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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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Ancient developed societies had social technology that worked on an evolutionary level. Family name was important, and so the actions of a father would influence the repute of the son. The effect of this was that social defection, from criminality to serious corruption, would not benefit the proliferation of the defector’s genes. A cowardly general or a treasonous noble would reduce their children's opportunity for gene proliferation. Towns in the past were often mono-ethnic, as were many religions, and so civic engagement and “selfless prosociality” would benefit the expansion of one’s extended gene pool. Many human populations evolved prosocial tendencies because such genes were beneficial to the whole, but not necessarily the individual.

It is interesting, but not often stated bluntly, that the culture of the modern West is illogical from an evolutionary standpoint. We are taught not to judge a person by the actions of their parents or kin, and in fact having parents who were antisocial has a sympathetic residue in our media. Because a person’s behavior no longer affects their children’s reputation in any meaningful way (outside of losses from legal action), corruption and perfidy is the evolutionarily correct option in certain cases. It doesn’t matter how many customers you harm, how many people you lie to, or how corrupt you are in a bureaucracy — if you make more money than the legal repercussions take, then your children will go off to a good college and have as high a social standing as before. A Madoff can make off with money and his descendants are not worse as a result, and arguably better than had no corrupt moneys been accrued. (Social shame is essentially limited to the children of conservative politicians who haven’t publicly renounced their parents. Even the children of murderers are given a sympathetic lens.)

Prosocial actions in pre-modern living conditions almost always benefitted the expansion of one’s genes which, in the zero-sum mathematics of mammals, are a kind of dominance-action against other human groups. Helping a homeless person get back to working on a farm may have lead to gene proliferation greater than that of passing up the opportunity. Acting modestly and selflessly, living a simple life of following social rules, would benefit the whole group exorbitantly provided others aren’t defecting from the same standard. Most remarkably, the modern multicultural cosmopolitan America is perhaps the first society in history where prosocial actions are generally against your evolutionary interests. That is, when you don’t signal them to others! The action qua action, undirected to a stranger, is likely going to benefit someone whose genes are too far from yours to benefit your expansion. Even in the Rome of the Roman Empire, groups manly lived in the same neighborhoods, had extended kin groups, had region-locked gods, and in the case of the patrician classes put enormous weight on family/tribal ties. When cross-tribal empathy was practiced, it was so that the stranger would know the goodness of your community — (for instance, failure to be a good host in Greece to a traveler in Greece would dishonor your family and town).

When we talk about the decline in civic engagement, and the bureaucracies that aren’t working for the best interests of the people, and the inefficiencies of ostensibly prosocial organizations that care more about signal than substance, we may want to look at the evolutionary underpinnings of all of our actions. Perhaps we have fashioned ourselves a moral Gordian Knot. We simultaneously value and miss prosocial actions, while forbidding any natural evolutionary impetus for prosocial action. Ironically, the most natural and established methods of prosociality — extended gene nepotism and racism — are the very things that are considered most defective by the cosmopolitan liberal. If this is all true, and there’s no good way to slice this Gordian knot, we will somehow have to devise an advanced capitalist surveillance state that incentivizes substantive prosocial action and not just the signal.

"The effect of this was that social defection, from criminality to serious corruption, would not benefit the proliferation of the defector’s genes."

On the other hand, there is this from the Analects of Confucius:

The Duke of Sheh informed Confucius, saying, "Among us here there are those who may be styled upright in their conduct. If their father have stolen a sheep, they will bear witness to the fact."

Confucius said, "Among us, in our part of the country, those who are upright are different from this. The father conceals the misconduct of the son, and the son conceals the misconduct of the father. Uprightness is to be found in this."

So it might be said that in the Confucian model, filiality and family loyalty trump eusociality. This makes the model of the city/the state/the village (whichever political-social unit from the smallest to the greatest) as a family a difficult concept, since the idea of sociality is that all the members of the unit are, in a sense, 'family' and so acting in the common interest and common good is what should be done - if someone is a thief, inform the authorities. But Confucius here seems to say that bonds of blood relationship outweigh duties to the common good.

Prosocial actions may indeed be against evolutionary interests, but they are necessary for a functioning society. A society where fathers and sons hide crimes, and families act for their own interests first, is not one that is high-trust or low in corruption. American society may not be an earthly paradise, but you can still be reasonably confident that crimes will be tried and punished and that you as a citizen have rights.

Just saying “prosocial actions are necessary” does not magically induce the prosocial action, which is the problem in our cosmopolitan democracy. If prosociality is necessary, we actually need to create the evolutionary underpinnings, otherwise I doubt they will really happen to any meaningful degree. Maybe American parents would not try to conceal their children’s crimes, I have no idea. But America is precisely the country where “families acting for their interests first” is not significantly punished, whereas in ancient societies the descendant’s reputation would be harmed (and so would be their opportunities). In America, if you have the chance to be a Madoff and it sends your kids to the best schools, that is the best evolutionary choice. In ancient societies, it wouldn’t be, because it would affect the child’s reputation, and reputation impacted status, and thus resources and mates. The fact that the children would be punished may lead children to attempt to cover up crimes, but only a small minority of social defection can actually be covered up by one’s children in the first place.

cf. Proclus, Ten doubts concerning providence (De decem dubitationibus circa providentiam), 5th century AD:

Such being the problems regarding [ancestral sin], let us first say that every city and every family constitutes one single living being, more so than every single person, being to a larger degree immortal and sacred. Indeed, one single mayor presides over the city as over one single being, one relative over the family as one whole. And there is a single [life] cycle in common for the city and [one] for the family, making the life and the customs of each of them converge, different ones for different cities and families – as their lives are simultaneous as it were – and their different body sizes, different resources, postures and motions – as if one single nature were pervading the whole city and every single family in it, making both that city and that family one.

If, then, also providence is one and fate, with respect to these things, is one, if their life is of the same form and their nature from the same root, how could one refuse to call the city and the family one living being, and from now on to talk specifically about each of them as one, since, when compared to any one of us, [each of them] is a living being that is longer-lived, more divine and more like the universe in that it encompasses the other, smaller living beings and is akin to the everlasting?

So if, as has been shown, every city and every family is a single living being, why wonder if the [deeds] of the forefathers are paid out to the progeny and if the life of the cities, being one, spread out from above [over the citizens] like a canvas, encompasses the compensation, in other times, for actions, be they good or bad, committed in other times? For providence shows not only that every one of us bears the fruit of the things that he did in another time [of his life] and receives the penalty for them, but also that [this is the case for] the city as a unity and the family as a unity – and as a living being, at that – whereby the first to act are not disregarded either (for it is not allowed that something is overlooked, given that providence exists) and the later-born because of the co-affection to the first as to their founding fathers and by the fact that together with them they complete, as it were, one single living being, inherit from them the share that they deserve. For their origin is from them and they share a life and nature in common with them, so that it is obvious that because of them they receive honour and punishment.

Weren't things we call 'corruption' today, from "bribes" to "nepotism" ... rampant and even accepted among many premodern societies? Something somewhat similar to this may be true, but historical evopsych is very hard to get right.

A Madoff can make off with money and his descendants are not worse as a result, and arguably better than had no corrupt moneys been accrued.

... as opposed to crassus, who

Marcus Licinius Crassus' next concern was to rebuild the fortunes of his family, which had been confiscated during the Marian-Cinnan proscriptions. Sulla's proscriptions, in which the property of his victims was cheaply auctioned off, found one of the greatest acquirers of this type of property in Crassus: indeed, Sulla was especially supportive of this, because he wished to spread the blame as much as possible among those unscrupulous enough to do so. ... Crassus is said to have made part of his money from proscriptions, notably the proscription of one man whose name was not initially on the list of those proscribed but was added by Crassus, who coveted the man's fortune

Some of Crassus' wealth was acquired conventionally, through slave trafficking, production from silver mines, and speculative real estate purchases

The first ever Roman fire brigade was created by Crassus. Fires were almost a daily occurrence in Rome, and Crassus took advantage of the fact that Rome had no fire department, by creating his own brigade—500 men strong—which rushed to burning buildings at the first cry of alarm. Upon arriving at the scene, however, the firefighters did nothing while Crassus offered to buy the burning building from the distressed property owner, at a miserable price. If the owner agreed to sell the property, his men would put out the fire; if the owner refused, then they would simply let the structure burn to the ground. After buying many properties this way, he rebuilt them, and often leased the properties to their original owners or new tenants.[18][5][19][3]

... prosocial?

Weren't things we call 'corruption' today, from "bribes" to "nepotism" ... rampant and even accepted among many premodern societies?

Important I think. It does seem that in the past leaders had less of a problem with their actions being seen. That could be interpreted as social norms being enforced on them better. "Prosocial" in the relevant evolutionary sense is not the same as pro-equality. Moldbug argument about unclear assignment of power being the problem.

Fighting fires costs time and money. If he is obliged to fight fires for people who didn't pay him, he'd go broke. It just looks bad because the firefighters are physically standing next to the fire, but standing next to it and not fighting it is no worse than being far away and not fighting it.

Would you quote it the same way if a supermarket was refusing to give away food to someone who couldn't pay?

I'm not making an anticapitalist / anti-paying-for-insurance argument here - the key phrase is a miserable price, and often leased the properties to their original owners or new tenants. Compare this to healthcare pricing - during an emergency, your 'willingness to pay' is limited only by your wealth, and the hospital you are at / crassus's fire brigade can demand much higher prices than they could in a competitive market because they have no competition at the moment of emergency, a problem (sort of) solved by paying for insurance from competing providers. It's possible wikipedia is overstating that, but other sources seem to agree. Even if that's untrue, the other bits are similarly antisocial.

If he had no firefighters and he was just a real estate developer buying up burned properties for pittances, nobody would complain. Adding the firefighters increases his profit, but it doesn't make the situation worse--losing your house from fire is no better than losing your house this way.

There's also nothing preventing another company from offering "I'll do this and charge half the rent on the lease", leading to a price war that makes the price for the service go down to the point where nobody loses their house.

In general, using monopoly power of any kind to demand prices significantly above the "ideal" market price is (currently) considered bad and antisocial. Even moreso if the thing extorted was "your house" instead of eggs. The same is true of a hospital - sure, "without the hospital, the person just dies", but "give me your life savings or i won't stop the bleeding" is still "antisocial". Economics describes this as "the producer extracting all the surplus". If the cost to crassus of putting out fires is much smaller than the price he demands, and he uses this to extract wealth, that's ... 'antisocial', in the sense it's worse for society than demanding only a bit above cost.

Note that (again, according to wikipedia in vague language, notanexpert, might be wrong) the privately owned system of firefighting became ineffective, and was replaced with a volunteer force.

This led to

"A major duty of the Vigiles was to enforce preventative measures against conflagrations. Adequate fire fighting equipment was required in every home. The Digest of Justinian decrees that Vigiles are "ordered to remind every one to have a supply of water ready in his upper room". While the Vigiles only had advising authority, their recommendations were often followed to avoid repercussions for negligence."

Which is something crassus's force would ... not be incentivized to do.

It's much easier to have a price war over food or steel, which buyers regularly buy large amounts of, can choose the time and place of purchase, and have many sellers, all of which give buyers opportunity and motive to inform themselves and select low prices, than something like a fire or rare medical emergencies, which satisfy none of those. (And history doesn't record several roman firefighting startups pushing the price down a year after crassus's thing began - and even if they did, unless multiple show up to the same fire, extortionate pricing would remain).

If he had no firefighters and he was just a real estate developer buying up burned properties for pittances, nobody would complain

... not about him, but people would certainly complain about the un-fought fires. It may be better for a steel factory that illegally dumps runoff into rivers to exist than not, considering the many benefits of steel, but it's still very bad to dump it!

In some ways, markets and free exchange are very effective in coordination! In other ways, they aren't, and 'it's all voluntary' doesn't mean every action is moral.

In general, using monopoly power of any kind to demand prices significantly above the "ideal" market price is (currently) considered bad and antisocial.

Your description only says that he used monopoly power in the sense of being the only company around--not that he did anything to prevent other companies from being created and competing with him.

It's much easier to have a price war over food or steel,..., than something like a fire or rare medical emergencies... unless multiple show up to the same fire, extortionate pricing would remain).

Why wouldn't someone create another company, which would also show up? It sounds like there's information you're leaving out.

One problem is that the same power over prices exists if crassus is the only one to show up to any specific fire, even if other companies exist. This makes market competition and price discovery much harder. Compare this to: multiple hospitals exist, but you have a heart attack and are only delivered to one. If his company shows up to some fires, and other companies show up to other fires ... and cartels like this are a very common phenomenon in businesses today.

Another problem is that this is ... ancient rome, not exactly a well oiled machine for free enterprise. Startup costs, frictions, and risk of 'you get your property stolen because higher status person dislikes you' were higher than today.

I think it might be worth noting that, contra your comment about it only now being the case that signaling is the way to harvest benefits from prosocial actions, that signaling also is the source of the benefit in the original example you gave. In the case of the father who benefits his son, it is not actually doing good to other which helps, but the building up of the family name. Once again, feigning to do costly actions, if you are not caught, outperforms actually doing them, and lives of crime and the like can bring rewards, if done in secret.

Moreover, it's just transparently the case that those sorts of goings-on still happened. One need only think of rapacious tyrants or common criminals or of hypocrites (woe to you, scribes and Pharisees!) to see that there existed in the ancient times people who defected, and that signaling was common.

Of course, there is something to the fact that our familial connections are weaker than they have often been in the past. But I am not convinced that it has these large effects of disregard for ethics or one's reputation, given that there still exist substantial pressures toward having the politically correct views, or whatever falls within the socially acceptable range.

New Twitter file dropped that I think touches on a few live wires of the culture war.

First, media quality. Scott, Richard H., and Bryan Caplan all somewhat recently have posts out relating to the media. Only Caplan has taken a really negative view. In the new Twitter files, it seems that media without much scrutiny amplified Hamilton68; a project that appears to without evidence slander mostly anti right political opponents as Russian agents. This was a big complaint against Scott and Richard — when the media gets something wrong, it is generally a big thing and seemingly in one direction. This was big because it was used to tar (or further tar) many political actors with links to Russia; notably the then President of the US.

Second, misinformation. The argument presented by and large by progressives is that misinformation must be caught back against aggressively by social media because it pollutes our political system. Yet this article shows how easily “misinformation” is really short hand for “political beliefs I disagree with.” Matt T. compared it to McCarthy. The biggest difference I see is that Joe was actually correct about his targets being communists (doesn’t follow that Joe’s actions were correct). Here, it seems the factual claim (Russian bots / agents) are just wrong.

