site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30106 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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

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

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

  • Shaming.

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

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

14
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Came across the following post from the other site. The OP deleted it shortly after posting, so I'm pasting it below (strange that the mobile app preserves the text longer than the web app).

Title: I (29M) got 200 Hinge matches in 1 week, likely because of my job title. Am I wrong to feel some resentment?

I (29M) want to start out by saying I'm not a particularly handsome or good looking guy. I have a high hairline and a very weak chin. I'm a bit overweight, and not muscular. I'm 5'9.

After not dating for 3 years (I got brutally cheated on), in 2020, I finally made my first Hinge profile. I got maybe 20 matches over a month, then Trump went on TV and said he was cancelling all flights to Europe because of COVID and I ended up deleting the app.

During COVID, my career really became a rocketship. I had always been a hard worker (I don't drink and I'm kind of introverted, so I mostly focused on work), but things really came together for me during the pandemic in a really surreal way. Working remotely at my parents house, I spent a year rising up in my firm, and then because of my niche knowledge set, I was recruited to become a Partner at a very large venture capital firm. I'm currently making $350k a year, and depending on how the fund performs, up to $1.5M a year. None of it really seems real because I essentially didn't talk to anyone but my parents for two years and have basically been sitting all day on a computer in my highschool bedroom.

At the beginning of the year, I moved to a big city and started a relationship with a former friend. It was really tumultuous (she had much more experience than me and seemed to relish throwing it in my face) and it ended after half a year. It was my second relationship of my life, and she really hurt me in ways I'm still unpacking. She told me I'm lacking in confidence and inexperienced and immature and hard to love.

A few months after the break up, I decided to create another profile on Hinge just to see what was out there. I put on my profile that I was "Partner at VC firm" and HOLY SH*T. I got over 200 matches in a single week. Not to be shallow but these aren't mediocre people either. Many are beautiful women with serious jobs as doctors, private equity analysts, lawyers, etc and more. Several of them have messaged me first.

I feel absolutely and totally overwhelmed, and I've since stopped swiping on the app. I can't bring myself to message a single person, and over a hundred have already fallen into the "hidden" section because I never sent a message.

On one hand, I am feeling so overwhelmed by this female attention that I don't know what to do. All of these women seem to have their lives together, and meanwhile I'm this introvert with a weird internet job with no dating experience (seriously, I've never asked a woman on a date formally) and I don't know how to catch up. I seriously feel like if I meet in real life, they'll smell my inexperience on me. I also, for some reason, just don't want to be rejected if that makes sense.

On the other hand (and I'm doing my best to unpack this here), I can't help but feel disappointed at how much more female attention I'm receiving as a result of having a more prestigious job and title. I think the person I was 3 years ago was much happier, kinder, less jaded, more fun, more ambitious, more authentic and all around better as a whole - but I could barely get any matches. I literally miss the person I was. I look at these beautiful women in my matches now and I kind of feel a sense of resentment towards them for only showing interest in me now that I've climbed the mountain or become (at least outwardly) a "finished product" so to speak. I can't help but feel like I'm basically just being objectified for my money, and any relationship I start with these women will be tainted.

If anyone could offer some words of advice on how to get my footing or at least help me unpack why the way I'm feeling is incorrect, I'd be very appreciative. Thank you.

https://old.reddit.com/r/amiwrong/comments/161q6df/i_29m_got_200_hinge_matches_in_1_week_likely/

Once you've adequately formed your opinion on this, I would like to ask:

How quickly did you think that the story is entirely made up?

I'm posting this because I'm worried that I am more gullible than I thought. Hundreds of comments on the thread point out fairly convincing reasons why this is a creative writing exercise: some claim to have equally prestigious job titles and/or make more money, but did not experience anywhere close to the reported success here; others say they've temporarily changed their job titles to something made up and far fancier and it didn't move the needle; then some point out that 200 matches in a week would require he swipe 400 times at a 50% match rate, and that seems excessive for one who claims to not have bothered messaging any of them; finally, there are some vaguely incel tropes that make this seem more likely to have a hidden agenda in influencing popular opinions.

In my defense, the majority of comments seems to buy into the OP's story and responds sincerely; they also have more upvotes, suggesting the majority of lurkers tend to agree. But I think most people here hold themselves to a higher intellectual/rational standard than the average Redditor, so I do blame myself for not thinking critically enough. Are there any simple heuristics that I could have employed here to better avoid falling for creative writing exercises? I did think the post had challenged my priors about what drove dating app success rates, so perhaps one strategy is simply to be more faithful to your priors.

P.S. lol @ the new 500,000 character limit on posts. Seems excessive...

Meta-comment: At first glance, this looks like a terrible top-level CW post. "I saw a reddit post. It made people mad. It's fake, right?" It'd get more votes on the other site.

But - it seems to have generated a lot of interesting discussion and long replies. So on the whole, I'd prefer for it to have been posted. And then what does that say about my filter for a bad post?

It generally seems like there's a lot less of ... every kind of discussion ... on this site, generally, because of the toplevel post bottleneck. It's used as a quality filter and a way to keep the place focused and prevent it from drifting away from 'open serious smart discussion', but how much discussion is just lost as a result?

I don’t think it’s entirely unrealistic tbh. But I think you have to have a fair amount of experience with dating apps to know that.

There are a lot of factors that influence your popularity on dating apps, besides of course your traditional ones re: appearance. One of them is that the apps tend to give you a “new user” bump in visibility for the first few days you’re on the app. They show your profile to pretty much everyone, because a) their algorithms need to find out who likes you and who you like, and b) they want to get you a match quickly so that you get addicted to the app. Another factor is the preferences you set in the app. How big of an area range are you swiping on? What age range? Have you set any preferences regarding race, religion, height, etc.? If you keep your preferences set to the default (default being incredibly broad, which I assume this guy did, given he is new to the apps) then that shows your profile to a lot more people than if you set more narrow preferences. Finally, the metropolitan area you are in plays a factor. It’s a lot easier to rack up matches in the NYC area than it is in New Mexico, for example. I remember vacationing in Santa Fe and there were 5 girls in my age range on Bumble within 25 miles. I had to extend the range to like 60 miles to reach Albuquerque to see more matches.

The “new user bump” could explain why people changing their titles to something fancier didn’t experience a boost in popularity, since they were doing it with an existing account and had already been seen by the majority of the people within their range. On top of that, you don’t post your salary on dating apps. These folks claiming they make more money than this guy, kudos to them, but that’s not something you’re able to evaluate from a dating app profile. Most job titles tend to be illegible signals as to how much money you make. “Partner at X Firm” on the other hand, is a highly legible signal that the guy is successful (even assuming you don’t know much about VC, you might assume partner at a law firm and still correctly believe he is successful). “Portfolio manager” or something at a hedge fund is less legible, unless you know something about how hedge funds are hierarchically structured.

Premium memberships also play a role. Every app has a swipe limit; buying premium allows you to bypass the limit and swipe as much as you like. It’s easy to swipe on a hundred people per hour, if not more. When I was in college, I would buy premium and then set the minimum radius to one mile and swipe until I ran out of people. Then two miles, then three. The first two miles would only take me a couple hours of swiping in Boston. So I don’t think “he would have had to swipe right on 400 people at a 50% rate” is really a great argument for saying the post is fake. He could have swiped right on 10k people within a hundred mile radius in a day or two. Two hundred matches is a 2% match rate, which judging by the numbers I used to see from the bumble subreddit seems to be around the average for men (bumble lets you request your user data and see how many people swiped left/right on you). As for why he would keep swiping while not messaging anyone? For starters, I bet he was a kid in a candy store getting all those matches. He probably kept swiping for the pleasure of seeing who else would match with him. But also, he’s never asked someone out on a date before. Would he even know what to say?

Premium also tends to let you see who has already liked you and match with them immediately. When I have signed up for Tinder in the past, it wasn’t unusual for me to get hit with the “99+ people like you, upgrade your membership to see them!” ad after a day or two, seeing as I have lived in major metropolitan areas (Boston/NYC). It’s possible he used one of the other premium features (called Spotlight on Tinder, forget if the other apps have it), to place his card at the top of the in the stack and be shown to more people for a short period of time (30 minutes). This would allow more people to like him first and rack up matches quicker.

The last premium feature I can think of which might have played a role is the concept of priority likes. This is a feature typically reserved for the highest tier of premium membership. How it works is that your card will be shown before non-premium users and lower tier premium users when you like someone. Unfortunately, it’s one of the only ways some guys get matches on Tinder, because they get buried beneath the hordes of other men competing for the relatively smaller population of women on the apps.

To be clear, I’m not saying he did all of these things. However, a combination of just one or two of these premium features combined with the right circumstances could produce a high number of matches in a short period of time.

Finally, regarding the incel tropes being a tell. Those stereotypes exist for a reason. There are a lot of shy, nerdy dudes out there with not a lot of dating experience. The “red pill” experience of realizing that women are attracted to status is a common enough experience that an entire internet subculture emerged around helping men come to terms with the realization and helping other men reach the same realization. I imagine it is a similar realization for women, realizing men only like them for their bodies. Is it really that hard to believe that this dude with very minimal dating experience suddenly gains some social status because of his job and is shocked by how differently people treat him? We read stories all the time about people who experience dramatic weight loss being treated much differently. Why should this be different?

How quickly did you think that the story is entirely made up?

Here:

Working remotely at my parents house, I spent a year rising up in my firm, and then because of my niche knowledge set, I was recruited to become a Partner at a very large venture capital firm.

This trajectory strikes me as wildly low-probability for a socially reclusive remote 29-year-old, absent some impressive 'extra-curricular' excesses. Also 'very large' seems slightly off as a descriptor for a successful VC.

I recently switched from "Writer" to "Director of Marketing and Media" did nothing... Mind you it's possible that that screams bullshit job... but My impression is you have to communicate through the photos, not words.

Genuinely shocked guys don't do group Tinder days where they just all rent suits and go about taking photos in a major city, then all charter a yacht for the day and take photos on it.

I feel like Writer has its own appeal, despite being associated with impoverishedness.

I recently switched from "Writer" to "Director of Marketing and Media" did nothing

Those both sound like bullshit jobs.

Genuinely shocked guys don't do group Tinder days where they just all rent suits and go about taking photos in a major city, then all charter a yacht for the day and take photos on it.

Guys used to do stuff like this. It was called "pick up artist" or PUA, and there was a whole subculture around in in 2008 or so.

Maybe I should just bite the bullet with "Twitter CatGirl"

I had no idea what Hinge is (except from the context it's clear it's a dating app) but the whole thing read a bit suspicious. I wasn't ready to declare it fake because so much of it was outside of my experience, so I might just have been having entirely wrong ideas about how VCs or Hinge dating works, and I'm pretty terrible in reading people anyway, but also the post felt like having an agenda-pushing vibe so I wouldn't be surprised to learn it's all fake.

Of course it’s fake. But the profile he described would also NOT get 200 likes on hinge.

Partner at Vc firm isn’t even that prestigious. Definitely not to crush dating apps. I’ve had a few friends do well on dating apps but it wasn’t because they had fancy title. I’m better looking than how he described himself. So yes that’s creative writing and it’s from a dude who doesn’t even have a clue what would get a ton of likes on the apps.

My profile pretty much says hedge fund manager and I can attest I’ve never gotten filled with matches. Always had to find girls thru friends.

Also you know it’s fake because his brags aren’t even that much. 350 is like tech bro not vc god level.

It is funny that some version of quant trade is completely a ratosphere type of just yet in the rest of the world extremely niche.

I think ‘rationalism’ became a meme in HF quant circles so - unlike everyone else, who discovered it online randomly - people at Jane Street or whatever were actually discussing LessWrong articles around the water cooler (see SBF/Caroline discourse).

In general almost all the relevant core professions (law, finance, medicine, academia, tech) are well-represented here.

How quickly did you think that the story is entirely made up?

Does it matter if it is? It being real just means something unlikely happened to someone who is nobody to you.

The ability to discern between reality and fiction is important and people don't come to worldviews solely from statistics.

Yeah, it matters.

The ability to discern between reality and fiction is important

Yes, generally, but your ability to discern fact from fiction isn't put at risk just because you think the veracity or lack thereof of an online story is inconsequential.

In fact, a well written story could be more important than a true account from somewhere like /r/amiwrong for the debate it sparks up and the shared frustrations it articulates, even if everyone were aware that it is a story.

The ability to discern between reality and fiction is important and people don't come to worldviews solely from statistics.

Yeah, it matters.

But this isn't, "I gave birth to a Bat Boy."

It's just some random person alleging they got more matches on a dating website because they have a nice job title. I've never used Hinge. I'm not a venture capitalist. It seems perfectly reasonable to me this guy might have significantly more matches than he had before if he's living in a bigger city and using a more appealing job title.

It's like if someone posted, "I used to be ugly and scrawny. Then I hit the gym and got swole, and now all my platonic women friends suddenly want to date me," and we were asked to decide if it was real or not. Why couldn't that be real? It might not be. It could be. It's not a science fiction story.

People should not be able to vote. Letting the ruling class hide behind people's insecurities is unadvisable.

But it's a interesting and useful exercise picking out what actually might be real.

How much somebody saying "some unlikely shit happened once to one person our of 9 billion people" should cause you to update your worldviews? Not an easy question, I think.

Seems real to me. If he was at a VC that did crypto they could have been ejaculating money over the pandemic.

Also his story seems not implausible given my own experience.

I filled out an OKC profile once and was my honest funny cute self. I also included my income, $250-500k and mentioned quant finance. I was getting about 3-4 dates a month. The women weren't amazing but not bad either. I kept this up for a year or so.

Then I came across some OKC blog post about how income is the biggest predictor of dating success for men. I felt crushed, in a lot of the ways the quoted guy did. Surely this didn't really apply to me?

So I removed my income from my OKC profile.

After that I landed two whole dates total over the course of an entire year.

Jokes on me, I'm cute and funny but not enough to cut through the noise the way possibly making $500k does.

Having sizeable income shows much more than just pure money numbers. It shows social skills, certain level of IQ (yes, there are exceptions, but there are always exceptions), likely a reasonably stable job, to some measure your social circles, your available budgets, etc. Having no information at all about any of that creates a risk, and the risk would not likely be justified given how many alternatives there are around.

I mean, it makes sense. If I have friends who don't earn high income I can often point to obvious character flaws, limits to intellect or mental illnesses. I can further imagine I'd probably not enjoy being in an intimate relationship with them.

Which isn't to say you are broken if you don't pull high income, but it's a not bad heuristic.

I find a rhetorical move that makes somebody saying "if you are a chess grandmaster, it's more likely than not that you are smart" into "so, you're saying if I'm not chess grandmaster, I am a moron, and if I don't play chess at all, I probably need to be institutionalized as hopeless drooling imbecile?!" to be very disingenuous and off-putting. I'd appreciate a little less of aggressive bad faith misunderstanding.

I wasn't being that extreme.

But also, chess is pretty superfluous to living a good life? Whereas money often directly affects the quality of your life?

Sure some people achieve enlightenment working as humble ferrymen deep in the woods but that's not the norm by far.

I think there's a question of what the data actually shows, though. For example, some percentage of women are mercenary gold diggers, in that they very much want the richest man they can find who isn't a complete piece of shit or horrifically unattractive to them (and even there there are people who will waive those requirements). I had no idea there were dating apps where you can literally filter for income, but given escorting / 'sugar babying' is a thing, that some women would seek a more permanent similar arrangement is obvious.

But the same relatively modest proportion of serious 'gold diggers' in a city who meticulously screen for wealthy men might then circulate among them, leading those men to perceive themselves as much more attractive to women in general once the latter knows their income even if that isn't the case. By the way, women dating for money is obviously completely a thing, but ime for many PMC type women it's less important because they know they'll have 'enough' either way and so being stuck in an unhappy marriage to a rich man for 40 years is less worth it than it would be to someone from grinding poverty or 150 years ago when her choice in husband usually determined a woman's economic class for life.

I know one attractive, accomplished, PMC woman from a decent family who married a much older (early fifties) uglyish (not hideous, still tall, not particularly overweight) rich guy in her very late twenties. But he's worth many hundreds of millions, is extremely nice and kind (and has a wide reputation as such), treats her like a queen, and she was never the kind of woman who went for looks in men anyway.

You can extend this logic to more famous cases. Larry Page has a beautiful blonde wife whose sister is a model and who has a PhD in biomedical informatics from Stanford, masters from Oxford, both parents have PhDs, essentially perfect hotness + intelligence pedigree. But at the same time, they met when she was 27 and he was 34, he's hardly ugly and is 5'11, and he married her within a year of dating. Even billionaires struggle to hit jackpot, many settle for pure looks on their second or third wives.

Larry Page has a beautiful blonde wife

A bit bad to say, but she's rough to look at, which accentuates your point.

She has a goofy smile, but I think she's pretty (and would be at least to most men).

It was an interesting experience in a few ways. None of the women I went on dates with struck me as gold diggers really. That was the biggest part of the head fuck I guess. Maybe they know to play it cool, but my pop culture impression of gold digging is that women drop hints constantly about wanting expensive gifts and going to exclusive places. Man always pays. Etc

I think they just generally found men less attractive if they didn't earn high income.

I feel like gold digger is the wrong angle to come into. I've been in a similar position dating, managed to date a bunch of professional high-flyers I met through various apps, and it's more of a 'I want a partner who's a financial equal' thing than a 'I expect my lifestyle to be subsidized' thing in a lot of cases

From my experience 'equal' is a lower bound. Just as a woman wants a man at least her height (but ideally taller) she wants a man earning at least her salary (but more is better).

Still I think the suggestion of gold-digger comes with an implication that the girl is contributing next-to-nothing financially

Yeah I don't use the term myself for the reason that basically every woman cares about how much a man earns. If we define that as gold digging, then every woman is a gold digger.

Similarly, if we define gold digging as women pretending to be attracted to a man because he's rich, then I would say there are very few women who meet that definition. My experience is that a man having wealth, fame, power etc makes him genuinely more attractive to women, in a way that is pretty alien to male sexuality.

Money is an imperfect representation of social status, but it is somewhat correlated. And honestly status is probably the main thing women go for, far above looks or money(tell me, how many successful scrap metal entrepreneurs pulling million dollar incomes and able to provide a vacation condo in the Caribbean, a mansion and a lake house in the US, etc, etc have wives who are beautiful and intelligent and good breeding etc? Probably few of them, they have bimbo model or eastern euro wives, or else marry smart women with serious family baggage).

Did you list how you got such a high income in your profile? I’m guessing that ‘surgeon, makes $350k’ is far more attractive to non-explicitly golddigging women than ‘owner of a plumbing business, nets $400k’.

I immediately thought it was fake because it's structured way too closely to a female experience, which is to become hot and suddenly get a lot more matches - too many to manage. This is probably bait to get people thinking about double standards. Of course, there is no believable male analog to that experience.

