regime in a country that supposedly enshrines freedom of speech as one of its highest virtues for My. Entire. Life. The only place where I can even come close to honestly speaking about how I view the world is in anonymous and pseudoanonymous forums like this one, and even then I take pains not to get too real with y'all because it's really not that difficult to dox someone with a long post history and it just takes one obsessive.

Why are there no rightists in the academy? Could it be because they were systematically deplatformed and depersoned and dethroned on a generational, decades long project to completely seize control of elite production forever? No, it's because righties are dumdums, we're all dumdums.

And now you have the audacity to complain when the institutions you hollowed out are being kicked over, all the support columns contributed from the right having been forcibly removed? Boo hoo.

If you may allow me a moment of cathartic ranting emerging from decades of repression; razing these institutions is a moral imperative. I want them to do it more. I voted for it. I hope it gets worse for you. I hope your degrees not only become worthless, but millstones to drown you. I hope you have to hide your former affiliations on your social media and resumes, like I have had to do with my views for my entire life. I hope you know every ounce of the fear and anxiety your regime has smothered on me like an inescapable burial shroud, for, again, my entire fucking life. I hope they are so thorough with their dismantling of your institutions that in 50 years your cathedrals that are on the tips of every tongue now are only vaguely recalled in retrospect. A quaint historical artifact, like Standard Oil. Only then can something somewhat resembling what was lost be built from the ashes.

You stomped on us for 20+ fucking years, did you never think what would happen when we became the shoe? You deserve everything bad that is happening to you; you will deserve the much worse things that are still to come.

Sorry for the heat, but it's probably more honest than what you usually get. If you read between the lines, you should have seen this seething rage boiling over years ago. I am quite certain that many, many people feel the same - they just don't say it, yet; the habit of censoring one's own emotions, thoughts, and opinions for safety being deeply ingrained. The tighter you seal it, the more dangerous the pressure cooker becomes.

I suppose I'm just tempermentally different in some fundamental way from many people here, but despite going through the same Great Awokening experiences as most college-educated individuals with heterodox views, I never felt this crushing sense of repression that others seem to. It has never been more than a minor annoyance to me that I had to attend diversity trainings, disinterestedly listen to whatever my progressive peers have decided to rant about that day, or that I would be mildly discriminated against by college admissions and hiring committees on account of my race(s), and one day in the past few months things seamlessly flipped over and I started being mildly annoyed instead that federal research grants were being canceled on account of including banned words. So it goes.

Perhaps I just never had any naive expectations of fairness, or that things like freedom of speech counted for much in practice, so the fact that I couldn't talk about race or sex differences in public didn't strike me as some sort of betrayal that needed to be avenged. Perhaps I don't have any real principles, and so, like the average person, I have no qualms about passively accepting whatever the ruling ideology happens to be and getting along as best I can without taking a stand for Truth and Justice. Perhaps I spent enough time in the third world that Americans complaining about basically anything at all strikes me as laughable. Whatever the reason, I notice that I am confused by this in the same way I am by the broader "mental health crisis" that has double digit percentages of my generation popping SSRI's like they're candy.

Spinelessness is not a virtue.

I don't see progressive ideology as an existential threat and so have not lifted a hand to fight it. Is not the man who does perceive it as such but does nothing except fume about it in an anonymous forum more spineless than me?

I must confess that my persona on themotte up to this point has been a lie. I'm actually a progressive democrat. Here's what I actually, truly believe as a progressive democrat. That we have gone much too far with our cultural revolution, that it's not enough we stop pushing for further progressive transformation but that we must also roll back the success we've had. I think that conservatives have a point that our institutions are buckling from the weight of dogma. I also find conservative women beautiful and the men to be strong and handsome. Reminder, I am a progressive.

Sorry for the heat

A rant about how much you hate your enemies and can't wait to see them get the rope is always going to be hard keep within the rules of discourse here, but all your "you" statements put this well over the line. The first part of your post was okay, but when you tell another poster that you want to see them, personally, suffer, that is too much heat.

My apologies, the you is rhetorical and broad. "You (the left)." I'm not wishing personal, specific harm on Skibboleth.

One of the divergences of right and left, however, is their belief in retribution, punishment, and suffering as morally justified and necessary in and of themselves. It has been my general observation that the left has completely abandoned the idea that retribution and punishment can be just and morally necessary for their own sake, not merely as incentives or correctives.

If there was a magic pill that would ensure a criminal never again committed crime - indeed, became an upstanding moral citizen - but induced no particular suffering, I get the feeling that many on the left would feel this was a sufficient "punishment" to, say, child murderers, and that any further retribution upon them would be barbaric and primitive. I do not believe this, nor do most on the right.

Suffering punishment when you do wrong is correct, morally. You SHOULD feel guilt when you do bad things. The push towards a shameless society is very, very bad. Shame is good, actually. Being punished when you do wrong is good for you and just good, full stop. A father disciplining his child does so out of love, and for their own good. So understand that even when if I say things like, "I think X should be punished" - this too is not necessarily a statement born out of hate. I can and do think that being punished can be good for someone. I think this is frequently the case, in fact.

And again, not merely for its utility to modify behavior. I think this a view that many postmodern leftists simply can't square - "I want you to be hurt because it will be good for you on a spiritual and moral level to be punished for your sins. I want you to suffer because I love you and suffering can, in fact, be good." The purely utilitarian view where all suffering is bad simply can't deal with this. Their instinct is to try and invert it somehow, "Oh, the suffering actually is good because it brings positive utility later-" NO. The suffering is good because it is suffering. If it is just it is just completely independent of the future. If the universe were to blip out of existence the next nanoinstant, it would still be just.

I want to also comment briefly on hate. Hate, in almost all modern popular media, is simply bad in and of itself. Epitomized by Star Wars philosophy schlock about the dark side. "Hate is the worst. Humans would be better off without hate. If only we could learn not to hate?" - These things sum up a LOT of the left's worldview. I think it's dead wrong. Hate is the most human and divine of emotions. God is merciful, yes, but he is also wrathful - when it is justified. A rat can feel fear, or even joy - can it feel hate?

And what of the utility of hate? The left seems to have completely forgotten why hate exists. Whether you think it a quirk of evopsych or a divine part of the grand design, hate has a strong, real, and practical purpose. It motivates you to completely destroy long-term threats permanently, even at considerable short term cost. A herd of gazelles might stomp out a lion that eats their young if they can catch it in the act. A tribe of humans tracks the lioness 30 miles to their den, kills her, kills her mate, kills all her cubs - and repeats the process every time they even see a lion in their territory from now until eternity until their distant descendants can't even imagine what it is like to fear being prey, to fear their child being snatched up in the red jaws. That is the value of hatred.

The events in Rotherham could never have happened to a society that hadn't had its ability to hate stripped from it. Hate is an essential part of society's immune system, and while it must be controlled, it should never be discarded.

The events in Rotherham could never have happened to a society that hadn't had its ability to hate stripped from it. Hate is an essential part of society's immune system, and while it must be controlled, it should never be discarded<

This is untrue. There was plenty of hate for Pakistani muslims in the 80s and 90s when this started. So that cannot be the whole story. The first reason it wasn't stopped and why white prostitution gangs still operate in the same way is that no-one really cares about the victims. Underclass girls who drink and do drugs and are from broken homes or in care are seen as a problem, as scum. I've heard the cops say it, in towns just down the road from Rotherham. Their own families barely care for them let alone anyone else.

That is the true and ongoing failure here. Condemned by conservatives for loose morals and sin and condemned by liberals for being chavvy and ill educated and low class.

They will continue to be victimised by one group or another for these reasons. Its Russian gangs in London, Sectarian ones in Northern Ireland, but the victims remain the same.

A lack of hate is not the issue by far. There is more than enough of that. It's not enough compassion. Not enough love.

Child prostitution is popular because there are always men who will pay for it. Always. Lock up the offenders of course, but just like with drug dealers, a new one will be along in a minute. You have to want to protect the victims not just punish the guilty. You have to want to see them not as a problem but as broken girls from broken homes who need help and treatment. But they aren't easy to work with or help so even the most compassionate of social workers or police officers becomes a jaded burned out cynic soon enough. I've seen it happen in my days working in social care. So then the cops treat the girls as prostitutes and drug addicts not as vulnerable children. No humans involved as the saying goes.

That is the almost insumountable problem. Anyone who wants to help is set against an almost unending torrent of misery and exposed to the sordid underbelly of human desire. Not many come out of it with their compassion intact. But that is what is needed, not more hate.

Have you commented anywhere around here on the refugee and resistance goings-on in Ireland? Seeing ladies getting run roughshod by the police is a bit strange to this American.

Not meant to be a gotcha of any sort, just asking since your commentary on the UK tends to be thoughtful and much more charitable than I'll see anywhere else. Not around as much as I used to be and figured I'd missed it if it's come up.

Not really, I'm from Northern Ireland, and I lived in England for a long while, so those are the places I know best. My insight into the South of Ireland is likely to be slightly superficial. I was raised Protestant so I don't have a lot of close links south of the border.

Dublin, I know is expensive and its likely immigration is contributing to that, and I think the Irish government much like the English has been reasonably pro-immigration for some time, so I'd imagine its the same pressures driving resentment as elsewhere. The Gardai don't to my knowledge have much of a reputation for unnecessary brutality, but they are part of the establishment and its very easy for an us vs them mentality to result in overreaction. To see the mass of people not the individuals.

@FtttG may have more local knowledge.

I appreciate your kind words by the way.

You also have to keep in mind that the actions of the public were stymied by their own government. There was no mechanism for driving out the Pakistani rape gangs because the cops were running cover for them — to the point that today, cops waste time and resources tracking down people posting mean things about the rotherham gangs and Pakistanis in general, while still not doing much about said rape gangs.

I think vigilante justice would probably be a perfectly reasonable way to keep grooming gangs from acting openly. They’d know that if they hang around primary schools they’re going to face consequences from the community, and they … don’t do it. They know that if they touch a girl they face being hung from a telephone pole, they’re not going to be doing that. Keeping Pakistani men from being able to gain access to children, and being willing to actually punish wrongdoing is protective. And as far as im concerned, noting who is likely to do harmful things to your community and acting to keep them out is a social good.