Third, Robin Hanson just produced a piece discussing the difference between elite and expert. The expert focuses on details and logic; the elite looks for the trees and how to navigate social (ie political) situations. The internal Twitter debates see the expert class somewhat at war with the elite class.

Anyhow, let me know your thoughts! Link to the story. https://www.racket.news/p/move-over-jayson-blair-meet-hamilton

Third, Robin Hanson just produced a piece discussing the difference between elite and expert. The expert focuses on details and logic; the elite looks for the trees and how to navigate social (ie political) situations.

Obviously, elites have power; experts do not. They have different priorities.

There's a pattern you'll see a lot in certain issues -- gun control and environmental issues, for instance -- where a previously little-known group is suddenly accepted as the unquestioned expert on the topic by the media. I interpret this as the Cathedral (or whatever you want to call it; I usually use "Left, Inc.") spinning up a new part of itself for the purpose of providing backing for the narrative that it has decided on. I suspect this is what was going on here; the Hamilton68 project was spun up by the same people who directed the media to pay attention to it, for the purpose of spreading the Russian collusion stories.

Not really, the central point of the Moldbuggian Cathedral concept is that it's emergent rather than coordinated:

The mystery of the cathedral is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.

...

So it’s not just that everyone—at least, everyone cool—is on the same page. It’s more like: everyone is reading the same book—at the same speed. No wonder all the peasants are seeing conspiracies in their motherfucking soup. If you saw a group of bright red dots move across the evening sky this way, what would you think they were? Pigeons? Remote-controlled pigeons, illuminated by lasers? Sometimes even Occam is baffled.

...

It is not hard to see why, in the lecture halls and newsrooms, dominant ideas tend to outcompete recessive ideas. A dominant idea is an idea that tends to benefit you and your friends. A dominant idea will be especially popular with your friends and former students in the civil service, because it gives them more work and more power.

And a recessive idea, of course, is the opposite of all these things. A climate scientist who holds the recessive idea of climate denialism is saying to his colleagues and the whole world: climate science is not important. Is it surprising—in the Bayesian sense— that a consensus of climate scientists would conclude that climate science matters?

Moldbug's model has no predictive power over public choice theory or some generic conspiracy, and its allure lies precisely in stripping «The Cathedral», culturally close to him and his target audience (cough cough «dark elves»), of moral culpability inherent to conscious exercise of power while being aware of its consequences. If there is no genuine malice, we can hope to resolve our differences with another round of musical chairs, «reformalizing» power so that no perverse incentives remain and hobbits can return to their bucolic farms.

Much the same can be said of the brain-addled Memetic theory of politics in general, which is buttressed by Mistake theory (because Scott, of course, is a... half-dark elf himself, despite his polite differences with neoreactionaries, and also refuses to see simple malice in blue tribe). Memes and fads very much exist, but they are fickle epiphenomena of mass culture; consequential ideologies and even rhetorical frameworks that are perpetuated by human organizations have unlimited lifespans, rely on scholarship vastly more complex and cerebral than their "memetic" payload, and follow from material interests of self-aware groups.

The practical nonexistence of memes is one of the most underrated thoughts of our friend Julius, which he regrettably had not argued for with sufficient finesse.

Isn't this just ideology dressed up as something else? I think it was Scott who said that Moldbug can't argue that people are consciously aware of themselves in this way, but also can't bring himself to say that it's just people choosing to believe something because that sounds too mundane, so he came up with something that combines the inadvertant nature of ideological belief with the sinister tones of a conspiracy.

See below — isn’t it emergent order?

I guess. Just seems like its easier to just call it ideology - the term explains what people mean pretty well as opposed to Moldbug's attempts at casting this as anything other than the ideology of the elites enacting what it logically would.

Sure, ideas have some memetic aspect to them , but there is still considerable centralization. . Look how quickly the BLM protests evaporated after Biden won. These things are planned by professional activists . Same for the higher-ed administrative structure. Or media companies. But what makes some ideas dominant , is harder to know. It could be a competition for status and power as stated above.

Ironically, this is merely rediscovering the logic behind markets or emergent order. As someone described it, of human action if not human design.

Markets are great because its incentives generally harness market participants’ selfish interest in a pro social way.

The concern about elites (in bureaucracies) is that the incentives arguably harness the participants’ selfish interest in an antisocial way.

I disagree with Moldbug on that. There's a lot of flock-like coordination, but there's also centralized structures (like Jornolist). And if you try to look into the web of funding of the various NGOs, you find a snarl. They're all connected to each other -- often through foundations that are also connected to the media.

Power laws and competition don't disappear just because they're affecting your enemy. It can still be a decentralised process whilst appearing to be focused around a few key groups—this is a measure of success, the wheat winnowed from the chaff. There are very few moments where it's actually more efficient to create a thing/movement/site entirely from scratch rather than finding an already moving thing, no matter how fast, and boosting it.

Power laws and competition don't disappear just because they're affecting your enemy.

You can do a lot if you have solved the coordination problem.

And how have they accomplished that? And if so, why in heavens name would you seek to displace the first group ever to manage it? Such an innovation would instantly enable a utopia, and even if of an aesthetically malign sort, that must be better than our present straits? Surely on any remotely conservative principle such a breakthrough should be regarded as extraordinarily unique and not to be tampered with at all?

I personally very much doubt they have.

Utopia is impossible. Every attempt at Utopia invariably results in dystopia.

And how have they accomplished that?

I'll be damned if I know.

And if so, why in heavens name would you seek to displace the first group ever to manage it? Such an innovation would instantly enable a utopia

No, solving the co-ordination problem does not lead to utopia. It leads to great power for those who solved it.

More comments

This seems like an important distinction between the concepts of "Left, Inc" and "The Cathedral", right? I'm inclined to think both have explanatory power.

This has always seemed plausible to me, and I do believe it to be so in practice even if not necessarily in intention, but I do wonder if anyone has gone and actually collected some data on organizations quoted as experts compared to those organizations' actual track records. Obviously this is a muddy field to plow, so I don't really expect much.

It occurred to me recently that while I've seen a great many shows/movies/etc about prejudice/tribalism/bigotry/etc, none of them reflect the kind of dynamics I've seen in the culture war. The closest things I've seen were The Hunt, a completely non-allegorical satire of current day social dynamics, and "The Great Divide," a filler episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender. It's hard to identify what phenomena I want reflected in this kind of story, but one of the most distinct aspects of our current polarization is how the dominant tribe justifies its antipathy towards the opposing tribe by accusing it of bigotry. Dehumanization isn't unusual, but dehumanizing people by accusing them of dehumanization seems novel. Or at least, novel enough that I haven't seen it outside of a South Park episode (The Death Camp of Tolerance) that treated the concept as inherently absurd because, at the time the episode was made, it still seemed outside the realm of possibility.

Do you guys know any good works of fiction that depict bigotry similar to that we've seen in America over the past decade? I don't necessarily mean stories where one group accuses the other of being bigoted. Just anything that leaps out to you as similar.

I think your use of the term "Dehumanizing" has derailed the discussion.

I've had somewhat similar thoughts/frustrations. It seems really hard to find stories with antagonists that use Woke tactics, or narratives that roughly align with the Anti-SJW ethos, that aren't tediously cringe or partisan or obviously ABOUT being Anti-SJW. It'd be really easy to wind up doing "straight white men are the REAL oppressed class," which is cringe even when true.

30 Rock: plenty of episodes involved Tracy or Jenna or some other character being super-entitled while claiming to be oppressed, using proto-woke, or just straight-up Woke, lingo. Or that black guy who flat-out says any woman who won't date him is racist or gay. This stuff is funny, but becomes less funny and more kafka-horror-y when every other character buys in hook-line-and-sinker.

House: there were plenty of situations where House was just being an equal-opportunity-asshole but gets interpreted as being racist or sexist or whatever.

but one of the most distinct aspects of our current polarization is how the dominant tribe justifies its antipathy towards the opposing tribe by accusing it of bigotry. Dehumanization isn't unusual, but dehumanizing people by accusing them of dehumanization seems novel.

I don't know why you are conflating calling someone a bigot is the same as dehumanizing them. Archie Bunker was depicted as a bigot, but he was not dehumanized. Dehumanization is something quite different.

You're absolutely right. I was being inarticulate. The accusation of bigotry, itself, is not dehumanization. The dehumanization comes when you say that because someone is a bigot, it's okay to "punch" them. That their rights, the rights that are supposed to extend to all of humanity, no longer exist. The trigger word they usually use is "Nazi," and they expand the definition of that term enough to include wrongthinkers of all races and religions. That's the most extreme example, but even it is frighteningly common.

I don't think Archie Bunker wouldn't be tolerated in today's world. While he was absolutely portrayed as in the wrong, he was also tolerated, even loved. Today, people like that are not deserving of tolerance. They get "cancelled." It's like.. you know how in the 00's, some Christians had a "love the sinner, hate the sin" attitude towards homosexuality, while others didn't want to let gay people anywhere near them? Leftists used to be analogous to the former, hating problematic attitudes while still loving people who possessed them. Now they're the latter. Or at least, that's how I perceive the situation.

Your link is broken; correct link is here

Ok, but "it is ok to punch someone who is x" is not dehumanization. Eg: it is considered ok for a woman to slap an obnoxious drunk. Does that mean that the drunk has been "dehumanized"? If a mass murderer is put to death, has he been "dehumanized"? I think you are referring to a different concept.

If the obnoxious drunk is following you, despite your repeated requests to be left alone, then he is invading your personal space and implicitly threatening you, making it okay to slap him in self-defense. Punching someone who is not invading your space or violating your rights in any way is not comparable, and doing so is actually a violation of their rights. To deny someone their rights is to dehumanize them. You are treating them as though they are not human.

Merely saying that somebody should be physically assaulted isn't the same thing as assaulting them, but it is still a form of dehumanization, and it precedes the literal violence.

The problem is that defining dehumanizing that broadly renders the term meaningless. If denying someone their rights is dehumanizing them, then a prosecutor commenting on a defendant's decision not to testify a trial is dehumanization. As is kicking a cheerleader off of the team for saying "fuck school fuck softball fuck cheer" on Snapchat. As is refusing a trademark to a band called "The Slants" because the term is derogatory.

And the other problem is with your argument that punching an obnoxius drunk is not dehumanizing him because he is invading your rights. That is the exact argument that Antifa types use when justifying punching people. They claim that speech is violence, after all.

Finally, you are needlessly complicating matters. What you are talking about is simply people using violence to silence those they disagree with. That is hardly a new phenomenon.

I was trying to say that the woman in this scenario is justified if, and only if, the man is following her and won't leave her alone despite her requests.

I'm trying to say that there's a spectrum of behavior that has violence against people you disagree with on the most extreme end. You can call this spectrum murderism, or dehumanition, or whatever, but I think it's fair to consider them all part of the same phenomenon. That's the entire concept behind racism, homophobia, and so on. I'm just expanding it more broadly.

And yes, lynchings and genocide and so forth are hardly new phenomenons. Doesn't make them acceptable. They are so terrifying that I want to make them as rare as possible.

No one is claiming that violence is generally acceptable.

To be clear, when I said that "people using violence to silence those they disagree with . . .is hardly a new phenomenon," I was not referring to lynching and genocide. I was referring to lesser forms of violence. I am dubious that most lynchings and genocides have been conducted simply because the victims held unpalatable views (and I say that as someone with PhD-level coursework on political violence).

You can call this spectrum murderism, or dehumanition,

I am sure there is a spectrum, but my point is that you really can't call it dehumanization, because that term already has an established meaning in the field of political violence.

Oh. What is the academic meaning of dehumanization? The most literal interpretation would be that it's denying someone's status as human, but that's not what happens. Like, the German didn't literally believe that Jews were rats in the clip you posted, but he was comparing them to rats as a heinous metaphor.

i marked this comment "bad" on the volunjanny page so i guess i should reply.

"it is ok to punch someone who is x" is not dehumanization

yes it is. "it is righteous to practice violence against the outgroup" is the last realization of otherizing rhetoric.

  1. outgroup is bad

  2. we should do something about outgroup

  3. we should be violent to outgroup

to give the sharpest comparison, that phrase is syntactically identical with "it is righteous to kill jews."

no motte & baileying. as-spoken "it's okay to" is to be heard and understood as "it is righteous to"

it's not righteous for a woman to slap a lush, but also nobody gives a shit. almost all of europe believes it is not righteous to execute criminals because their framing of human rights extends even to mass-murderers. this is a deep subject of philosophy where i largely though not entirely agree with the europeans. i blame none for being uncomfortable with the state ending lives.

it is not righteous to practice indiscriminate violence against anyone. even nazis. this was the point of postwar trials: moral authority. righteousness. because they understood the indiscriminate violence practiced during the war was bad in and of itself. that statement goes against the trials.

that statement necessarily affirms certain premises; it is okay to dehumanize, it is okay to practice indiscriminate violence.

that statement says what the nazis did was only bad because of who they did it to.

to repeat and conclude: there is nothing you can say more dehumanizing.

There are several things wrong with your argument:

"it is righteous to practice violence against the outgroup" is the last realization of otherizing rhetoric.

  1. Even if the last step of otherizing is making the claim, "it is righteous to practice violence against the outgroup", it does not follow that every incident of making the claim is necessarily the last step in the process of othering.

  2. We are talking about dehumanization, yet you are making a claim about othering. They are not the same thing. See, eg, Genocide Watch's "Ten Stages of Genocide", which distinguishes clearly between othering (what they call "classification") and dehumanization.

to give the sharpest comparison, that phrase is syntactically identical with "it is righteous to kill jews."

Perhaps I was imprecise when I described the class of statements as, "it is ok to punch someone who is x." As my examples showed, I did not mean to define "x" as group membership, but rather as exhibiting a certain attribute, such as drunken loutishness, or a tendency to commit murder.

More importantly, you seem to believe that I said that it is righteous for a woman to slap a lush, or righteous to execute a murder, or righteous to practice indiscriminate violence against anyone. I said no such thing, nor do I believe any such thing. I merely said that doing so was a phenomenon different from dehumanization. I was making an analytical claim, not a normative claim.

i marked this comment "bad" on the volunjanny page

I >90% agree with your post, but I marked the one you're replying to as neutral because I didn't see evidence that @Gdanning was dishonest. My theory is "we want honestly-wrong people to come here, say honestly-wrong things, talk to people about them, and stop being wrong, so I don't want people to get in trouble for saying honestly-wrong things".