Of course, there is no believable male analog to that experience.

As the song says, girls don't like boys, girls like cars and money. While I doubt the story about getting hundreds of formerly way out of his league replies, I can well believe that a guy who upped his earnings to $350k a year found he was getting a lot more positive responses than when he was the same guy on half the money.

Men are simpler*, in that they're wired "fuck hot chick, big booba" so a woman who manages to lose weight and is averagely attractive will get a ton of responses (including the infamous dick pics). So while a man who increases his attractiveness via "he can spend money on me" won't get the same volume of responses, I think that analogy does hold: same guy, more money, more women considering him (especially if it's 'well he's ugly but so long as he takes me out to fancy places and buys me expensive stuff, I can put up with it' attitude). After all, escort services aren't selecting which clients they'll see on the basis of "is he good-looking enough?" but "can he and will he pay top dollar?"

*Apologies, gentlemen; I'm not scorning your sensitive and poetic souls which yearn for love and companionship and intimacy, we're talking on an evopsych level here.

For me it was more educational: when I got my PhD, a lot more women got the D (and the Ph, because I'm rather didactic). It was comparable to the increase in female attention I received after losing about 40 lbs of fat.

I can believe that going into five-figures salary territory would result in a lot of female attention.

I don’t think anyone is getting excited about 10,000 or even 99,999.

Hah! I missed two digits. Shows how much I make...

How quickly did you think that the story is entirely made up?

Around this point: "I feel absolutely and totally overwhelmed, and I've since stopped swiping on the app."

Scrolling up, there were parts of the story that looked suspicious, but none of them was really a red flag.

It's may not be real but it doesn't really have to be.

I have several friends who are doctors. The amount of attention they get from women is actually unbelievable to me. It's so much attention that it becomes a problem, and they have to start hiding things on social media to prevent women from basically stalking them.

So depending on the city, I could absolutely see this as being true, since I've seen a version of it be true first hand.

If this is true, this is why the AMA will forever be a cartel. Fuck over an entire profession and many many QALYs for the bitches.

I'm posting this because I'm worried that I am more gullible than I thought.

Are there any simple heuristics that I could have employed here to better avoid falling for creative writing exercises?

Sure, you could practice being cynical:

cyn·i·cal /ˈsinək(ə)l/

adjective

  1. believing that people are motivated purely by self-interest; distrustful of human sincerity or integrity.

There's a reason rationalists are sometimes accused of being quokkas. There is also a reason why, at a certain threshold, open-armed rationalists can be seen transforming virtually overnight into hardened black-pilled culture warriors. The transition from Jedi to Sith portrayed in the Star Wars prequels is sometimes mocked as too abrupt, in a way that is arguably responsible for all the Jedi lore that has developed since (though it did give us a wonderful bit of flash rationalfic from Eliezer Yudkowsky). But the strongest counter is that George Lucas just had it right to begin with: the most sensitive are the most vulnerable. A mistrustful misanthrope who is constantly on guard against being tricked, lied to, and abused, is rather insulated against betrayal from the beginning.

By contrast, a tendency to simply believe what people say, until you have a reason to believe they are lying, is the kind of attitude that is difficult to maintain in the face of persistent exploitation. But if it is your "nature" (insofar as any of us has one of those) to be a quokka, you probably aren't going to change the first time you get burned. Instead, repeat burns are going to accumulate until it is simply no longer psychologically possible for you to ignore them, and then the whole quokka edifice is going to come crashing down all at once.

I would like to suggest that the question you've posed is complicated in part because there is a good reason for you to continue falling for creative writing exercises: that you fall for them at all suggests you still have faith in humanity, or at least in its potential. There are explanations for every objection raised; the story as told is not literally impossible (I think--I've never used Hinge--but any given lie may also be an exaggeration, or an attempt at infosec, rather than proof that a story is entirely false). And even false stories may communicate truth, else why ever touch fiction? Presenting fiction as fact is problematic, of course, but there are also times when a carefully crafted lie is instrumental to uncovering truth.

The question that has faced careful thinkers since time immemorial, then, is whether your love the truth is so strong that you are willing to be stripped of human experience as a result. Socrates died for the truth, and Plato preached the virtues of the solitary mind. The original Cynics, including Diogenes of Sinope, were ostracized from polite society over their commitment to the truth. But there are others--Aristotle, the Epicureans--who thought that socialization was crucial to human flourishing. They, too, were committed to truth, but the Epicureans at least recommended against participation in certain kinds of conversations (most especially, politics!).

It's probably good mental hygiene to maintain a healthy skepticism against anything you read on the Internet; anonymity and inaccountability present a different incentive profile than face-to-face interactions, after all. But "gullible" is not quite the same thing as "open and trusting." Aristotle might say that "gullible" is having too much trust, while cynicism is having too little. I don't know what the relevant virtue-mean is ("credulous?" maybe just "trusting?") but striking the right balance is probably the pursuit of a lifetime. Falling for a somewhat-plausible work of creative fiction is a far cry from, say, getting bilked out of your life savings.

Trust but verify as the golden mean?

Trust but verify as the golden mean?

That seems right to me, yeah. Thanks for pointing it out!

What's the difference between "trust but verify" and "don't trust"?

The post is fake. Reddit users write far more than they need to on their story, including useless details that a real person being bothered by their problem wouldn't include. However, it appeals to a real, observable phenomenon: a dude is worth as much as his stacks of paper.

Like everyone else, I assume most posts like this on reddit are fake more often than not. Others have mentioned a lot of the reasons to doubt its veracity. A few things that stood out to me:

  1. Too many details that are just too perfect for the agenda it's pushing. Incels really hate that high-status women chase high-status (wealthy) men, so "Ugly loser living in his parents' basement attic suddenly gets lots of matches when he advertises that he makes a lot of money" is candy for a certain type of redditor.
  2. I'm not all that familiar with the financial world, but the idea that his career as a "VC partner" "skyrocketed" while he's working from home in his parents' house in his jammies seems... unlikely.
  3. $350K is a very decent salary, especially if he has occasional $1M+ years, but it's not mega-rich, super-high status, it's not Hollywood star or decimillionaire-level success, of the sort that would have literally hundreds of hot doctors, lawyers, and private equity analysts (whatever that is) flocking to him. Especially if he's as homely he describes. That sounds like a number someone who's never made anywhere near that pulled out of the air as "makes a lot of money."
  4. Someone who lists himself as a "VC Partner", especially if he doesn't look like one in his profile, I would assume raise alarm bells with women viewing him. Women know just as well as men do that people lie on the Internet. I'm sure he'd get some hits, but I doubt he'd get that many VC-chasers credulously sliding into his DMs.

I came to the same conclusions. The chances of someone being a VC Partner and living in mom’s basement are basically nil. The people hiring him would have noted signs of low status (and not having your own place and car are extremely low status.

Some of the richest people I know still live with/at their parents' place, but their parents place is like a $20m Manhattan townhouse or 14-room co-op in a top building where they have a chef, a live-in housekeeper, and their parents are away 8 months of the year so they essentially live 'by themselves'.

That still wouldn’t be “living in mom’s basement.” He’d have a whole wing of the house, and a nice car that would advertise status enough to overcome the perception of poverty. Especially if the family is obviously rich.

Bill Burr has a funny bit about men not being prepared for the kind of female attention that comes with becoming rich/famous...

Eh, it could go either way. My feeling was along the lines of a guy who make a hinge account as a "partner at vc"; Was surprised at the reaction and continued larping.

A lot of women go for fame, but fame is different from wealth. Fat middle-aged guys who sell their family's tools business might have $30m in the bank, but they're not famous, they don't get into the good parties, they don't have famous friends, they're not 'cool'. A low-level rapper, mediocre club DJ who occasionally books big clubs in Myokonos or Tulum, a singer in an indie band that achieved regional success and plays to crowds of a few hundred people, and an artist you'd only have heard of in the Dimes Square scene but who is known in NYC art circles are all much, much poorer than the above, but they also undoubtedly do better with women.

Burr is famous. He knows a ton of Hollywood celebrities, he gets invited to all the events. That's a different kettle of fish.

You're arguing different points.

Burr is famous. He knows a ton of Hollywood celebrities, he gets invited to all the events. That's a different kettle of fish.

That has nothing to do with the clips. Why comment on something you didn't listen to?

As if most women would know that Partner is an order of magnitude more prestigious than "Associate" and the thousand other job titles that are floating around nowadays.

I think it's pretty well known that "Partner" is the shit and "Associate" is just shit. The ambiguous ones are things like "VP" or "Director".

Nah, Partner is good at a good firm and literally nothing at a small firm. So these women would have to have knowledge of the VC scene, which strikes me as... Unlikely.

If you're bright enough to know what VC is but not inside baseball enough to know which firm is which you're more likely to reject all VC claims than to give credibility to every one of them because "Venture Capital" is also the job claimed by a hundred thousand morons online.

If you're bright enough to know what VC is but not inside baseball enough to know which firm is which you're more likely to reject all VC claims than to give credibility to every one of them because "Venture Capital" is also the job claimed by a hundred thousand morons online.

Similar for people claiming to be a trader, since 99.99% of the time it's somebody yeeting around their Robin Hood balance on memestocks for a few months before going broke

"Executive" is ambiguous as well

Yep, you need that "Chief" in front of it to really mean something, hence the term "C-level".

29 year old ain’t lateraling into partner at a very large VC. Also generally the carry is a lot more complex (and profitable) compared to 1.5m.

Yeah, even if he did make it into the job by 29, it would be quite a few years before he was making real money given the startup cycle these days.

Exactly. Post made a mockery of how carry works for the partners making the deals.

Money, job and education matter far less for dating than what people think. I know plenty of people with fantastic careers, high levels of education and high income who are reasonably looking and decent people who barely get any dates. Some end up dating women who are clearly unattractive. I have friends who have low paying jobs, failed high school and are broke but date women noticeably more attractive than them.

The factor that correlates the most with dating success for men is being the guy who would be the one who would stand out the most at a party. Not counting clownish behaviour or someone who stands out because they are a freak but stand out in a more positive way. The guy doesn't have to look that good, he just needs to be the center of attention at a party.

A real estate agent with average looks probably has a far hotter wife than a similar looking man with a masters in engineering who makes three times the money.

As long as you aren't completely broke, unemployed or have a terrible job or a hideous face the main correlate of your dating success will be skills most associated with car salesmen. Rich men aren't more successful for being rich, they are successful because they can buy themselves the attention. If the party is on your yacht it is difficult not be the center of attention.

I have seen too many men optimize their career thinking it will give them an attractive wife. It doesn't. They end up being 29 with a masters in statistics/CS and guys with similar backgrounds think they are cool. For women they are just the same guy drinking the same beer. I have asked guys in this scenario what it would take for them to have met a women. No women rejected them on a night out because of their job and few women even know what they do. Getting the next promotion or increasing their salary wouldn't matter since few women even know what they make or what they do. Unless they become spectacularly rich it won't matter. Most women don't know the difference between tech support or graphics engine developer nor do they know how much you make.

Money, job and education matter far less for dating than what people think. I know plenty of people with fantastic careers, high levels of education and high income who are reasonably looking and decent people who barely get any dates. Some end up dating women who are clearly unattractive.

Not to harp on again about it but this is once again a symptom of modern Western social norms. Back home "fantastic careers, high levels of education and high income" are like the top 3 things families look for (definitely all three are in the top 5 once you remove dealbreakers like religious compatibility) when suggesting men for their daughters. Long term I expect that valuing these things is beneficial for society as a whole compared to the current modus operandi of the West.

It seems totally possible to me that the typical woman in western countries would go down a bit in terms of handsomeness/height to date a man with a good, stable job and a strong intention to commit to her, but has no idea how to go about making that bargain.

From talking to girl friends/watching them swipe on dating apps, I'd beg to differ. Plenty of guys who are pretty stable, nerdy vibes get instantly dismissed for being boring.

I’ve always thought this was a mixed bag. In the ‘old country’ rich men typically weren’t just set up with the prettiest possible woman either - there were all sorts of family ties, dowries, possible commercial or political links and so on to consider, plus temperament and who seemed likely to be a good wife and mother. Many a rich man was married to a plain rather than beautiful woman whom his family considered a good match.

In the ‘old country’ rich men typically weren’t just set up with the prettiest possible woman either - there were all sorts of family ties, dowries, possible commercial or political links and so on to consider, plus temperament and who seemed likely to be a good wife and mother.

And it's the same for us right now. Recently my mother talked about finding me a wife, and the number 1 most important thing she said was that the girl must have a "good heart", in fact she didn't even mention looks at all until I told her that was important as well and that I would just staright up say no to any woman below my personal looks threshold, so she should keep that in mind when finding people.

I actually think this is a good thing. If you want a marriage to last long term and be successful, your wife having a good heart at 50 will be a lot more important than how she used to look at 25.

Looks need to pass a certain threshold but beyond that are less important compared to other traits.

This has always been my thinking. My greatest preference is a slim, tall model type (my height or taller) but that's a very limited category of women, many of whom regard me as too short or otherwise unattractive. I've only dated one woman like that. However, there are still plenty of great women out there for me.

Yep, I was doing decently well with women back when I was making essentially poverty wages for the city I was living in doing part time work and my living situation was such that I had almost no place to bring a girl back to.

What I did have a lot of back then was free time! Time to go out and try to meet women, time to think about improving my skills with women.

If you have a great job but it means you only have enough energy left over to spend maybe just a few hours a week trying to meet women, well you might not get good success unless maybe you get really focused on apps or match-making services or something. Although I don't know, I haven't tried much on those.

I should probably qualify this post, though, by saying that it's not unlikely that women would find, say, a 35 year old man who is almost broke and does not have his own place to be less attractive than a 25 year old man with the same characteristics. But I don't really know, I am only speculating there.

It could be totally fake, it could be a fictionalised version of the truth. What makes me go "Huh?" is "Trump went on TV and said he was cancelling all flights to Europe because of COVID and I ended up deleting the app". What has that got to do with presumably American guy looking for dates with American women in America?

As to the rest of it - it may well be a guy going "Women only like me for my money, not for myself" and that part about the ex rings true for this: "She told me I'm lacking in confidence and inexperienced and immature and hard to love". Sounds likely, if the rest of the story about being introverted and asocial and not asking any women out is correct.

So it's probably someone who got hurt by the brutal truth and is now picking at the scab with "look at all these women who would never give me the time of day if they knew what I was really like, and they only care about my money, I knew it".

The details are probably heavily fictionalised, but people are self-hating enough to do the emotional equivalent of cutting, which is what this is.

"Trump went on TV and said he was cancelling all flights to Europe because of COVID and I ended up deleting the app". What has that got to do with presumably American guy looking for dates with American women in America?

I remember exactly where I was when this happened. It wasn't just that Trump canceled flights. This was the same night that the NBA canceled it's season, and Tom Hanks tested positive. This all happened within a few hours. Everyone knew things would never be the same after that.

At the third sentence, I was leaning strongly towards fake. No one self-describes as having a weak chin. But my priors are rather high that all of these subs are filled with creative writing exercises and wish-fulfillment. If you're going to read these subs, you have to suspend disbelief and enjoy the ride or there's no point in bothering.

Plenty of people on 4chan and incel forums would freely self-describe as having a weak chin.

No one self-describes as having a weak chin.

If you're in a particular self-lacerating mood and ruthlessly picking at all your flaws, you may well list out all the things wrong with you like "my chin is weak". There do seem to be sites where people are obsessed with tiny increments of "my jaw is the wrong shape, my forehead is wrong, my face isn't masculine enough".

I quickly suspected that this was fake, although the particular kind of fake I guessed was the moderately common "swap the gender and see if Reddit gives the same response" experiment.

For an example experiment, in the original post a man says "I stopped being attracted to my wife because she got overweight, and divorced her; my beautiful new wife is thin, but my ex makes snide comments about it, saying she's probably anorexic. Am I wrong to be offended?" The experiment post purports to be from a woman who says "I stopped being attracted to my husband because he was underweight, and divorced him; my handsome new husband is ripped, but my ex makes snide comments about it, saying he's probably on steroids. Am I wrong to be offended?" The author of the fake post then compares the responses to see what kind of double standards people apply.

Other folks mentioned the details that ring false, but the obvious one to me is getting matches on a dating app without changing your appearance. Absolutely nothing matters as much as the man's photographs. Even a man with a prestigious, high-paying job needs to prove it with photographs that depict him doing prestigious things, in or around expensive objects he purchased; changing the job title won't do it.

I suspect a gender-swap double standards test because the reverse post - "I'm a woman, during the pandemic I changed, now I get way more attention from the opposite sex, but for a superficial reason, so I have mixed feelings" - could be plausible if changing the right details. In the original post, she doesn't get a new job - she goes on a pandemic diet-and-exercise change that makes her much thinner, and the quantity and quality of dating app attention goes way up. I can imagine that other details that don't apply to men-looking-for-women on dating apps come from transliterating, rather than translating, similar parts of the original woman's post.

At no point did I think this was made up, perhaps I'm just gullible. I also made a lot of money during COVID, so that part seemed believable. The equity boom going on then seems like the best time for people with niche skillsets who sit in their bedroom (crypto people) to be getting high-paying jobs. There are all sorts of possible regional variations too. There might be many venture capitalists in San Francisco, but far fewer in smaller inland cities, so he'd get more attention there. This might also explain the prestigious lawyers who would most likely be in NY or LA complaining that they don't get attention.

Then again, I don't use dating apps and don't really know how they work.

I know nothing about dating apps, but the writing style tells me it’s fake.

I thought it was made up at the Title.

I would be shocked if anyone is reading anything in the profile at all. Other than swiping purely based on pictures. See: all those tinder experiments where the bio literally talks about being a child predator and a laundry list of other felonies with pictures of a male model and still gets 100s of thirsty chicks in the dm. I'm sure all those women are lovely folk who don't want to associate with a child predator.

The simple heuristics you should have known are just the mechanics of dating apps. Namely Rules 1 and 2. Applies to just about anything, The more you know about something, the more fine-tuned your BS detector, its not that complicated.

I mean that’s very consistent with the ‘different women have different preferences’ hypothesis- some women are looking for an underwear model(we can assume these women are overrepresented on dating apps) and probably don’t read the bios, but lots of women do read them.

I would be shocked if anyone is reading anything in the profile at all. Other than swiping purely based on pictures. See: all those tinder experiments where the bio literally talks about being a child predator and a laundry list of other felonies with pictures of a male model and still gets 100s of thirsty chicks in the dm.

Even more black-pilling: Many of those chicks did read the profile and were still more than down to get railed.

To be fair, are you really going to swipe left on this? or this?

In a vacuum, both would likely be “woulds” for me.

However, I actively screen out women who’ve had a child or children, even for casual flings, so the former would had been out.* The upper limit of my OLD age settings is generally quite a few years younger than when the latter did her infamous needful, so she wouldn’t had appeared for me to swipe in the first place.