To be clear the anti-racist stuff was certainly the reason those particular gangs were able to last longer than they should.

Though I'll note cops in the 80s and 90s were not running cover and it still happened thats why it isn't the whole picture.

The problem is no-one actually wants to hang around the schools these girls go to and protect them from Pakistanis or anyone else. Are you going to hang out in schools and care homes in Stoke on Trent? In run down city centres with drug addicts shooting up around the corner and breaking into your car? And the local alkies shambling around? You're going to be there all day everyday? You won't and nor will anyone else, is the point. Regardless of Pakistani grooming gangs, no-one cares enough to start vigilante gangs. The odd attempt to burn down a mosque is the best you're going to get.

I want to be really clear, I worked in city government in the Midlands and large numbers of Pakistani immigrants are a huge problem for multiple reasons, over-representation in child prostiution gangs being one among many. But class attitudes towards lower and underclass girls are a huge part of why they are victims all across the country and people don't care.

You ask why the average Brit won't riot to protect these girls? Because to most of them they are just as much the outgroup as Pakistanis. Worse even because they should know better. Even with the cops blessing there aren't going to be lynch mobs over this. Not until most of the victims are nice middle class girls.

That's bullshit covering for them, because the government actively went after a) anyone who tried to do anything, like the girls' dads, and b) anyone who tried to bring it to public attention.

"Ohh we're just so lazy" would be a better excuse if the coverup wasn't so active. And yes, I was there in the 80s and 90s, and local governments were absolutely running cover just as much back then. I remember the "minorities can do no wrong, so the police had better find no wrong" attitudes of the time, and I'm very much not surprised you were mixed up in it.

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Being punished when you do wrong is good for you and just good, full stop.

If punishment is not merely an incentive or a corrective, then what else is there, particularly in the "good for you" scenario? Suppose I'm an incorrigible psychopath who already did wrong, you punish me in secret so that it is not a counterincentive for others and does not provide catharsis to anyone - how is it good for me? (I imagine it would still provide catharsis to you, the thought experimenter, but that can't be helped.)

If you're tempted to answer with something like "God" (paraphrased), first recall your rage when a trans person told you the definition of a woman is whoever wants to be a woman.

I get the feeling that many on the left would feel this was a sufficient "punishment" to, say, child murderers

This would not be sufficient punishment because it does not deter potential criminals from first doing the crime and then being force-repented. If this was the sole punishment for murder, I believe the Luigis of the world would be many more in number. This example of yours demonstrates the importance of the deterrence part of punishment, not the esoteric goodness you're hinting at but haven't explained.

Yes, it's axiomatic. Being punished when you do wrong is good. The cosmic scales are balanced. It simply is good.

Why is pleasure good? Why is pain bad? Why is fulfilling preference good? As you well know, at a certain point we all must defer to some axiom of what is right and wrong, whether it come from god or preference or whatever.

I simply see punishment for wrongdoing as axiomatically good. Indeed, your hypothetical incorrigible psychopath deserves to be punished and suffer. If he does not learn, being incorrigible, he will do more wrong and deserve more punishment. It is simply obviously good to me that this occurs. It is good when evil and wickedness are punished. It is bad when they are not.

That the psychopath does not recognize this no more changes this brute fact than does his opinion that killing people is fine, actually, makes that actually true. But, of course, it is superior if punishment also effects a moral change. And the most significant and greatest punishment is not that which is externally and bodily administered, but that of genuine guilt and shame for understanding one's own transgressions. But it is extraordinarily for the good when someone does, in fact, recognize their guilt and repents it, even if this causes them to suffer greatly.

It is far, far superior for a murderer to repent their ways out of genuine contrition than to be given a magic pill that, say, makes them forget their crimes while also causing extreme pain in addition to making them model citizens, even if that has the same deterring effect.

And since it is important to the overall calculus, if you are a calculating sort of person, I would be remiss if not to mention the obvious. If you believe in an afterlife where all imbalanced mortal scales are finally put to rights, any wrong someone does where they do not suffer the appropriate punishment in this fleeting life will surely be addressed in the long run.

Also, I don't believe in true incorrigibility. Everyone has the potential for redemption. "Members of His faction have frequently admitted that if ever we came to understand what He means by Love, the war would be over and we should re-enter Heaven." - The Archdemon Screwtape

Why is pleasure good?

Our reward systems, as evolved from those that reproduced best, respond to certail stimuli with seeking more of them.

Why is pain bad?

Our reward systems, as evolved from those that reproduced best, respond to certain stimuli with avoiding them.

Why is fulfilling preference good?

It's not always good. For example, many people prefer to do hard drugs, but fail to predict and conceptualize that they will develop a tolerance, overdose and die an early death in a ditch, which they don't prefer now and wouldn't prefer later.

Punishment may result in net higher pleasure and/or net higher reproduction for the punished individual, but whether it does is quite far removed from whether the punishment was actually just. This leads us back to incentives.

It is simply obviously good to me that this occurs. It is good when evil and wickedness are punished. It is bad when they are not.

The very fact that it is "simply obviously good to you" betrays that what we're observing is the retributive effect of punishment, not a cosmic axiom of its goodness. You imagine evil being punished, you feel good. If you imagined good being punished, you would not feel good even if it was, unknown to you, actually evil. It would be the furthest thing from obvious.

The incentive societies face is to indoctrinate their constitutients with the idea that punishment has a cosmic axiomatic importance, along with their particular definitions of wickedness, of course. This is to persuade the members of society to act according to the rules even if they are sure they will not get caught.

Sometimes shame is good for the immediate survival of the individual. Sometimes it is good for the immediate survival of the society, which usually benefits individuals and their reproduction long-term. Other times, shame is an instrument that only serves a particular layer of society at the expense of others.

Examples are left as an exercise to the reader. Given the role shame plays in the toolbox of the left-dominated society you wished destruction upon, the exercise shouldn't be hard. Your compatriots who were shamed by leftists have felt the exact same shame that wicked people supposedly must feel for understanding their own transgressions. Shame does not have a hash code that decyphers to "good" if it was a wicked person feeling shame for wicked deeds and to "bad/fake/wrong" if it was a righteous person misled into feeling shame. It is the same mechanism.

And since it is important to the overall calculus, if you are a calculating sort of person, I would be remiss if not to mention the obvious. If you believe in an afterlife where all imbalanced mortal scales are finally put to rights, any wrong someone does where they do not suffer the appropriate punishment in this fleeting life will surely be addressed in the long run.

Because I'm a calculating sort of person, I do not believe in the kind of afterlife where finite wrongs done in life are punished infinitely/many times over what would be the punishment in life. This is exactly the kind of afterlife I would have people believe in if I wanted them to voluntarily seek punishment in life, because I actually only cared about what they do in life. I would also be susceptible to believing in that kind of afterlife if I wanted to cope with wickedness not being punished on earth by imagining how it's punished in hell (and then, because I wanted to be a righteous person, convince myself I feel sorry for them and regretful for them not repenting earlier). But as it happens, I want my enemies punished now, and I want to avoid letting them run amok by convincing myself they'll get their due in the afterlife.

Our reward systems, as evolved from those that reproduced best, respond to certain stimuli with seeking more of them.

Why is that good, as opposed to merely feeling good?

Our reward systems, as evolved from those that reproduced best, respond to certain stimuli with avoiding them.

Why is that bad, as opposed to merely feeling bad? I think you don't recognize that such a difference could even exist, which seems to me very... empty and sad.

The very fact that it is "simply obviously good to you" betrays that what we're observing is the retributive effect of punishment, not a cosmic axiom of its goodness. You imagine evil being punished, you feel good. If you imagined good being punished, you would not feel good even if it was, unknown to you, actually evil. It would be the furthest thing from obvious.

No, it would not matter whether or not it was observed or imagined by me, or you, or anyone. That it is obviously good is because we have a moral sense.

You can't seem to disentangle your own belief that everything must merely boil down to meat preferences in the end. It has nothing to do with feeling good or feeling bad. It has everything to do with being good or being bad. Feeling guilty doesn't feel good. It actually feels quite shitty. It would be much, much easier and more pleasurable to simply decide that the thing you are feeling guilty and shame about is actually not bad at all and it's just your irrational guilt/shame that's the problem, not your bad actions correctly causing them. Believing this would feel a whole lot better, it would feel good, but it would be bad.

You can make a just-so story about why such and such moral beliefs must have been adaptive (except when they weren't), but what I am trying to say is that most people don't believe this. They believe that they have a moral sense (perhaps imperfect) and that through the exercise of this moral sense they can discern right and wrong. Almost everyone believes this unless it is deliberately taught out of them.

Because I'm a calculating sort of person, I do not believe in the kind of afterlife where finite wrongs done in life are punished infinitely/many times over what would be the punishment in life. This is exactly the kind of afterlife I would have people believe in if I wanted them to voluntarily seek punishment in life, because I actually only cared about what they do in life. I would also be susceptible to believing in that kind of afterlife if I wanted to cope with wickedness not being punished on earth by imagining how it's punished in hell (and then, because I wanted to be a righteous person, convince myself I feel sorry for them and regretful for them not repenting earlier). But as it happens, I want my enemies punished now, and I want to avoid letting them run amok by convincing myself they'll get their due in the afterlife.

Well I don't want to get into a whole discourse - but there is a whole discourse on sorts of wickedness that are inflicted on others vs. internal wickedness (which is nowadays called victimless - nonsense, as if you yourself can not be a victim of your own actions - and therefore not wickedness). Both are wicked, but the correct response to both is very different. I also do not believe in an afterlife where finite wrongs are met with infinite punishment.

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I wasn't commenting on the quality of your argument or whether nor not I agree with it. Just the tone. Even if your "you" was meant rhetorically (as I suspected it was), we're going to step in when people start posting things that seem meant to turn up the heat.

You are allowed to hate here. We are used to hate, seething hate, boiling, barely-contained rage. But we have rules about expressing it. Yes, that is frustrating to those who want to feel the hate flow through them. But unfiltered rage-posting just isn't what this place is for, as the unfiltered rage-posters are wont to tell us, before they storm away.

I have spent my entire adult life, and even before that, with the knowledge that if I ever spoke my true political/social views I would instantly torpedo my entire career and social standing forever.