If we say that dehumanization means strictly to treat someone as inhuman or less than human than maybe not. But people on the left have been using an expanding definition of dehumanization for decades. Feminists love to say that various forms of sexual attraction to a woman are dehumanization. Like if a man wants masturbate to images of pretty women, it's dehumanizing to the women. That sort of usage has the same flaws as saying that "it's okay to punch someone" is dehumanizing.

  1. I'm not a big fan of the "the other side does it, so it is ok for me to do it" argument.

  2. Those examples are re using "dehumanize" to mean "treat as an object, not as a person", as in the second definition here ["to deprive of human qualities or attributes; divest of individuality"]. I believe that the OP was using the first definition ["to regard, represent, or treat (a person or group) as less than human"]

I'm not a fan of "the other side does it, so it is ok for me to do it" either, but I think it makes far more sense that people saying "we should be able to inflict physical harm on a person without remorse" is an example of dehumanization, as opposed to "we should be able to imagine a person in sexual situations". The later doesn't make much sense for it to be dehumanizing.

The latter fits the second definition of dehumanizing reasonably well, it seems to me, if the claim is that the person in question is treating a human being like a fleshlight, as a tool, essentially, as opposed to a person with feeling of their own, etc. That is indeed what they are saying, as I understand it. I don't know that I agree with the claim empirically, but it is a reasonable use of the term. It is really a very different claim than the other definition, which I think OP was using, which was to see someone as less than human (note, by the way, that some have argued that, in some contexts, it is toxification, rather that dehumanization, which is what is really going on).

Archie Bunker was depicted as a bigot, but he was not dehumanized.

The Archie Bunker TV shows were made in the 70s/80s. Do you think that today a TV show would be made with such a character in the lead role, and as anything other than an out-and-out villain?

How is that relevant to my point, which is that claiming that someone is a bigot is not the same as dehumanizing them?

It's relevant in that you claimed Bunker was presented as a bigot but not dehumanised. That was forty-plus years ago. Today, we wouldn't get an Archie Bunker except as a villain with no redeeming features, or else he does a 180 degree turn and realises he was wrong about everything and current-day idpol is right, true and just.

Have you really not seen any online descriptions of Republicans? Even Freddie deBoer has to do the customary obligatory disclaimer about how bad they are:

if the odds of Democrats doing good are a 1,000,000:1, the odds of a third party or the Republicans doing good are even less

The issue is that “better than the Republicans” is a bar about as low as “better than slowly lowering your genitals into a blender.”

the same maniacal zeal the Republicans pursue a right agenda

Why the Republicans don’t appear to pay more of a price for the utter insanity of the messages in their media is a question for another time

The Republicans were asked whether they could continue to be the party of bitter racist yokels and hope to win elections.

you can engage with a roster of interchangeable lunatics who lie and dissemble in defense of a cruel revanchist movement

I like Freddie, I think he's honest and he makes reasonable points, but even he goes for "maniacal zeal", "utter insanity", "bitter racist yokels", "interchangeable lunatics" and so on. Maybe it's not yet at the point of calling Republicans actual rats and vermin, but some will go that far.

Ditto with the pro-life movement, TERFs, etc. It's a short step from "they're bigots and maniacs" to "they're not real humans, not like us, they have no compassion and are motivated only by hatred and spite and destructiveness".

"Customary obligatory disclaimer" implies that he's just saying those things due to outside pressure, not because those are his actual thoughts. Freddie is a socialist, you'd expect him to view Republicans very negatively.

This doesn't actually seem dehumanizing. There is no comparison of republicans to animals(unless you count the handwringing over dogwhistle politics), no description of disgust, no description of republicans as lesser-than.

It's an accusation of republicans being evil. And in a democratic system, that's far, far from unprecedented- the Greeks had a special word for it(stasis) and the Romans saw the same thing occurring in their republic and saw it as almost identical to the Greek process. Nor, by the way, is it a one way street; republicans also see democrats as evil.

This is an emergent process of republics and cannot be fixed by one party acting alone.

Online rightists call leftists "NPCs".

Again, how is that relevant? My point is that the categories "calling someone a bigot" and "dehumanizing someone" are distinct categories. Hence, whether someone is dehumanizing Republicans is an empirical claim which must be established by evidence more than that said person called Republicans bigots. I note that deBoer's articles from which you got those quotes seem to have little to do with bigotry, for example.

I think the point is that "dehumanising != bigot" is ITSELF irrelevant because while you are right that it is theoretically possible to portray someone a bigot without dehumanising them, if you use a 1950s dictionary and several slide rules, it is not practically possible to portray someone a bigot without dehumanising them in The Current Year, because the incentives of the zeitgeist converge modern media writers on that conflation too incentivisingly.

That is true only if you are using a very eccentric definition of "dehumanize." it does not mean "immoral" or "evil" or even "loathsome."

It's interesting to note that Norman Lear meant for Archie to be seen as a bigot. The audience was supposed to laugh at the racist ignoramus, not with him. Lear was horrified when he realized that Archie was becoming the Fonz of the show and that the audience loved the old rascal for being so "politically incorrect."

That said, I can list many, many shows made in the 70s and 80s that would never be made today (or at least, not with the characters and storylines we saw then). Like for the example the infamous blackface/n-word episode of Gimme A Break!

Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” is famously about white supremacists who envy black bodies while denigrating black minds. A true horror delight, and definitely Culture War fodder. His “Us” and “Nope” are less on the nose for your request, both terrific filmmaking in and of themselves, but also worth watching for what they have to say about the black experience/The Struggle.

The rather confusing hextuple film “Cloud Atlas” is what drove home for me the concept of privilege, but also how much social justicers want to be The Ally Who Helps Oppressed Group Get Unoppressed.

I saw Get Out and loved it. I don't think what I got out of it is the same as what everyone else got out of it, judging by other peoples' reactions to it and even what other people have directly told me, but I did love it. I should see the other movies you've mentioned. Thank you.

I saw the symbolism in Get Out, but I got more out of it as a sci-fi horror film dealing with the nature of brains and minds. I’ve always loved body transformation stories, and fantastic tales about what nerve networks can actually do, and this scratched one itch while giving a delightful ick factor to the other. I enjoyed “Nope” even more.

Have you seen Being John Malkovich? The central plot device is the same as that in Get Out, but the themes of the film are different.

That was the film which gave me an appreciation for John Cusack; I think I’ve seen it thrice.

I see no correlation between these two life-extension films, even though apparently there are links such as one actress being in both films. One was a magical realism story where the mechanism is mystical and the multi-person possession target is apparently random; the other is barely squishy hard SF where the mechanism is bloody and the single-person possession targets are kidnapped for their physical attributes.

If anything, I see more in common with both in 2011’s In Time where the rich buy time to live and the poor have to beg or steal it.

It’s worth noting that the truly subversive aspect of Get Out is that the “white supremacists” (as you call them) are old-school liberals who fetishize blacks, almost literally consuming them for their own advantage, reflecting the racial dynamics of the Democrat party.

Can you remind me what part of cloud atlas you’re talking about?

Five of the six stories has a person being dehumanized by their society because of one of their attributes: the slave, the gay guy, the senior citizen, the clone, and the “primitive human” on the Old Earth reservation. Each gains the sympathy of a person with a standard amount of privilege and together they struggle for the dehumanized person’s freedom from their oppressive situation, with varying degrees of success.

Five of the six stories has a person being dehumanized

In the sixth story, nuclear power is dehumanized.

Dreher's Law defied? Transgender rapist Isla Bryson moved to men's prison

After years of haranguing feminists and critics for suggesting that things like self-ID would lead to women being potentially at risk as unsafe males entered women's spaces, the topic has burst unto the scene as a rapist in Scotland sought movement into a female prison because he "transitioned" after being caught.

The basic economic logic of "if barriers are removed from socially deleterious activities people will do them" proven once again. Yet it somehow evades certain parts of the political spectrum.

Isla Bryson was remanded to Cornton Vale women's prison in Stirling after being convicted of the rapes when she was a man called Adam Graham. She has since been moved to HMP Edinburgh.

Bryson decided to transition from a man to a woman while awaiting trial.

She was taken to a male wing of HMP Edinburgh on Thursday afternoon.

It came after First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced that Bryson would not be allowed to serve her sentence at Cornton Vale.

This situation seems to have proven to be a boondoggle for the SNP. Sturgeon faced resistance in her own party to passing gender legislation already and the UK government even blocked it for equality concerns (leading to a -cynical imo - row on devolution as well, which I'm sure Sturgeon would prefer to be the issue).

Now this case came up and caused a bit of a stir. Sturgeon came out proactively and reassured everyone, saying that no rapists will be allowed into female prisons, making it clear where she stood & using the "risk assessment" argument to save face: every trans applicant will go through risk assessment therefore there's no problem unless they come to a wrong decision. Of course, the problem seems to be that a) these people are assessed at the female prison and b) maybe the best system is no system. All this effort won't change the fundamental reality of males vs. females so why not use the rule of thumb that works the vast majority of the time? Certainly, if the FM has to come out and reassure Scots that the right decision will be reached in each of these cases that says something about their confidence.

Of course, I've not seen even a hint of reflection on this from the very people who called it bigoted to suggest that weakening gender barriers and implementing self-ID would lead to these ludicrous situations. If anything, activists seem to be doubling down on the claim that anyone who raised the alarm about this was just being bigoted instead of letting the process play out.

Meanwhile, a second plane has struck the Towers

I'm astonished at the sheer amount of people and their new found concern for Scotland's prison population, so astonished I'm left wondering where they've been for the last however many centuries while men who rape other men were placed in, shock horror, men's prisons. Talk about the proverbial fox in the chicken house. Could it be that prisoner safety isn't really uppermost in the agenda of the red tops and certain politicians and commentators?

As for the case of Isla Bryson. How can anyone say the system failed when, at the time of this media storm, she had been found guilty before a jury, had been placed in Cornton Vale on remand in segregation while undergoing an assessment as to the proper place for her to serve the sentence that had yet to be served on her. Her sentencing is next month and the judge requires a variety of assessments.

If this media rumble hadn't arisen, it's overwhelmingly likely Bryson would have been assessed to be unsuitable for a women's prison and would have served her sentence in a male prison.

There are about 15 trans people in jail in Scotland and over 200 in England. Trans women are serving their sentences in male and female prisons north and south of the border (as are trans men) showing that individual assessments by the relevant prison authorities are taking place as they are statutorily obliged to do so.

Why is the sky falling in, people?

The vast and insurmountable difference in physical strength between human males and females is the driving force behind concerns about trans identified males in female prisons, and other female-only spaces where females are vulnerable. Male humans account for the vast majority of perpetrators of violent crime and sexual assault.

Males and females are different, humans have sexual dimorphism and only magical thinking erases that. I'd go so far as to say that some parts of modern gender ideology are implicitly creationist.

The problem for the SNP is that the Scottish courts could overrule her based on her own law. Why would a woman be imprisoned with men even if they are a high risk to women? The best to hope for is isolation within the women’s estate.

The prison estate is still divided by gender, if not by biological sex. If a transwoman is a women as Scottish law assumes, she must go into the proper estate.

(The SNP might be saved by British courts but rather than help Scottish nationalism this may hinder it).

Why is a Scottish nationalist party making this an elemental part of their program anyway?

Why is a Scottish nationalist party making this an elemental part of their program anyway?

The SNP styles themselves as the most-progressivest party in Scotland, cruelly held back by those evil evil Tories that England votes for. So you should vote for them so they can leave the UK and implement loads of progressive policies! Such as running to hand their leash to the EU immediately, and implementing loads of extra welfare! Somehow! After amputating 60% of their trade... when they're net receivers from the UK treasury already...

Honestly, don't think too hard about it. Their manifesto is basically "we're not the Tories, watch as we advocate the opposite of everything they say." Their speech restrictions and laws are even more draconian than the rest of the UK, they proclaim "refugees welcome!" despite having almost no refugees (and the ones who are placed there aren't happy about it and don't want to go), they call the rest of the UK horrible racists while basically being an ethnostate... give Humza Yousaf, their Health Secretary, a listen, and pay particular notice to the way he spits out the word "white" like it's venom and complains about the majority of positions of power being held by white people in a 96% white area.

Why is a Scottish nationalist party making this an elemental part of their program anyway?

I can't find the article anymore but I recall one making the argument that progressive virtue signaling and standing against England is what Scottish nationalism boils down to at this point (since blood and soil isn't a good sell in Europe anymore, even though it is the more standard or intuitive justification for nationalism).

The UK was perceived as stepping back on some of this stuff recently so perhaps Scotland decided there was an opportunity to distinguish themselves via moralism (aka the Canada model)

Gender dysphoria is no longer regarded as an illness therefore why would a Gender Recognition Certificate require two doctors signatures?

Remind me again how things like this would never, ever happen. I was told that several years back when part of a discussion about the possible problems in letting self-identified trans women use female-only spaces. No boy or man was going to undertake the social costs of dressing like and identifying as a woman just in order to get access to women's spaces.

How many formerly AMAB sexual crimes trans prisoners does this make now? And of course, if I take the lessons that I am being taught, Isla was always a Real Woman, so she was a Real Women when she raped two women with her feminine penis, and she still has her feminine penis while awaiting gender affirmation surgery while in a women's prison, and if you deadname her then you are inflicting real violence on her and denying her human rights.

Does that sound mean? Well, the liberal side like to pose the "what about the pregnant 12 year old victim of incestuous rape, are you going to force her to have her rapist's baby?" in abortion discussions and as we've seen this is a rare but real problem. The Real Woman trans sex offender is the equivalent for the liberal and progressive side, and a real problem they have to deal with, and decide if they are going to stick with the most extreme loons who declare that you can too be a Real Woman if all you do is grow your hair out and change your name. It would be instructive to count up how many "pregnant 12 year olds" versus "sex offender suddenly decided while in men's prison he was really a woman" cases and see who needs to do some tough decisions.

Of course, I've not seen even a hint of reflection on this from the very people who called it bigoted to suggest that weakening gender barriers and implementing self-ID would lead to these ludicrous situations.

Sure, and why not? Their opponents still concede the frame. The linked article continues to refer to the male rapist in question as "she", despite this guy looking like a parody of the "men will exploit this system" claim. Sturgeon says:

She said: "There is no automatic right for a trans woman convicted of a crime to serve their sentence in a female prison even if they have a gender recognition certificate.

Notice the verbiage there, that there is no "automatic right", as though it's something that's often entirely reasonable. She added:

The first minister also stressed it was careful that people "do not, even inadvertently, suggest that trans women pose an inherent threat to women", adding: "Predatory men, as has always been the case, are the risk to women."