Especially knowing what they allegedly did, even if they were younger and childless, I’d definitely pass. I’m not Captain Save-a-Hoe and I can’t fix them.

I’m also not indestructible: chloroform, drowning, stabbings, and bullets hurt me too! (To borrow from the Bill Burr bit).

To be fair2, the point is that it’s fairly well-accepted that men, for the most part, are thirsty coomers who will take what they can get. A lot of men will readily admit that they’re weak for female youth and beauty, and it’s morally agnostic just like how apples fall from trees. They don’t pretend their preferences have some sort of moral underpinning.

In contrast is the mainstream view that women are Wonderful, and that women’s attraction for men are but moral litmus tests for men who have the “correct” attitudes and behaviors, a view that in mainstream and online discourse many men will whiteknight and women will fight tooth and nail to protect and insist. It’s evergreen Just World insistence.

* Interestingly enough, I could had sworn she used to have a long and extensive Wikipedia article that appears to have been deleted; only an article for her daughter remains.

In contrast is the mainstream view that women are Wonderful, and that women’s attraction for men are but moral litmus tests for men who have the “correct” attitudes and behaviors, a view that in mainstream and online discourse many men will whiteknight and women will fight tooth and nail to protect and insist. It’s evergreen Just World insistence.

Yeah, this is the thing thing that stuck in my craw as a young man and still does when I run into it; it kinda vanished into the "Boo Straight White Male" background noise ~2017.

If you had been keeping up with the dating discussions on here, ACX, and /r/slatestarcodex, you would have known this is false from signaling economics.

If there were any possible string of text characters one could put in one's profile to increase one's match rate this much, then dudes would be doing exactly that. Getting the date, hoping to click, and then hoping she becomes attached and doesn't care that you're not rich is a much better strategy than getting zero dates. Perhaps you have ethical hangups that would prevent you from doing this (as do I), but there are plenty of desperate or overly horny guys out there who would be willing to do this.

Of course, women are agents, and thus would change their behavior after getting ripped off constantly. Most likely by disregarding text on male dating profiles without a credible signal to back it up.

EDIT: Actually, a much simpler way would be by looking at his baseline Hinge matches. I've never used Hinge, but if it's anything like Tinder and Bumble, 20 matches a month for someone overweight, not particularly handsome, and 5'9" is almost an order of magnitude higher than what I would find likely.

I wouldn’t claim to have particularly great bait detection relative to the modal Motte user, but there were three main things that tipped me off beyond the Bayesian prior that all things on the internet (especially Reddit) are of questionable veracity and sexuality:

  • Women messaging first
  • Partner at 29
  • Private equity “analysts”

Any story involving anything other than Bumble that mentions “several” women messaging first instantly makes me skeptical. Women are coy, and insanely passive and devoid of initiative when it comes to making the first move—especially beautiful women.

Normie chicks aren’t going to know what “VC” stands for—and even if they do and/or know what venture capital is, they don’t know if “partner” is a senior title is not. Eww what’s a “partner”? Is that what they call ranch-hands in “venture capital”? Ick. Thank u, next. And chicks that are familiar with venture capital (say, private equity "analysts") usually won't hold it in high esteem. Venture capital is like the greasy snake-oil sector of the "high-finance" realm.

Beautiful and not-so-beautiful female doctors, private equity “analysts,” and lawyers are constantly surrounded by high status, rich men who are generally taller than 5’9”: Other doctors, more senior men in private equity (including partners), more senior men in law (including partners). 5’9” can be a steep hole to climb out of, even with a robust income. Jamie, Table 5.5 of Height/Income Trade-offs, pull that shit up. And crickets are still a common experience for tall, high-income men in online dating and social media.

Furthermore, 29 would be an incredibly young age to make partner at a “very large” venture capital firm, regardless of a “niche knowledge set.” Multiple articles would be written about this person on Business Insider or whatever, and gossiped about in various online spaces. If a 29-year-old told me he was partner at a very large venture capital firm, I’d assume the firm was him and a few buddies in one of their parents’ basements. This is something most private equity “analysts” would suspect too, perhaps even some lawyers. Although I imagine many female “analysts” and lawyers would be willing to overlook such a technical detail if he’s sufficiently tall, good-looking, and/or famous, teehee.

I repeatedly put quotes around private equity “analyst(s).” Private equity “analyst” is a fairly uncommon position, so this aspect also rustled my Spidey senses. Sometimes there are private equity analysts (interns or straight-out-of-undergrad hires), but most junior private equity front-office personnel generally have the title of “associate,” having already served their sentencing spent at least two years or so as an analyst in investment banking.

Wealthmaxxing can certainly work in online dating and social media. However, that generally requires harder-to-fake signals like photos with exotic cars, expensive mansions/hotels/apartments, travel in exotic places. Photos with hot chicks are always helpful for the usual preselection and female mate-choice copying reasons, further confirmation that your wealth signals are credible. And that still wouldn’t boost one from crickets to 200 matches a week. Additionally, from an efficient markets perspective: A market as crowded as OLD from the male-side shouldn't have many $[X] dollar bills to pick-up.

The “let’s not forget that men bad” and “female hypergamy doesn’t exist, but if it does it’s only because men are so shitty and insecure”-type comments in that thread were all too predictable. I just made a reference to the quote “man who thought it was all so tiresome finds he is more tired than previously thought possible,” but it’s also quite pertinent here.

Agreed on analyst, good catch although people who aren’t in finance don’t know or understand the distinction between analyst and associate and so that alone doesn’t prove it’s fake. What does prove it’s fake is the VC thing which is 100% bullshit and that, as you say:

“Beautiful” and not-so-beautiful female doctors, private equity “analysts,” and lawyers are constantly surrounded by high status, rich men who are generally taller than 5’9”: Other doctors, more senior men in private equity (including partners), more senior men in law (including partners).

Rationalist or otherwise autistic online dating metrics obsession (of TRP, ‘cel and ‘normie’ variety) assumes class and social circles aren’t real and the market is efficient. In reality almost all mating is assortive, working class men aren’t competing with rich men and vice versa, dating down in terms of class is very low status and dating up in terms of class is more rare than at any time since the early 20th century. If one is an affluent white PMC, one is competing in the pool of this class. Even on apps, most people date in the same class, a working class makeup artist is subconsciously more likely to respond to the same guy with a good blue collar job, tattoos and a truck compared to in a suit or in khakis at the country club and with a generic PMC job, in part because she knows the former is more who she’s ‘supposed’ to date.

Rich women mostly don’t have to worry about losing on marriage to men of their social class to pretty working class girls who work as hairdressers or airport check-in agents. PMC men likewise need not fear handsome plumbers even if they make more on paper than they do.

Wealthmaxxing can certainly work in online dating and social media. However, that generally requires harder-to-fake signals like photos with exotic cars, expensive hotels, travel in exotic places.

Doesn’t this usually mean petty, low level crypto scammer / hustle bro now? It’s always funny how the drive of the Du Cap in Antibes is full of American and English tourists staying in some cheap shithole in Nice but getting the ‘iconic’ shot they must have seen on some rich person’s page that they follow for themselves. Every Ferrari is rented, every first class seat was bought via churning / points, travel is cheap since airline deregulation etc. The only way you know is when you get their full name and can look them up on LinkedIn, that tends to have enough to predict pretty accurately.

Rationalist or otherwise autistic online dating metrics obsession (of TRP, ‘cel and ‘normie’ variety) assumes class and social circles aren’t real and the market is efficient. In reality almost all mating is assortive

I don't think rationalist or other spaces that discuss online dating metrics assume markets are efficient, nor that social circles aren't real, nor that assortative mating isn't real. After all, dating and relationships come with tremendous search costs, transaction costs, switching costs, information asymmetry, conditions that introduce substantial friction and make markets less efficient. I'm quite certain such spaces are familiar with the notion of assortative mating, far more so than the complement of their union (i.e., mainstream blue-pill spaces).

I view dating market efficiency (or lack thereof) and assortative mating as completely orthogonal; one could just consider assortative mating as another factor in an agent's utility function just as one could allow assortative mating when setting up a population genetics simulation (instead of assuming random mating).

Rich women mostly don’t have to worry about losing on marriage to men of their social class to pretty working class girls who work as hairdressers or airport check-in agents. PMC men likewise need not fear handsome plumbers even if they make more on paper than they do.

I mostly agree that people tend to pair-up assortatively when it comes to marriage. However, mostly is doing a lot of work here, likely too much. At some point, pretty hairdressers and handsome well-earning plumbers do pose a sufficient source of competition, even if we're talking about competition for rich women vs. PMC men (I parse "rich" as more elite than mere "PMC", PMC women tend to be much more threatened by working class women than are their male PMC counterparts and working class men). Plus, someone from a working class background can always re-brand via some Russell Conjugation as they make the up-jump. The hairdresser becomes a stylist, the well-earning plumber becomes a small business owner.

As a side note, "airport check-in agents" (and flight attendants) can be PMC-adjacent, depending on country and perhaps airline, with multilingual and education requirements, de facto or de jure. I know in many countries they're basically like glorified fast casual restaurant workers.

Doesn’t this usually mean petty, low level crypto scammer / hustle bro now?

People have varying levels of naivete and cynicism, so you can fool some of the people all of the time, and some people will accuse you of being a fake poser no matter what you do. Of course, it helps to manage the lifestyle in their profile(s) to be consistent and authentic in a way that's perhaps reminiscent of the Diderot effect. There's also a notion of faking it until you make it: If you're the type of guy who can minmax your life to consistently and authentically fake being actually rich, at some point the hindbrain of a sufficiently large quantity of young attractive women will just view you as actually rich. You might actually have became the mask and are actually rich. Having evidence of other hot chicks in your life reinforces the illusion/reality.

Yeah, he became a partner at a large VC firm by working from home at his parent's house, big eggs dee. Something that is the career level achievement a very select few get to experience. This guys career trajectory is almost as believable as 200 matches a week whilst having a small chin.

It’s immediately fake because “partner at VC firm” isn’t an impressive title to PMC women who are actually familiar with job titles (ie those he seems to discuss in his post). VC almost universally pays worse than other ‘front office’ finance, and while a handful of people at top firms or who found or join good firms with significant capital of their own (that they bring from their own exits) can make real money, the average “Partner at a VC” isn’t working for Sequoia, they’re working for some third-tier shop with a few million that does very little and fails at most of it but technically affords them the title of ‘VC Partner’ despite making much less than many comparable PMC professional.

And that’s if he actually works in real VC. The average person with that title on LinkedIn (and by extension Hinge) is literally one step (or no step) above a ‘hustle’ crypto influencer and hangs around their city’s startup coworking scene selling ‘networking services’ and asking for 5% in exchange for ‘marketing and connections’.

It’s immediately fake because “partner at VC firm” isn’t an impressive title to PMC women who are actually familiar with job titles (ie those he seems to discuss in his post)

This.

Normie women (secretaries/hairstylists) don't get the reference. Lumpen-PMC women (librarian, administrator) are woke and actively hostile to capitalists. Haute-PMC women (like he says he is dating) see right through him and aren't impressed.

He's a bit of a type - fake "finance" hustle-bro, usually Desi. His $350k/yr $300k managing his uncle's gas stations (which all goes his uncle), and $50k driving a leased base model Tesla for Uber. He's got pics of himself in a thin gold chain leaning on his Tesla too. The 1MM comp? He'd be lucky if he had 1MM AUM. Job titles and wealth got women in the ancestral homeland, so he thinks that it will get him some here. Unfortunately, it's not. Also he's not 5'9", he's 5'6" and lying.

I actually dated Haute-PMC women before the Great Awokening, and as you say, they see right through it. 350 is no big deal to them, and they filter ruthlessly on class. I'm not PMC myself, but I did go to a PMC school and live in a PMC city, so young residents/associates/etc. were willing to date me, even though I was a line cook (at a restaurant that was trendy ten years before I worked there) and I spent most of my time training with my cycling team.

The average person with that title on LinkedIn (and by extension Hinge) is literally one step (or no step) above a ‘hustle’ crypto influencer and hangs around their city’s startup coworking scene selling ‘networking services’ and asking for 5% in exchange for ‘marketing and connections’

Roman criminals weren't nailed this hard my god

I’m thankful this is fake. When we start the truth and reconciliation commissions, false blackpills will be a docket item.

Some mean people go (used to go?) to some reddit asian subs and post obviously fictional stories from the point of view of an Indian or East Asian man learning that his wife who doesn't much want to have sex with him used to be wild fucking white guys before she met him and settled down. It's ragebait targeted at an insecurity some asian Americans have. Some bad people manufactured horrible fake black pills for these men.

I got suckered. In my defense, I'm not familiar with modern dating apps, and on older sites I've seen A/B testing of seemingly trivial things make a huge difference. On one old site, my friend had profile pics get rated around 4/10 when it was just him visible and around 8/10 when his brand new sports car was in the background.

I wouldn't have jumped right to the "gold diggers" conclusion in either case, though. In fact, IIRC my friend's experiment was when "hotornot" wasn't yet a dating site, just a gimmick whose default setting was "show men and women", so his ratings might have been mostly from straight men. When OKCupid found a strong effect of narrow depth-of-field on profile picture ratings, I wouldn't have assumed that people were thinking "A-ha! This person is wealthy enough to afford prosumer camera equipment!" Maybe in some evolutionary sense everything bottoms out in "would this person provide well for our children", but at least at the conscious level I think most people stop at points like "is this person ambitious and responsible" or "is this person exciting and fun" without overanalyzing past that.

How quickly did you think that the story is entirely made up?

Pretty damn quickly. Back in the old days I tried out these dating apps, first without stating anything about my job, just my education. Didn't get many matches and those that did were mostly not interested. Then I added my job (quant at a prestigious firm), it did not make one whit of a difference.

I've never consistently stated my job nor education on OLD or social media, aside from the occasional times when I was doing A/B testing. Doing so always struck me as poor opsec, just more material for a potential psycho-chick to latch onto.

When I did, job/education made little difference relative to height, looks, and photos for preselection/female mate-choice copying. A lot of jobs are just also simply illegible to normie chicks.

Quantitative Developer at Renaissance Technologies would be an extremely elite position to hold, both in terms of difficulty and compensation (likely much more than that of all but the most superstar roles in professional sports). Yet, all of that would just be random word-noises to the modal young attractive woman, even those who nominally work in finance or tech.

Same here. Tried a a few variations of Data Scientist/ Data Engineer/ML Engineer at a well-known company and it made fuckall difference from when I was a college student. (I only swipe on women who probably make a fraction of what I make)

Worth taking into account how these apps work though. If you go an extended period with no one swiping right on you, your profile's mmr drops, eventually into a bracket that has no real women in it at all, and your profile simply won't be seen. At that point you could change it to "7ft NBA star + astronaut" with pics to match and you wouldn't be able to match.

Same with me when I added my height (6'4"). Girls are just picky across the board.

Pretty much thought it was fake based on the title alone. When he described his appearance I was about 100% sure it was fake. Even male models would likely struggle to get to 200 matches/week and looks matter more than job title in online dating. And the job title on Hinge is not displayed that conspicuously. He didn't mention anything about pictures in a ferrari or a nice beachview apartment.

The Saga of Jaime Reed continues

For those who haven't followed it:

  • Part one was Jaime Reed blowing the whistle on the St. Louis Children's Hospital by submitting an affidavit, and Bari Weiss' Free Press publishing an article about it.

  • Part two was the aftermath, Missouri Independent's and the St.Louis Post Dispatch doing an investigation that contradicted Reed's statements, summed up by @PmMeClassicMemes, focusing in no small part on the ridiculousness of the claim that one of the patients identified as an attack helicopter.

  • Part three was Jesse Singal doing an investigation of his own, pointing out the statements contradicting Reed were made by members of a group called TransParents, some of who actually co-founded the clinic in question. He also got documentation from her about the attack helicopter kid. I summarized it here.

Now the New York Times has also investigated the issue. As someone following trans issues for a while I found it to be a bit of a slog, but it could be interesting to someone out of the loop. The short of it is they've corroborated many of Jaime Reed's claims, though they claim to have contradicted one of them:

It’s clear the St. Louis clinic benefited many adolescents: Eighteen patients and parents said that their experiences there were overwhelmingly positive, and they refuted Ms. Reed’s depiction of it. For example, her affidavit claimed that the clinic’s doctors did not inform parents or children of the serious side effects of puberty blockers and hormones. But emails show that Ms. Reed herself provided parents with fliers outlining possible risks.

For what it's worth Reed responded to it on Twitter:

I provided parents fliers, no disputing that. And I emailed these. I also made many of them (I am not a doctor). Getting a flier emailed does not equal informed consent. Getting a copy of a flier handed by a doctor also does not equal informed consent.

The question of NYT's bias is an interesting one. A lot of people from the "anti-trans" side of the issue are praising the article as very nuanced. I'm also firmly on that side, and personally I feel like they're pulling a lot of their punches, if an "anti-trans" version Cade Metz wrote that article they'd have many opportunities to go wild on this particular subject, to the point that the article on Scott would appear like a fluff piece. On the other hand I do recognize they're constrained by their audience, and even writing the article in it's present form is probably about as much as they can get away with at the moment.

Indeed, GLAAD got maad, and unleashed The Truck. This is actually the second time they did this, the first was after NYT published a profile on detransitioners. I think this might a strategic mistake on their part. The first time they protested the NYT, their action carried some energy, even if it didn't result in anything. The problem is that doing the same thing again after their original protest had no effect, makes this one feel rather impotent. With responses turned off it's hard to gauge people's reactions, but it feels like they aren't having it anymore, at least on this particular issue.

At the beginning of the year I made a prediction that something's up with the trans issue. The debate rages on, and we're probably still years away from a resolution, but I'm growing increasingly confident that this year is a turning point.

I think we're about 3-5 years out from a "the Science changed, idiot" with a side helping of blaming repressive conservative gender roles for the prevalence of transition between 2014-2025. 40 years from now kids will learn how the election of Republican Donald Trump coincided with a large surge in transitions, so obviously it was a Republican phenomenon. Some internet pedants will conduct statistical analysis of congresspeople to demonstrate that the evidence is more blurry.

It’s clear the St. Louis clinic benefited many adolescents: Eighteen patients and parents said that their experiences there were overwhelmingly positive, and they refuted Ms. Reed’s depiction of it. For example, her affidavit claimed that the clinic’s doctors did not inform parents or children of the serious side effects of puberty blockers and hormones. But emails show that Ms. Reed herself provided parents with fliers outlining possible risks.

What gets me about this is that these surgeries are being declared as helping kids six weeks after, when the full weight of the decisions made may not happen for 5-10 years later when they become full adults and can understand the life-long effects of these decisions. Most tattoos would be considered great if you only asked about it in the first few month when the person is still experiencing an after-tattoo glow. The same tattoo might later be a cause of grief if the location or content proves embarrassing or limits their options. That facial tattoo might feel cool at 19 when you’re young and in school and only need to worry about looking cool to your peers. At thirty when you’re turned down for jobs and can’t get serious dates because you look like a circus freak, it’s not so successful. I want to see a study that at least follows the same kids from transition to middle age, because I think a lot of their opinions on the subject will change as they mature.