...

You stomped on us for 20+ fucking years, did you never think what would happen when we became the shoe? You deserve everything bad that is happening to you; you will deserve the much worse things that are still to come.

Do you think you deserved this treatment? The left's long march and resulting political/social power was itself a reaction to decades of similar suppression after all. Is your goal to doom us to cycles of repression?

Is your goal to doom us to cycles of repression?

Thus has it ever been. Thus is how it always will be.

Do you think you deserved this treatment? The left's long march and resulting political/social power was itself a reaction to decades of similar suppression after all. Is your goal to doom us to cycles of repression?

What? When? Commies were popular in the university from the outset.

His description of having to hide who he really is, could nearly word for word be from a gay man in the not so distant past. That he is discriminated against from a black man in the 50s and 60s and so on and so forth.

Not that it matters, but I did not sin against gay or black people in thought or deed before I found myself in the Left’s sights.

The collective Left chose to wage wide-ranging racist, sexist campaigns of persecution in flagrant contradiction of all their loudly stated principles and as far as I’m concerned they have utterly forfeited the right to tell sob stories about the 1950s.

We had a society that was, for all intents and purposes, colour and sex and sexuality blind. It was the left who chose to push that pendulum back up on the other side. In retrospect, I think they probably had to, because pertinent facts about these different groups did not make it possible for them to become interchangeable in reality, with all the consequences of that.

But the pendulum is still going to swing back, and it should.

Being gay or black is orthogonal to political persuasion.

It is also statistically true that being a gay or black man means you pose a heightened risk to society over a straight white man.

Theres always reasons why it is different. But there are reasons why the Democrat coalition looks like it does. In the US for example being black or gay is very predictive of political persuasion at somewhere around 90% voting Democrat. That can change over time but currently it is not orthogonal to political persuasion.

No, my goal is to end the cycle with permanent victory (Hell, I'd settle with just most of my remaining lifetime). I am sure you will say, "But don't you see how the left was trying to do the same thing?"

Obviously. They failed, so the cycle continues. And your proposed solution is simply to cede victory forever. Yes, of course, we could end the culture war today if we just unconditionally surrender. Why didn't we think of that?

Endless cycles of repression is infinitely preferable to total defeat. Let's flip it around - all the left has to do is just totally renege on all their culture war beliefs; just 180 on trans, 180 on abortion, 180 on affirmative action, 180 on forced vaccinations, 180 on marxism/socialism, and damn the cycle's over. Peace in our time! Why do you guys not do it, do you just hate peace? Do you just want an endless cycle of repression? Sounds pretty barbaric not gonna lie. Just give up, like you're proposing we do. Is your goal to doom us to cycles of repression?

"Is your goal to doom us to cycles of repression?"

The problem is there can be no permanent victory. For you or for them. You tried, they tried, there is no reason to think it will work better than last time. And I agree there is no reason for either you or them to concede defeat and see your values lose.

So now we've agreed on that, and setting aside heat if we can, what does that tell us? If neither of you should surrender, and neither can win, are there any other options?

And the answer may be no! An ongoing pendulum swinging so we kind of average out over time to moderation may be the best we can hope for. But we can at least think around the topic, without committing to unilateral disarmament.

Sorry for the heat, but it's probably more honest than what you usually get.

No, I actually hear stuff like this on the regular from gainfully employed relatives and acquaintances, loudly telling anyone who will listen how they're not allowed to speak their mind for fear of dire consequences.

For reasons that I don't understand, a lot of right-wingers simultaneously openly, viciously loathe liberals but also seem to crave their respect and approval.

loudly telling anyone who will listen how they're not allowed to speak their mind for fear of dire consequences.

No, they aren't. "They say it where I can hear it" isn't the same as "they'll say it to anyone".

No, I actually hear stuff like this on the regular from gainfully employed relatives and acquaintances, loudly telling anyone who will listen how they're not allowed to speak their mind for fear of dire consequences.

And why don't you believe them?

You do realize what they AREN'T saying, right? Do you ever wonder what they don't say to you, you seemingly being clearly hostile to their entire worldview, when they complain about not being able to speak? Do you have an ounce of self-awareness about what a damning statement it is on your character that people complain to you about not being allowed to speak their minds instead of actually speaking their minds? Complaining to you about not being able to say things is their only safe way of expressing that they don't feel comfortable actually expressing themselves around you.

For reasons that I don't understand, a lot of right-wingers simultaneously openly, viciously loathe liberals but also seem to crave their respect and approval.

People crave good careers and not being harassed by twitter randos. In many areas access to such things is gated by saying goodthink and not saying wrongthink. Don't confuse kowtowing to the mad emperor with heartfelt respect for his insane majesty.

I think you will understand this position better when you are made to bow.

Do you ever wonder what they don't say to you, you seemingly being clearly hostile to their entire worldview

Considering that several of them are openly sexist or homophobic and routinely make outrageously bigoted comments about blacks and latinos to my face, with seemingly no expectation that I might find any of that objectionable, I can only imagine the true opinions they're hiding are that George Wallace was right.

(to be fair, at least one of them seems to grasp that it's not appropriate to openly say all our black coworkers are incompetent, but he either thinks I privately agree with him or at least trusts that since he outranks me I just have to put up with it (he's correct on that last point)).

I think you will understand this position better when you are made to bow.

What makes you think I haven't? I don't think conservatives understand that the reason their ideological adversaries are unsympathetic is not because they don't understand what it's like to have to bite your tongue, it's because many of them have had a boot up their ass their entire lives.

whose boot?

Their approval is worthless, the cultural power they wield is the prize. I expect better analysis from one who is not "proudly ignorant".

Having been unable to contain my inner thoughts and having had my career and social standing indeed torpedoed, I too can't help but feel a large dose of schadenfreude toward the cathedral these days. I hope that with a true swing of the pendulum, more of these silenced voices can join an open dialogue to help rebuild a high-trust society from the ashes of the torn country we have today.

The red tribe produces plenty of petroleum geologists, clergy are generally quite intelligent, has successfully engineered affirmative action for themselves in the legal profession despite the legal profession trying to do the exact opposite.

What you’ll notice is access to status from non-academic sources(money, religion, conservative activism). This is a consistent pattern- the red tribe does not care about status within the school system for its own sake(which is the main reward for anthropologists).

The red tribe produces plenty of petroleum geologists, clergy are generally quite intelligent, has successfully engineered affirmative action for themselves in the legal profession despite the legal profession trying to do the exact opposite.

All of this just seems to me to be implicitly conceding the point. My contention, contra Hanania, is not that Red Tribers are literally stupid. It is that Red Tribers are somewhere between uninterested in and actively hostile to intellectual/cultural production (by which I mean things like scholarship or art). But they are still very much interested in those products, hence my remark that they want liberals to think conservative thoughts for them. They want (liberal) artists to create conservative-inflected art, (liberal) historians to write conservative historical narratives, etc...

I think it's correct to say that conservatives don't care about academic status and prioritize income/general social status - that's my point. Nothing wrong with that on an individual scale (I'm certainly not one to talk), but a side effect of this taken across a whole society is an extraordinarily vulgar* culture that produces little thought, little art, and can't handle critical perspectives.

*for lack of a better term. I do not mean that it is rude/inappropriate.

Who’s hostile though? My perception of most of academia is that they are not going to give an “out of the closet” conservative a position, let alone a tenure track position in a university. The field has been closed to them for decades. Under such conditions, I think great claims of “conservatives, bless their little hearts, just aren’t interested in academia,” to be equivalent to claims that blacks in the Jim Crow South just weren’t interested in attending white majority schools. The system keeping black out of those schools was legal as well as cultural, while tge system keeping out conservatives is informal, but if you’re not going to be allowed into a system, your interest in going into that system tends to fall off a cliff.

One thing about the clampdown on college protests and DEI will hopefully bring is to make the campus less openly hostile to conservatives who are open about being conservatives.

True, but given that the Dems will be back in power eventually forcing a bunch of conservatives into tenured positions in the academy might have some long term positive effects

It’s a generations long project because the liberals have long been in charge of the hiring and are looking specifically for signs or being insufficiently progressive. That’s one thing that the DEI and Land Statements and Pronouns in Signature are meant to do — weed out those who aren’t actively progressive by forcing them under threat of losing their jobs to make performative progressive statements. And until you have at least non-progressives in those hiring positions, it’s going to be really hard to get conservatives into those positions and other high powered positions.

Near term, I think it’s best to also build parallel institutions where the conservative opinion can be put out in publi.

Parallel institutions are good, but Harvard is Harvard and its reputation extends far beyond the US. Tenure can’t easily be revoked, so pressuring universities into hiring conservatives could be long term smart.

I’ve heard of red state universities doing this. Specifically I’ve heard rumors about Texas A&M and Ohio state being made to begin doing this.

And it can’t work unless there are good tenure ready conservatives with a strong background and lots of published papers that are pushing their field forward. If old progressive universities are not going to hire conservatives, they can’t get in the door, let alone be in a position to hire conservative professors. Plus, having those conservative institutions around gives the public a fair test case. If conservative leaning universities are producing more useful research, better quality education, more capable graduates, either the old guard dies off, or they are forced to compete by producing the same results.

By all means, try to go to art school and get elite support and patronage - some nice New York galas - as a traditional painter who wants to make Christian iconographic art. Really emphasize in your applications and piece descriptions how Christian it is. Maybe throw in some quotes like, "If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell." Make sure to REALLY tie that into current trans trends, and pornography! Man, really emphasize how bank loans are usury and a mortal sin, and how all the people working for Chase (who funded the museum wing) are going to (justly) burn for eternity. I'm sure that will go over really well over champagne and salmon bites.

I'm sure you'll have your own special exhibit in MoMA in no time at all.

There is a vast amount of conservative art, but you do not see it in your bubble. It is not on TV, it is not in the papers, it is not advertised - cities don't commission it, (taxpayer funded) nonprofits don't fund it, museums don't host it, universities don't teach it.

I think a Christian artist might get artworld support if their art was about their complex feelings toward Christianity or had some kind of critical lens, or maybe if it was by a Christian outsider or even mentally ill person and mixed in another culture or influences in novel ways. If it was primarily proselytising art, it wouldn't stand much of a chance though, especially if it was iconographic in the sense of emulating previous artists in already existing styles. Today's art world insists on newness above all. Not to say most 'tastemakers' of the 21st century aren't incredibly judgemental, they are, but they don't generally deny the incredible artistic output of christianity in centuries past, just today.