Well, I'll go ahead and suggest it - trans "women" that look like parodies of men in drag pose an inherent threat to women. That this sentiment is still outside the Overton Window of polite conversation is precisely why it makes sense for the people that want to weaken gender to keep calling people bigots. Why not? If even the policy-makers that eventually move male rapists out of female prisons maintain that there's nothing particularly predatory about trans "women" in female prisons, continuing to press the point makes sense.

Sure, and why not? Their opponents still concede the frame.

I'm unsure, but maybe they have to in the UK? I know that they've sent policemen to people's houses for trans critical tweets, so it's possible it runs afoul of some hate speech law.

Lol. There were a few admittedly ridiculous instances here and there of police visits but a) they didn't result in anything (still silly but an important caveat) and crucially b) that it absolutely not the norm. I mean you can go on twitter right now and see loads and loads of British commentators and other twitter users with names and faces etc. taking a v. critical position on trans issues. I mean this is just an absurd suggestion to make.

"Predatory men, as has always been the case, are the risk to women."

So are they men or are they women? Because if this guy isn't a woman, then all the trans stuff is just pretence and he shouldn't be humoured in it; he should be referred to by his real name and not allowed prance about in wigs and false nails and pink.

If she is a real trans woman, then she's not a predatory man, she's a predatory trans woman who is an inherent threat to women.

You can't eat your cake and have it, too: if Adam Graham is not trans, then the whole trans thing is mainly a pretence since it's so easy to claim to be a woman. If Isla Bryson is trans, as claimed (and their origin story sounds like it's taking the familiar path - see below), then trans women can be threats and it's not being a TERF to think that allowing people with penises into spaces where other people have suffered at the hands of people with penises is a bad idea.

Imagine if Isla turned up at a domestic violence shelter where one of her rape victims was also living. Is it TERFy to say that maybe Isla should not be taken in to that shelter? Or indeed any female shelter, since Isla has demonstrated she is not safe to be around women?

Originally a male named Adam Graham, Bryson has claimed to have known she was transgender since the age of four, but did not decide to begin the process of transitioning until the age of 29. At the time of her trial she was undergoing hormone treatment and seeking surgery to complete her gender reassignment. Bryson was briefly married after meeting a woman through a dating app in 2015, but the marriage, which occurred the following year, ended unhappily. As a male Bryson told her trial she had also struggled with her sexuality, and had been in relationships with men as well as women.

This is also broader than the entire question of trans rights and if it's all a con job; the perfectly safe and harmless guy out on bail while awaiting trial for rape was able to enrol on a beauty therapy course as a woman and be around young women for a whole three months:

STV News has learnt that Isla Bryson, who was this week convicted of raping two women, attended classes at Ayrshire College’s Kilwinning Campus in 2021, while awaiting trial.

Bryson, previously known as Adam Graham, was on Tuesday found guilty of raping one woman in Clydebank in 2016 and another in Drumchapel, Glasgow, in 2019, following a trial at the High Court in Glasgow.

Susan Smith from the campaign group For Women Scotland said: “He was charged under his original name, Adam Graham, and presumably they knew him by his new name, so they (fellow students) probably wouldn’t have been able to find out anything about this person.

“It’s absolutely terrifying that people can hide their identities and gain access to young women in this way.”

The course involved Bryson enrolled on featured a mix of classroom work and practical elements such as students doing each other’s make-up.

The other students were almost exclusively female and much younger than Bryson, who is now 31.

A statement from Ayrshire College said: “We can confirm the individual was enrolled as a student at Ayrshire College for a three-month period in 2021 and is no longer a student with the College.

I suppose we can only be thankful she didn't decide to try raping anyone else during this period. What the hell kind of carry-on is this?

Also why women are paranoid about meeting men; this specimen met women online and seems to have done this as a deliberate strategy to find vulnerable women (his ex-wife and the two women he raped) so while it's not fair to treat all men as potential threats, this kind of case doesn't help.

Of course, I've not seen even a hint of reflection on this from the very people who called it bigoted to suggest that weakening gender barriers and implementing self-ID would lead to these ludicrous situations. If anything, activists seem to be doubling down on the claim that anyone who raised the alarm about this was just being bigoted instead of letting the process play out.

Meanwhile, a second plane has struck the Towers

This is old news. It's not the first case of a male sex offender being sent to women's prison, it's the first where politicians found themselves answering for it. Activists have moved from "it will never happen" to "it's a good thing that it did" years ago.

"Predatory men, as has always been the case, are the risk to women"

says Nicola Sturgeon. Well, if this prisoner is not a man, then they're not a predatory man. If they're not a predatory man, then they are not a threat to women. If they are not a threat to women, then they should pass their risk assessment.

So, it follows from her view that even though the prisoner should not be transferred to the women's prison, they should be.

Yvette Cooper just seems overwhelmed by the whole matter:

"It should be clear that if someone poses a danger to women and committed crimes against women, they should not be being housed in a women's prison"

I am pretty confident that Cooper has never been to Cornton Vale, though she may have been to other women's prisons given she's Shadow Home Secretary. She would know that there are a lot of prisoners who are dangers to women and who have committed crimes against women. Sexual crimes? Well, probably not convicted, but "crime" and "sex crime" are not the same thing. One of the main reasons to put female criminals in a prison is that they are dangerous to other women. One would hope that Cooper, if she is going to be Home Secretary, would know that already.

I can see that Nicola Sturgeon is trying to say "not all trans people" and that's perfectly true. There are a lot of trans women out there who are not sex offenders and rapists.

The problem is the loudmouth activists and the crazy ones, as well as the predatory guys who suddenly discover their inner femaleness when the prospect of being sent to a men's jail and having the shit kicked out of them arises. If, like J.K. Rowling, you can be vilified as a TERF and have people doing their best to destroy you (thankfully their best is not very good at all) simply for commonsense observations that hey, maybe putting people with dicks in the same space as people who have been hurt by people with dicks is not a good idea, then we're going to have more of this kind of thing: the rapist was always a Real Woman and you are the insensitive boor for deadnaming her.

We really are going to have to look hard at the idea of transgender being a mental health issue, if the likes of these guys are going to be cropping up again and again. Maybe they really are trans, but it's all part of a pathology. It's a gradient - dysphoria is a mental health issue, but you have milder (person just wants to transition and live like an ordinary person) and graver (sex offenders who are probably getting off on the notion of being a woman).

We really are going to have to look hard at the idea of transgender being a mental health issue, if the likes of these guys are going to be cropping up again and again.

I feel like we should have looked at it hard as a mental illness or paraphilia when people started to suggest surgically removing their genitals. Like...we don't need more than that. Prima facie that is a strong indicator of potential mental illness that needs to be examined.

But an utterly contingent act of sidling up to another sexual minority civil rights movement seems to have led to people to be less critical in assuming that this is just more of the same: a harmless deviation from the norm.

And somehow the fact that trans are making claims that gays didn't (e.g. you need to provide an intensive suite of self-modification tools so I can pretend to be a woman or I will kill myself vs. just don't be bigoted towards me) doesn't seem to penetrate. If anything people use it in defense of uncritically accepting transpeople as the next civil rights cause when it seems to be the best argument for a mental illness definition of trans-identification.

I personally think this is incoherent but it manifestly seems to not bother others.

I'm not sure what Dreher's Law is - searching with DuckDuckGo suggests it's something to do with a Nazi prosecutor - but if defying it means trans women convicted of sex offenses will be put in male prisons, then while I would consider that a win, I wouldn't say it's completely out of the woods. Trans rights activists will almost certainly campaign for that trans woman to be put back in a female prison and may even end up reversing the decision.

Dreher’s Law of Merited Impossibility: X will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.

That is clever and astute.

I think it is.

Some people make accusations of conspiracy theory or slippery slope fallacies, but really would like to slide a step further down the slope and will suddenly switch to "and of course it is a good thing" after the latest slide down the slope has occurred. A handy term to group these people together could be valid.

It's a touch of motte-and-bailey while simultaneously pushing everyone down the slope while denouncing everyone who notices.

Is it really?

The original article is halfway to Moldbug levels of purple prose. The hypocrisy of the "overclass" is assumed rather than shown.

I'll agree with @4bpp.

I still think that it's actually more of a memetic superweapon in the class of bingo boards than an astute observation. Show me one example where someone actually says something that it is fair to gloss by this abbreviation, as part of one utterance, because as far as I can tell, all examples including the present one actually fall into one of the following patterns:

  • One person says "X will never happen". Another person says something that may be interpreted as "When X happens, you bigots will deserve it." This means nothing, unless you fall to the old temptation of treating the statements of all outgroup members as being coordinated.

  • One person says "X will never happen". Later, under different circumstances, the same person says something that may be interpreted as (...). This is only objectionable insofar as the person revised their former prediction without publicly conceding that they were wrong/miscalibrated/overdramatic before. The culture war is replete with people on all sides being wrong, miscalibrated and overdramatic and making no admission thereof, no doubt fueled by an overwhelming desire to imagine oneself the underdog ("the ingroup will NEVER win this much, since our enemies are too strong"), so I'm not particularly convinced that your outgroup is uniquely guilty of this.

  • One person actually says something like "X will never happen, but if X were to happen, you bigots would deserve it". I don't see anything inconsistent about this viewpoint, and I'm sure your ingroup believes lots of things that have this shape as well. If X does later happen, then the miscalibration thing above applies, but that's about it.

I personally encountered "vaccine passes will never be introduced in this country" and "why are you mad that vaccine passes have been introduced? Are you an anti-vaxxer?" during Covid. I can't say with perfect confidence that the same person said both, but I'm quite confident that I've never heard someone admitting fault for falsely asserting that vaccine passes would never be introduced.

That's the second point in my taxonomy, I believe. I stand by the statement that if the problem is just about mispredictions without subsequent apology, this is a nothingburger on the culture war grading curve.

Symmetrically, do you not imagine yourself possibly acting in the following way?

  • You predict that vaccine mandates will never be banned in the US.

  • Later, against all odds(?), compulsory vaccination is in fact banned. Someone in circles of what you thought were respectable right-wing peers is mad about this. You say something to them that amounts to "why are you mad that mandatory vaccination has been banned? Are you a progressive?". It does not seem relevant in this case to go out of your way to revisit your past prediction.

During the pandemic, I was seriously concerned that vaccine passes in the country in which I live were the first step on a slippery slope to a China-style social credit system, and sincerely predicted as much in public fora. When this came not to pass and vaccine passes were (eventually) abolished, I was only too happy to admit my error in judgement, as basic humility and epistemic hygiene demand. I am proud of my ability to acknowledge my mistakes and not to pretend that I have always been at war with Eastasia, even if it would be expedient to do so.

One example that I recall was that the classical liberal "You don't like gay marriage? Don't get gay married!" has turned into punitive attacks on cake decorators.

This is only objectionable insofar as the person revised their former prediction without publicly conceding that they were wrong/miscalibrated/overdramatic before.

The key observation is not that they were wrong, but that if a right-winger was foolish enough to believe them when they said it wouldn't happen, they'd be wrong, and that the right-winger probably shouldn't believe them the next time, either.

The general expression of this is "Cancel culture is not a thing at all, it's all a right-wing invention, nobody gets fired or removed from their job just for saying something" and then when someone has been fired, or otherwise removed from a position, just for saying something by the activists baying for blood then it's "X was engaging in hate speech and it's a good thing this happened to them".

You can argue (and I'm inclined to agree) that that particular instance is bad and calling it out is appropriate. What makes this a rhetorical superweapon is that it is effectively applied even in cases (such as, arguably, this one) where it is not.

One person says "X will never happen". Another person says something that may be interpreted as "When X happens, you bigots will deserve it." This means nothing, unless you fall to the old temptation of treating the statements of all outgroup members as being coordinated.

When One refuses to notice the existence of Another or treats you as crazy for believing that Another said something that may be considered representative, it's a mite insulting.

I think youre missing an important part. The whole conversation the idea describes goes more like this:

A: "We shouldnt do Y, that would imply we should also do X, which is bad"

B: "X will never happen, it would be totally safe to do Y"

Y is done, X happens

A: *angry*

B: "Obviously its good that X happened, its good for the same reason Y is good, are you really such a backward bigot that you think even Y is bad, or are you too dumb to understand consistent principles?"

Your third scenario is not a case of the pattern at all, because the "X will never happen" isnt used to assuage. Your second scenario might be, but I think youll find very few examples of conservatives using it that way. They just dont get enough wins for that.

As for the first example... well somewhere in between those two totally different people saying these things, the X did in fact happen. That would be very unlikely if noones mind changed. So propably there is a significant faction who made the switch in-one-person.

But thats not particularly relevant. The point is that you shouldnt believe the "X will never happen", and waxing about how totally sincere the liberals are and how mean and unsportsmanlike it is to say theyre not doesnt change that.

or:

I think it's interesting how it combines or reconciles two contradictory things ,one that is unpopular with another which is at least not as bad. For example, censorship is generally unpopular. It's hard to make a case for it. No company or group can easily come out as openly pro-censorship. But preventing hate or misinformation is at least easier to justify due to the socially desirability bias. So it's like, "We will not censor (or 'we are committed to speech'), but if there is censorship, it's to prevent hate speech/misinformation." This is the sort of logic I have observed with the left, at least. It's like a motte and bailey.

One person actually says something like "X will never happen, but if X were to happen, you bigots would deserve it". I don't see anything inconsistent about this viewpoint, and I'm sure your ingroup believes lots of things that have this shape as well. If X does later happen, then the miscalibration thing above applies, but that's about it.

I wish that this was the standard formulation of the law, for exactly the reasons you suggest. It's a case of bad argumentation that's not as simple as inconsistency, but which justifiably aggrieves people. You could probably spend years of research doing informal logic to work out what is wrong with it (insincerity? excessive discursive robustness?) but that doesn't mean it's right.

After all, our ability to systematically categorise and understand pathologies of human thought is far from advanced:

https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html

Hey I only got like ten paragraphs into this, and I would like to read the rest, but it feels a bit like a shaggy dog joke. Is the issue that when smart people are interested in something they get super invested in it and start talking in circles like an obsessed lunatic? Does he acknowledge that he is doing that in this essay?

He's talking like an obsessed lunatic, but not in circles. And the issue is that, when humans leave relatively concrete domains, our thinking tends to fall apart in a very diverse range of ways.

I'm not sure what Dreher's Law is

The Law Of Merited Impossibility

The Law Of Merited Impossibility is an epistemological construct governing the paradoxical way overclass opinion makers frame the discourse about the clash between religious liberty and gay civil rights. It is best summed up by the phrase, “It’s a complete absurdity to believe that Christians will suffer a single thing from the expansion of gay rights, and boy, do they deserve what they’re going to get.”