Not to mention there are all kinds of biases and social pressures against even considering the downsides of life-changing decisions you already made.

I have a strong prior that trans is going to, long term, have trouble overcoming the personally unsympathetic nature of its protagonists and their constant shitflinging and temper tantrums are mostly going to hurt them rather than get what they want.

Indeed, GLAAD got maad, and unleashed the truck.

That seems like a mistake on their part, because usually the kind of people who put messages on vehicles and drive around or park them outside the place they have a beef with are, not to put too fine a point on it, loo-lahs. There was a guy fighting with the cops in my town (he probably still is) who did exactly this - closely written placards fastened onto a car parked outside the police station. It didn't convince anyone of his sanity, much less that he was in the right in this argument.

What's fascinating in this is that the NYT is even being anything like even-handed on the issue; the newsroom revolt and crackdown does seem to have shifted the power balance back from the younger, activist journalists to the older editorial staff.

What's fascinating in this is that the NYT is even being anything like even-handed on the issue;

My theory is that they figured out this issue is a dead end, or at least came to believe there's a real chance it might blow up in the progressive's collective faces, so they're covering their asses to preserve credibility.

Also she probably was told sometime on the way, that trans kid is better than dead kid, and if there's any questioning of the program would be happening on the way, it's a direct way to the kid committing suicide. So given that, would you dare to criticize anything about what is happening? Like telling "hey kid, we thought it would fix you but turns out you're screwed for life, not only once, but twice" - to a supposedly suicidal kid? What parent would do anything like that? Of course they'd say everything is peachy and going great and we are supper happy and those idiot relatives could please just shut up before they make my kid suicidal again?!

This seems like excellent evidence for exactly what Reed described: a climate where the beneficence and effectiveness and necessity of these treatments was just assumed, no matter what happened.

I don't think it was just assumed. I think somebody worked hard at impressing on the mother that if she assumes something else, the potential deadly consequences are on her.

Also, when Wash U investigated itself, it reported zero adverse effects.

That would be a huge achievement if they could have a medicine that literally overhauls the whole body's biochemistry, against how it naturally supposed to work, and had not little, not insignificant - but zero adverse effects. Either they are superbly lucky geniuses or they are liars. But I guess it gives the usual suspects the base to say that the science is settled, and anybody who pushes it further is a bigoted conspiracy terrorist.

For example, her affidavit claimed that the clinic’s doctors did not inform parents or children of the serious side effects of puberty blockers and hormones. But emails show that Ms. Reed herself provided parents with fliers outlining possible risks.

That's a novel argument, there can't have been a culture of silence because the whistleblower was able to allege that there was one.

For example, Cassandra claims that nobody warned the Trojans about the Greeks in the horse. But the record shows that Cassandra herself provided Trojans with this information.

This is what the New York Times is doing when they write "nuanced" articles.

Indeed, GLAAD got maad, and unleashed the truck.

So they parked a truck displaying a complaint on 41st street across from the NYC Sports Club? (The NYT building is on the corner; it starts where that metal grating over the windows is) Oh yeah, that'll do it. Come on, now, when the unions want attention they use a GIANT RAT. And they put it on the avenue. A truck on the cross street? Nobody cares. I don't know what you'd use for gender issues, a giant snack cake or something?

I don't know what you'd use for gender issues, a giant snack cake or something?

Autumn Scardina has got you covered on that, and will throw in the lawsuit for free.

but I'm growing increasingly confident that his year is a turning point.

There is precedent for the LGBTQI2 movement to overreach. Decriminalization of child molestion and destigmatization of pedophilia were once positions which were tolerated by its majority, but today they go as far as deny any historical association. But when the rift between the majority of gay and assocated advocates and pedophiles emerged, the former lacked the institutional support they now have. When the senate threated to withdraw funding of UN unless NAMBLA is ejected, the Sixcolour was a partisan symbol, not a second national flag as is today.

How big do you figure was the movement at the time? If the "LGBTQI2 movement" went from being 1% of society of whom 50% were pederasts to being 50% of society of whom 1% are pederasts - as one may expect to be the case if the movement could be modelled as providing a home for all that are sufficiently far from the conservative ideal of sexual orientation, with the distance threshold steadily going down - then this simultaneously call into question the "wokes are crypto-pederasts waiting for their time to strike" narrative many right-wingers seem to want to get out of this historical observation, and whether we can generalise to assume that the movement will step back from another putative overreach, given that there is now much less room for further growth and hence dilution.

It's not that "wokes are crypto-pederasts", it's that the genuine paedophiles will use any movements around loosening the 'conservative ideal of sexual orientation' as stalking horses and useful idiots, see the push on now for MAPs instead of paedophiles since that term is stigmatising, etc. There probably are genuine people with this perversion who want to change, but given that we've had it hammered into us that conversion therapy doesn't work, is a fraud, is torture, and should be illegal, then are we supposed to believe "it doesn't work at all except in this one instance of a new sexual orientation" and the real child-rapists who don't want to change and have no intention of doing so will use these organisations as a cloak and protective colouration - 'how dare you slander me by accusing me of being a paedophile, I'm taking you to court! I just have this particular orientation that is not my fault, ask the psychologists and social scientists!'

Look at trans rights movement - for whatever genuine people are out there, isn't it strange how all of a sudden male-identifying violent rapists suddenly found their true inner womanhood when it was a question of going to jail and which prison they'd be put in? And such people used the force of law which was intended to protect oppressed minority to get their way about being put in women's prisons.

we've had it hammered into us that conversion therapy doesn't work, is a fraud, is torture, and should be illegal, then are we supposed to believe "it doesn't work at all except in this one instance of a new sexual orientation"

I think this understanding fails to model low-decouplers properly. A high-decoupler might indeed see the $currentyear belief system and think that there's a glaring unprincipled special case ("conversion therapy doesn't work... except for pedos") at work that is only waiting to be regularised. Meanwhile, I think, for the low-decoupler, the principle has never changed: things are either simultaneously evil, in violation of principles, wasteful, ineffective and fraudulent - or simultaneously good, in line with all principles, efficient, effective and honest. You could consider this an instance of the just-world fallacy, or simply affect-loading as the main and only way to make pronouncements about the real world. "$orientation conversion therapy doesn't work" was never intended to be the scientific statement, orthogonal to questions of morality, that you imagine it to be: it simply means that $orientation belongs in the good-effective-honest cluster and interfering with $orientation belongs in the bad-ineffective-fraudulent cluster. Any social debates being had, and any shift of public opinion, is not about eggheaded technical arguments regarding techniques but only about where the line between good and bad is drawn, and there I don't see any significant qualitative shift having happened in previous years. The last big Chesterton Fence that broke down in the western theater of the good-bad assignment battlefield was the loss of Christian authority, and I don't think we're getting back to that anytime soon; if you are serious about stopping pederasts, you probably should be more concerned with fortifying a new line. (I think that the liberal principle of bodily non-compulsion - which seems to have stood strong enough that the push for "you must sleep with trans women" fell completely flat - and some reinforcement of the idea that unrelated adults are by default sexually exploitative towards children and so children can't consent would be sufficient.)

Look at trans rights movement - for whatever genuine people are out there, isn't it strange how all of a sudden male-identifying violent rapists suddenly found their true inner womanhood when it was a question of going to jail and which prison they'd be put in?

I reckon this to be a sideshow entirely driven by the circumstance that approximately nobody actually has the slightest stake in what happens in women's prisons, and so the whole issue is a convenient side-stage to fight proxy wars for the conflict that actually matters (similar to how so many people with an opinion on Trump appear to have a strong opinion on Orbán, without necessarily even being able to point out Hungary on a map). I don't think the pederasty case has the same potential: many more people actually have a stake (by virtue of having children), and at the same time it doesn't have the shape of any live CW battle that it could serve as a substitute for (since all "can A have sex with B?" battles are currently cleanly resolved in favour of yes or no). (During the brief heyday of NAMBLA, the latter condition was not yet met, which is why the pedo question managed to get some air.)

The problem with non-compulsion is that it’s quite gamable. You can convince the public that kids are capable of “wanting” sex with adults (which was a line NAMBLA pushed at one point, and via trans-activity at present) and then the age of consent is pushed downward. Likewise, it’s fairly easy for a determined person to manipulate others into consenting to sex through drugs, alcohol, social or physical pressure.

Kids are undeniably capable of “wanting” sex with adults. Parents, caregivers, and (to a lesser extent) members of society at large have a responsibility for recognizing when kids shouldn't get what they want and preventing them from doing so.

and then the age of consent is pushed downward

The age of consent for sex has been consistently rising over time and was much lower in the centuries before either NAMBLA or the "trans-activity at present", so I think you'll need a bit of evidence for this claim.

Oh, I never thought it was anything to do with science but was purely for the "homophobia! bad!" sloganeering. But the thing is, when they're going to be dragging MAP into the spotlight as the new 'homosexuality is not a perversion or mental illness, but it is a disorder, but they can't help it and so should not be persecuted or prosecuted', part of that will be the useful idiot psychologists et al. going on about therapy to help them deal with these impulses.

And we'll all be expected to forget that this boils down to conversion therapy, which we were all told never works anyway. Because that will be the politically convenient take on it.

I'm sufficiently autistic/OCD on details like this to want them to pick a story and stick to it, and I know that makes me a fool. There is no objective truth, there isn't even any subjective truth, there's just whatever line is the most convenient to get them what they want, and Science has replaced Religion as the moral arbiter and setter of rules for society. "The science is settled" is the secular progressive version of Roma locuta, causa finita est. And "the science" changes according to the whim of the day.

useful idiot psychologists et al. going on about therapy to help them deal with these impulses.

Ugh, I hate useful idiot psychologists. Probably the single most disappointing group of elites in the past 50 years in my personal opinion. The legacy of Freud, Young, Piaget, and so many other brilliant men has been absolutely squandered by the cowardly, stupid, contemptible and frankly just lame breed of psychologist we have nowadays.

At least Peterson is still showing a bit of the potential the field once had. I hope it can be saved before the damage is irreparable, but I'm frankly skeptical. We'd probably be better at this point burning it all down and having Peterson & co. create a new discipline from scratch.

But MAP not being persecuted or prosecuted is not sufficient to actually enable pederasty. We're quite comfortable with letting people have sexual orientations they can't legally act upon otherwise (the morbidly obese and disfigured, incels, and even the vast majority of MtF-seeking-female), and I'm not convinced that dangling some sliver of hope before those groups ("well, theoretically, if you became really rich and beautiful, you might find someone who will consent, one day... it's not impossible...") makes so much of a practical difference. Why not just defend the line that children can't consent? The virtue-ethicist transference which seeks to bring the hammer down on MAPs and assorted anime lolicons and amounts to "the problem is not that children are subjected to sex by adults, but rather that adults get off on children" is quite counterproductive here because it does in fact turn a problem that's beyond a defensible line (necessity of consent + non-recognition of consent given by children/societal lessers) into one whose only defensible line (society can wield violence to align your beliefs/mental state to norms that are set by the right wing) has already long collapsed.

(I note that uncharitable voices on the left have also long benefited from the natural suspicion that right-wing virtue ethicists also buy into the converse of the virtue-ethicising of pederasty condemnation: i.e. that if the adult is not getting off on the sexual interaction with the child, it is no longer such a big deal, and hence may take a backseat to other preferences. There's a general sense among the left that right-wingers are reticent about state meddling to disrupt abuse which may be motivated by power more than pedophilia, be it intrafamilial or in the "suspiciously sexualised punishment at Jesus camp" class, which inoculates left-wing parents against right-wing think-of-the-children arguments.)

...so long as he never indulges them with a real infant.” I’m still going to find any interest in my infant extremely creepy

I don't think this is quite true. I think what gives you the creeps is the fact that this individual is going to pose a heightened risk of committing molestation compared to a normal person, and your reputation is damaged by associating with and tolerating someone paedophile-adjacent.

The first problem is rational, but this is fine if we can actually know for sure that "he never indulges [his fetish] with a real infant" (obviously this is impossible for the real-world, but you're arguing that even if it were, you wouldn't consent)

The second problem is also reasonable (it's why I think I wouldn't consent even if I knew for sure nothing untoward were to happen) - but it would be non-existent if society destigmatised being a "MAP".

So let me pose a more useful hypothetical. Imagine the following:

We live in a world where paedophillia is accepted as an involuntary condition like homosexuality, depression or schizophrenia (there are inevitably some nasty paedophobes, but they're relegated to the fringes of society where they belong)

We celebrate and encourage MAPs ("paedophile" is so clinical and sounds vaguely bigoted) in finding safe ways to cope, such as viewing/drawing lolicon, wearing diapers, etc. (there are some who then actually commit sex crimes, but they are a tiny tiny minority, and only bigots would suggest they are in any way reflective of the MAP community)

In fact one of the members of this oppressed and marginalised community is your brother. Ever since he came out nearly a decade ago, he has never even been accused of doing anything to children. He loves watching animated child pornography (voiced by 18+ actors) and has a diaper fetish, and is open and unashamed about all of these things, as society says he is entitled to be.

Given his squeaky clean record, and the fact you've known him since childhood, you are completely confident that if you let him change your infant's diapers, he wouldn't ever molest it. And your friends and family wouldn't bat an eye to you if you allowed this to happen (indeed if anything, they'd wonder if you might be a bit of a bigot if you don't let him do it)

In this scenario, I would allow my brother to change the diaper. I believe if he did all of this without making lewd comments, it doesn't matter if inside his head this is the hottest thing ever for him - I would view it the same to a heterosexual male gynaecologist treating an attractive young woman.

More comments

I'm not sure what this example is saying. Is this to say that you would you be okay with your perfectly vanilla heterosexual male relative changing your wife's, or a hypothetical 18 year old daughter's, underwear? Or, if not, do you think this is evidence that they should be jailed or removed from society in some other way, rather than just not letting them do that (resp. not letting your diaper fetishist relative change your infant's diaper)?

More comments

if you are serious about stopping pederasts, you probably should be more concerned with fortifying a new line.

We probably have to do both, the push has been quite happy to move up to where we abandon and start pushing on the unfortified back lines before we manage to get anywhere.

This is a good point. But I think you're making an assumption which might not be true, which is that people's beliefs on sexuality are not malleable.

At different times in history, pederasty was perfectly acceptable. We've just seen in the last few decades how behaviors which were deeply taboo have become mainstream. Why not pederasty too? It would stand to reason that the people who were most malleable in the past would be most likely to embrace the next transgression.

With concern about child sexuality being painted as right-wing, how long until we see the "and its actually a good thing" articles start to appear?

Probably a while - softening age of consent laws is still seen as a reason to tar Libertarians, who in certain circles are only one step removed from Fascists.

With concern about child sexuality being painted as right-wing, how long until we see the "and its actually a good thing" articles start to appear?

Oh, I'm sure we'll see the "When I was 16, I had an older lover - and it was the best thing that ever happened to me" articles in the glossy magazines, with the women and men, straight and gay, examples. Plenty of emphasis on how paederasty is not at all the same thing as paedophilia. Historical examples. Age of consent laws around the world where 16 is old enough. Examples of exceptions in America - 'Romeo and Juliet' laws. If we accept that 15 year olds are having sex, despite it being technically illegal... and all the rest of it.

I take the point that I made that assumption, but I still don't think that it's correct to extrapolate present trends to expect a normalisation of pederasty. The direction of change is clearly not as simple as "away from right-wing morality" - we are not seeing murder becoming acceptable or mainstream, and I don't think zoophilia is getting there either (even though it would be such low-hanging fruit if you just wanted to offend conservatives), though the carrying principle may be switched from sexual taboos to animal welfare. Therefore, a priori, the details of the concrete activity matter - a model like "right-wingers hate it, therefore left-wingers will eventually push for it" does not have sufficient predictive power. In the case of pederasty, there are enough features that set it apart from the activities that have been made acceptable by the left-wing drive that I don't think you can just put it on the same trendline:

  • the existing taboo rests on the idea that "consent" by the child is unavailable or invalid on principle, as opposed to the pattern, memed as "A: I consent; B: I consent; GOD: I don't", that previous normalisations overcame - in other words, there was no principal objection that, say, out of two gay men, one of them could not competently consent to gay sex because he was not mature, unencumbered and responsible enough to be trusted with grasping the consequences;

  • it goes against a countervailing tendency to shelter children/tighten parental control over them more, out of security considerations;

  • the main beneficiaries of a legalisation of pederasty would no doubt be straight men (who already exhibit the greatest variability/jitter and a well-documented preference for youth), and the left-wing ethos strongly defaults to limiting this group's sexual self-actualisation, rather than enabling it.

What are the forms of legalised/normalised pederasty that could plausibly slip by these three? It seems to me that a NAMBLA-style "legal when gay only" version would be exceedingly hard to sustain with the present memetic complex (and anyhow would collide head-on with the third point above with the first publicised case of a Discord lothario who has the rule engineering mindset to ask his 12 year old to become a boy on paper). I could imagine a weak version along the lines of it being systematically tolerated in the case of trans perpetrator + blessing of the legal guardians, but that seems like a case where the delta-damage that can be done by the systematic tolerance over the baseline of having that sort of guardians and environment is not particularly big. (Also, children's lives being ruined by bad guardians is a problem that society seems to have resigned itself to leaving largely unsolved apart from the occasional bandaid solution.)

Here's a good parallel: "democrats will never tolerate gang shootings: they hate guns and anyone who uses them"
In practice, we get decriminalized gang shootings combined with ever more aggressive laws against legal gun owners, because it turns out the hatred wasn't directed at the guns and violence, but at the (white, male) gun owners featured in their anti-gun propaganda.

Similarly, leftist hatred of sexual misconduct is targeted at "the (cis-white) patriarchy," not the misconduct itself.
A girl at my local school had to be withdrawn recently because another student with a penis wouldn't stop aggressively sexually propositioning her, and the staff with the new progress pride flag in every classroom window wouldn't do anything about it. They said "she" was just expressing her identity as a lesbian.
This is only going to escalate in the same way that anti-gun rhetoric coupled with pro-crime policies did. The same leftist prosecutors already have "queer affirming" prosecution policies that are going to effectively decriminalize age of consent violations as long as it's "queer," while legislators simultaneously increase penalties for 17 year olds getting married.

And there's another factor. When leftists really don't like something, they get aggressive about it. They "problematize," they make hashtags, they get people fired, they set a party line and ruthlessly establish conformity by any means necessary.
When they don't really care and just want to stop conservatives from doing anything about it, they make whatever soothing/mocking/rationalizing mouth-noises necessary to convince the person they're talking to that nothing is going to happen, and anyway it won't be bad... besides, it's too late to stop it, and anyway you probably deserved it.