If you have got some good example of contemporary conservative Christian art that is uncelebrated, would you be willing to share? I'm genuinely interested.

Today's art world insists on newness above all.

They say they do, but whether they actually do is another question. And at any rate, constant newness is not a reasonable demand. Creative work always falls into regular patterns; in both the sciences and the arts, the majority of work consists in simply filling out the details of a given paradigm, rather than actually pushing at the boundaries of the paradigm itself. True innovation is hard, and at this point in human history, the possibility space of the traditional plastic arts has been explored pretty thoroughly.

A sculpture that consists of, say, a few loose pipes and concrete slabs strewn about the floor, which are alleged to represent the struggle for Palestinian liberation, is just as much of a genre piece as a representational painting of the deposition of Christ. It follows genre conventions, it shares a clear lineage with other works in the same group, etc. It's just that "abstract sculpture paired with a leftist artist statement" is a politically favored genre, whereas "representational Christian painting" is a politically disfavored genre.

I don't know if you're describing an actual or hypothetical sculpture, but yes, it does sound workmanlike from your description (although, if we're evaluating comparative newness alone, we can note that it is at least in a relatively new genre compared to a representational religious painting, and potentially expresses emotion about a breaking situation rather than depicting the motifs of an ancient faith).

I also think a lot of the artworld would agree that abstract political sculptures genuinely were a lot more exciting back when there was something innovative about them as a form. In other words I suspect artworld people often really are interested in newness and I am not convinced by your suggestion that it's a pretense. (Of course within that story, loads of art is totally boring and not innovative and exists only for reasons of business, personal ambition and to rally political causes.)

Not off the top of my head, in regards to painting. I was just giving an example of conservative subject matter that would not fly far in contemporary art circles. You raise a good point that one of the issues is the constant drive for novelty, which I think comes at the cost of alienation from more universal experiences and values that could reach a larger audience.

I'm more familiar with Christian music. POD is an example of a Christian group that was very contemporary and found wider market success when I was younger. I like Alive and Youth of the Nation by them. Looking them up, I hadn't realized they were still going, I need to check out their recent stuff.

It is that Red Tribers are somewhere between uninterested in and actively hostile to intellectual/cultural production

Sad Puppies says hello.

You are looking at the empty buildings and barren fields and conflating it with a lack of interest, refusing to acknowledged that the bodies have already been buried and the survivors herded away elsewhere.

I'm just going to refer back to what I wrote when this came up a few years ago, since nothing has really emerged that had changed my views on the subject (tl;dr Correia and Torgersen mostly precipitated the situation they claimed to be fighting because they were upset pulp wasn't winning awards, pre-2015 Hugo winners were totally fine):

Part 1

Part 2

If we are going to assign blame to anyone on the puppy side, I think the problem was Vox Day/Theodore Beale rather than Correia and Torgersen.

Beale is a prime example of why the Red Tribe doesn't produce good cultural products. He first came to my attention for his theology blogging - heresies as interesting as his views on the equal divinity of the Holy Spirit are rare nowadays. The Selenoth books are overly wordy and ultimately I couldn't read them, but they were not written by an idiot. And he has other mid-tier accomplishments in multiple fields (music, video-game development, hardware design etc.) I am happy to call him a genius. But in order to remain relevant, he gradually shifted his blogging output from serious theology and literary criticism to standard-issue midwit Confederate apologia and ultimately to antivax and conspiracy theories. Whatever incentives he was responding to were to be less interesting and less intelligent. Last time I bothered to look into what he was doing, his main project was putting out superhero comics with a crass political message in every panel, which is as unappealing to a normie reader as the left-wing equivalent.

The only one of the Puppies who I found plausibly award-worthy was John C Wright. Correia writes technically competent schlock which plays the same role for his male readership that romance novels do for their female readership. It is valuable work and harder than it looks, and he fully deserves the money he made, but that kind of book has never been supposed to win awards.

But in order to remain relevant, he gradually shifted his blogging output from serious theology and literary criticism to standard-issue midwit Confederate apologia and ultimately to antivax and conspiracy theories

How is this different from transgender blm lockdown posturing taking over previously cogent blogs?

I would have to agree with this, although some more explanation would be nice.

@Skibboleth: I don't have personal experience* (yet; I suspect this'll show up when I do my MEd) but I strongly suspect that in the arts/humanities side of things, expressing conservative views/tastes in assessments will literally often get you marked down (when you aren't thrown out), which literally makes it harder to become legibly "a historian" or "an architect" as a conservative than as a progressive. If you want to see the prior ratio, you need to either enforce political neutrality in the current universities' assessments, or enforce that degrees from those universities be held to be of negligible credential value (as in, "I hired this architect because he got a Harvard degree in architecture" becomes identical in legal ramifications to "I hired this architect because he's white").

I suspect that that ratio does favour progressives, but not remotely to the current extent.

*Well, I do have personal experience that there are opportunities open to progressives and not conservatives in university, just not in the academic side - specifically, I wasn't able to become an RA in my dorm because "spread SJ propaganda" was part of the job description. Would have been nice to not have to pay rent, particularly since I was doing much of the rest of the job anyway!

I strongly suspect that in the arts/humanities side of things, expressing conservative views/tastes in assessments will literally often get you marked down

I don't find this to be true except in one very particular sense: there are a subset of bigots who are also conservatives who define conservatism in terms of their own prejudices, who arrive in a space that is extremely hostile to those prejudices and find that expressing them gets them in trouble. You're not going to get marked down for saying we should lower taxes or be tougher on crime, for using nationalistic iconography, taking a pro-American stance in history class etc... If you study philosophy, there's a good chance there will be literal fascists on the curriculum. You may find yourself as a distinct minority opinion and arguing with your peers a lot, which is undeniably an unpleasant experience, but the actual landmines tend to be homophobia and racism.

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Assuming all of this is entirely accurate, it seems exactly as bad a situation as the worst things that people are complaining about here. In a humanities course, someone being marked down for making arguments in favor of open homophobia and racism is utterly horrifying. It defeats the entire purpose of a humanities education to judge students' capabilities based on the conclusions they land at, rather than the arguments and reasoning they use to land at those arguments. Some professors might claim that only bad reasoning could land at those conclusions, but that, in itself, would be even more perverse, in a humanities professor being that simple- or closed-minded as to hold such a belief.

Why? No one would blame a geology teacher for marking down a student who hands in a paper whose conclusion is that the Earth is flat. Sometimes positions are known by a field to be outrageously wrong, so that any student who's let those ideas become a part of their conceptual landscape is worse than ignorant. There is no reason, prima facie, why sociology couldn't deem other positions equally deleterious.

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When you say you don't "find" this to be true, are you saying you're involved with this personally in some fashion?

I think you should be more specific about the subset you have in mind.

My first thought was “Civil Rights era Southern Democrats,” a group which unapologetically grounded their racism in conservative thought. But those people are mostly dead now, and their legacy is a good bit more complicated.

If you’re accusing Bob Jones fundamentalists or scientific racists or based post-Christian vitalists of confusing prejudice for conservatism, you’ve got to do more work to establish it.

It's not a unified subset. It's a disparate collection of individuals with discriminatory beliefs which they nevertheless consider to be an integral part of their political identity, though you can point to specific groups in some cases. Religious conservatives are a big standout on the gender and sexuality front, but they're hardly exclusive. Insofar as there's a real unifying theme, it's the "facts don't care about your feelings" aesthetic that many conservatives (especially younger ones) adopt, which IME mostly ends up glossing prejudice as "realism".

To put it as plainly as I can: whenever you find right-wingers saying "I don't think I can be open about my political beliefs because I'll be ostracized", it's never about fiscal policy or foreign policy or even touchier things like immigration or criminal justice. You can think we should slash welfare or defend aggressive foreign policy or declare that Christianity is the one true religion and your left-wing peers at college may think you're an asshole (or a rube), but you're not going to be a pariah (nor is the TA going to mark you down on your essay). The sticking point is basically always about either gender/sexuality or race, and often beliefs that would be considered boundary-pushing even in conservative milieus. For example.

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And Larry Correio, John Ringo, David Weber, Orson Scott Card etc remain extremely successful science fiction writers. Again, the red tribe just cares about things other than status within the academy. I'll wager their fiction is better than black lesbians in outer space or whatever wins the hugos these days. I don't read that much fiction.

The majority of your examples cut their teeth on writing novels over 30 years ago, exempting Larry Corerria, who seems to thrive on controversy and culture war, and is a relatively newcomer, putting out his first book in the 2008.

That we're discussing the current state of conservatives producing cultural content and how we got here and the writers you point to are a bunch of giants in their field nearly three decades old does not make the argument you think it does.

a side effect of this taken across a whole society is an extraordinarily vulgar* culture that produces little thought, little art, and can't handle critical perspectives

How do you square this with the phenomenon of "this artist expressed rightwing opinions, we have to disavow anything he ever made"?

They want (liberal) artists to create conservative-inflected art,

If anything, I think they'd be happy with conservative artists making conservative-inflected art, but The Academy has largely destroyed the teaching of traditional forms of (visual) art. Over the last decade or so I've found a decent list of artists whose works I enjoy, but most of them have very mixed advice about "art school" specifically: it's not a great place to learn, for example, traditional painting (landscapes, formal portraits, still life) because "traditional" isn't "cool," and so you see those produce things (uncharitably: ugly schlock) like "CalArts-style" or brutalist architecture that are IMO visually unappealing.

For some reason, the (traditional) music side of the academy seems to have held onto tradition better, although even there "I went to music school. Don't go to music school. Just make music." is a surprisingly common piece of serious advice. And despite not being a huge Rand-stan, The Fountainhead feels fairly relatable here: most of the artists I'd list seem successful because they chose to make what they were themselves were passionate about, not what the zeitgeist told them to. Some of them seem to be doing reasonably well based off their social media profiles. And I really appreciate it, because it's had me take up art as a modest hobby, even if it'd never work for me as a career.