There are popular formulations that make it less specific to gay marriage like "that'll never happen but, when it does, you bigots will deserve it/it'll be good".

In this case, we've seen the absolute refusal to grant any potential downsides like this specific scenario, until it happened.

I wouldn't say it's completely out of the woods

Neither would I. To be frank: even having this discussion at all seems like a sign of vast confusion, in multiple domains.

But, while I did start to write a "Dreher's Law strikes again?" post I think it's fair to note that the worst didn't happen...yet. While pointing out that it still could.

the worst didn't happen...yet.

Yes it did. Like I said, it's old news.

I think it's fair to note that the worst didn't happen...

I don't think it's fair at all. If anything, the fact that Bryson ended up in a Women's prison in the first place kind of proves Dreher's point.

I think it's fair to note that the worst didn't happen

Not the worst, but a significant step on the slope. "What if a rapist identifies as trans and wants to be transferred to a women's prison?" was one of those steps on the slope that we weren't supposed to think about.

"What if a rapist identifies as trans and wants to be transferred to a women's prison?" was one of those steps on the slope that we weren't supposed to think about.

It was one of those steps we were told absolutely would not happen, could not happen, and we were just bigots and horrible people for even suggesting it. Years back on Ozy's old blog, to be fair to them, they did let a lot of discussion between conservative-leaning and others happen, and the trans thing was just taking off - this was the time of the bathroom laws. And one of the rock-solid principles the pro-trans right side insisted on was that no boy or man would ever pretend to be a woman, because the social costs were just too high, and for what? The chance to leer at naked women? And anyway, if any man did do this, they weren't really trans in the first place. So there could never be anyone pretending to be trans because if they did, then they weren't really trans, and only real trans people counted and real trans people would never do anything bad, they just wanted to use the bathroom.

Well, years of fighting hard to reduce the social costs of claiming to be the other sex have paid off with this kind of happening. And of course, we saw with the Loudoun County school case, they did all run out with "the boy wasn't really trans/never said he was trans or gender-fluid" after it was proven he did indeed assault two girls.

So where do you envision this slope leading?

On that matter, I'm not sure that this idea that people should actually be encouraged to think (non-quantitatively) about outrage-provoking edge cases of a policy would at all work in favour of the right-wing agenda. Most right-wing causes (access to guns, religious freedom, restrictions on abortion...) have edge cases that the median grilling centrist will find far more outrage-inducing (school shootings! sadistic pastors running special Jesus camps in their basement! 10 year old pregnant rape victims!) than that some rapist got transferred to women's prison. (Even if we assume that the prison environment is so lax that this basically guarantees that our protagonist will be able to rape the female inmates, they're prisoners! The median normie doesn't know any women who went to prison, can't imagine women going to prison for anything short of "microwaved her 2 year old", and probably has laughed about prison rape jokes when it was about male prisons)

I, for my part, don't find single instances of any of those situations to be particularly meaningful. In this particular case, if the prison can't be expected to prevent the rapist from assaulting other inmates, it seems to me that something is wrong with it that goes beyond admitting biologically male rapist inmates, and would only be hacked around by not doing that. Women sexually abusing other women is a thing that also happens; is the implication that that is less concerning?

Women sexually abusing other women is a thing that also happens; is the implication that that is less concerning?

The fact that cis women cannot impregnate other cis women is a major contributing factor why male-on-female rape has historically been considered a graver crime than female-on-female rape. For this specific reason, male prisoners raping female prisoners is a qualitatively different problem to female prisoners raping other female prisoners.

So where do you envision this slope leading?

If trans rapists have to be referred to as "she" by news reports, or else, even when they were still presenting as male at the time of committing rapes, then I think we're sliding downhill pretty fast.

If Isla and her ilk are really trans, then they're really women. And it's unjust and unequal treatment to make a woman serve a sentence in a men's prison. So they should be sent to female prisons. Otherwise we are not treating trans people equally, and it's TERF and it's the trans genocide and all the rest of it.

You can't say it's a mental illness. You have to accept it as normal. Look, they even have their own Pride flag! And if it's normal, then we will have women raping other women, using their feminine penis to do so, and nobody can say a word about it because you're guilty of transphobia and hate crime Trans rapists are real women too and should be housed in accordance with their gender, which means women's prisons.

Just accept the new reality, women can have dicks, men can get pregnant, and trans criminals are not representative of all trans people, even if they seem to be disproportionately sex offenders. Any questioning around what does constitute being transgender or how can we identify it is medical gatekeeping and oppression. Denial or psychological screening means driving trans people to suicide.

So where do you envision this slope leading?

A number of locations are plausible, but one of the more probable is towards treating trans women in the same way as non-trans women.

On that matter, I'm not sure that this idea that people should actually be encouraged to think (non-quantitatively) about outrage-provoking edge cases of a policy would at all work in favour of the right-wing agenda. Most right-wing causes (access to guns, religious freedom, restrictions on abortion...) have edge cases that the median grilling centrist will find far more outrage-inducing (school shootings! sadistic pastors running special Jesus camps in their basement! 10 year old pregnant rape victims!) than that some rapist got transferred to women's prison. (Even if we assume that the prison environment is so lax that this basically guarantees that our protagonist will be able to rape the female inmates, they're prisoners! The median normie doesn't know any women who went to prison, can't imagine women going to prison for anything short of "microwaved her 2 year old", and probably has laughed about prison rape jokes when it was about male prisons)

Do you think that outrage-provoking edge cases would not be used against right-wing agendas if the right-wing stopped encouraging median normies to think about outrage-provoking edge cases that could be used for right-wing agendas?

I, for my part, don't find single instances of any of those situations to be particularly meaningful. In this particular case, if the prison can't be expected to prevent the rapist from assaulting other inmates, it seems to me that something is wrong with it that goes beyond admitting biologically male rapist inmates, and would only be hacked around by not doing that.

Is your suggestion that everyone who is worried about biological male rapists in women's prisons are not concerned about rape in women's prisons?

Women sexually abusing other women is a thing that also happens; is the implication that that is less concerning?

It seems uncharitable to assume that the concern is about an asymmetry of outcome rather than an asymmetry of probability. Certainly, Mother Theresa killing and eating a woman is just as bad as Ted Bundy doing it, but that doesn't mean that we can't have asymmetries of concern. If you think you can demolish a widespread position in two clauses, perhaps you consider the possibility that you haven't appreciated some of the nuances of that position.

A number of locations are plausible, but one of the more probable is towards treating trans women in the same way as non-trans women.

I did get the impression recently that there is a push to drop the "trans" bit and just refer to them as "women".

And some are arguing that taking hormones means that trans women are indeed biologically female, so you can't make a distinction between biological sex and social gender. They are not biologically male, they are biologically female.

Some may not go that far, but they do hold that trans women are women and trans men are men, so you have to include trans women as well as cis women in the category of "woman".

Good points.

Slippery slope arguments aren't fallacious if you have good reasons to think that the slope is slippery.

some are arguing that taking hormones means that trans women are indeed biologically female

From the link: "to be a trans woman is to have been through, be going through, be intending to go through, or desire to go through a process that results in a change of a person's sex to female"

Tacitly admitting that only men can be trans women makes a poor argument that they're women. Wait a second, notice the sleight of hand in framing the premise in gender terms and the conclusion in sex terms? Very clever! But oh no, wait a second longer, that means a female can't be a trans woman.

Using the writer's own definition, either a) gender is primary and only a man can be a trans woman, or b) sex is primary and a female can never be a trans woman. Conclusion: Trans women aren't women and they aren't female. Alternatively, man and woman are empty signifiers and the pursuit to justify crossing from one category to the other renders the enterprise meaningless.

My position - the position a decade of high tempo trans rights advocacy itself has led me to - is that trans women aren't trans women either. It's a polite fiction. The uncomfortable reality is that they're transgender men with bad logic and a rhetoric built of sophistry. I've got no business telling them how to live their lives: change your name, buy some surgery, switch your wardrobe! I won't stop you. Demonstrate adequate commitment and I'll refer to you by the fitting pronouns and use practical labels out of simple pragmatism. But don't claim seriously that you are what you aren't and you aren't what you are.

[And vice versa re women/men and males/females.]

to go through a process that results in a change of a person's sex to female

Given that it is (currently) impossible to change one's sex, this definition implies that "trans women" is an empty set.

Even if we assume that the prison environment is so lax that this basically guarantees that our protagonist will be able to rape the female inmates, they're prisoners! The median normie doesn't know any women who went to prison, can't imagine women going to prison for anything short of "microwaved her 2 year old", and probably has laughed about prison rape jokes when it was about male prisons

I'm not sure it matters. Even putting aside a women are wonderful effect , I think some policies can be unpopular or eye-catching enough that it draws a serious political backlash. Which seems to have happened.

Especially when the underlying logic is also being used in other highly visible cases like women's bathrooms (which almost all women use) and schooling (which many people use) and sports (which many people don't play but gets outsized visibility)

I, for my part, don't find single instances of any of those situations to be particularly meaningful.

I do, when:

  1. The problem is totally avoidable and was in fact predicted ahead of time.

  2. It's motivated by a maladaptive ideology that will not be content to stop here.

  3. It is worse than a previously used or easily implemented alternative.

My problem with this is not that one person did it. I don't freak out at every car accident or serial killer. That's a real random, individual act that is probably not driven by policy - i.e. doesn't require large masses of people (or a small mass of dedicated elites) to buy into an ideology I find perverse and then instantiate that, even partly.

The fact that this - a rapist man - was even potentially a possibility is bad. Because going from an absurdity to a possibility for social ills is bad. Going from an absurdity to a possibility despite being clearly warned about it and the consequences being utterly predictable should make you worry about the ideological gulf between you and the lawmakers of your country.

Women sexually abusing other women is a thing that also happens; is the implication that that is less concerning?

The argument is simple:

  1. Women are less aggressive and physically powerful than men

  2. Therefore women are less likely to be in prison for violent crime. In fact: less women exist in prison period.

  3. Women are less likely to commit violent sex crimes.

  4. Women are also more likely to be the victims of said crime at the hands of men.

  5. Thus segregating women can not only reduce incidences of said male-on-female crime, but women's spaces can be more appropriately designed given their different crime patterns.

  6. Allowing men into female prisons breaks all of this. Not only are more powerful and aggressive men more likely to assault women (they assault men right now and they're harder targets), this will almost certainly lead to changes in female prisons to minimize this (e.g. more restrictive to provide more safety)

  7. Of course, as mentioned, there're far more men in prison than women so even a small transfer can have disproportionate impacts.

  8. Even worse than that: there are other practical considerations. The most obvious being the fewer men in female prisons the less the risk of pregnancies that the state will have to pay to take care of.

This situation seems like it makes women worse off for...minimal gain to say the least, while not helping the vast majority of men who do face more violence in prison. Women face increased threat from men. A few men get to transfer to women's jails while everyone else suffers. The more of them that do get to transfer, the more female jails simply resemble male jails and defeat the purpose.

I frankly see little to recommend this as a policy. If I had a metaphysical belief that TWAW then maybe I would feel differently. But I do not, and I think there's limits to how far people's self-making should go.

You might recall that an adjunct professor was let go from Hamline University after a Muslim student complained about a depiction of the prophet Muhammad shown in class. The immediate responses were not terribly surprising to me. Given past incidents, I assumed that college administrators would have an interest towards affirming the student's complaint, no matter how unreasonable it was. This panned out, with the university president issuing a very bizarre statement where she presented non-sequiturs like:

To suggest that the university does not respect academic freedom is absurd on its face. Hamline is a liberal arts institution, the oldest in Minnesota, the first to admit women, and now led by a woman of color. To deny the precepts upon which academic freedom is based would be to undermine our foundational principles.

What do the demographics of the university president have to do with academic freedom? Fuck if I know.

Similarly, I also assumed that non-profit organizations would have an interest to bolster their profile by seizing upon the incident. This too panned out, with the local Minnesota Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) chapter condemning the professor as Islamophobic. The local chapter's executive director even dismissed the fact that the professor went out of her way to add a content warning and said "In reality a trigger warning is an indication that you are going to do harm."

Since then, things have changed. First, the national CAIR organization felt the need to step in and rebuke the local chapter, and issued a (tepid) defense of the scorned professor. Then, Hamline University faculty just voted overwhelmingly (71-12) to ask the president to step down. For a defense of freedom of expression, the statement they issued is (at least on its face) pretty good.

Both of these developments surprised me, and it made me wonder whether this is a sign of a potential turning point on the topic of suppressed freedom of expression on campus.

Both of these developments surprised me, and it made me wonder whether this is a sign of a potential turning point on the topic of suppressed freedom of expression on campus.

If it is, it's only the most mild of turnaround, aided by the professor being genuinely careful and sensitive about Islamic sensibilities. Genuine academic freedom would include the ability to say, "yes, I am an Islamophobe, and the Muslim reaction to this situation has amply demonstrated why". I cannot imagine such a statement failing to elicit firing, blackballing, and maybe even a civil rights investigation.

the local Minnesota Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) chapter condemning the professor as Islamophobic

Yes, standard accusations of Islamophobia. But also:

“If you want to know how people respond, you've seen what happened in the horrible tragedies of Charlie Hebdo..."

-Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations

I didn't know about these comments before and they seem even worse in context:

When Hussein opened the floor for questions, the first was from Mark Berkson, chair of Hamline’s religion department. “I’ve taught Islam at Hamline for 22 years,” Berkson began. “This event was organized in response to something very particular. This wasn’t hate speech or vandalism or violence.” Berkson’s core objection was that, contrary to Hussein’s claims, there has been historically, and is even now, substantial diversity of opinion within Islam on the extent to which images of the Prophet are forbidden. “What does one do when the Muslim community itself is divided on an issue? There are many Muslim scholars, and experts, and art historians, who do not believe that this was Islamophobic.”

At this point in the video recording of the conversation, a woman’s silhouette moves into view and approaches Berkson; she apparently intends to stop him from talking. “It’s OK,” Hussein said, and Berkson went on: “In this particular case we have a work of art considered a treasure and masterpiece by scholars, painted by Muslim artists for a Muslim king that honors the Prophet —”

Hussein interrupted him. “You can stop.” Then: “Here’s what I’m going to tell you. If you share pedophilia in this school as an art, I’m happy for you to show the picture of our Prophet. But if you don’t do that, then you’re not going to disrespect our Prophet.” Hussein then launched into a long, rather confusing comparison involving Hitler. After all, he said, some people — some white Minnesotans, even — think Hitler was good. But that wouldn’t justify teaching a pro-Hitler class! “If you ask me right now, I’ll come back with a 26-page paper telling you why Hitler was good. That does not make it right.”