Which of those modes do you see happening here? Because I see a lot more anger from leftists here about "election deniers" and "residential school genocide deniers" than I do towards pedophiles. The excuses and rationalization about pedophilia look an awful lot more like the "deflect" mode than the "deal with" mode. And I think you're too smart to be doing this unconsciously.

Edit: and of course the second I open twitter CNN is going to bat for a gay man who raped a 12 year old

Edit edit:

The growing consensus among scientists is that pedophilia is biological in nature, and that keeping pedophilic urges at bay can be incredibly difficult. “What turns us on sexually, we don’t decide that—we discover that,” said psychiatrist Dr. Fred Berlin, director of the Johns Hopkins Sex and Gender Clinic and an expert on paraphilic disorders.

You know what's going to happen when the "sex and gender clinic" starts talking about a "growing scientific consensus," don't you?

Here's a good parallel: "democrats will never tolerate gang shootings: they hate guns and anyone who uses them" In practice, we get decriminalized gang shootings combined with ever more aggressive laws against legal gun owners, because it turns out the hatred wasn't directed at the guns and violence, but at the (white, male) gun owners featured in their anti-gun propaganda.

Not a good parallel - in the scenario I painted, the beneficiaries of any such policy would still be straight white males, who by pure force of statistics are the majority of pedophiles. It would be more akin to republican gun owners realising the loophole and joining suburban gangs en masse, which they won't do only because of their distaste for the company they would have in those suburban gangs. Sex with minors is generally a small group activity, not subject to that issue.

Which of those modes do you see happening here? Because I see a lot more anger from leftists here about "election deniers" and "residential school genocide deniers" than I do towards pedophiles.

That's just saying that they don't participate in your current moral panic about it. There is a lot more anger from leftists about "election deniers" and "residential school genocide deniers" (...here? Who here believes in the latter so firmly as to get angry?) than about union-busting at the moment too, but rest assured that leftists are firmly against union-busting.

but I still don't think that it's correct to extrapolate present trends to expect a normalisation of pederasty.

I agree- if the (predominantly straight female) Left were really wanting to normalize under-18/over-18 sexual relations, we should have by now seen a marked increase in attractive and enthusiastic late teen and early twentysomething women doing their part to seduce the tweens and teens of America. One would think that, were the Left as sex-positive as they desperately want/need to pretend, that straight young men would be the group they'd start with given their massive oversupply in the sexual marketplace.

With that tone-setting preface out of the way:

and the left-wing ethos strongly defaults to limiting this group's sexual self-actualisation, rather than enabling it

But not non-straight men, which is kind of why they're the tip of the, uh, spear in this regard. The Junior Anti-Sex League predominantly female left-wing sees them as an excuse to hurt straight men anyway ("it's time to learn about buttsex today boys and girls, all genders are equal but some genders are more equal than others, equality means that both boys and girls are prohibited from socializing like boys because the gay boy complained once, etc." being perfectly representative of this point), which is the main reason the '60s pedo "experiments" mainly concerned themselves with pairing gay men and straight boys (and to an extent, why it's "man-boy" in the first place; man-girl needs no movement as it's merely a natural expression of the power equilibrium between men and women).

I could imagine a weak version along the lines of it being systematically tolerated in the case of trans perpetrator + blessing of the legal guardians

This is already documented fact, regardless of whether the legal guardians go on to lose the next Virginia election. Unless the we-bes and associated problem children, er, adults are removed from the department (the actual solution is to mandate that no schoolteacher without kids shall be employed by the district- affirmative action forcing the teacher population to match the students' would go a long way to solving the problem provided the current high tolerance for public school molestation-by-weird-sex-propaganda stays constant, and it obviously won't now that the people tolerating it have little else to do after being purged!) nothing will change.

Also, children's lives being ruined by bad guardians is a problem that society seems to have resigned itself to leaving largely unsolved apart from the occasional bandaid solution.

Maybe those children's grandparents shouldn't have freaked out so hard (over, ironically, the same problem: scatterbrained pedo enablers in school daycare, pedos catfishing/lurking in Internet chat rooms, and the occasional snatching blown way out of proportion by financial incentives) in the '80s that constructive interactions and lessened age segregation were still things that existed thus enabled some exposure to social normalcy. The [Outer Party] parents have already lost this war hard and are fighting over the last table scraps of parental power they're currently "allowed" to exercise, and if they can't see that (though, again, it's been the room temperature for the past 40 years) I think they probably deserve to lose.
Sucks for the kids, but the only other [straight men] that seem to care about them by definition are just doing it to get them in bed- though if not them, the [totally risk-free alternatives] who are trying to convince them to mutilate themselves with the end result of nobody ever willingly going to bed with them (splitting the fatal cuts of that one suicidal kid across a thousand healthy ones, a solution redistributionists should naturally favor) so really they were fucked either way.

What are the forms of legalised/normalised pederasty that could plausibly slip by these three?

I agree that the idea of consent (magically obtained at age 18) did form, until recently, a very strong Schelling point that prevented the NAMBLA types from gaining influence.

This Schelling point is now under strong attack from multiple groups.

  1. The trans enthusiasts who are pushing children (even very young children) into adopting trans identities and even surgical or hormonal modification.

  2. Feminists who are pushing that age 18 no longer forms an age of consent for women, and that a man dating a much younger (but still legal) woman is a groomer

I have a hard time believing that any Schelling point is strong enough to withstand the current fast-changing sexual environment. In any case, it my personal view, pederasty (defined as post-pubescent but under 18 sexual relations) causes far less harm to the minor than does exposure to trans ideology.

I'd far rather have my 16 year son or daughter have a sexual relationship with their teacher than to have a sex change. So I guess I don't even know why we worry about pederasty so much when the larger problem is people causing irreparable harm to their bodies through exposure to trans ideology. We don't need to argue that trans is bad because some of the proponents are groomers. It is bad on its own merits.

Then oppose it on those merits, rather than trying to conflate it with pedophilia.

I think the age-of-consent Schelling point is still strong. /u/4bpp gives several good reasons for why it’d remain intact. The current push for trans acceptance makes a hard brake when it approaches the subject of children.

I certainly don’t think that shaming men for allegedly imbalanced relationships is going to weaken such a norm.

When the senate threated to withdraw funding of UN unless NAMBLA is ejected, the Sixcolour was a partisan symbol, not a second national flag as is today.

I don't think that matters. The flag is just a symbol, and you can just pretend the symbol never had anything to do with transing kids, putting rapists in women's prisons, etc. Institutional support is important, this is why the issue got so far to begin with, but institutions aren't omnipotent.

Wesley Yang (coined "Successor Ideology") interviews Corinna Cohn, former trans activist, now regretting his (born male, now prefers male pronouns) transition as a teenager in the early 1990s.

I seem to recall the name from maybe 5-10 years ago, with some annoyance, like maybe pushing ultrawoke Code of Conduct mandates on open source projects. Might be wrong, haven't yet checked.

Now Cohn acknowledges being male and rejects his transition, but for health reasons remains on estrogen treatment. I suppose there is some question of what it means to be a detransitioner. Wesley Yang is well equipped to tear into this lamb, and does so, as far as I can tell. This is gonna hurt.

I have only read the posted transcripts, a tiny sliver. An excerpt:

On Affirming Parents

Corinna:

“For every parent who is transitioning their child, here's the future: your kid is going to get into their 20s and 30s. somewhere in this range. Even the ones who are failing to launch are going to figure out how to actually get their shit together at some point. Every one of these kids is going to start to ruminate. “How did this happen to me?” None of them are going to say, “Why did I do this to myself?” Because they didn't have agency. They didn't know. It doesn't matter if they said, “Oh, I really, really, really want to be a girl, mommy.” They don't know. They've got no idea. They're not even going to remember that. Right? They're not going to know that.”

“They're going to start thinking — “How did this happen to me?” And they're going to get to know kids. They're going to get to know children. Newborn babies. They're going to be involved with the lives of these children. They're going to watch them grow up and become thinking human beings. They're going to even watch them become adults. And they're going to know what innocence looks like. And they're going to start to remember that their innocence was absolutely destroyed.

And they're going to want to know why. And they will know at the time — I'm telling, I'm telling you now that the reason that this happens is largely because of the sexual interests of men like Rachel Levine, Admiral Levine, and other men who have continual fantasies that they wanted to be little girls”

So you have you have sent these children to satisfy the fantasies of these men. These children when they become adults are going to realize that this is why their innocence was destroyed: to make these fantasies come true. And the first people who will get the blame for this will be their parents. That is the future. That is the future.

Wesley: So I don't remember his name, bu he's like, “I'm 28 Look at me. I'm puberty blocked…”

Corinna. That was Seth.

Wesley: That was so powerful. And you're saying like, that's gonna happen to all these fucking parents?"

Corinna: Yes. It will not matter to these adult children…

Wesley: …that they begged and demanded and connived in order to get this is…

Corinna: I’m not even talking about that part. It won’t matter to these kids that their parents’ calculus was they want zero of one child to commit suicide. They don't care about one in 20,000. They want zero of one to commit suicide.

They won't care about their parents’ concerns. A lot of them aren't going to be able to have their own kids and so they're never going to even learn how to think like a parent. They're always going to think like a child. They're not going to appreciate what their parents were up against — being lied to by the government. Being lied to by their president being lied to by their doctors.

They're going to think “my parents ruined me.” For what? Why did my parents did my parents do this to me

So parents: that's what you have to look forward to.”

Corinna is no lamb at all. This is two wolves and a lamb deciding what's for dinner.

I seem to recall the name from maybe 5-10 years ago, with some annoyance, like maybe pushing ultrawoke Code of Conduct mandates on open source projects.

Are you thinking of Coraline Ada Ehmke?

Could be. I have a vague recollection of like 3 or 4 like minded individuals from that era.

100% people meant Ehmke. I've never heard of Cohn.

Ada initiative and Ehmke earned a lot of negative attention, however.

I couldn't find any reference to Cohn from more than a few years ago.

I feel like the debate around gender identity and the debate around surgical/medical intervention are almost two different things.

I'm personally pretty comfy with people identifying how they want, but I feel that the current iteration of hormonal & surgical intervention has a horrific risk-reward where it's like lifelong issues in exchange for maybe if you are a bodytype that's already leaning towards your preferred gender, being able to pass from a distance at certain angles.

This is going to sound intentionally absurd, but I'd almost prefer a world in which people just got their preferred gender pronouns tattooed onto their forehead and then everybody hypothetically just went along with it, than the current state of corrective therapy.

What do you mean, the gender identity ('born in the wrong body') is justifying the surgery. Also the gender identity stuff is an incoherent belief system that is being taught in schools and mandated in workplaces.

The irony is that having a sex category, being an immutable fact, allows for any manner of expression. It is gender identity where the individual is forced to show social proof of membership, typically confirming to regressive sex stereotypes in order to do so.

What do you mean, the gender identity ('born in the wrong body') is justifying the surgery. Also the gender identity stuff is an incoherent belief system that is being taught in schools and mandated in workplaces.

Is it, though? A world in which the gender surgery actually accomplished what was on the tin I'd agree, but as-is it's kind of a shambles

Yes, that's what I mean, 'is justifying it in the confused minds of the people who are immersed in the ideology'.

Corinna is no lamb at all. This is two wolves and a lamb deciding what's for dinner.

So if Yang is a wolf and Corinna is a wolf, who is the lamb?

In a separate vein, I suppose as a society we've aught to figure out what to do with a bunch of infertile, underdeveloped, and purposeless/telosless young people. The usual modes of hedonism I am pretty sure aren't going to an option for this class so it is likely that left alone they go to even more anti-social routes. Any ideology that picks them up is going to have people who have fire and will not age-out of it.

I hope I don't have to impress upon you how much of problem that will become...

The one saving grace is that the recent spike in trans medicalisation seems to be primarily concentrated in adolescent females (ROGD, social contagion etc.). Governments have less to fear from a cohort of infertile, underdeveloped and purposeless females driven to anti-social behaviour than they do from a cohort of infertile, underdeveloped and purposeless males.

Is this after they've been dosed with Testosterone for years or no?

I still don't think a group of trans men on T for a few years poses nearly as much of a threat as a group of males. Has there even been a single example of a trans man who was able to compete (not even win) in male sporting events?

We're going to see. So far only one FTM mass shooter. (Anyone saw that manifest? Even rdrama or kiwi farms doesn't have it?)

People with male hormonal profile and personality disorders are more violent than normal men, no?

about four years ago there was another publicized FTM mass school shooter

The school is suing to stop the manifesto release, IIRC. Chances are it implicates them in something or other.

Apparently, not the school but parents of children enrolled.

Bizarre.

https://nypost.com/2023/06/09/audrey-hales-parents-transfer-manifesto-to-school/

The baseless speculation I've seen is maybe a bombshell about bullying or molestation at the school. Something that makes the school administration or teachers seem horrible. And playing into the false narrative that the Columbine shooters were retaliating for bullying, but maybe real and plainly stated in the manifesto.

Isn't the idea of blocking publication of manifestos in order to discourage putative school shooters? You won't get your long complaint published, people won't be reading it and sympathising with you, you won't get the fame you want, you'll just be one more loser.

Isn't the idea of blocking publication of manifestos in order to discourage putative school shooters?

Yes; the problem is that it's not a blanket ban.
Manifestos by [demographic] for whom the demand for violence exceeds the supply get published, doubly so if they're anti-regime; others won't get national media exposes (if the police department is even-handed it won't release anything, but that's more common in Red areas and Red PDs as either way they lose- either they fuel the meme and make more parallel-killers, or they release it and further their enemy's meme of "Red tribe's culture caused this, Red culture bad, ban Red to be safer").

Won't they just gets cats and wine like the current cohort of post-fertility women with fake email jobs?

You have been warned before about this kind of low-effort booing. You've got a long string of these and it seems to be all you post, so this time your ban is a week. You probably have 0 to 1 more strikes before it becomes permanent.

So if Yang is a wolf and Corinna is a wolf, who is the lamb?

The strawman of trans ideology, that which is pushed by activists, and worse, activist-practitioners. I might not disagree with the steelman of trans ideology, but the lamb is the reality of gender-affirming care at this moment in the US, as I understand it.

Trans is an unusually high profile example of, perhaps the most high profile example of, American society’s peculiar loathing for saying ‘no’ to adolescents and for people who do so, but it is very definitely not the only one. Everything from choice of college major to choice of gender to even table stakes things like choice of fashion- parents are told over and over again that their job is to affirm whatever their adolescents want to do even if it’s obviously stupid.

And trans is downstream of that! Obviously parenting of 12-21 year olds involves lots of saying ‘no, quit being stupid’. But when parents already think they’re doing screwing up by it, the narrative of ‘you’re killing your kid!’ Just takes better.

It's not even 12 year olds, that's positively ancient by comparison with "how can you tell if a pre-verbal child is trans?" and getting told "if they pull the barrettes out of their hair or open their onesie to look like a skirt" by the expert who is helping to set national policy on trans issues.

Timestamp for the question about pre-verbal children. And that was from back in 2016.

I think that you might not be seeing the forest for the trees. The vast majority of adolescents in the US are forced to go to school whether they want to or not, which is a 40 hour a week involuntary commitment. Also, helicopter parenting is common at least among the middle and upper classes. Minors in the US are actually pretty constricted in what they are allowed to do. I mean, even the barbaric practice of parents getting their sons circumcised is legal in this country.

Americans have never liked the idea of saying no. I’ve often thought of it as a sort of Achilles heel for our version of western civilization. We aren’t the people of “you have to earn it”, and “work hard” or even really delaying gratification. It’s something I tend to admire a bit more in older societies and often East Asian societies. You are not simply handed things. If you don’t earn it or aren’t good enough to have it, you don’t. And they generally don’t see themselves as exceptions to the rules. You aren’t allowed to bring a dog or food into a building, you don’t. You don’t try to argue about how the rules don’t apply to you.

I've made this kind of observation before, how social media can mold us into becoming the online identities we wear.

I kinda don't miss the flame wars of old, personally, but I really wouldn't say that modern-age online beefs are any improvement.

white progressives

white progressives

privileged white progressives

Yawn. It’s really tiresome to see that even purportedly “anti-woke” people have allowed their minds to be colonized by the nakedly anti-white framing that pins the blame solely on “privileged white” progressives for spreading and enforcing the things about modern society that they don’t like.

Well, as someone who has spent the entirety of my adult life in thoroughly progressive social spheres - everything from explicit socialist activist spaces in college, to the world of musical theatre and “queer performance art” - I can tell you from direct personal experience that the people who have been the most vindictive, the most ready to pounce at the slightest hint of wrongthink, the ones who have done the most to sully my personal reputation and those of others far less off-the-progressive-reservation than I am, have been uniformly non-white.

The three most egregious examples - the people who will be first against the wall if I’m ever magically granted dictatorial power - were, respectively, half-Filipino-half-black, fully black, and half-Puerto-Rican-half-white. These three individuals (and they’re far from alone) have significantly damaged the lives of a number of people whom I personally know, and they’ve successfully terrified a great many more people into staying in-line with the approved opinions. That’s the reality: most white progressives whose careers or social standing are wrapped up with their ability to stay ideologically up-to-date are terrified of stepping out of line, in a way that this simply far less true of most non-white individuals in the same milieu. Whites are far more cancellable than non-whites. Able to draw on a far smaller pool of mercy and benefit of the doubt, because they lack any sort of shield of “marginalized identity” on which they can fall back when questioned. Why do you think so many of them are socially “transitioning” to “non-binary” and other sorts of low-investment boutique identities? I’ve seen this process play out a number of times among people who, again, I personally know. If you’re a white guy in these spaces, you are literally vulnerable at all times and have to watch what you say at all moments, because you’re inherently suspect. So, you grow your hair out, maybe wear sort of ambiguous clothing, and declare yourself non-binary to give yourself some modicum of breathing room. Yes, many non-white progressives are doing the same, and I do not want to overstate the level of relative immunity from cancellation they enjoy, but the bar is undeniably set higher for them than it is for similarly situated whites. “White progressives” are not the ones primarily driving the dynamics you’re pointing at, and I think it’s a distraction tactic, or maybe part of a personal vendetta you’re prosecuting, to act as if they are.

Yawn. It’s really tiresome to see that even purportedly “anti-woke” people have allowed their minds to be colonized by the nakedly anti-white framing that pins the blame solely on “privileged white” progressives for spreading and enforcing the things about modern society that they don’t like.

Indeed, as it implicitly accepts the progressive Who? Whom? framework and the notion that non-Asian minority Lives Matter More: Non-Asian minorities can only be failed, not fail, much less be blamed for anything. For example, common normie conservative takes are that the Root Cause of black crime is white progressives being soft on crime and that the True Victims of affirmative action are talented non-Asian minorities. The old adage that conservatives are but progressives driving the speed-limit comes to mind.

Mood: “Man who thought it was all so tiresome finds he is more tired than previously thought possible.”