(liberal) historians to write conservative historical narratives,

I think this has largely the same concerns as the artists: the pipelines for traditional publishing are fairly tightly controlled, and while it's possible for non-leftist fiction authors to self-publish, non-fiction has a higher expectation of review. I'm not the biggest reader of history, but my understanding is that nonfiction skews more male than other parts of literature, and I haven't seen modern book reviews of history (say, Scott's review of Hoover) take on a hugely strong left-leaning bent. But your average school history textbook is probably a left-of-center framing.

There are beautiful traditional churches with traditional art being newly built today. Somebody, presumably, is making that art. I don't know where we source it from but it is representational and new.

Red Tribers are somewhere between uninterested in and actively hostile to intellectual/cultural production (by which I mean things like scholarship or art)

That depends on what you mean by "Red Tribe" (everyone seems to have a slightly different definition).

It's not particularly hard to list right-wing intellectuals and artists. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Pound, Eliot. There was an intimate link between Italian futurism and Mussolini's fascism.

I think Yarvin's concept of the dark elves is useful here: internal traitors to the Blue Tribe who align with Red Tribe on certain key issues and provide intellectual and cultural support to the reds. If your definition of a Red Triber is a person who prioritizes "income/general social status" over intellectual development, then sure, ex hypothesi such a person will take little interest in cultural production. But you're ignoring all the dark elves who very much are in the business of thinking "conservative" thoughts, and as others in this thread have pointed out their perspective has been systematically censored in elite institutions.

I mean, Ross Douthat is not a red triber. He seems unlikely to deer hunt or listen to country music. He's clearly quite conservative, but he's a blue tribe conservative.

I think this exposes the fundamental flaw in the red tribe/blue tribe model and undermines this whole debate.

If we're defining "red tribe" (as Scott does, it's his model) solely in terms of class markers for the white working class, and dumping literally all other Americans into the other bucket... well, uh, yeah, it's going to be a tribe that values higher education less than the other bucket. Put the way you have, "the red tribe" isn't even represented by the Republican Party -- Trump is not a red triber in this sense, Josh Hawley (the Trumpiest senator) is not a red triber in this sense, Clarence Thomas is not a red triber in this sense, Alito is not a red triber in that sense, Amy Coney Barrett is not a red triber in that sense, all but very few in elected office is a red triber in that sense, Vance grew up in the red tribe but is very much not so red tribe now.

In fact, J.D. Vance is a perfect example; he grew up "red tribe" but adopted many values of the "blue tribe" as he gained social status, yet he's a fairly conservative guy who believes in God and cares about the needs of rural white people. If red tribers who adopt the beneficial aspects of the blue tribe like the pursuit of higher education, while having a religious conversion experience and supporting policies driven by patriotism, lose their "red tribe" cred... then the distinction doesn't actually cleave to anything relevant for whether conservatism or progressivism values art and scholarship more. It would mean that valuing art and scholarship makes you not a red triber, making the whole debate circular.

Conservatism, in any meaningful sense, isn't about being a member of the white working class. It's about having a commitment to conserving the values of the past that contribute to human flourishing. Often it's about believing in God.

If a devout Christian who reads his Bible every day and goes to church every Sunday and puts his hope in Jesus Christ for eternal salvation -- but also lives in a city and works in a computer science lab on a university campus -- is a member of a different tribe than his fellow parishioner who lives outside the city limits and works as a contractor, then not only these tribal markers but the Church itself means nothing. If we're going to talk about whether conservatism is intellectually vacuous, we had better get our definitions right first, just as we had better get our dogmas in a row before we start anathematizing people as formal heretics. We should probably try to understand reality before we condemn.

The near-complete alignment of the tribes with politics is a result of the culture war. The progressive long march through the institutions not only threw conservatives out of the institutions but out of Blue Tribe itself. Much of this is conversion -- your devout Christian who goes to progressive college will likely lose his faith. Some is oppression -- your devout Christian who doesn't lose his faith but remains in the progressive environment will conceal it out of self-preservation, and so be invisible. Some is reverse-conversion -- your political conservative who is driven out of Blue Tribe will adopt at least some of the tribal markers of the tribe that DOES accept his politics.

I go deer hunting with a senior partner at a CPA firm. He plays 70s country, has a masters degree, drives a pickup truck, speaks only English but thinks learning Spanish is generally wise(this is not echoed for eg French, Japanese, etc), wants nothing to do with Europe except maybe a vacation, and watches college football in his free time.

This is red tribe, but very much not working class. Now he probably valued money over self actualization(no one dreams of becoming an accountant, let’s be real) when he was ~20, which is a red tribe value that does go a ways towards explaining the conservative under representation in academia. But it’s tribal identity markers, not class, and there may be class markers involved but they’re tangential at best.

Now he probably valued money over self actualization(no one dreams of becoming an accountant, let’s be real) when he was ~20, which is a red tribe value that does go a ways towards explaining the conservative under representation in academia

Yes, thank you for saying this. Conservatives tend to be a lot more practical about career choice, and working at a museum just isn't the kind of thing you can make a career out of that can support a family. When I was growing up, my parents told me a big long list of careers I should not get into, including music and art.

That depends on what you mean by "Red Tribe" (everyone seems to have a slightly different definition).

The Red and Blue Tribes may have rough analogs in other countries, but IMO they are strictly American (and primarily White American, though there peripheral non-white members) phenomena. As I've said before, the artistic and intellectual bankruptcy of the Red Tribe is not some universal attribute of conservatives. It's not even some atemporal quality of the Red Tribe. It seems to be something that's emerged in the past few decades.

So what is your basic definition of the Red Tribe, exactly?

More or less what what @hydroacetylene said. I'll admit that there's an element of "I know it when I see it", but I think it's important to note that it's not just (or even primarily) a proxy for rural - most Red Tribers live in suburbs/exurbs, not rural areas.

White Southerners (including the white Southerners who settled the Mountain West after the Civil War), Appalachian hillbillies, anyone who goes to or pretends to go to a church where those groups dominate, and any non-white or white ethnic who makes a good-faith attempt to assimilate into the traditional culture of the white South or Mountain West. Serious Catholics and Mormons are generally allies of the Red Tribe, but they are not part of it.

My equivalent definition of the Blue Tribe would be New England Yankees, Quakers, pre-Ellis Island era German/Scandinavian immigrants*, descendants of the above who lost religion, and any non-white or white ethnic who makes a good-faith attempt to assimilate into the traditional culture of the Northeast - notably including Conservative/Reform/secular Jews. Unassimilated non-whites are (or were) allies of the Blue Tribe, but not part of it.

* i.e. all Mainline Protestants

Albion's Seed is the definitive book on the origins of the culture war.

Serious Catholics and Mormons are generally allies of the Red Tribe, but they are not part of it.

Yes we are(can't speak for Mormons obviously but it probably applies). We have a lower view of evangelicals than they typically do of us, but your median Knights of Columbus family has recent experience of representation in the military, serious Catholics drink a lot but don't pot smoke(tell tale tribal marker- blue tribe loves its party drugs, red tribe has a big double standard), Catholics make a big outreach to supporting police and fire and often distrust the public school system, etc, etc.

There's a class difference between the majority of serious Catholics and your stereotypical red triber, but there's plenty of higher-class red tribers.

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'People who match the culture of white republicans' is a basic paraphrase of Scott's original definition.

What that culture is is of course not monophyletic; there's the country music crowd, the church crowd, the red dirt types(genuine connection to the rural), and that's before getting into the importance of regional and religious differences. But there's an identifiable cluster there, where a Cajun and an eastern Oregon rancher and a UAW worker and a snake-handler all would rather socialize with each of each other rather than a professor of gender studies, despite their vast differences.

But there's an identifiable cluster there, where a Cajun and an eastern Oregon rancher and a UAW worker and a snake-handler all would rather socialize with each of each other rather than a professor of gender studies, despite their vast differences.

Would this apply also to socializing with an academic in a field that is more neutral but still without practical applications, such as for example a professor of theoretical astrophysics? I suspect it very much would but I'm not an American so I won't outright make such a claim.

Here in Finland there is a similar contingent who see non-practical work as "useless" but it's smaller due to historical reasons (education was seen as an important factor in increasing national consciousness in the 19th century as well as a way to improve the next generation's social standing). More importantly the lack of a two party system means it never got coupled to the broader left vs right political orientation. It's easy to see the difference even in looking at who people consider to be academic compared to the discussions here on The Motte where The Motte definition of an "academic" has a large bias towards social sciences and other left dominated fields (whereas locally people would consider a professor of Electrical Engineering very much an academic).

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The fundamental problem the Red Tribe/American conservatism faces is a culture of proud, resentful ignorance.

Mass, public epistemic victory is about popularity and not truth. If you can gaslight the population to the degree that a 38 year old man can hold the belief that there are no physical differences between genders then it's trivial to gaslight the public to believe that anyone who speaks up otherwise is "proudly, resentfully ignorant". Too bad for you that society requires a minimum level of truth-based epistemology to function and you don't understand that you've crossed the line.

This is pure boo-outgroup. Anyone who doesn't share your views would read something like this, and respond "Oh, they're sneering at us from the high windows of the ivory towers of their institutions again. Keep those bulldozers coming."

The conservatives did not abandon the institutions. The institutions were taken over by their opponents, who then gatekept new entrants and in many cases expelled the remainder of the old guard. They cannot "make their case" because this is not a courtroom; there are no impartial judges. The only judges are those within the institutions, who are thoroughly corrupt. Well, as I've been saying for some time, once your enemies have occupied the institutions and expelled all your people, there's no reason NOT to shell them from the outside. That's what's happening.

The left took over these institutions because the right couldn't be bothered to defend them. 25 years ago, while there was a clear left-wing bias in academia, you could still be a conservative and get tenure and publish papers without too much controversy. And conservatives were still telling my generation that if we pursued a career in academia, or government, or the nonprofit sector, or whatever, we were idiots, because those jobs were for people who couldn't hack it in the private sector. Hell, just look at their paychecks. Hell, I remember us joking after our first semester in law school that we could relax for a few weeks between the end of finals and discovering that we were all destined for the public defender (never mind that a year later working as a PD seemed like a pretty good deal).