The Chronicle seems to be the only place that printed this quote, and I'm really curious why the audio/video was not released anywhere else.

Based Chris Rufo demonstrates how to deny the heckler’s veto.

I have to give credit where credit is due and say that's an admirable display of conduct from Rufo. I wish he'd spend less time with Chinese cardiologist insinuations and more on what the video showed.

Great link, in terms of actually digging down instead of flinging talking points. My take is that Rufo is comfortable fighting fire with fire, getting dirty with the hogs, etc. He can also shower off and don a 3 piece suit for the Harvard set.

My impression of Rufo is in line with my impression of De Santis: these guys are getting soft-balled. It's almost staged. Not to say they aren't sincere or competent – they are – but it's not some political brilliance to flip the board (of trustees), it's making use of available resources in an allowed way. This woman in the video is blatantly trying to overstep her authority with a two-bit safetyist sermon based on a low-effort anonymous threat, she's a predictable villain of the week, and she's alone – physically at least. This also suggests that conservatives who got heckled out of colleges and demonized within the prestigious discourse were drooling morons who couldn't navigate their own spaces. I guess this looks plausible today to some (e.g. Hanania), but it hadn't been the case during the slow purge. So how come they lost so hard?

The hard stuff is not politely standing your ground before an old crone who wags her wrinkly finger and tries to make you feel like a naughty child – though I suppose for decent prosocial people (as well as for simple folk with poorer impulse control than what a snake in a suit like Rufo can display) that may be hard too. It's withstanding pressure in tens if not hundreds of dimensions; from direct physical intimidation and obstruction, to your own family beginning to feel shame for you, to business boycotts, to vilification coordinated by large orgs who can rope in public icons, to actual legitimate decrees, to plain apathy of your network which is sane, myopically, and so doesn't feel like fighting such an uphill battle is worth the effort.

Manipulation of procedural outcomes relies not so much on high-IQ plays as on slow march through the institutions and seizing control over many nodes at once, to the point it's redundant. When you know that there's at least one friendly Board above any Board that your enemy may coordinate to seize, it's hard to lose. Unless you decide to throw the match, or implode from within.

This also suggests that conservatives who got heckled out of colleges and demonized within the prestigious discourse were drooling morons who couldn't navigate their own spaces. I guess this looks plausible today to some (e.g. Hanania), but it hadn't been the case during the slow purge. So how come they lost so hard?

Conservatism in America has never been about fighting hard . Conservatism is inherently defensive (negative vs. positive rights). This puts the right at a disadvantage against the left. For the right to succeed, it needs the status quo to change. It cannot just force change.

these guys are getting soft-balled. It's almost staged.

I understand your point, but disagree. I felt kinda bad posting Rufo dunking on the Karen president, particularly in response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre, but I also feel like we've seen tons of well-meaning administrators cave to the forces of safetyism and pearl-clutching in order to prevent certain views from being aired.

But there's kind of a structural bind here: if Karen wants to come back from this setback, she needs to go, ultimately, full Charlie Hebdo. There are of course many steps in that direction. But Karen now needs to pray for violence in order to prevent speech. Yet -- where security and safety are truly concerns, one may host debates in highly secure environments.

I also feel like we've seen tons of well-meaning administrators cave to the forces of safetyism and pearl-clutching in order to prevent certain views from being aired.

That's just another layer of the onion. The same "well-meaning administrators" would not respond the same way to similar threats against talks pushing opposite views. Such a threat would not be used stop the threatened talk, and would instead be used as an excuse to crack down on opponents of those views. This is what makes the tactics asymmetric; it's why right-wingers can't just send in anonymous threats (through the obligatory nine proxies) to put a stop to leftist talks.

So how come they lost so hard?

Perhaps like the mainstream media: at the start of Fox News it did lean left, though not as heavily. Fox drew a lot of right-wing people which made the media be perceived as even more left-leaning, combined with the polemics against this which also drove conservatives away into their own networks because the rest of the media was seen as a leftist province. Polarization begets polarization.

There is a difference of course: conservatives didn't run away from school altogether. So why the rout? Well, I suspect that's where civil rights law and DEI initiatives come in. Cons could still go to schools, and still go to less "woke" subjects but the university's social policy had to be subject to Title IX and other "woke" laws (shaped by ideology in spaces dominated by the left and enforced by administrators who may have been woker than the median professor) and, especially, how the government du jour interprets them.

If anything, what makes Rufo and DeSantis effective is that they understand that part of the game is about the law and changing institutions, not just dispositional concerns that other, more left-wing critics of cancel culture raise which boil down to "just stand your ground if the cancellers come for your employees" or "maybe only cancel really bad people guys!"

Helps when you're a member of the college's board of trustees.

Chris Rufo is so clearly the rising star of the new-republican party. The guy is smart, knows how to hit back against his main ideological opponent in the woke & seems to be raking in the cultural wins one-after-another. He has an elite educational background while also living around west-coast liberals. Yet somehow, De Santis and republicans seem to trust him.

I don't necessarily agree with him, but watching him navigate these seemingly unwinnable fights and come out on top is fascinating.

I see him get called out for straw-manning & being a bad-faith actor, but his videos pretty much come across as a 'fight fire with fire' approach. The worst things people have to say about him, also apply to his ideological opponents.

Like him or not, he is interesting to follow.

I think his conduct in the video above is commendable but I still think he's too often a bad faith actor. One example happened after the spat between DeSantis and Disney, where Rufo jumped in to mention that a Disney employee has been arrested for child sex crimes at least once a year for the past decade, omitting that Disney employees 190,000 people and how that would compare to an average baseline.

I see him get called out for straw-manning & being a bad-faith actor

I don't think he's bad-faith, inasmuch as he's pretending to be something that he's not. He's openly a right-wing culture warrior, and he details exactly how he fights without reservation. When he was placed on the New College board by DeSantis, the NYT accused him of staging a "hostile takeover" of the school in order to roll back the "long march through the institutions" that had made such colleges left-wing bastions. His response was, essentially, "yes, that's exactly what I'm doing".

He's also strangely scrupulous for a culture warrior, refusing to engage in "groomer" rhetoric like his compatriots. Definitely a guy to watch for, as most people in his space develop acute Twitter Brain and self-immolate before they can have any sort of meaningful political impact.

He's openly a right-wing culture warrior

Yup, he's a clear political operator.

It's a strange category error when leftists cite him saying "Do X to win" (e.g. make sure parents associate woke ideology with CRT or vice versa) as if it's him using a logical fallacy in a formal debate or in a philosophical paper. As if political maneuvering hasn't always included this (see the conveniently named "Don't Say Gay" bill which deliberately picks the less controversial LGBT minority as the target and ignores anything else)

It might also reveal something about the mindset of political operatives on the Left: they seem to believe that they win via socratic dialogue and good faith and that similar tactics to Rufo's (or even ones much bigger in scope) aren't being used.

Suffice it to say, I'm sure their enemies are equally skeptical of them.

Committed leftists tend to use a reasoning process which finds the at very least plausible, logical extrapolation of a particular position and see if it violates any well established sacred values. They then declare it illegitimate if it does, and by extension declare illegitimate anyone who might raise it. Ex: If X is claiming blacks are unequal, and he's not claiming that this is the result of white actions --> there must be something fundamentally flawed with black people. People claiming there are fundamental flaws with black people, and by extension that race is a useful proxy for eliminating flawed traits must be racists. There are obvious discrepancies in outcomes. QED: Conservatives are racists. QED: Conservatives are evil and not legitimate critics, they are racists.

It's the Emperor's new clothes, if no one was allowed to mention the nakedness of the emperor and some people had convinced themselves they weren't alluding to it even when they obviously were. Apologies for the spelling errors, I'm drunk.

I saw a lot of this sort of thinking on those EA forums that were linked over the Bostrom controversy. It's a fundamental problem with collectivist, authoritarian thinking. They can't just accept a descriptivist fact, it must be twisted into a prescriptivist dictate.

I mean if I tell you, hey that pitbull is charging for your child - there's a gun in the car, I technically haven't made any policy prescriptions. Nonetheless, it's pretty obvious what basic widely shared moral intuitions demand that you do with those facts. This is why I bring up the emperor. In the real world, your emperor being deluded enough to fall for invisible clothes implies that him and/or his advisors need to be removed from power and there's no way around it.

The general atmosphere of seemingly paranoid fear among the blue tribe is totally legitimate. In this country, the kulaks never lost their guns and blue tribe subjected millions of their children and it's own (Columbia students ride the subway too) to disgusting conditions... for nothing. What is mind-boggling for me, having recently realized what this is in fact what we were doing and defected to the other side is finding that the dog-whistles we were worried about weren't dog whistles at all, and that there are only marginal elements in the red world interested in doing anything about it's subjection.

I see him get called out for straw-manning & being a bad-faith actor, but his videos pretty much come across as a 'fight fire with fire' approach. The worst things people have to say about him, also apply to his ideological opponents.

It's funny that I see a lot of criticism of him from other people who also criticize wokeness in the same way.

I think significant portion of those critics* are those who broadly agree with his ideological opponents except on a few issues or tactics and therefore are obliged to hate Rufo for working with The Enemy, even though that's basically the only way to achieve anything when one of two political parties is totally opposed to your positions.

Truth be told, there's a class of homeless leftists who I think are a) jealous that he can have an impact, b) have been browbeaten into ineffectiveness by the constant leftist smear that they're further right than they are and, unlike Rufo, aren't willing to bite the bullet and c) scared that by doing so he's empowering the right wing to achieve their other ends (e.g. weakening public schooling)

Ultimately, they're politically irrelevant, clinging on to some self-serving, slave morality definition of "good faith" in spite of its inertness on a policy level. I can see why they're resentful; they can't work with Republicans cause that's a no-no in today's polarized world, but their own side has cast them out as witches. Meanwhile Rufo is using all of their critiques** and winning.

* We know why his direct opponents don't care for consistency.

** I remember Katie Herzog being furious when Rufo (rightly) responded to a trans-skeptical feminist's accusation that he was appropriating their arguments without giving respect by pointing out that the feminists had either totally failed to hold the line on gender identity issues or had actively abetted the problematization of their own hard-fought privileges and so didn't deserve much respect anyway. Having the argument means nothing if you constantly lose or fold; Rufo was going to have to come up with the central piece -winning- on his own anyway, so it's a bit much to demand laurels.

You've hit the nail on the head. As much as I like B&R, Katie's comments on Rufo sounded more like jealously than disagreement. Katie has suffered some of the worst ostracization, while also having the least disagreements with her bullies on most issues. The lady was practically chased out of Seattle. It is natural for her to feel like she deserves the most credit, since she was the one who suffered most. Of course, your willingness to suffer quietly & ineffectively has nothing to do with who gets rewarded once the tide starts turning back again.

It's funny, because Katie's own co-host has written about a similar type of resentfulness from the monetary perspective. The good non-woke-liberal journalists rejected Substack to 'stick by the ingroup's rules', but were instead rewarded with paltry wages & editorial suppression at big media. On the other hand, the sub-stackers 'played dirty' by not following institutional rules, made $$$.

From the POV of on-the-ground impact, Chris Rufo is doing to the 'substack liberals', what the substack liberals did to institutional journalists from a monetary POV.

feminists had either totally failed to hold the line on gender identity issues or had actively abetted the problematization of their own hard-fought privileges and so didn't deserve much respect anyway. Having the argument means nothing if you constantly lose or fold

Harsh, impolite & more accusatory than was necessary....but fair.

Here is the reference to this

Thanks but - side question- does Nitter just not ever work for anyone else?

nitter DOT net is based in Germany, and German instances seem to work worse for me. I use nitter DOT 1d4 DOT us which works pretty well. There is a list of public instances at https://xnaas.github.io/nitter-instances/

Interesting - your comment reads "twitter dot com is based in Germany," but I assume you wrote "nitter dot net is based in Germany,". A side-effect of the Nitter option in user settings?

More comments

Yes! Although it seems to vary from day to day for me. One day it will load fine or after a couple of refreshes, the next day it just won't load no matter how many times I refresh. Now if it doesn't load after the third refresh I just cave and replace twitter.com with twitter.c0m like the quitter I am. I know I could change my account settings back to not redirecting, but nitter really is so much better when it works.

Edit lol I am dumb

I self-host my own instance, hadn't had issues since.

Twitter's API has been throttling lately. Just keep hitting refresh periodically.

Tends to work for me, but if it doesn't work for you there is a profile setting to not update the links to nitter.

Ah, that there is. Thank you.

This story is noteworthy because it happened to a professor; hardly anyone cares or talks about people who get fired from other professions for stupid, arbitrary reasons. Just as profs are at the mercy of students, other employees are at mercy of customers complaining, bosses, etc. It's like work is not fun and workers are in a precarious position and must be on their toes. Also, one must keep in perspective how uncommon this is. There are over 200k people employed in higher ed in the US in depending if you count full vs. part time, adjust vs. tenured, etc. --it's a lot.

But on the other hand, the notion of academic freedom is considered to be inviolable, which I guess is why these stories get so much attention despite being so rare. It also has a chilling effect, so it's not entirely isolated even though it's uncommon. I think only tenured profs are protected.

It's like work is not fun and workers are in a precarious position and must be on their toes.

I'm not speaking on this particular incident because I don't know enough details, but a lot of these people who get shoved out ceremoniously are in a precarious position for a reason totally unrelated to the incident--workplace feuds, poor performance, being a weirdo in a general undefined sense, etc. Then management or HR will take some arbitrary unsubstantiated claim and kick them out. This is pretty common in the mid and higher ranges of bureaucracies and probably makes up a lot of woke firings IMO.

This reads to me more like a story of Islam liberalizing than one of academic freedom. Freaking out over pictures of Muhammad isn't cool, makes Muslims look bad, and isn't what Islam is about. I can't help but notice the low-class, unsophisticated Somalis of the Minnesota chapter getting put in their place by the high-status, cosmopolitan Arab Muslims of the national CAIR.

Andy Ngo is notoriously opaque with his news commentary but I think the point he is trying to convey is clear when he posted a video of Muslims burning a Danish flag in protest of the guy who burned a Quran. I imagine the reaction to burning a Danish flag is a shrug, and so whatever point the Muslim protestors thought they made just ends up further exposing how alien their incomprehensible rage is.

What made this even worse is that the pictures were not modern Western depictions, they were mediaeval Persian ones and respectful. They were included in the class as part of having art history not be European-centric. Whatever about the Somali Muslim student (and this may have been her trying to get more political traction as often people involved in student body activism like this are hoping for a career in politics eventually), the response of the administration was beyond stupid. The Dean of Inclusiveness shouldn't even be a job in the first place, and by rushing a dumb statement as he did, should have been booted out on his backside. That the president fell into line and fired the professor is even worse. They didn't even bother looking at the case, they just caved in to some little madam instead of telling her that she's supposed to be a young adult and is going to university to get an education about the broader world and history, not to stamp her feet like a toddler.