The three most egregious examples - the people who will be first against the wall if I’m ever magically granted dictatorial power - were, respectively, half-Filipino-half-black, fully black, and half-Puerto-Rican-half-white. These three individuals (and they’re far from alone) have significantly damaged the lives of a number of people whom I personally know, and they’ve successfully terrified a great many more people into staying in-line with the approved opinions.

This is really not a healthy way to live. You don't need to take it from me, just pay attention to the sheer number of cliches along these lines---it's overwhelmingly accepted wisdom that keeping grudges like this is not good for you. "Living well is the best revenge", "don't let them live rent-free in your head", "you're just letting them hurt you even more", etc.

Even beyond that, revealing this kind of mindset dramatically weakens the potency of your arguments. It makes you sound like a strawman---the person who only becomes a white supremacist because they can't get over what some specific minorities did to them in their past. However many words dress it up, none of their beliefs are based on logic or correctness, just emotions they can't deal with properly.

I can literally point out this comment to people I know IRL as a way to argue "yup, racists really are what you think they are, here's some more confirmation that nothing they believe in is based on anything logical". This should tell you that something has gone terribly wrong on your end.

"Living well is the best revenge", "don't let them live rent-free in your head", "you're just letting them hurt you even more", etc.

If your enemies tell you that you should do something for your own good that straightforwardly helps them and harms you, that's probably motivated reasoning or concern trolling. Some of the biggest proponents of getting rid of grudges are the people who are targets of grudges, who should be ignored for this reason. Someone who you have a grudge against probably isn't very interested in your mental health overall; why should you listen to them on the one subject where they have something to gain?

And combine this with sour grapes--when you can't have something (in this case, defeating the group you have a grudge against), you tell yourself that the thing you can't have really isn't all that great. Sour grapes is a form of bias, and it may be a coping mechanism, but it isn't rationality.

If your enemies tell you that you should do something for your own good that straightforwardly helps them and harms you, that's probably motivated reasoning or concern trolling. Some of the biggest proponents of getting rid of grudges are the people who are targets of grudges, who should be ignored for this reason. Someone who you have a grudge against probably isn't very interested in your mental health overall; why should you listen to them on the one subject where they have something to gain?

This is 100% the argument that every group that feels it's been aggrieved (including by you) uses. You're essentially arguing that we should never let go of grudges and always pursue retribution (reparations, anyone?).

Unprincipled conflict theory is at least as bad as naive mistake theory.

There are times when we should let go of grudges. But usually not when someone is telling you to let go of grudges, unless they're your family or someone else who is actually concerned about you and has has no ulterior motives.

"Guy on the Internet tells me to let go of grudges" is not it.

If your enemies tell you that you should do something for your own good that straightforwardly helps them and harms you, that's probably motivated reasoning or concern trolling.

Seeing everyone as your enemy is a big part of the problem. Besides, do you really think holding grudges and living your life in anger and fear is the best way to live?

Besides, do you really think holding grudges and living your life in anger and fear is the best way to live?

Sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it is. And the people who are in a position to make that judgment are not the people with a stake in ensuring that you don't hold the grudge.

I'm reminded of Scott's post claiming that Republicans should vote against Trump because electing Trump actually helps the left. The straightforward effect of electing Trump is to help the right, and Scott isn't trustworthy when he tells you the reverse.

Seeing everyone as your enemy is a biggest part of the problem.

Not if you're surrounded by enemies.

Besides, do you really think holding grudges and living your life in anger and fear is the best way to live?

It may be the best available.

Not if you're surrounded by enemies.

Then go somewhere you aren't surrounded by enemies, as @Amadan and many other users have been saying.

It may be the best available.

I don't think that's almost ever the case. There have been some miraculous transformations in life towards living a more peaceful and gentle life. Take for instance General Butt Naked, who transitioned from literally being a cannibal warlord to a Christian who at least purportedly does good deeds and runs a church. If you want to tell me that you and @Hoffmeister25 have fallen farther or are more surrounded by darkness than he is, well, it will take a lot of convincing to say the least.

I think this 'woe is me' attitude is the problem with large parts of the conservative movement, as a matter of fact. I tend to sympathize with the viewpoints of young white men who struggle to make it in the modern world, but if you change your viewpoint and take some damn agency and responsibility for your situation, your life can change into something much better than you might imagine. I say this because I see the posts above getting a lot of upvotes, and I'm worried about the type of young men especially who endorse these sentiments.

Then go somewhere you aren't surrounded by enemies, as @Amadan and many other users have been saying.

  1. That presumes the existence and practicality of moving to such a place. I'm not going to fit in with "red tribe" any better than I fit in with blue, and if I tried I'd have a couple of strikes against me for coming from a blue place and not being religious or generally not understanding the culture at a practical level.

  2. There's a culture war on, and my enemies are winning; no place is safe.

but if you change your viewpoint and take some damn agency and responsibility for your situation

I think this attitude on the part of normies and "responsible conservatives" is part of why the left is winning. The left sees or imagines an injustice towards one of its own, they rally around them. Normies or responsible conservatives see an injustice towards someone by the left, it was the victim's personal responsibility to avoid it. Got a sexual harassment complaint for saying hello to the wrong girl? Well maybe you should have read the signals better. Got fired for saying the wrong thing? Well maybe you should have kept your damn mouth shut. "But leftists can say what they want?" "We're not talking about them, are we?".

Normies or responsible conservatives see an injustice towards someone by the left, it was the victim's personal responsibility to avoid it.

Wrong. Responsibility has a large part to play, but it's not the victim's responsibility to avoid it. It's the victim's responsibility to deal with it, grow stronger, and continue to stick to good morals and the path of God. The path you and @Hoffmeister25 are taking is fundamentally weak, that's why 'normie' conservatives don't like it.

Got a sexual harassment complaint for saying hello to the wrong girl? Well maybe you should have read the signals better. Got fired for saying the wrong thing? Well maybe you should have kept your damn mouth shut.

This may be true in some scenarios, while at the same time it's true that the larger society, and a specific subset of progressives in particular, are at fault. You are trying to reduce out all of the context and nuance in these situations and make it black and white, between you and 'leftists,' your sworn enemies. Again, I think that type of response is weak and leads to horrible outcomes. I reject it entirely.

More comments

I don't see what kind of mindset this reveals at all. If you were to say, witness a superior abusing their position to sexually exploit others at your workplace, are you supposed to just let it go, and not let it affect any of your beliefs around sexism or corporate culture or power, because to do so would be petty and grudgeful and Not A Good Look, like seriously my dude, Yikes?

I think you're reading 'against the wall when I'm dictator' as an outburst of suppressed rage. It's plausible that isn't the case, though. One explanation: in some online communities, "up against the wall" is just a figure of speech used to ironically emphasize distaste - "redditors should be shot / furries should be shot". Another potential explanation is OP's moral system puts much less emphasis on the 'right to life' of antisocial individuals, so "X should be killed" doesn't require all-consuming anger, and rather is a casual observation. I think the first is a more plausible explanation here, but the second demonstrates that desire for violence or murder doesn't have to emerge from hatred per se.

I think the context missing here is that "X will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes" is typically targeted at abstract groups ("Furries" "Business majors" "Lakers fans who don't live in LA") or public figures ("Roger Gooddell" "Nancy Pelosi" "Martin Shkreli"). Presumably you don't actually know these people, your rage is directed towards what they do in the world. It's not personal, personal impotent murderous rage is a different animal.

It's very different to say "These three people I know personally, I'd really like to murder them. When I talk to them I think 'The world would be a better place if you were dead.' The things you've done to me personally are awful enough to deserve death." That's an expression of personal Animus, and when your political conclusions seem to follow from personal Animus, well FreudGPT doesn't need much more of a prompt does he?

It's also a profoundly anti-conservative attitude to want to murder your friends. I've noticed a contrast between Evangelical conservatives, who often hate abstract groups while being friendly to actual members of those groups; and Bloomberg Democrats, who often love groups in the abstract but hate or ignore the actual members of these groups they come across. As exemplars picture a putatively racist contractor who will complain about Puerto Ricans over beers while working with them every day, versus the Liberal BLM profile pic investment banker who has zero Black friends they speak to regularly.

I admire our friend Hoff for his willingness to examine his own psyche, but it's hard not to disagree with his conclusions after we see what premises he's working with.

See my reply to Hlynka. The “get the wall” comment was intended to be read as an obviously hyperbolic joke. I do not want to kill my ex-friends in the San Diego theatre community.

I do advocate political violence in a limited capacity, and you’re correct to note that in this sense I am profoundly different from the median conservative who just wants to restore some sort of détente, but I don’t believe it’s in any way necessary or morally right to extend that violence to individuals whose “power” was ultimately nothing more than hyper-localized and entirely social in nature.

We will ultimately need to see certain public officials killed, maimed, or permanently jailed. I truly do believe that healing in this country will need to include that. This doesn’t mean that I want the jerk who told people not to be friends with me because I’m a problematic white man to suffer this fate.

I do advocate political violence in a limited capacity

Okay, can you please explain in more detail why you are so extreme in your views and why you think violence is necessary? I actually agree with you that the identity politics and views of the modern left are insane and need to be curtailed, but I'm nowhere near justifying the awful means you endorse.

All I'm getting from these posts is that you, personally, have had a really hard time and so you think extreme, violent, measures are needed to change our society. On a societal level, why have we moved so far that we can't resolve this situation without violence?

All I'm getting from these posts is that you, personally, have had a really hard time

No, I haven’t! My life could definitely be a lot better, but a huge amount of that is because of poor choices I’ve made! Apparently my posts have given people the impression that I’m some sad-sack burnout with no prospects or something like that. My income is nothing like what most of the people on this sub make, but I’m not struggling to make rent or pay bills or anything like that. I even have some discretionary income that I use for frivolous things! My love life is a mess right now, but there was a period where it wasn’t, and a lot of why it is now is, again, due to things I’m doing wrong and choices that I’m making. I don’t feel “oppressed” or anything like that.

As for why my views are “extreme”, I don’t think that’s actually true when you look at the full scope of human history. In fact the norm historically has always been that major regime changes have been incredibly bloody affairs. This was true long before Robespierre and Cromwell. When the ruling class of a country fails spectacularly, and especially when those failures seem not only avoidable but to actually be the result of specific bad ideas or corrupt motives which that ruling class actively chose, then usually blood has been spilled.

Liberal democracy was supposed to “fix” this. It was supposed to structure society in such a way that this bloodletting would no longer be necessary, nor even desirable. And for some length of time, in some countries, it even accomplished this for real! That was no mean feat, and I’m not going to pretend like it wasn’t an improvement over a lot of what came before it. The problem now is that I think the Gods of the Copybook Headings have begun to reassert themselves. I believe that some public officials in nearly all European and Euro-diaspora countries have failed their people so comprehensively - in fact, they haven’t merely failed the people, they’ve actively conspired against them - that the burning rage, the despair and hopeless and sense of injustice which have begun to proliferate among the common people of these countries is going to boil over at some point.

And I’m not even a populist! I think that some of the complaints that common people have about the government, and some of the things which they accuse the government of doing, are actually illegitimate and ill-considered! That doesn’t change the fact that the rage is real. I certainly feel it. When I see career criminals continually released back into the streets by DAs who are actively pro-criminal and anti-white, and when I see what used to be actual borders reduced to open doors, I feel burning rage at the people responsible, and a profound sense of injustice when I reflect on the fact that none of them will suffer any consequences or accountability whatsoever. Even if they get voted out, they’ll immediately land on the board of a non-profit, or get a show on a cable news network, or an academic sinecure, which in some cases will make them even more powerful - and certainly more wealthy - than they were when they were in formal elected office!

This cannot continue indefinitely. We are so far past the point of no return, as far as I can tell. And my reading of history is that these situations always end in bloodletting. And that this is not always a bad thing. In this case, since I’m not expecting to die myself, or for anyone I know or care about to die, as a result of the coming bloodletting, it’s especially easy for me to be comfortable with expecting it.

Do you disagree with my assessment of what’s coming? Or do you merely disagree that it will be something other than a calamity? Do you think that the targeted persecution of specific individuals responsible for catastrophic failed policies is the historical norm? Or do you think it’s “extreme”? Can it be both? What does “extreme” mean in this context?

As for why my views are “extreme”, I don’t think that’s actually true when you look at the full scope of human history. In fact the norm historically has always been that major regime changes have been incredibly bloody affairs. This was true long before Robespierre and Cromwell. When the ruling class of a country fails spectacularly, and especially when those failures seem not only avoidable but to actually be the result of specific bad ideas or corrupt motives which that ruling class actively chose, then usually blood has been spilled.

Absolutely, and this still happens today in much of the world. I think it's bad, and I think one of the most important efforts of each person is to move away from this sort of world.

Liberal democracy was supposed to “fix” this. It was supposed to structure society in such a way that this bloodletting would no longer be necessary, nor even desirable. And for some length of time, in some countries, it even accomplished this for real! That was no mean feat, and I’m not going to pretend like it wasn’t an improvement over a lot of what came before it. The problem now is that I think the Gods of the Copybook Headings have begun to reassert themselves.

When I see career criminals continually released back into the streets by DAs who are actively pro-criminal and anti-white, and when I see what used to be actual borders reduced to open doors, I feel burning rage at the people responsible, and a profound sense of injustice when I reflect on the fact that none of them will suffer any consequences or accountability whatsoever

Do you think people didn't have burning rage during the Civil Rights movement? After the Great Depression? During the fight of the sufragettes? Hell, I'd say the rage back then compared to the limp, satiated populace we have today is barely comparable. I'm frankly shocked you just look at history, supposedly, then say the rage in the modern West is at a boiling point. People have endured far, far worse situations than we have without rebelling. We don't even have it that badly, and even if we did we have ample distraction. Bread and circuses orders of magnitude better than the romans.

You really see the modern world as irreparable without violence? I don't buy it.

This cannot continue indefinitely. We are so far past the point of no return, as far as I can tell. And my reading of history is that these situations always end in bloodletting.

I don't trust your reading of history. I think that as you admitted above, the miracle of modern liberal democracy is that we can make changes like this without bloodshed. I'd argue that we try and let those mechanisms work, and actively push for that sort of non violent revolution.

Do you disagree with my assessment of what’s coming? Or do you merely disagree that it will be something other than a calamity? Do you think that the targeted persecution of specific individuals responsible for catastrophic failed policies is the historical norm? Or do you think it’s “extreme”? Can it be both? What does “extreme” mean in this context?

Yes I disagree with your assessment if it means violence is inevitable. Sure I think targeted persecution is a historical norm, but I also think that we've miraculously managed to move past that historical norm, as we've moved past other historical norms. Did we all the sudden go back to oral history after writing was invented? No. Permanent step changes in human history can happen when we find a vastly superior cultural technology. Liberal democracy is a step change.

Whether or not violent political purges are extreme, they are foolish, sub-optimal, and most importantly wrong. Whatever justification you try and make for them regarding our current state of the world is foolish. Perhaps in circumstances orders of magnitude worse than the West's current situation I could see the justification for violence, but even then I'd prefer we find our way without it.

What happens is not out of our control. Which path we go down depends on the actions individual people make, day to day. Creating a just-so story of inevitable political violence is you trying to justify your worldview by making up a narrative that makes it impossible to avoid. Again, I don't buy it.

More comments

You’ve made a series of baseless assumptions about me, based on limited evidence, and used your false model of me to prove your thesis about “racists”.

Firstly, I didn’t bring up the three individuals in question because I obsessively ruminate about my contempt for them. While they genuinely are contemptible - two of them are actually quite pleasant in person (though ruthless behind your back) and the other is just an absolute mess, keeping everyone around him on edge - my contempt for them has absolutely nothing to do with their race, and did not have any influence on my developing a racial consciousness; the latter came significantly before the former. My relationship with these individuals soured in large part because I, independently of anything they did or said, had turned toward a positive racial identity, and therefore could not react any way other than negatively to their naked anti-white statements and assumptions. I brought them up, though, as counterexamples to a specific claim that had been made by the OP. I felt that they were appropriate to bring up in that context, not because I think of them all the time - I don’t - but because OP’s post made me think of them.

If the standard you want to hold white advocates to is “never make any negative statements about specific non-white individuals who have pissed you off or wronged you, because of you do then I will immediately assume that all of your beliefs are based on petty feelings of personal vengeance and not on logical reasoning” then not a single one of us is going to pass your test. You might as well write us off completely.

The reality is that for the vast majority of people who adopt any ideology, other than maybe the one they grew up around because of their parents, it’s going to be because of some combination of personal experiences, exposure to arguments, observation of patterns in the world, independent reasoning, and natural inborn personality traits and instincts. By ruling out one of those factors (the personal experiences part) as inherently illegitimate and discounting the possibility that others also played a part, you’re holding your ideological opponents to an impossible and anti-human standard.

Yes, I have had some bad experiences with some particular individuals in my life; the lion’s share have been non-white, although some have not. This is actually the pattern one would expect if one takes racial differences and the inevitably of interracial conflict seriously. You don’t, so you’re forced to impart causality that doesn’t actually exist, or at least not as a monocausal explanation.

Here's what I specifically assumed about the story in that post: there are some people who wronged you in the past---a few months to a few years ago. You cut off contact with them and are likely never going to interact with them ever again. However, you still keep a list of their names in your head as those who would be first to die in fantasies where you're a dictator. Please let me know if these specific assumptions are substantively incorrect.

Even this by itself is not normal. It is also very different from simply just "making...negative statements about specific non-white individuals who have pissed you off or wronged you" or "obsessively ruminat[ing] about [your] contempt for them". Please don't play this kind of debate game of skewing the strength of a claim to make it sound wrong (though you're definitely not as bad as some of the other replies here).

On your second point, there is a hierarchy of types of evidence. Personal experience and anecdotes are at the bottom and really on acceptable when you're dealing with something so hard to measure that you don't have a better option. For the specific question you raise about the inevitability of racial conflict, there is much stronger evidence---you can find statistics, research trials, multitudes of case studies of different modern and historical societies, etc. Just as a heuristic, if something is an active field of academic research (well, barring certain fields), you shouldn't be reasoning about it based on personal anecdotes. In fact, your strongest, most thought-provoking posts are the ones where you stick to these stronger forms of evidence.

By ruling out one of those factors (the personal experiences part) as inherently illegitimate and discounting the possibility that others also played a part, you’re holding your ideological opponents to an impossible and anti-human standard.

I do have to disagree far more vehemently here. You can see above exactly what standard I use to discount the personal experience factor as illegitimate---I personally care more that my evidentiary standards lead me to conclusions that are correct than that they feel "human" to me. Obviously people are imperfect and not perfectly rational in seeking truth. However, I can't see any other interpretation of what your saying here except that this means that we should give up because trying to improve is "inhuman" (please again correct me if I'm wrong).