Government jobs were for the mediocre, nonprofit jobs were for the bleeding hearts. But academia was the worst. At the age when your peers are all established in their jobs, have mortgages, and are trying to figure out how to coach a little league baseball team, you're living in a shithole apartment in a college town on a stipend, hoping that you'll get to move to rural Nebraska so you can teach history at a small liberal arts college that's not even offering tenure. And even that's such a long shot that it's pretty much your dream job at this point. The GOP at this time was preaching a civic version of the prosperity gospel: Taxes on the rich only serve to penalize the most productive/talented/innovative citizens. If you make a lot of money it's because you deserve it, and if you don't it's because you simply aren't as good. And God help you if you were on welfare or some other kind of public assistance, which was evidence that you were simply lazy and expected a handout.

This wasn't the case among Democrats. The important thing in Democratic families wasn't maximizing your paycheck, but having a job that made full use of your talents. So if a smart kid wanted to be a taxi driver, that was looked down on, but if he wanted to be a teacher, it was okay, even if they both made the same salary. So there was a period, probably beginning in the 1980s, where the number of conservative PhD candidates began dwindling, year by year, and as conservative professors retired, they were replaced by liberals. By 2015 you had a critical mass of leftist professors and new Republican orthodoxy that was repugnant not just to liberals, but to old guard conservatives, and has no intellectual foundation. At this point, it's hard to imagine what a conservative academic would even look like, since the tenants of conservatism are all dependent on the fickle whim of one man. So even the conservatives who have made it through probably aren't conservative in contemporary terms, since up until fairly recently no self-respecting conservative economist, for example, would ever wright an academic treatise on why 30% tariffs are actually good, and no conservative political scientist would write a treatise on why the US needs to invade Canada. As much as the right complains about this, the wound is entirely self-inflicted.

As much as the right complains about this, the wound is entirely self-inflicted.

I think this line of thinking misses where the wound actually is - it isn't that conservatives are absent from the academy (although we do focus on that a lot, in part because it is easier to point at when it comes to data), it is that the academy can't function in their absence.

Gender studies can be a real discipline in the absence of conservatives, in the same way that most theological work can. But it isn't.

The current lack of representation would be unfortunate but otherwise benign, instead it has become an existential threat as most academic institutions can't manage to be anything other than a lobbying arm of the progressive wing of team blue.

Asking the conservatives to be there to intervene is about as dumb as saying "why weren't you there to stop me from shooting myself????"

Maybe they kicked themselves out maybe they got kicked out. That might be a problem but it isn't the root of the issue.

I think this line of thinking misses where the wound actually is - it isn't that conservatives are absent from the academy, it is that the academy can't function in their absence.

I apologize for my STEM arrogance, but I would claim that if a discipline can not function without having followers of any particular ideological bent, it is probably bullshit.

It's not the lack of followers of conservatism or any particular ideological bent. It's the dominance of followers of a particular ideology that is far more dogmatic than most religions, and does not value objective truth or an impartial search for same.

It’s not like STEM is immune, or even that resistant: the Hirsch-Dias feud is noteworthy only because we actually got to see the denouement in public, and the fraud was ‘replicated’. Had Hirsch not had such a bee in his bonnet, Dias would have ended up just like the Mxenes guys: maybe embarrassed, but Not Actually Proven.

I mean Medicine for instance is an example of a STEM field which can't function with the level of ideological mono polarity currently present in it - anything remotely politically controversial is super unreliable.

I would not count medicine as STEM. Also, there are plenty of subfields of medicine which are not very subject to ideology.

I would expect a Nazi obstetrician who wants to help Aryan women to give birth to new soldiers and soldier-makers for the Fuehrer and a minority ethnic radical feminist obstetrician to show a high degree of instrumental convergence in the long run.

The subfields ob medicine which are controversial -- like gender stuff, or perhaps psychiatry -- are generally few and far between. In most stuff which is tangentially related to medicine and controversial, the controversy is orthogonal to the science part: abortion, death penalty, MAID, embryo selection, germline editing, organ donation debates are all not about what is the case, but what we should do. Sure, sometimes activists smuggle in arguments masquerading as science, but mostly there are no open questions of fact there.

Every kernel of medicine has room for controversy, as Nybbler points out below. Where to prioritize resources, how research works (what do you do about males disproportionately signing up to be test dummies? ....a million other things. Some of it is certainly the "social" end of medicine like how to train and teach (is advocacy required?) but the hard science parts of it have plenty of dimensions.

Ethics are also fundamental to medicine and fundamentally on the spectrum of controversy.

The subfields ob medicine which are controversial -- like gender stuff, or perhaps psychiatry

Or kidney function?

This is a just-so story. It isn't true that conservatives "couldn't be bothered to defend them". It's that they weren't able to. They realized what was happening far too late, and treated the leftists as intellectual opponents at worst, while the left treated the conservatives as enemies to be vanquished or fossils to be re-buried.

They realized what was happening far too late

I think this is correct, and in areas where conservatives have made a concerted effort (particularly in law) they've been able to do very well.

Something I found a bit funny about the Woodgrains position of "shouldn't you build it up rather than tearing it down" is it seems to be to imply that Trump Et. Al. should redirect all of those funds straight into right-wing institutions. Which I somehow doubt would make people very happy. But if they were run by serious conservatives instead of grifter conservatives I think they would do just fine.

As much as the right complains about this, the wound is entirely self-inflicted.

Your make a good point overall, but it is an overreach to claim that this is entirely the fault of the right. Even when things weren't as bad as they are now in academia, there was still a bias (as you yourself said). I myself saw it when I was an undergrad student: conservatives were shamelessly (if clandestinely) mocked in ways that would never fly if it happened to other groups. I remember people leaving taunting messages on the chalkboard used by the university Christian group, or vandalizing political signs for conservative candidates. Nobody cared. But I strongly believe that if, say, the black student group had someone put derogatory messages on their chalkboard, there would have been a campus outcry and investigation of it.

That is the kind of environment conservatives faced, and even though it wasn't as bad as it has become, it wasn't remotely welcoming either. Would you make your career in an environment that was tacitly hostile to your beliefs and way of life, just to try to fight the good fight? I certainly wouldn't, and I can't really blame those who wouldn't either. I think it's fair to say that the right-wing culture which is suspicious of academia and other "not real work" kind of jobs is their own fault. But there are other factors here which aren't their fault.

I think it's fair to say that the right-wing culture which is suspicious of academia and other "not real work" kind of jobs is their own fault. But there are other factors here which aren't their fault.

Setting aside the word fault. If you have a culture that is suspicious of academia and other not real work, then it is likely the people in those positions are going to react and to be suspicious of you in return. I don't think it is either sides fault. Its the chicken or the egg. I think it is the outcome of the structural and systemic differences in value sets between tribes. Blues mock Reds for being dumb hicks and Reds mock Blues for being effete intellectuals. The result is any space that leans slightly one way or the other is going to cascade. Whether anyone is deliberately planning it or not.

90% of farmers are Republicans and that is ok. It is ok for your values and preferences to determine that some areas will be dominated by one tribe or the other. At scale individual choices are overtaken by systemic differences. There likely isn't any way to have a 50/50 split in academia for Reds and Blues short of changing what Reds want and hence what Reds are. Likewise with farming and Blues.

But the existing farmers don't make prospective farmers write a "why I love Trump and how my work will advance the cause of Trump" document in order to become a farmer. The left wing academia DOES make prospective new academics write DEI impact statements. If conservatives are so uninterested in being academics why did the academy need to put up so many walls and man their gates so firmly?

I can’t speak for farmers, but expressing liberal opinions will make it much harder to get a trades career going.

They didn't, because 1) They don't in general see a DEI statement as being analagous to supporting Trump or a wall.They see being anti-racist as something any decent person should do. They would see the fact conservatives won't do that as evidence they hold sexist or racist attitudes. They do not see that as being left wing and thus filtering out conservatives. They see it as being decent people and if conservatives aren't decent people that says more about conservatives and not them. That is the of power of "its just the right thing to do" framing.

  1. DEI statements aren't as common as you might think, I am a straight white man in academia and i've never had to write one. We have a couple of "out" Trump voters (admittedly in the economics department which is the most conservative in general I think), and while it does skew left overall, there isn't a lot of antipathy to the Red Tribe, because they don't really think of them at all. We're in a Blue city so its not like they come across that many in any case. They are steeped in Blue culture and Blue ideas. They're not even thinking about building walls to keep them out. Too busy fighting for grant money or hating dumb students of today and their short attention spans.

Now I don't work for an an Ivy League school or indeed any of the top ranked schools so maybe its more common and problematic there. But I think people have skewed ideas about academia as a whole, by looking at say Harvard or Columbia.

As for farmers, they have their own ways of enforcing social pressure. Its just not going to be a written statement. A Catholic farmer back home might find all of his neighbors equipment is mysteriously not available for him to rent come harvest time. Or an ex neighbor of mine in rural PA talked about how they charged hippies more for calves because they didn't know any better and were just going to go under anyway.

All communities enforce behaviors and beliefs, they just do it in different ways.

Now I don't work for an an Ivy League school or indeed any of the top ranked schools so maybe its more common and problematic there. But I think people have skewed ideas about academia as a whole, by looking at say Harvard or Columbia.

I don't know about that, I've been attached to X academic institutions in the last X years (sorry, vague, opsec blah blah) and while I've never had to write a diversity statement I also don't know any faculty who are "out" as a Republican and I know of exactly one student (who was widely criticized and socially censured).

I know plenty of students and faculty who hide their affiliation (in fact...it is a lot), and I've seen how both are treated when they are assumed to be Republicans (often by demographics and shallow stuff like owning a truck) and the way they are treated is about even with how old school racists treated Blacks.

In my experience academia is even worse than you'd guess from the stories.

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They didn't, because 1) They don't in general see a DEI statement as being analagous to supporting Trump or a wall. They see being anti-racist as something any decent person should do.

This just seems like describing the how, rather than contradicting the notion that they metaphorically put up walls and man the gates against conservatives so firmly: they do so by genuinely believing that being anti-racist (by their conception of anti-racism) is something any decent person should do and rejecting the contention that this belief is due to their partisanship rather than due to it being true. It's particularly a severe failure for academia, where one of the ostensible main themes is the inescapability of individual bias and the need to correct for it through multiple contrasting perspectives.