I'm not one bit surprised any adult Muslims were embarrassed by this, it's not about "high-status cosmopolitan", it's about "do you want to make us all sound like we haven't a brain in our heads?"

Yes, the issue with drawing Prophet Mohammed is one of the more embarrassing things for secular Muslims.

Try as they might, there's really no pretending that this isn't an Islamic problem - Hindu nationalism is its own issue but no one kills Frenchmen over it - and one that can't be boiled down to economics or geopolitics (which amount to blaming America)

It's thus a place where Americans are less likely to be sympathetic.

It is interesting though; to see such pragmatism in activists. I guess it reflects more of a sense of vulnerability on Muslim activists compared to others.

I wonder if this is connected to the general trend of Islamic countries becoming more secular than before (see this and this), for example.

Both of these developments surprised me, and it made me wonder whether this is a sign of a potential turning point on the topic of suppressed freedom of expression on campus.

It's better than the opposite happening for sure. Although I think the whole depicting the prophet, at least in the states, isn't an establish route of canceling. Or at least if you want to establish a pattern can you find a past successful canceling over something like this?

Although I think the whole depicting the prophet, at least in the states, isn't an establish route of canceling.

If not outright "cancelling," it's the source of extreme skittishness. There's the famous instance of South Park intentionally poking at this issue (https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Muhammad) by including Muhammed amongst a group of superheroes. This episode cannot be found on HBOMax, Comedy Central or the official South Park website (run by Comedy Central).

My priors are that anyone who doesn’t vociferously apologize and try to make some costly signal of disowning the person who decided to depict Mohammed is laying a trap in some way.

disowning the person who decided to depict Mohammed

In this particular case, you'd be disowning two people who lived in the 14th and 16th centuries.

I find this an incredibly confusing take. I just find those people to be cowards, it's a much simpler reasoning. What trap are the setting?

edit: It's impossible for me to believe the group of who broadly support piss Christ, which I support too in its being legal and allowed if not very artistically interesting, have some kind of hang up of unnecessarily offending religious people.

It's impossible for me to believe the group of who broadly support piss Christ, which I support too in its being legal and allowed if not very artistically interesting, have some kind of hang up of unnecessarily offending religious people.

It's okay to offend Christians, particularly in the American context, since as we know they are all bitter clingers, racist rednecks with guns and Confederate flags who want to round up all the gays for torture conversion camps. They're the white majority so they're in power and it's punching up. Anyway, this is art and it's not your fault if the knuckle-draggers can't tell the difference.

It's not okay to offend other faiths because they are non-white, non-majority, and have been oppressed by the Christians in the past (Crusades, the Holocaust) and you can show how tolerant and inclusive and virtuous you are by supporting them and being good allies.

‘Hang up of unnecessarily offending religious people’ isn’t how I would describe my mental model of these people- more like genuine fear of terrorism coupled with a twinge of guilt about treading on the feelings of brown non-Christians.

On the other hand red tribers who hold Mohammed drawing competitions then stand around with their guns ready for an attack.

genuine fear of terrorism

It's in the rational self-interest for someone who feels they will have a guaranteed place and privileges (even under a society of 'enemy') to feel a genuine fear of losing them because they sided with the 'enemy' too enthusiastically.

On the other hand red tribers who hold Mohammed drawing competitions then stand around with their guns ready for an attack.

Yes, that's what you'd expect supply-side political action to look like. It should be revealing that the demand-side tribe's guns all belong to the supply-side tribe, this is why military organizations code red.

The meta-level of "Blue tribe's enemy is Red tribe, Red tribe's enemy is external" is "the demand-side tribe's enemy is the supply-side tribe, but the supply-side's enemy is external". Which is why the supply side's tactics are confrontational to things that code "external" (as in, that one should not say anything because their political enemies could get violent) in a way the demand side's aren't.

Uh, do you mind restating your thesis in smaller words? It’s clear as mud and maybe defining your terminology would help.

I, uh, assume the "trap" involves the "fuck around and find out" strategy of dealing with angry people who try to do something about the depictions, a la that incident at an art museum where a shooting was stopped by another guy with a gun.

IDK anything about a trap (or really what that guy meant), but I don't see them as cowards. That's just not the hill they want to literally die on. Someone who cared more about free speech might well decide to risk death on that hill though, and that's commendable.

If you're in a land where it's illegal and surrounded by people who suspect you're with the guy whose depicting the big Moh, sure self preservation yourself. If you're in the united states and no one is even asking you, and your reasoning for doing it is to avoid offense, yeah, that's not the same situation.

Who are we talking about here? I think the college president can't come out and say "that's dangerous," but she doesn't want to risk her staff, so she instead says that it's offensive. Maybe she's good at doublethink and has even internalized that. In the end we probably agree but I think there's still an element of danger (if much smaller) here in the US as well.

but she doesn't want to risk her staff

However, the backdrop is that the State (and the local social majority) won't back her up. Which is why regime-aligned speakers who threaten her staff all the same do not get shut down when a threat comes in.

Followed by a two parter where Tom Cruise wants to steal Muhammed's 'goo', which ended with comedy central censoring the image of Muhammed and bleeping the entirety of the boys' ending monologue (which explained the magical power of violence).

https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/criticizing-bostrom-stifles-honest

Criticizing Bostrom Stifles Honest Discussions and Encourages More Attacks - Those who dig up old messages with offensive content to expose to millions of people want to ruin reputations. We cannot empower these people to influence conversations about the future of humanity.

More discussion of the email incident with Bostrom. I make the case that Bostrom should not have to apologize and that philosophical discussions are an appropriate place to discuss offensive ideas. I argue that many Effective Altruists shouldn't be surprised that other Effective Altruists believe in cognitive differences between populations. I argue that the real purpose of the discussion around Bostrom is enforcing taboos. And that taboos around controversial topics can be very harmful. Being myself, I couldn't help but discuss cognitive enhancement and the taboos around it which are probably incredibly harmful.

I agree with your observations on the puritanism of Critical Social Justice and think the cancellation of Bostrom is ridiculous, but I want to comment on this:

This trend can be ethically and humanely reversed with the widespread adoption of genetic enhancement technology. This enhancement is not limited to cognitive ability. Since physical and psychological characteristics are under genetic influence, selecting or editing embryos can improve these traits. Since many traits are highly polygenic, potential returns can be substantial. Humans could have vastly better mental health, physical health, lifespan, and cognitive ability.

It does need stating that genetic modification leads us into a multipolar trap the ramifications of which are possibly quite large. For one, the optimal cognitive structure might not be anything like human neural architecture. Human cognition is a hodgepodge of simplistic drives and instincts that have slowly accreted over time despite the fact that these preferences often conflict with each other. A huge portion of the activities we view as imbuing life with meaning (art, music, etc) are actually inefficient reward-hacking behaviour and are a product of poor optimisation, and the probability that humans are the apotheosis of evolution, that we exist on the global optimum, is very low. At best, we exist on a local optimum which we can’t move off because the extremely gradual nature of evolution prevents us from moving past a “valley” in the fitness landscape where intermediate forms would have low fitness.

Technologies like genetic modification solve this failure of evolution to optimise, and that leads us into a situation wherein people and societies that fail to modify themselves in the “right” way will slowly disappear. It doesn’t matter how much we want to maintain our human minds and values or how instinctually repugnant we find abandoning them to be, we don't get to decide how we develop, there are many incentive structures baked into the fabric of reality that we just can’t escape. As Scott Alexander puts it, human agency in such a situation is a mere formality.

And once this technology is out there, there is no way to have a worldwide moratorium on it. The benefit of defection is too high, and any country which legalises modification and in fact makes it maximally available to its citizens will spread at the expense of others and at the expense of human-like cognition. Consider also that the people who optimise themselves for breeding and spreading many copies of their genes are going to be most successful, and this might accelerate population growth immensely and lead to a Malthusian situation wherein population bumps up against the limits of carrying capacity.

Of course because of the aforementioned issue regarding multipolar traps and arms races I don't think it is possible to stifle the creation of genetic technology in the first place, it's pretty much an inevitability, and if it's going to happen anyway it is reasonable for any given society to want to be at its forefront.

I've long accepted that any kids I have will seem at least slightly alien to me. I'm somewhat baffled that any reasonably intelligent person has had children within the last 50 years without expecting the same. Have you ever wondered what your twenty-times-great grandparents would think of your modern ways? Values change over time, even the most conservative RETVRN poasters are ideologically very different from medieval farmers -- and happily so. I don't want to dictate to future generations, any more than I'd want the ghosts of my ancestors dictating to me.

Maybe this goes wrong? Say economic doubling times continue to accelerate and the disconnect between generations grows larger than we can bear. Or maybe Aubrey de Grey wins and it goes the other way, with 200-year-old fogeys clogging up politics? It's all very uncertain to me, I'm worried about one or the other on alternate days of the week.

I agree that my kids will be somewhat alien. I guess I just want to make sure that this trajectory seems right to me? I don't know I find the whole framing a little stifling. We don't actually operate in a system when each generation takes a turn and then hands it off to the next generation. I don't want to dictate anything to the next generation, I just think I've actually figured some of all this complex living stuff out. It didn't come easy and some of it even came from the lessons of previous generations, part of each generation's process is to distill all of this understanding and pass it on. It's like the corporate speak concept of institutional knowledge. If they refused to take on that generation gift I think bad things might happen.

Scott has posted a short article: You Don’t Want a Purely Biological, Apolitical Taxonomy of Mental Disorders.

Takeaway:

if “political correctness” sounds too dismissive, we can rephrase it as: “they want something that doesn’t think about ethics and practicality at all, but which is simultaneously more ethically correct and pragmatically correct than other taxonomies”.

Some of Scott’s best work comes from the tension between categories-as-descriptive and categories-as-prescriptive, so I’m pleased to see him tackling this subject.

He has a couple potentially spicy sentences which have been interspersed with extra letters to ward off journalists. Legends say they aren’t able to remove text without an invitation, preventing context-removal. A handful of commenters immediately proceed to demonstrate why this will do nothing to keep some people from thinking Scott is literally Hitler, but perhaps it will keep them from publishing that? I’m not optimistic this will keep an opportunistic editor from stripping out letters with no direct relevance unless they’re legally required to put “…” in their place.

As I pointed out, the reason why newspapers have to point out when they remove words is not some principle of responsible journalism, it's the "does removing context and not pointing it out makes it easier to accuse me of lying than removing context and pointing it out?" Removing extraneous N's won't lead to such accusations, so the media would be perfectly willing to do it.

Scott's running on mistake theory and the media are not.

From a purely biological point of you foo and bar are propably pretty similar. Both are a person having AIDS. If this is accurate, the relevant difference between foo and bar is moral, not biological. Both involve getting infected with HIV, but in the foo case, the effected person is sexually oriented towards getting infected and participated willingly, and so its fine. In the bar case, the effected person is unwilling, so its bad.

So, should your purely apolitical taxonomy of mental physical disorders classify foo as a mental illness, or should it refuse to classify bar as a mental illness?

When the FTX thing happened recently and people argued about consequentialist justifications for lying, I realised Scotts theory of categories literally cant tell the difference between the truth and the highest-utility-thing-to-say. Now, he doesnt seem to know this. He thinks that:

There are facts of the matter on each individual point – whether a whale has fins, whether a whale lives in the ocean, whether a whale has tiny hairs, et cetera. But there is no fact of the matter on whether a whale is a fish. The argument is entirely semantic.

But thats not how it works. If tomorrow the Ministry of Hide-tanning decides that whale skin is hairless, you might insist that it obviously has hair, I mean look at it (possibly with some magnification). But they could just as well say "Well, there are facts on each individual point - whether they hold water, whether they resist against the grain, whether theyre made of ceratin, etc. But theres no fact to the matter whether theyre hairs."

More generally, "X falls in category(set) Y" and "X has property Z" are isomorphic - everything you can express in the first form, you can also express in the second, and vice versa. If "is a fish" really were just semantic, then by the same mechanism "has tiny hairs" would be just semantic. So there would be no facts based on which you can classify things.

The only thing that makes this theory remotely workable is that you already know which things you want to apply it too. Its pure Humpty-Dumpty-ism in practice.

I’m having trouble understanding your point, with a lot of what seem to me like unsubstantiated yet controversial assertions.

I think Scott's title is actually wrong. People do want a purely biological apolitical taxonomy of mental disorders - they just also want the world to be just, so there wouldn't be any conflict. That what is true and what we want to be true do, in the end, coincide; that the truth would never be inconvenient to those with the correct values.

I read Scott as saying “No, you don’t want to eat that tub of ice cream, even though you are tempted. It comes with consequences, laid out here, that you are not actually willing to accept”. Is that your read in this paragraph? I don’t think so, but I’m not sure what you’re getting at either.

To take a very different example: Todd Akin's claim that "legitimate rape" could not cause pregnancy: often considered an example of rank misogyny, but even if so, I would say it's much more importantly clear just-world thinking.

I’m not familiar with this person or claim. I’m struggling to understand how pregnancy can be ruled out, given PIV intercourse, whether coerced or not.

EDIT: Akin said “legitimate rape” rarely causes pregnancy, because because their bodies prevent them from doing so. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

I have no idea of the biology there. Maybe stress hormones in a traumatic situation somehow prevent conception? Does this still comport with your point?

I’m struggling with the rest, likely because of the above.

I’m not familiar with this person or claim.

Wikipedia has a quick rundown here. It was enormously controversial in 2012.

Thanks. I didn’t see any serious wrangling with the idea that the trauma and stress of a violent rape may induce physical changes that prevent conception. The wiki article showed many plausible statements from conservative doctors in support of the idea, and just bare rebuttals from the medical establishment, presumably along the lines of “there is no evidence…”, likely driven by mood affiliation. I dug into the most direct rebuttal but it 404d and I stopped there.

My understanding is that pregnancy from rape is no less common than pregnancy from consensual sex and that the contrary position is not taken seriously by many medical professionals.

That’s my prior, but I’d also be surprised if there were zero effect on conception from the stress and trauma of a violent rape. Direct evidence would be impossible to gather, but I can imagine studies based on other forms of stress and trauma.

This post continues Scotts tradition of having jarringly different Ideas about what relationship categories have to truth than me. Scott is of the opinion that categories are just word games and that technocrats should be able to shift their borders are any time to maximize public utility. Being rhetorically gifted as he is he describes this position well. There is no natural force that decides whether whales are fish or some other category so we ought to define fish however this best serves us. It's a difficult position to assail. And yet...