From another perspective, I'm someone who strongly disagrees with you about some particular argument; if you make a mistake because of human failings, that's your problem and I'm perfectly justified in writing off what you say as not convincing. However, please note here I'm not taking this as evidence that your point is wrong (just pointing out that many people definitely will!). I'm simply asking you to fix your argument and holding judgement until I see what happens.

Here's what I specifically assumed about the story in that post: there are some people who wronged you in the past---a few months to a few years ago. You cut off contact with them and are likely never going to interact with them ever again. However, you still keep a list of their names in your head as those who would be first to die in fantasies where you're a dictator. Please let me know if these specific assumptions are substantively incorrect.

You are the third person to interpret my joke as a serious statement, which means it clearly wasn’t a good joke, and I regret making it. No, I do not actually have fantasies about killing some bitchy theatre people who harmed me socially. No, I do not actually have fantasies about becoming a dictator. I expected people to extend to me some basic charity and assume that I’m not a nutcase; in hindsight I should not have expected this, especially given that people here are inevitably going to pattern-match me to The Austrian Painter, and therefore I need to hold myself to a higher standard.

That being said, your suggestion that it’s abnormal to remember specific individuals who have pissed me off or harmed me, and to remember those people’s names and faces, just seems nakedly wrong. That’s a completely normal human thing to do. Would it be more “normal” of me to have… forgotten who they were? People I knew for years and interacted with as recently as three years ago? It’s normal to lose all recollection of their names and faces in the span of three years? No, that would actually be really weird! I would have to have a pretty bad memory for that to be normal.

As for the rest of your post, we just disagree strongly about the relative merits of personal experience/anecdata as a basis for reasoning about the world. I agree with you that it’s not sufficient in itself and that it needs to be backed up by data. Were I to have made a serious effortpost, with citations and links and statistics, it’s fair to say that this would have been a stronger argument than my relatively low-effort comments that I rattled off without much forethought. That doesn’t actually mean that a post without data and citations is necessarily weak. Anecdotes are actually a totally valid way of reasoning, as long as the preponderance of available macro-level data doesn’t actually countervail against the conclusion you’ve drawn from personal experience. I think that the conclusions suggested by my personal anecdotes are sufficiently similar to the conclusions that the available data suggest, such that the anecdotes actually strengthen my case rather than weakening it. One would expect society-wide trends to be replicated at the micro/interpersonal level more often than not, and indeed that’s what my personal experience has been.

You are the third person to interpret my joke as a serious statement....

That drops the situation from "abnormal and worrying" to "within the range of normal but not healthy", leaving aside points others have made about whether the joke was a Freudian slip and whether that's a valid way to infer things about someone. The point that you're never going to interact with them again is doing a lot of work here---why waste mindshare making them one of the first things you think of in a situation like this?

I think that the conclusions suggested by my personal anecdotes are sufficiently similar to the conclusions that the available data suggest,

Sure, as long as you understand that this is not going to mean anything to anyone who doesn't already agree with your interpretations of the stronger, macro-evidence. I think a lot of the pushback you got was because people interpreted you as saying that it should---the Motte isn't that much an echo chamber yet.

...pins the blame solely on “privileged white” progressives for spreading and enforcing the things about modern society that they don’t like.

It is true that the progressive racial agenda is driven primarily by non-whites. However (excluding the brief aftermath of George Floyd) the LGBT agenda seems to be much more prominent currently, and this is dominated by whites.

The three most egregious examples - the people who will be first against the wall if I’m ever magically granted dictatorial power - were, respectively, half-Filipino-half-black, fully black, and half-Puerto-Rican-half-white. These three individuals (and they’re far from alone) have significantly damaged the lives of a number of people whom I personally know, and they’ve successfully terrified a great many more people into staying in-line with the approved opinions.

Was this ever done in response to violating orthodoxy on non-racial issues?

Why do you think so many of them are socially “transitioning” to “non-binary” and other sorts of low-investment boutique identities?

This seems to be completely contrary to what I've seen. Every "non-binary" I know of is either a woman or a male homosexual, except for one heterosexual white Chad, but he would be the one who punishes others for being insufficiently progressive. So in any case, this phenomena seems to be motivated primarily by attention-seeking, and, in rare cases, the opportunity to be an activist - but not out of fear you'll be accused of being some brand of bigot.

But to address your general annoyance at anti-woke people complaining about white progressives, I think you're looking at it from the wrong angle. The problem isn't that they are willing to notice race here, it's just that they refuse to (or are at least extremely averse to) notice race when it would lead to blaming a non-white group.

I’m assuming you’re not very familiar with my posting history and my views, if you believe that I’m currently an “ally” to progressives, or that I’m moved by your accusations that progressives “divide people by race”. It’s an easy misunderstanding based on my (true) statement that I’ve spent my entire adult life in heavily progressive social spaces; however, a quick perusal of my posting history in this forum should help you understand where I’m coming from. My worldview at this time is very, very far from progressive, and I’m far more guilty of “stoking racial division” than any of the progressives, white or otherwise, with whom you’ve incorrectly lumped me in.

My worldview at this time is very, very far from progressive.

It's not though. You just to think it is because "as someone who has spent the entirety of my adult life in thoroughly progressive social spheres - everything from explicit socialist activist spaces in college, to the world of musical theatre and “queer performance art” you don't seem to grasp just how far your worldview already is from the median American. If the distance between the worldviews of yourself and your compatriots in the world of musical theatre is measured in 100s of feet the distance between you and the median republican who chuckles at the Babylon Bee is measured in nautical miles.

From outside those thoroughly progressive social spheres spotting the differences between progressivism and whatever you call your particular offshoot is like one of those bar room games where you have to spot the mole on the pin-up girl. They might not be exactly the same picture, but they are the same picture.

Likewise things like...

The three most egregious examples - the people who will be first against the wall if I’m ever magically granted dictatorial power - were, respectively, half-Filipino-half-black, fully black, and half-Puerto-Rican-half-white.

...are why "Stormfront or SJW" is a meme. I'm half tempted to link your rant to just such a board, but I value this place too highly to risk crossing those streams.

I urge you to stop and reflect upon the ideological choices you've made that lead you to arrive at that thought.

I think your rants would be better served by naming specific ways that reactionaries are progressive, instead of saying 'REAL americans can just tell'.

Let's try comparing the stereotypical reactionary's views to the conservative and progressive, and see where the clusters are. I don't think race is the most representative issue here, as progressive 'we must uplift the poor and oppressed' shades into the ethnic identity of minorities, creating a similarity that's mostly superficial in the US, but much deeper in e.g. third world left-wing nationalism. Picking a random issue:

"Thoughts on abortion?"

Progressive: "A woman has a right to choose and shouldn't be burdened with children if she doesn't want them. Free individuals should experience the joy of sex with whoever they want to without risking pregnancy."

Conservative: "A child's right to life is paramount, and killing them is wrong. That is that. A woman raising a child with her is beautiful, and is God's plan if she becomes pregnant. Sex belongs in marriage and is for reproduction. Abortion is the culmination of progressive disregard for morality itself."

Reactionaries are divided on abortion. The most common perspective is (slightly caricatured) :

"Abortion is satanic, it is the duty of women to raise children for her family and for her society. The fact a woman would even consider killing her child shows how progressives despise nature and God. Women should marry and have children, not have a series of sterile dalliances with random men."

Another, significantly less common, perspective is (less caricatured than you'd think):

"Abortion is good if the child is low IQ/degenerate/black. It's a crime if the child is white / smart. Only white and healthy women should have children, they should many children, and they should be raised in a traditional family".

You're asking me to believe that, because the last perspective and the first one are both pro-abortion in some cases, progressives and reactionaries are the same. But they couldn't be more different! One supports sex for pleasure and human connection, disposing of fetuses if the woman wants to - the other wants to abort potential low-iq and black people. The latter three support traditional values, the family, patriarchy, a moral force for having children, and oppose casual sex. The first is the opposite.

I think your rants would be better served by naming specific ways that reactionaries are progressive, instead of saying 'REAL Americans can just tell'.

This what my series of effort posts on "Inferential Distance" been all about but sure, lets break it down real quick. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but here are 5 examples that spring immediately to mind.

  • First off because it applies directly to the topic at hand there is the question, where does "Identity" reside? Progressives believe that it resides with the identified. Conservatives believe that it resides with the identifier. In progressive spaces "identifying as [X]" carries a certain sort of weight. @Hoffmeister25 identifies as "right wing" and this being a largely progressive space we are expected to respect that on some level, same deal with biological males identifying as "Women" and vice versa. Coming from a conservative space these sorts of appeals seem nonsensical as these are not things one "identifies as", they just are. Identities are little more than heuristics for use by the identifier. See the whole bit in Scott's The Categories were Made for Man about whether whales should in the fishery department's jurisdiction or the agricultural department's. This is why the "I identify as an attack helicopter" meme had such legs. It perfectly encapsulates just how absurd most of the progressive rhetoric surrounding identity (sexual, political, racial or otherwise) sounds to the average conservative.

  • Second, is the question of internal vs external loci of control or where does the responsibility for an act ultimately reside? Conservatives believe that it resides within the individual whereas progressives believe that it is something external. That the actions of the individual are simply reactions to the conditions presented. Hence progressive' preference for some flavor of determinism or other "structural x-ism" as explanations for [current thing]. "Society is to blame" that sort of thing.

  • Which brings us straight into the third point. The question of whether social structures are imposed upon the indivual from the top down, or do grow organically from the ground up. Progressives maintain that most, if not all, social structures are imposed upon the from the top down. Conservatives maintain that that most, if not all, social structures grew organically from the choices made by individuals at each level and were never "imposed" at all.

  • While we're on the topic, Number 4 is the question of what is mankind's "default state"? War or Peace? Tyranny or Freedom? Progressives maintain that it is latter while Conservatives maintain that it is former. The thing that ultimately makes most progressives "progressive" is that they sincerely believe in capital-P Progress. That all that is needed for progress/good to triumph is for the barriers that are currently standing in its' way to be torn down. Meanwhile the conservative view is exactly what Chesterton was trying to explain when he made his fence analogy. Progressives see anti-discrimination laws as barriers to progress (who's progress is immaterial). Meanwhile conservatives look at the last two centuries of US history and conclude that this fence was built for a damn food reason.

  • Finally there is the question of Mysticism vs Materialism, more specifically (and particularly relevant to discussions of abortion)is whether the moral value/weight of a human life is something metaphysical, or if it is something material? Conservatives almost inevitably come down on the Metaphysical side of the debate typically quoting either the Bible or the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. In contrast progressives tend to maintain that it is something material, or at the very least something that can be readily measured and/or quantified. The specific quality in question might be intelligence, it might be strength, it might be membership in a particular social, political, or ethnic group, it could even be expected QUALYs according to some hypothetical super intelligence. The point is that it's there and can measured. The reason these debates tend to drag on endlessly is that progressive's by their nature want to make the debate about object level cases, "what if the baby has some horrible congenital disease?" "what if the baby is black?" "what if the baby grows up to be Hitler?" That sort of thing. Meanwhile from the conservative's view these sorts of questions only serve to demonstrate just how thoroughly progressives have missed the point. Life is life and has a value in to and of itself. End of conversation.

These 5 questions might not seem all that meaningful or relevant at a glance, but I think whether a person comes down on one side or the other has substantial downstream effects on patterns of thought and behavior even when the question itself is not being consciously considered. Maybe it's just a product of having a foot in both world but when I compare how the people I interact with in explicitly conservative/right-wing spaces seem to talk and think to the people I interact with here the differences really are quite stark.

In conclusion, I developed my theory that the Alt-Right is best understood as an offshoot of the progressive left after a couple of run-ins with the Takismag crew during the 2012 election when I was still serving as a local GOP Rep. My reasoning was/is straight forward, pretty much every alt-righter I've ever interacted with has A) come from an extremely progressive/left-wing background, and B) taken the "progressive" side in at least 3 of the above 5 questions if they didn't go a full 5/5.

Ultimately it all comes back to the first question in my list, my thesis is that there is a category to which both intersectional progressives and the alt-right belong, and whether they appreciate being in the same category together has no bearing on whether that category is useful or "cleaves reality at the joints". I believe that it is, and that it does.

edit: spelling/formatting.

Yep, there deserves to be a top-level post (perhaps there have been several already) but the alt-right definitely steals from the worldview of the progressives.

Ie there's this big hegemonic cultural force that is imposing a progressive view of race and inhibiting the success of whites. Gee, that sounds an awful lot like structural racism a la critical theory.

Alright, so let’s take your model seriously and see how I actually think I score on your five-criteria test. I believe that there are a number of better, more useful models than the one you’re using, but it’s not terrible - it at least successfully allows you to perform a basic Schmittian friend/enemy analysis and to obtain a somewhat reliable result, and in that sense it suits a useful purpose for you. So, where do I fall on your grading curve? Well, let’s take them in order.

[W]here does "Identity" reside? Progressives believe that it resides with the identified. Conservatives believe that it resides with the identifier.

My actual stance is: it’s both. Some identities are less or more constructed than other identities. Most of the important ones we care about have at least some bedrock of objective truth behind them, such that a reasonable observer of sound mind would conclude, the vast majority of the time, that someone either is or isn’t a particular example of that identity, and the observer would need to have a strong ideological reason to conclude otherwise. Gender/sex is certainly one of these. There are weird edge cases and people who, through a ton of effort, manage to “pass” by fooling/manipulating observers’ perceptive faculties, but the vast, vast majority of people are readily identifiable as one sex or the other, and our human perceptive faculties are incredibly well-tuned to make accurate determinations about that identity.

Some identities are more ambiguous, or operate on a spectrum. Reasonable observers can disagree about whether a particular specimen is or isn’t an example of that identity category, based on what each observer is optimizing for. “Disability status” is, I think, one of these. Some people are profoundly disabled, and only a tiny minority of “critical disabilities studies” - AKA, hardcore social constructivists who are committed to a very wacky definition of disability” - would fail to recognize them as such.

Other people have health conditions or neurotypes that either confer both advantages and disadvantages, or otherwise confer disadvantages that are easily manageable using modern medical technology. Someone who is totally blind is very obviously disabled; lacking sight is strictly worse than being able to see, in pretty much all scenarios I can imagine. Someone whose vision is just not great, or who wears reading glasses to slightly reduce eye strain, is probably not someone almost anyone would call “disabled”. However, if there’s some concrete or social gain to be had by persuading others to view me as disabled - say, a scholarship, or a workplace accommodation - then whether or not I’m perceived as disabled suddenly has real-world consequences, and I’m going to use the tools at my disposal to try and persuade people to alter their perception of my identity. I can’t force them to see me as something different than what they genuinely see me as, but I can try to present an alternative model that they might choose to adopt, and thereby change how they decide to signify me. In that sense, my identity is still determined by the signifier, but I can actually influence their perceptual decisions. I think that race is one of these sorts of muddled identity categories that contain both objective elements and constructed elements, and that someone can either fall into a category or fall out of it depending on what the signifier wants to accomplish by sorting that person into a particular identity.

There are also identities that are either entirely or nearly entirely elective, and we pretty much all agree to just honor the signified’s decision to adopt that identity category. I adopted a particular English Premier League football team as “my team”, based on criteria which most would see as arbitrary - I wasn’t born in England, let alone in the particular part of England where locals support this team, and I’ve never even been to that part of England. Yet nobody really has anything to lose or gain by deciding to challenge my “fandom identity”, so this identity can be constructed by my choice without it really having any consequences that would cause people to look twice at it. Now, for the locals who were born into families who’ve supported that team for generations, their “fandom identity” is somewhat less constructed - they have objective considerations that make their identity somewhat more determined, or at least harder to choose otherwise. That being said, there is nothing stopping them from just deciding to support a different team instead - maybe becoming a Manchester City fan because you get to see your team win every week. Your family can get mad at you and call you a traitor, a plastic, or whatever, but if you genuinely internally experience happiness when Man City wins and dejection when they lose, you truly are a Man City fan at that point.

So, if I believe that identities can exist on a spectrum between “totally signifier-determined” and “totally signified-constructed” then do I pass or fail Criterion #1?

Second, is the question of internal vs external loci of control or where does the responsibility for an act ultimately reside? Conservatives believe that it resides within the individual whereas progressives believe that it is something external.

Again, I’m going to say “both”. I think it is fair to talk about people having a sort of “default orientation” or psychological trait that causes them to instinctively feel either less or more “in control”. My default psychological state is very much an “internal locus of control”; I blame myself incessantly for things that go badly in my life, reading some level of “if I had made a different decision, things would have gone differently” into pretty much every event in my life, including ones where objectively I didn’t really have that much control over the outcome either way. There are a ton of things about my life that I wish were different/better, and I very often ruminate over why I made the choices I made. In that sense you’d be correct to identify me as someone with a strong psychological “internal locus of control”.

That being said, we actually can analyze data and statistical trends to try and gain insight into what sorts of life outcomes track reliably with non-chosen factors, versus which ones don’t map to any identifiable trends and therefore seem to be one’s where personal agency and choices have a strong effect. I am one of many peoples who have observed that, based on data, the great majority of people end up with more or less exactly the same economic outcomes as their parents and grandparents. Now, this has been significantly less or more true in different countries and different eras. Some places and times genuinely do appear to have varying levels of social/economic mobility. The rise of what we might call the “middle class” took place in different societies at different times, and in some places it still hasn’t happened.

In no society above the level of the hunter-gatherer have people with an IQ of 85 - let’s assume here, for the sake of argument, that IQ is measuring something real and that this factor, whatever it is, has existed among all human populations in history - have, in aggregate, done better economically and socially than people with a 120 IQ. There are little exceptions here and there - like how in our society, we pay professional athletes and musicians far better than they were paid in other times and places - but the pattern does hold and can be measured.

And if IQ is in fact heritable, this means that there is some extent to which outcomes genuinely and objectively are deterministic. Now, we can respond to this as a society in any number of ways! We can suppress knowledge of it, on the premise that the psychological health and “sense of agency” of our citizenry would be profoundly harmed by the widespread acceptance of this knowledge. I’m not even going to argue that this is wrong! (I do think it’s wrong, but I’m not going to make that argument right now.) And certainly it is possible to overestimate how deterministic outcomes actually are. Smart and well-meaning people can overfit their conclusions to insufficient/inconclusive data! Maybe that’s what I’m doing! I don’t think I am, but it’s a real and important question.

So again, we have a situation where there is both a “default psychological orientation”, and there is the objective data (assuming our measurements and collection methods are reliable), and the way that each individual interprets the latter is to a great extent influenced by the former.

Which brings us straight into the third point. The question of whether social structures are imposed upon the indivual from the top down, or do grow organically from the ground up.

I actually don’t think this is really a useful or coherent model at all, so I’m not sure how to respond to it or which side of this illusory binary I’m supposed to fall on. “Both”? “Neither”? “N/A”? In general I don’t think I really understand what people are referring to when they talk about “structures”. I know, it’s odd for a former (self-identified) socialist to admit this, but the whole concept always just sort of bounced off me. I don’t know if society actually has “structures” or not, or which direction they’re imposed from if they do exist. I guess I’m gonna have to say “I pass” on this part of the test and let you decide which bucket to sort me into.