I recommend the (short but boring)book Compromising Scholarship to read a case for discrimination against conservatives in the academy. Very solid account of academic prejudices against proxies for conservatism.

The fundamental problem the Red Tribe/American conservatism faces is a culture of proud, resentful ignorance. They can't or won't produce knowledge and they distrust anyone who does.

I do not think this is true at all. The right is very good at producing knowledge, it is just unevenly distributed. If you spend any time reading Supreme Court briefs, you'll see rightie knowledge production in action, as this is an area where the right has (very successfully!) focused much of their energy and attention.

I think that the right-wing intellectual capital is considerably better than that on the left, if considerably smaller. Conservative or conservative-friendly educational institutions I think can be very good, just dwarfed in number by default-left-wing ones. (Some of this depends on what counts as "right" and "left" of course.)

There is also a structural reason for lack of conservative intellectual output. Conservatives like old ideas. There are only so many publishable takes on Aquinas, Hobbes and Kant, or why Shakespeare was pretty dope.

New ideas are the domain of reformers, who are definitionally not conservative. The main issue is that most new ideas are extremely likely to be less practical than old ideas. There are an infinite number of ways to explore why bread is racist, actually.

But there aren't many institutions teaching the old ideas either. And the ones that do are mostly Catholic, not core Red.

Serious religious Catholics mostly are red tribe, although aside from Cajuns they're often not-stereotypical red tribers.

I dunno. It seems to me that lefties live in the shadow of Marx much more so than the right lives in the shadow of, say, Aquinas.

You're not exactly wrong about conservatives definitionally (although consider conservative hero Edmund Burke - not exactly a hidebound anti-reformer), but righties per se have no problem with new and innovative ideas. Look at science fiction (which is very forward-looking) - is it more "conservative" or "rightie" than other areas of literature? Or less? Now look at mainstream film, media, literature, etc. Is it eaten up with retreads, remakes, retellings of fairy-tales and people reliving their childhoods? Where is the innovation truly?

Or look at politics - is there really more innovation in the Democratic national platform than "we should make Greenland a US territory?"

There is a De Maistre shaped hole on the motte. I'm Hlynkaposting I know.

Conservatism has come full circle- la contrerevolution nest pas la revolution contraire mais le contraire de la revolution. Building something that functions by the old rules until it grows and overtakes is the conservative project and it is the work of generations. Building off of the foundations of the old rules. Building a functional society. The counterrevolution is long but it is utterly predictable.

I for one like the Hlynkaposting.

Leftists are already razing their own institutions. Rightists might need to destroy the academy in order to save it.

For instance, leftists have started destroying historical artifacts.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/australians-are-destroying-our-ancient-past/

Museums might actually be dangerous places once leftists begin to turn to viewing history as “bourgeois” errrr I mean “racist” or whatever

My God, yes. I got so mad seeing the ~40k year old human fossils be buried. On the one hand, we're enlightened by science and we don't need this pesky Christianity anymore. On the other hand, give into (some of! not even all of them are calling for this!) the natives' homebrewed ideas about what belongs to whom and ancient customs and destroy priceless artifacts. Western civilization deserves to die if it's gonna be like this.

It seems like no country anywhere can stand up to indigenous peoples when they want something unreasonable. Even the Russians caved when it came to the Siberian Ice Queen. Look at this, too. Thirteen thousand year old kid. Modern Native Americans don't even have any more claim to that than we do, man. There's no way their cultures resemble each other at all at that point. And I don't see European natives kicking up a fuss that Otzi the Ice Man got dug up and put on display.

DNA research by the Russian Academy of Sciences found clear differences in the Ice Maiden's genetic material and that of modern Altaian communities, which led archaeologists to claim that the mummy was European and that Altaians were recent migrants to the region.[9] This was used as a reason to keep the mummy in Novosibirsk, and in 2004 the archaeologists who had refused to repatriate the Ice Maiden to the Altai because of her supposed European heritage were awarded the prestigious State Prize of the Russian Federation. Claims regarding the Ice Maiden's European or Altaian descent are, however, considered the products of indigenous Altaian cultural identity and political autonomy being undermined by a broad "Russian" nationalism

Holy fuck I hate Wikipedia

I don't get your point.

The wording is horrifically biased and self contradictory. How is the European heritage “supposed”? It was analyzed for their DNA and confirmed not to be Altai! Just emblematic of how terrible quality most articles on Wikipedia often are

I’m sure you do.

This is still not the place for your Two Minute Hate. Put some more substance into it or keep it to yourself; I don’t care which.

I have a complicated reaction to this line of argument, I think.

The other day, when talking about the future of the Department of Education, I made a general comparison to how Latvians in what is now Latvia would or should have felt in 1984 if an ethnic Russian were defending the efficiency or professionalism of the central Soviet bureaucracy as it pertained to overseeing education throughout the Soviet Union. And my point then was that the fundamental split was who / whom, and no amount of arguing from the ethnic Russian would bridge that. But the devil is... the "What have the Romans ever done for us" bit in the Life of Brian has a lot of wisdom in it. That was the Soviet bureaucracy. And that is the Cathedral as well. And yet, also, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." And here we are.

To me, it seems like the fundamental problem is that American liberals want there to be "shared" central institutions and "shared" central media voices with "shared" trust and "shared" authority that are somehow perceived as "democratically legitimate", but they also think it's the most natural thing in the world for those "shared" institutions to have their particularist values and their particularist worldviews and be populated by their people and for them to do the gatekeeping. It's totally understandable that they should feel that way, given the actual reality of American since the New Deal, of course. And yet, any argument that's not grappling with that central tension here is, fundamentally, just trying to paper over the actual chasm. For all of these things, they're the Soviet party member in 1984 trying to insist that the ethnic Latvian is being misled by misinformation and propaganda from capitalist roaders by not accepting the authority and value of the central Soviet bureaucracy.

I can't remember if it was Moldbug where I first saw this observation, but I once came across the observation that almost every major power in the world covers, in their authoritative institutions, a lot of the same material in the hard sciences and engineering and basic medicine, and they get a lot of legitimacy by mastering and employing that materially-based knowledge and improving the lot of their citizens - and then they smuggle in a bunch of not-science in the same institutions but call it science to piggyback off that authority, and they spread the legitimating ideology of the hierarchy in this state or empire... anyway, once I saw that observation, I can't not see it everywhere. And that move seems fundamental to this specific discussion, especially given the role that trans (and LGBTQ2IA+ more broadly) has played in exactly this kind of context.

I remember The Alternative Hypothesis making the claim about states smuggling their ideology in with technological advancement on a cozy stream.

I've heard more than one Russian nationalist complain that the Soviet Union was run by a cabal of Jews, Balts, and other minorities to the detriment of the Russian majority, but I digress. The implication of the science+smuggled ideology take is that whatever you try to replace the existing order with ought to have the same basic command of the hard sciences in order to be seen as legitimate, and the ongoing attempts to defund and intimidate universities and national laboratories into compliance with the new administration's agenda seem likely to damage that core competency, unless parallel private organizations (i.e. Bell Labs 2.0) are set up at lightning speed to take their place.

If the right were to admit that they simply don't have the "elite human capital," to use Richard Hanania's term, necessary to rebuild the institutions they are currently destroying, then that would make them nothing more than Vandals plundering Rome out of spite. Perhaps the Romans were immoral and degenerate and deserved to be conquered by the virtuous and strong Germanic tribes, but the latter couldn't build an aqueduct or a bridge worth a damn and their civilization was poorer for it.

I've heard more than one Russian nationalist complain that the Soviet Union was run by a cabal of Jews, Balts, and other minorities to the detriment of the Russian majority, but I digress

Everybody in the former Soviet Union has some variant about ‘other ethnicity running for their own benefit at our expense’ and I suspect this is just a coping mechanism for the reality of shitty societies.

But regardless, every society believes not-science in elite institutions. Some of this not-science gets in the way of social functioning more than others, but there has never been a society running on science.

If trace is concerned about cultural institutions maybe he should have some words with blues using them as cover to shovel propaganda. He knows reds don't have the temperament or interest to "show up" for museums or libraries and begs them not to nuke from orbit leaving no option but to impotently shake their fist at enemy indoctrination operations that overwhelmingly target children.

No thanks. If trace cares about these institutions maybe he should be imploring them to police themselves.

He knows reds don't have the temperament or interest to "show up" for museums or libraries

I really don't think it's a "showing up" issue. Federal vaccine mandates during covid caused a lot of institutions to shift from purple or light blue to turbo monoculture extreme left. Turns out when you find a wedge issue to forcefully terminate red tribers over, a lot of public institutions are suddenly extremely blue.

Do you have a citation for this? Asking because it makes sense to me and I'd like to be able to use this while arguing lol.

I think you're right and a better way of phrasing would have been that if 30% of paleontology enthusiasts are red and 70% are blue then it becomes a matter of time until social selection pressures ensure that nearly all (or all in the case of NPR's editorial board) end up blue.

You can find red paleontology enthusiasts they’re called creation scientists. You can disagree with them but basically all high-human-capital red tribers are practicing Christians(as elsewhere, secularization is a bottom up thing) and the pressure for talented individuals with nothing else to do(and I suspect the job market for grad degrees in paleontology is not good) to work in YEC apologism or research is high.

You can find red paleontology enthusiasts they’re called creation scientists.

That parses a bit like "you can find spiritual astronomy enthusiasts, they are called astrologers".

YEC goes with paleontology about as well as geocentrism goes with astronomy. I mean sure, there are likely people with a mainstream degree in paleontology who found work giving YEC's a veneer of respectability, but I am doubtful if in their heart of hearts, they actually believe in YEC. It would be like someone studying electrical engineering and then denying that electrical currents exist -- sure it might happen, but I would call that person either deceitful or insane.

Did you think coming up with epicycles was easy work? The actual job of a creation scientist is to introduce epicycles so that otherwise educated and scientifically literate people can believe it with less dissonance. This is necessarily a job for a knowledgeable and intelligent true believer.

Ken Ham's audience has a negligible chance of listening to Dawkins instead. Apologetics doesn't exist to argue against evolution. It exists to make creationism give equivalent results. This requires a dedicated person who understands both theories very well, and who has the theory of mind to explain things in a YEC-friendly way.