I think firstly that there is such a thing as a natural category. These are things people can intuit about the territory, like canyons etched by the simple combined implications of gravity causing water to flow down hill and precipitation taking that water back uphill. This forms natural borders between things. Creatures capable of flight are an intuitively useful category, people use it for things like determining if a wall is going to keep that creature out. This kind of category cannot and will not bend to our word games. We may call it something different or create new categories that mostly but don't exactly match this category(maybe you'd like to include or exclude insects based on some further need) but the natural category remains.

What people want out of things like the DSM is for it to have as its first goal to reflect a natural category. And there are a few options here, I think whether we pick a natural category that includes or excludes homosexuality is an important debate that could go either way. But it should be about which category to pick, not whether we should shift between different categorical systems from line to line. Because if you're switching up the justifying for inclusion from one definition to the next the actually underlying category is just "Whatever I find expedient" which is a maximally bad fit for a document meant to describe reality. It makes a farse of the whole project and in the end it turns the DSM into just another locus of power in the culture war with no more legitimacy than a piece of paper that says "I do what I want".

I mostly disagree, there are a few natural categories like periodic elements, since every element has an exact integer number of protons; but pretty much everything more complex than an atom does not fit into a natural category.

For flight, you'll get into blurry areas when you consider stuff like gliding, whether an animal can fly but only under optimal nutrition and wind conditions, animals that have true flight but for shorter distances than some other animals can jump, etc.

For whatever definition of "flying animal" you can come up with, I'm pretty sure I could come up with an exception, unless maybe you write a couple hundred words in your definition explicitly listing exceptions to the point where it's a very obviously unwieldy and not particularly natural category.

The map won't exactly match the territory I agree, but maps can be made to as faithfully match the territory as possible. It's when an aim comes in other than to match the territory that the process is corrupt. A genuine disagreement can be had over whether homosexuality belongs in the territory, but it should be decided by discussing the territory, not considering special interests.

I think I still agree with Scott's opinion that while trying to make your map match the territory as much as possible is respectable, it can still provide not nearly as much utility as trying to make a map that's just useful. Having something like stuff that DSM categorizes as mental illness be "bad stuff that we want insurance to cover" is a pretty unnatural category, but might be a lot more useful for real life than some sort of biological definition about deviations from a mentally healthy human.

This just seems like a lack of imagination. It's like thinking one to many relationships in a relational database are impossible because you store everything in a flat table. If you are willing to maintain good database schema this is not a problem. The fundamental problem is you have this single table trying to handle two or more things that ought to be separated. The trade offs disappear if you simple use three tables referenced to each other. One to describe to the best of our ability mental disorders. One to enumerate treatments that do and do not work for those disorders. And one to actually map which of those treatments insurance should cover. Really I could easily see half a dozen or more tables being useful.

I don't know much about mental disorder taxonomies. Looking through Scott's post, my guess as to his response to this would be "That would be great! But you'd never get anyone to actually use your system because people would still be shouting about how homosexuality appears anywhere in it, even if it's under the 'don't stigmatize these' table". But that's just my guess.

I guess one of my frustrations is that we as a society have decided to give the kind of people that object to things like that so much control over things that matter. We've decided it's more important to neuter the tools we use to think clearly to protect fools from offense.

For whatever definition of "flying animal" you can come up with, I'm pretty sure I could come up with an exception, unless maybe you write a couple hundred words in your definition explicitly listing exceptions to the point where it's a very obviously unwieldy and not particularly natural category.

Yeah, even 'flying animal' for the purposes of fence building I'm sure for any given fence there's some animals capable of limited flight that would nonetheless find it insurmountable.

There's a difference between a category that's fuzzy in in some cases because it's hard to have a perfect category, and a category that's fuzzy in in some cases because the category is gerrymandered for some reason other than its stated purpose.

there are a few natural categories like periodic elements, since every element has an exact integer number of protons; but pretty much everything more complex than an atom does not fit into a natural category.

Here too there are intermediate states where its unclear whether a proton is part of the atomic core. During radioactive decay, at what point does the atom change element? Now, these intermediates are fine to ignore 99% of the time... just like with lots of other categories that people want to deny being natural.

What people want out of things like the DSM is for it to have as its first goal to reflect a natural category.

I don't think that's true. The very premise is informing/influencing public policy. No matter how well a natural category cleaves reality at the joints, if it doesn't enshrine how we should react to the category, it's no good.

The actual underlying category should be akin to "phenomena that are mental AND have bad consequences to society." This isn't a natural, Platonic category because other people are involved. But it's also not line-to-line word games. "Pedophiles want to have sex with kids" fits both criteria. "Birds can fly over walls" only fits the second. "Homosexuals want to have gay sex" used to be viewed as fitting both. DSM authors say that it only fits the first, now, so it doesn't belong. It's a claim that the categorization was wrong, not that the category must be fluid.

Scott observes that a purely-biological-apolitical category does not fulfill the goals of the DSM authors, or really of the policymakers that would use the DSM. That's because it really only handles the first category. Leaving out the second one for being political/judgmental/whatever removes most of its utility.

I think you're confusing the use of the DSM with it's purpose. The DSM is supposed to reflect reality as its primary goal, it's written by unelected technocrats. To the degree that those technocrats are using the DSM to control industry they are usurping the role of the people. As a sanity check imagine if the APA was run by a right wing extremists group and they included leftist beliefs as a mental condition requiring involuntary hospitalization. It would certainly "fulfill the goals of the DSM authors" to include things like this, but I'd argue it is not the intended role of the DSM or its creators to be making politically salient points. They're doing a run around social consensus making and the political process itself and this would be very obvious to its defenders if it were their own ox being gored.

Sure, in a perfect scenario, the Best DSM (BDSM) measures the public impact of each response to each phenomenon. Then Congress enforces using the BDSM's best-impact response whenever insurance asks if something is covered. Popular opinion is preserved.

How should such a document be updated?

If social consensus changes, and people on aggregate believe that gay sex is okay, or that tiktok is a mental illness, or that the appropriate treatment for anxiety is mockery, that should be reflected in the BDSM. Scott might suggest a prediction market solution, or Congress could vote on each line item like a spending bill. In the interest of avoiding stalemates and weird corner cases of our full economy or democracy, we'd be incentivized to import a lot of those systems, too. For the BDSM to fully respect "the role of the people" it has to include a lot of overhead.

The solution we've used instead is delegation. As citizens are bound by judges with tenuous connections to any actual voters, insurance companies are bound by recognized experts. Yes, this leaves room for said experts to abuse their authority. So does every other practically implementable system! The fundamental principle of popular will remains even when diluted.

I understand believing the experts have exceeded their mandate on a specific issue. There is enough friction in the process that they really aren't held very accountable, and the cost to spin up an alternative is eye-wateringly high. Call it a market failure. The fact remains, though, that an effective DSM must include some level of value judgment. Without it, an apolitical/biological document cannot fulfill the delegated purpose.

Does the BDSM include a category for people who like to be tied up and called mean names?

The apa isn't elected, they just produce a document that is currently being fed into the legitimate system. It's like there being an exposed config file for some important system that has been found and captured by a special interest, in time the hole will be patched. But we shouldn't pretend this is a legitimate purpose of the design, it was never intended for the DSM to be used as a political lever. To the extent it is being used as one it should be objected to.

This impulse people have, to recognize that there is a legitimate process for achieving some goal but instead using some hacked work around to subvert the process because it is easier than arguing your case convincingly to the public is just tyranny. That's all it is. Of course tyranny is expediant. I do not trust people who defend this impulse.

No, I think choosing whether or not homosexuality is a disorder is exactly the legitimate purpose, as intended, of the DSM.

The government wants a way to tell what insurance should and shouldn't pay for. That means it absolutely has to include judgment about what requires treatment. There can be no alternative that just describes symptoms.

Consensus, at some point, settled on this document produced by some technocrats. Now you're convinced that they've altered the deal, that the earlier version was privileged in some way that DSM-5 is not.

How do you propose such a document gets updated, if not by the authors coming together and saying "hmm yeah, that's a good pull request"?

The government wants a way to tell what insurance should and shouldn't pay for. That means it absolutely has to include judgment about what requires treatment. There can be no alternative that just describes symptoms.

You could have, you know, two different lists? You understand that what insurance has to pay for mean the rest of us are required to pay into it right? This is a tax benefits system with extra steps.

How do you propose such a document gets updated, if not by the authors coming together and saying "hmm yeah, that's a good pull request"?

Yes, unelected authors. Not the people. Unelected beaurocrats vetted by the industry that brought us frontal lobe lobotomies and repressed memories. I am not impressed by this process.

So what process would impress your cynical self?

I get that you're unhappy about unelected bureaucrats raising your taxes. What's your solution?

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Perhaps some terms really do (or really should) denote "natural categories" or "natural kinds". Examples might include "iron" and "mammal". But I don't think all terms can be like that. Some seem to fit better with a "family resemblance" model. Moreover, some terms have normative implications or consequences. I sympathize with the idea that we should try not to let our normative views "contaminate" our scientific understandings of how things work, or of the terms we use to express those views. But I don't think we can really dispense with using some words that reflect values and goals - perhaps including goals about which treatments are funded by health insurance.

I would dispute even "mammal" -- in the present time, you have basal species like the platypus that, while solidly classified under Mammalia, have generally un-mammal-like features such as laying eggs and lacking nipples; and in prehistory, you have the whole series of mammalian ancestors gradually emerging from reptiles, developing the characteristics trait of mammals through many intermediates. Granted, in most practical circumstances this is pointless pedantry, and the intuitive category works just fine -- how often are you going to deal with a platypus or a Procynosuchus in real life? But there are very few categories that have really sharp borders; most things blur at the edges.

What's interesting to me is that the statements in question mean the exact same thing in context as they would out of context.

"from N a N biological N point N of N view N, homosexuality N and N pedophilia N are probably N pretty N similar."

"the N relevant N difference N between N homosexuality N and N pedophilia N is N moral N, not N biological."

"So N, should N your N purely N biological N, apolitical N, taxonomy N of N mental N disorders N classify N homosexuality N as N a mental N illness, N or N should N it N refuse N to N classify N pedophilia N as N a N mental N illness?"

"That N means N that N a N purely N biological N apolitical N taxonomy N of N mental N disorders N which N classifies N all N things N with N similar N biological N causes N in N the N same N way N would N also N probably N classify N homosexuality N as N a N mental N disorder."

"Pedophilia N is N worse N than N homosexuality N, not N because N the N biology N necessarily N involves N different N processes N or N brain N regions, N but N because N it’s N important N for N your N sexual N partners N to N be N able N to N consent."

Amazingly, you can just quote all of the “PLEASE DON’T TAKE THIS OUT OF CONTEXT” sentences, in order, and get a perfectly functional 1-paragraph summary of the entire blog post.

I think his intention was to use that as an example of why biological definitions of mental illness were bad, not give the impression of homosexuality being wrong.

Slightly aside from this, is there even such a thing as a biologically defined mental illness? Is there a single mental illness that’s diagnosed with a blood test or some other empirical measurement that doesn’t involve a checklist of symptoms that the patient describes to the physician?

Sure.

There's a whole DSM section for substance abuse disorders. Alcohol/nicotine/opioid withdrawal are real, measurable things.

Or the variety of conditions with a single, specific response. REM Sleep Disorder is measured on a "polysomnograph." Actually, there's a bunch of sleep-specific ones. Elimination disorders like enuresis are also fairly obvious. For something like PTSD I imagine you could objectively measure a panic response.

Does an effective, selective drug count as evidence? Ex. prescribing antipsychotics seems like a rather objective way to measure schizophrenia.

I'd argue that you could count certain behavioral disorders as empirical. It's not a lab test, but if someone compulsively gambles all his money away, he doesn't have to tell the physician it's a disorder. Likewise for the paraphilias.

Plus, at a certain point, it just gets lumped into physical illnesses. Rabies includes anxiety, hallucinations, and fear of water or blowing air on one's face. It's diagnosed with virus isolation. Obviously, it doesn't get counted as a mental illness on account of all the non-mental symptoms.

To the question of an effective drug counting, I would say no. I’m more concerned that there is a physiological symptom from which the supposed mental condition is diagnosable.

I’m not sure that someone having a physiological withdrawal symptom from a substance to which they’re addicted would count either as someone who is not an addict will still experience those.

The sleep disorders seem a better candidate.

I’m more concerned that there is a physiological symptom from which the supposed mental condition is diagnosable.

Things like Down Syndrome, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease etc. can be. I'm guessing your asking this question, because you don't really view them as mental illnesses and are gerrymandering the category to only include things not easily physiologically measurable. The DSM doesn't do that and includes these things.

I’m just thinking it through out loud.

My family has a lot of mental illness of the OCD and bipolar type, and those family members insist this is a well understood science and then make claims that seem essentially religious. I’m feeling out the edges of where measurable physiological issue versus vague “chemical imbalance?” meet.

Want to share what those claims are exactly? Hard to know if they’re backed by science or not without actually seeing them.

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No, because then it would be a physical illness with neurological symptoms rather than a mental illness.

Funny enough, the desire to avoid my statements being taken out of context later generally leads me to do things like add parentheticals (where appropriate), or include a brief aside, as I am doing with this particular segment at this very moment to illustrate the point, and thus force someone trying to smear me to either accurately quote the statement with context intact or to deceptively edit it and thus undermine their own credibility. This does cause a lot of my sentences to become unwieldy, sadly enough.

Scott was maybe going for ghoulish overkill with that one but yeah, when your risk of being quoted in national publications is a bit higher maybe that sort of caution is warranted.

Is there anyone left who will all three of being shocked by equating homosexuality and pedophilia from the perspective that it’s beyond the pale, know who Scott Alexander is, and not dig into the claim?

Journalists misleadingly quoting subjects is something that is difficult to defend on non-partisan grounds. I, personally, would prefer if what a person said and what journalists thinks about that statement to be clearly separated and obvious to the average reader which is which. For example, I think ACLU crossed the line when they changed RGBs statement from:

The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity, it is a decision she must make for herself. When government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.

To:

The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person’s] life, to [their] well-being and dignity…When the government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices.

The original text doesn't consider the possibility of abortion being about bodily autonomy of men, while the latter does, without making it clear what the original said.

It is revision of fact, such as that defended by /r/ssc posters who compare silenly misquoting text to removing "uhh"s from speech, or my example, that brings to mind a quote from a book often cited, yet never ceaseing to be prescient, 1984:

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.


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