IIRC there was a funny thing where YEC paleontologists/geologists were presenting posters and research with timescales measured in mya despite the universe, like, not existing at the time (according to them).

(as elsewhere, secularization is a bottom up thing)

It is your belief that a certain zealotry is necessary to motivate achievement?

I believe that functioning people generally like belonging to institutions, even small ones, and churches fit the bill for the red tribe. I also believe that practicing Christianity makes people better, practicing Christians are generally a good influence on each other and this attracts human capital.

The equivalent might be something like 'nearly all high-functioning blue tribers obtain a college degree'.

He knows reds don't have the temperament or interest to "show up" for museums or libraries

No, part of having a culture is to fund it. You can in fact FORCE the people who do show up, to be much less liberal in how they act in institutions. Look at the effort the Trump admin is doing to try to force college people to be more pro Jewish. You could exert pressure in a pro conservative direction in all sorts of ways. Not just by directly funding, but obviously defunding woke ideology.

I do admit that culture funding shouldn't be unlimited and defunding things that are a waste of time is good idea, but there should be some culture related activities funded.

In regards to what Trace is after, he is pretty anti right wing and he isn't going to be for that.

Do I object to defunding left wing patronage networks? Nope. But a culture needs museums. It doesn't need the holocaust and slavery museums though or for the Smithsonean to have an exhibition for white supremacy.

Rather than general anti spending on culture, be more for directing the spending for culture. This is different than what Tracing claims, since I don't think that he and likeminded anti right wing leftists should be allowed to do as they want and run such institutions based n their ideology. It is about dictating culture and taking it away from people like Trace. The purpose should be for the culture and arts to achieve positive goals which includes many areas that goes against the agendas of mainstream liberalism.

Part of this does include defunding the various slavery museums, simply because the issue is framed and presented and overpromoted by them, in a manner that is for a negative goal of grievance and the agenda it serves is blacks as a superior caste and whites as permanent oppressors. History is also presented in a distorted very one sided manner in line of such oppression narratives. I think (at least most) Holocaust museums should also be defunded and private donors should NOT be allowed to fund them as well.

It is completely feasible through policy to successfully dictate that this kind of manipulative guilt culture under antiracist pretension would not exist anymore, by also removing from positions of influence and punishing those who engage in it. It is possible for these kind of grievance movements to come to an end.

Maybe a type of museum that covers subject matter of attrocities can exist if it is in a limited manner, and not used in such propaganda and also focuses more of the suffering of the respective people that is situated at. Or even with minorities if it isn't abused in the manner I have been criticizing and there exists elsewhere sufficiently funded perspectives that aren't narcissistically obsessing with only that group's interests. What is absurd is to allow enormous amount of propaganda including with museums about the grievances of foreign, or minority groups.

It doesn't need the holocaust and slavery museums though...

To be fair here, the national Holocaust museum in DC is one of the most powerful and memorable experiences I've ever had in my entire life. That museum is great, or at least it was 23 years ago when I went. Maybe it has gone down the drain since then, but I would be in favor of keeping it assuming it's still the same quality. We don't need more than one, though.

While numbers of museum are important, if too many people visit the one holocaust museum and is made a ritual that would still be a problem. That and how such museums present history also matters.

The issue is that indeed people do experience religious like powerful and memorable feelings in the summer of floyd, in regards to both visiting museums, but also tv shows, lessons, about slavery and holocaust, in a manner that leads to a grievance culture and in treating groups like Jews and Blacks as utility monsters. It leads to preferential treatment but it also leads to identifying groups like Europeans as permanent oppressors.

Both the way such issues are presented and their central importance is a problem. It would be better for Americans to have museums of history that desacrilize the holocaust and treats Jewish suffering in WW2 as one suffering among others and puts greater importance to American history. Maybe with a slight mention of them being targeted more by the nazis. If that is the central way it is presented, and in rare cases it is focused more, but still contextualized in a manner different that it tends to be presented now, then that would be fine.

Even from a universalist perspective too much has been made of holocaust, colonialism, slavery, in a manner that is used both by ethnic chauvinists who have grievances but also by general far left activists who support any of these specific movements. And also their right wing equivalent that compromise with this.

Also, it would even be better if blacks and Jews had less powerful experience in relation to slavery and holocaust, for the aforementioned reasons. Same applies of course to people who don't belong such groups who share such experiences.

Not saying we should go to the opposite extreme of say censoring anyone who ever mentioning it, but I do think it would be good if people who use them to justify "You don't get to have a nation anymore because holocaust, slavery, colonialism" were to be treated as extremists to be suppressed, instead of treating the whole movement as something sacred. In fact, such movements are not sacred but damaging. And of course there is also the issue of the amount of money taken by the goverment to fund activist groups including Jewish activist groups, holocaust centers, and so on. But certainly, there is some room for groups, even minority groups to care about their particular suffering, but that room must be limited and not limitless, and can't be an imposed dominant culture. Even for such groups, it can lead to too much disregard of the interests of other groups and in a different country part of the social contract ought to be not to prioritize such things too much. So it matters how such things are presented by museums, where there must an actual effort to not only stop the way such narratives are presented, but also to make such sensitivity part of the message.

I.E. Don't present history as a narrative of oppressed Jews and Blacks who never didn't do nothing wrong taking revenge on oppressors but a) talk about how such framing has been common and a genuine a problem, and mention things like opposition to european self preservation as an example of extremism and even make analogy to how nazi disregard of other ethnic groups preserving themselves was bad, and this agenda is also bad b) present sufficient elements or at least a taste of history to counter this that does enter into territory of such groups wronging others. For example the truth of black American violence and the history of discrimination in the postcivil rights USA would be a narrative that ironically provides more balance and counters the actual racist narrative that is dominant today.

Jews could be told that polls that shows that 70% something American Jews oppose European self preservation, more than even American blacks, with Hispancis even supporting it, illustrates an anti european racist attitude that Jews should not have. That some of the hostility towards Jews has been due to Jewish disrespect of other ethnic groups rights which at times Jews pursued through the means of left wing activism (including making right wing movements adopt such left wing agendas), and they have a duty to avoid engaging in that and to respect them. There is plenty in Jewish history in modernity to influence people to not have a perspective of Jews as just an innocent oppressed group that must be privileged and must take revenge. Even more so when it comes to holocaust jewish lobbies since the bad behavior of ADL is undeniable and includes even less well known facets like engaging in Armenian genocide denial.

Also there has been a general movement of maximalist suffering that includes the idea of black american slavery as worse suffering ever, Jewish suffering in holocaust as unique ans worst suffering ever, and this movement has fueled various copies such as the one about Indian graves in Canada. Such approach to history of sacred narratives of maximal suffering even if one were to hypothetically grant that in some cases might not necessarily be promoting falsehoods always, gives licenses for groups to take it further and further.

So knowledge of past atrocities should be used to oppose being screwed over in line with a healthy range of ethnocentrism, and a moral understanding of the universal fate of different ethnic groups, but not to allow particular groups and their champions to create utility monsters.This has happened in this case and needs to be countered.. This is in general, but even more so in particular nations, the grievance perspectives towards the historical majority should be more limited. I think slavery of blacks in the USA makes sense to have some greater presence than the genocide of the Jews in the 1940s, but even that should not be that much present, and framed quite differently as I described.

He knows reds don't have the temperament or interest to "show up" for museums or libraries

Well... isn't that just a skill issue then?

Regardless of the institutional form it takes, there will always be culture of some kind, and it will indeed belong to those who show up. A purely destructive strategy with no positive program for cultural production of your own is not viable in the long term.

Well... isn't that just a skill issue then?

You can argue that. But it seems that the obvious counter argument is that these institutions positioning themselves so badly that they lose their funding is a skill issue as well, no?

That is to say, the argument that "if you lose something, it's a skill issue" has the current outcome as a perfectly acceptable option. Given that the original post is arguing for the continued funding, it can't just boil down to that.

Kind of hard to organically developed conservatives into institutions when they face overwhelming hostility to their presence there. The lack of conservatives isn’t just some organic thing - it was explicitly designed that way

A purely destructive strategy with no positive program for cultural production of your own is not viable in the long term.

Knocking down the old, controlled-by-the-enemy, institutions can be a precondition to having production of your own. Note that they have been pushing out conservative culture for a very long time. In the Floyd push ABC canceled their top-rated show because the actress offended their sensibilities, a popular Disney actress from their most popular show was fired for similar reasons, and other popular conservative shows (like "Cops" and its imitators) were also canceled.

In the Floyd push ABC canceled their top-rated show because the actress offended their sensibilities

Which show was this?

Roseanne

That happened before the Floydenning, though.

Some three or four years prior to that they also cancelled Last Man Standing when it was the second highest show on their network for reasons that definitely had nothing to do with Allen's politics, they just didn't want to do comedy any more. It ended up moving to Fox due to public support.

Your point would be better taken if they didn't continue to make the show (Roseanne) except under a different name (The Conners) and just say that her character died.

For the most part ratings don't matter anymore because they're all too low. And anything that just says "ratings" is likely bullshit because the amount of people that watch it also doesn't matter or hasn't in the past, it was all the demo, 18-34 year olds who watched. Years before what your talking about Harry's Law was I think also the second highest rated show on NBC but it got abysmal demo ratings so they cancelled it despite it being owned by the network.

Last Man Standing was not owned by ABC it just happened to air there and at that point they're only making money on commercials so while ratings might matter there, the fact that FOX actually owned the show makes more sense why they'd pick it up if it was cancelled elsewhere.

More and more shows have very little value if they're not owned or anomalistically high in ratings (speaking for terrestrial television). Funnily enough, both of those things were true for ABC and the Roseanne revival. Though the Conners didn't drop much in the ratings so they probably saved an enormous amount of money, but it remains to be seen how much value they lost in the brand, because selling The Conners to a streamer probably loses you money if you instead had seven more seasons of Roseanne.

I'm pretty sure last man standing was developed at ABC and purchased by Fox after the cancellation. And while I am all for abandoning ratings, they are still the metric the industry uses to gauge success. Also I think Roseanne Barr getting ousted despite being a top earner is still a pretty solid point, although it wasn't mine.

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