While we're on the topic, Number 4 is the question of what is mankind's "default state"? War or Peace? Tyranny or Freedom? Progressives maintain that it is latter while Conservatives maintain that it is former. The thing that ultimately makes most progressives "progressive" is that they sincerely believe in capital-P Progress.

I think I believe in progress with a lowercase p, but that only some parts of society can progress, whereas on most axes moving in one direction or another isn’t “better or worse” but rather a series of trade-offs. Medical knowledge, for example, can definitely progress. We can in fact develop better - meaning both “more accurate” and “more useful” - models of the human body and the way its internal processes operate. The “four humors” model was not very good, and smart well-meaning doctors had to do their best under that suboptimal model, whereas modern doctors have a better model which allows them to more reliably cure ailments and save lives. Probably most scientific knowledge is like this, although I’m at least sympathetic to arguments that certain types of knowledge were better off without. It’s not a ridiculous concept.

In terms of whether or not different “modes of societal organization” can be said to be “better or worse”, such that movement in one direction along such an axis represents a total improvement for all humans and a move in the other direction represents a setback, this I basically don’t believe at all. We can imagine hypotheticals where this would be true - the imaginary society where everyone is immediately crippled and tortured at birth and lives a life of unremitting forced agony would pretty obviously be improved by people no longer doing that to infants, but such a society has never actually existed and I don’t imagine why it would ever be brought about, so it’s not useful to reason about it. In general, humans today are actually less physically healthy, live shorter and more painful lives, experience less day-to-day leisure and personal agency, etc., than the hunter-gatherers of 10,000 years ago. That being said, the hunter-gatherers would never had successfully landed a man on the moon, or built Notre Dame, or discovered germ theory, because their model of society wasn’t built to optimize for those things. (In fact, it wasn’t “built to” do anything. There was no top-down planning or political theory, as far as we know. It was just an emergent, locally-adaptive way of life, with people who probably didn’t think about whether or not there were other ways to live.)

The advent of agriculture and permanent settlements necessitated the advent of political and economic centralization, private property, and rigid social hierarchies. Was this “progress”? It certainly made life better for a certain class of people. A different set of skills and proclivities was now emphasized, leaving people who excelled at the old values probably less well-off. This was both good and bad! There was no ultimate teleology that such societies were “working toward”, and in fact there were many peoples who remained hunter-gatherers even after farming was introduced, and who competed against the farmers rather than adopting their ways. Was agriculture and “centralized society” always destined to win out and eventually wholly replace hunting and gathering in nearly every place on earth? I don’t know, we can’t do any experiments about this which would help our reasoning, so we’re stuck reasoning based on aesthetics and trade-offs and questions like “Which society would I personally be better off in?” “Which one seems to have led to the most society-wide gains in knowledge/self-mastery/martial glory/egalitarian distribution of resources/whatever considerations my ideology tells me are most important?”

I want humanity to colonize the stars, and therefore I think that the transition from decentralized and communitarian societies to centralized hierarchical superstates was a step in the right direction insofar as it might this outcome more likely. The transition was “progress” along that one particular axis that I care about, even if it may have been a regression among other axes that are more important to other people.

Finally there is the question of Mysticism vs Materialism, more specifically (and particularly relevant to discussions of abortion)is whether the moral value/weight of a human life is something metaphysical, or if it is something material?

On this criterion, I’m just going to fully admit that I’m on the “Materialist” side of this binary, and in that one sense I am unambiguously closer to the “progressives” than I am to you. If this is an issue where it’s important to you to identify Schmittian friends and enemies, I’m your enemy in this specific battle. I just think you’re thinking about abortion the wrong way, and that my way is better. I have no hope of persuading you of this (not because of anything deficient about you nor me, but just because our Inferential Distance™️ is too vast) so I’m not going to attempt to. Ultimately, if abortion becomes the Big Split, I’m going to end up on the other side from you. Fortunately I don’t think abortion will ultimately end up being the determining issue that decides how different political factions re-align in the coming decades. I don’t actually want to be your Enemy - I want you and I to each be able to live very different lives without interfering with each other’s ability to do so - so I certainly hope I’m right about that.

Soooo how’d I do on your test? Again, I don’t actually accept the framing of your model, but if you insist on continuing to rely on it, I hope this will at least be a useful exercise in helping figure out more clearly where and how you and I disagree so strongly. Contrary to your assertion, I don’t expect you to call me “right-wing” because that’s my chosen identity. I honestly believe that the most useful political models, the ones that cleave reality at the joints, show me to actually merit that perception by the “signifiers” such as yourself. If I have not persuaded you otherwise - and I’m betting I haven’t - them you’re welcome to keep calling me whatever you like, and I’m welcome to continue disputing your nomenclature.

Isn't the

Abortion is good if the child is low IQ/degenerate/black.

Perspective the same as the

Conservative: "A child's right to life is paramount, and killing them is wrong.

Perspective if only applied to my high-IQ, non-degenerate, white in-group?

That is something that they share. But there's a big difference in how they get there

The conservative is committed to universalism / believing that we need to help the low-iq and black as much as the high-iq and white. They both suffer, feel, and experience life in the same ways, after all. It's a deeply Christian idea. Also, I think they get to anti-abortion in large part via 'the baby is a weak and vulnerable person so killing them is extra bad'.

The 'maybe it's killing babies, maybe it isn't, it's fine either way' reactionary believes what's valuable in a person is specific to - I'd like to say their capacity for impact, contribution, and deep experience, but it's usually just a confused form of contrarian racist tribalism. But for the idealized reactionary of which maybe 50 exist, the vulnerability of the baby plays much less of a role than their potential to be a Great Man, and then their potential to be a productive member of society. (not a comment about anyone on themotte, just those people generally).

Hlynka, how many fucking times are we going to do this dance? There are other things someone can be other than progressive or mainstream conservative. I have never claimed to be a conservative, nor to have views anywhere remotely close to the median American. My views are also nowhere remotely close to the median progressive. There are other options! How obstinate do you have to be to keep doing this “if it ain’t my specific ideology, it’s progressive” thing? There’s a whole world of possible world views out there, but you are totally incapable of seeing outside of the fake binary you’ve constructed within your own head.

And as for your inability to recognize a simple hyperbolic joke, I don’t really know what to tell you. I’m not going to magically obtain dictatorial power, I wouldn’t actually want it even if it were given to me, and at no point in my life am I going to have any power to put anybody up against the wall. I think that’s pretty obvious to everybody, which is why idly joking about your personal petty enemies should “get the wall” is not actually that uncommon, nor is it indicative of my real political program. I do believe that political violence is coming to this country, and I think it will largely be a good thing when it happens, but I don’t want it to happen to my idiot ex-friends in the San Diego theatre community.

Hlynka, how many fucking times are we going to do this dance?

As many times as you play the tune.

You have a point about people kneejerk complaining about "white progressives," but while you can argue all you like that it's a handful of POC dominating and terrorizing nice white boys like yourself, they would have no power if not for all the white progressives abetting them. You stay in these ultra-woke environments but keep complaining about the wokeness. You can't like everything about the white progressive environment except for the fact that they allow non-whites to have influence. That's part of the environment.

You stay in these ultra-woke environments but keep complaining about the wokeness.

Have you uh… forgotten whom you’re speaking to? The guy who got a degree in theatre and had planned to pursue it as his life’s work, but who gave it up and distanced himself from huge swathes of his social group - burning important and otherwise rewarding relationships which he’d spent over a decade cultivating - primarily because of fundamental incompatibility with the progressive values dominant in that industry? Who’s still rebuilding his professional aspirations from the ground up as a result? That’s the guy you’re accusing of “staying in these ultra-woke environments but complaining about the wokeness”?

You can't like everything about the white progressive environment except for the fact that they allow non-whites to have influence.

Again, an incredibly bizarre accusation to make toward me in particular. You actually believe that my only complaint about wokeness is that some non-white people believe in it? You have my entire posting history to disabuse you of that notion. I’m responding to a specific claim that “privileged white people” are the ones primarily responsible for driving wokeness. I believe that this claim is false. This is not a defense of the ideology, it’s merely a disagreement over the people driving the enforcement of it.

Have you uh… forgotten whom you’re speaking to?

No, I have not. That's my point. As I understand it, you still live and work in that same environment (I don't know how much progress you have made in leaving it, but you seem like you are still very much a theater kid).

Again, an incredibly bizarre accusation to make toward me in particular. You actually believe that my only complaint about wokeness is that some non-white people believe in it?

No, I think you basically like the white progressive environment, you just don't like the non-white people in it (and all the things they bring), and you think non-white people invented wokeness. Well, in a sense they did ("woke" was originally African-American vernacular), but we have had many people here over the years write extensively about how wokeness is just the natural endpoint of the Enlightenment. Which is quintessential white progressivism. Maybe you disagree with that take, but I haven't seen you offer an alternate hypothesis.

I’m responding to a specific claim that “privileged white people” are the ones primarily responsible for driving wokeness.

Yes, and I think that claim is correct.

we have had many people here over the years write extensively about how wokeness is just the natural endpoint of the Enlightenment

I have seen people say this but it makes little sense to me. The Enlightenment celebrated reason, it was a move away from unconditionally accepting orthodoxies about things like science, religion, and the supposed rights of monarchs.

Wokeness, on the other hand, is largely a turning away from reason and towards orthodoxies.

Why would wokeness be the natural endpoint of the Enlightenment?

You're underestimating how much of this is driven by reason.

Transhumanism in general has a declared goal of freeing the mind from the body, which is the ultimate end of a movement which is the rejection of man's natural condition to recreate him in his own image using technics.

That this in turn makes itself into an orthodoxy is just the eternal irony of philosophy: all movements taken to their logical conclusion invert their original goal.

Now reason isn't bad or evil don't get me wrong. But it is indeed its worship that led us here. There is a direct throughline from Kant and German Idealism to the totalitarian modernisms and to post modern subsersive politics.

Such a throughline that some saw this as the conclusion of this style of thinking way back when the French Revolution ignited it all.

But all human history is the rejection of man's "natural condition" to recreate him using technics. The Enlightenment marks an acceleration in this but it's not like humans weren't trying to improve on their natural lot before it, it's just that around the time of the Enlightenment they got much better at it, so much better at it that scientific progress started to seem like it would just keep going and going rather than being something that happened once in a blue moon. Man's "natural condition" is to live naked without knowledge of agriculture or even how to make fire. Man has been rejecting it for hundreds of thousands of years.

I also think that philosophy's impact on politics is overestimated. Totalitarianism would probably have come about one way or another because of the rise of modern technologies that allow near-instant communication and dissemination of propaganda.

As for transgenderism, haven't there been versions of it in various human cultures for thousands of years? Modern transhumanism is not what created it. I doubt that transhumanism even did much to give it its modern, Western shape. Probably most transgender people don't even think in abstract terms of freeing their mind from their body, their concerns are more specific.

all human history is the rejection of man's "natural condition" to recreate him using technics

This is absolutely untrue, and you only believe this because you're a man of the Enlightenment living in a society made according to its principles.

People of the past did not think like this. Technological escape from man's condition was a very secondary concern if you actually look at what they left as artifacts of their thinking.

What you value of what they produced and what they valued of themselves are not the same categories, and people always confuse the two.

Man's "natural condition" is to live naked without knowledge of agriculture or even how to make fire. Man has been rejecting it for hundreds of thousands of years.

You're thinking in tautologies here. All you're attempting to relate nature to here are relationships of production. There are other things in life than making transformed goods that can fit on a spreadsheet. And before the advent of this period dominated by merchants, people thought of those are more important.

Are war, honor, faith and family more or less constitutive of man's natural condition than agriculture and business?

I also think that philosophy's impact on politics is overestimated. Totalitarianism would probably have come about one way or another because of the rise of modern technologies that allow near-instant communication and dissemination of propaganda.

As you know, this is a longstanding debate in historiography. But I think sole technological determinism the likes of which you seem to be supporting here is almost entirely falsified. If only because we're not currently living under Both great men and ideology have a seat at the table of causality. Were Marx and Kant not to exist, the manifestations of the industrial revolution would take a distinctly different character, if through similar means.

Consider how similar and yet different those totalitarianisms of the XXth century are from each other despite being determined by supposedly similar technology.

haven't there been versions of it in various human cultures for thousands of years?

No. Androgyny is eternal and its popularity recurs. Transgenderism in particular (both in ideological terms and in technical terms) is wholly new.

Gender theorists are constantly producing propaganda to pretend the past agrees with their novelty, a stratagem borrowed from the one used for homosexuality, but people of the past did not thing of things in those terms and it doesn't make sense to paint social edge cases of completely different social orders using contemporary social theories. No person born before the 1990s ever was "queer" in the sense these people mean.

This is like saying the proletariat always existed because at any time in history you can point at people who have more than others. Useful propaganda. But sociologically moronic.

But all human history is the rejection of man's "natural condition" to recreate him using technics. The Enlightenment marks an acceleration in this but it's not like humans weren't trying to improve on their natural lot before it, it's just that around the time of the Enlightenment they got much better at it, so much better at it that scientific progress started to seem like it would just keep going and going rather than being something that happened once in a blue moon.

The Enlightenment didn't just accelerate the rejection of the natural condition, it marked a turn where the rejection of that natural condition became the end goal.

For most of history, in Christian Europe at least, technology progressed and people worked to improve their lot, but the main motivation (culturally if not individually) was to help the poor, and to improve people's lives in order to help them better serve their community and God. This motivation wasn't necessarily written down anywhere, because everything in this worldview was about serving God.

The ultimate purpose, the thing that gave people the motivation to get up in the morning and work on improving their lot despite their often terrible material circumstances, was the love of God. The belief that the divine was on their side and cared about them personally, that they were fundamentally flawed in many ways, and that by doing good they could save their soul:

During the Middle Ages, the Church provided education for some and it helped the poor and sick. It was a daily presence from birth to death. In fact, religion was so much a part of daily life that people even said a certain number of prayers to decide how long to cook an egg!

Christian belief was so widespread during this time that historians sometimes call the Middle Ages the “Age of Faith.” People looked to the Church to explain world events. Storms, disease, and famine were thought to be punishments sent by God. People hoped prayer and religious devotion would keep away such disasters. They were even more concerned about the fate of their souls after death. The Church taught that salvation, or the saving of a one’s soul, would come to those who followed the Church’s teachings.

The Enlightenment celebrated reason, it was a move away from unconditionally accepting orthodoxies about things like science, religion, and the supposed rights of monarchs.

"Reason" doesn't mean embracing "The Truth", but rather embracing "whatever I can't personally think of a good counter-argument for, possibly while being actively deceived." The Enlightenment moved away from Christianity; it immediately and enthusiastically adopted novel orthodoxies about science, religion, and the supposed rights of social classes, frequently to disastrous results. The places where it delivered good results are also the places where its push away from Christianity was largely neutralized. The places where it did move away from Christianity, it produced slaughter and oppression.

The basic problem is that human reason is not, in fact, a very good way of figuring out the world around us. If you're familiar with economics, think about economic Central Planning, why it was attractive and why it didn't work. The Enlightenment failed for similar reasons: it assumed it had the answers to questions that it did not, in fact, have the answers to.

See here for a debate on the subject.

I like this post, and liked your previous one. Do you remember where you found these arguments?

I'm especially interested in historical books that focus on this - and discuss the long term rise of reason versus Christianity.

Violence Unveiled touches on this topic if you're curious.

Do you remember where you found these arguments?

I came up with them myself, largely from reading and arguing with people in the various forums that preceded this place. It'd surprise me if someone else hadn't thought it first and better, but if so, I haven't found them yet. Failing that, I've been off-and-on trying to write up a concise encapsulation of my own, but the going is slow.

Thanks for the recommendation!

I don’t think reason is the problem here. I think the notion of democracy as the defining form of government is the problem precisely because it is anti-reason. No reasonable person would allow people who don’t understand a subject weigh in on how it’s to be done.

To give a simple example, the current situation between Russia and Ukraine. Most of us, even here know so little about the subject that it would be ridiculous to give our opinion the same weight as someone with real expertise in Russian and Eastern European politics. We don’t know enough to make good decisions, but of course we do know enough to think we understand how to fight the war, or whether we actually should. It gets worse in science based policies— the average voter is for all practical purposes scientifically illiterate. They don’t have any idea how to decide what science is real, what’s useful, or even what’s dangerous. So, they base it on movies or TV or YouTube videos. When people think about AI, it’s not based on any understanding of what real AI is or does, it’s based on TV or movies. It’s Data VS Terminator, neither of which exist except on celluloid film.

Democracy can work for very simple things. You can probably reasonably vote for local roads and stoplights. But once society gets complex enough, it quickly outstrips the average person’s ability to really understand and make good decisions about every aspect of society. There’s simply too much going on.

The problem is that 'reason' does not provide any sort of moral imperatives on its own. The ultimate state of 'reason' is something like extreme libertarianism - treating every human like homo economicus. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective) as we all know, humans are not like that. So you have a situation where reason tears down Chesterton's fence after fence, and ultimately starts to eat its own tail.

The only reason reason was able to go so far and become so successful at understanding the world was the high trust religious backdrop it developed in, Christianity. When you have reason on its own without a higher end than itself, bad things happen.

Well said.

You can't like everything about the white progressive environment except for the fact that they allow non-whites to have influence.

I retired permanently from performing several years ago. Most of my IRL friends are still people whom I met while in that sphere, because I can’t just magically recreate an entire social network in my thirties. I have complained many times about how it’s easy for right-wingers who grew up in conservative areas, or who were never closely affiliated with any left-wing people or communities, to say, “Just move to a red state, join a church, get new friends, etc.” as if ripping up your entire life and starting over is just a super simple thing for people to do. I’ve burnt a considerable number of bridges by even revealing a fraction of my true beliefs, and I would almost certainly lose what’s left of my friends and my side job if I were outed.

progressive environment, you just don't like the non-white people in it (and all the things they bring)

You have a poor mental model of me. It is very true that I like a lot of things about living among college-educated people with artsy-fartsy tastes; I’ve commented before about how when I attend classical music concerts, I’m acutely aware that the vast majority of the people in the audience with me are not remotely conservative, and that this is not an accident. Progressivism correlates highly with having good taste in music, in film, in literature, etc. That correlation is only partially causative; a lot of it is simply that intelligent and educated people are socialized into progressive values by the sense-making institutions they gravitate toward, as is the case with me, but part of it is also that psychological traits such as openness to experience are related to leftist instincts. I also unapologetically love the urban lifestyle, and for a number of reasons that also correlated with progressivism. It’s not the progressivism that is the appealing part. I’ve said many times that my overriding goal is to figure out how to do my small part toward facilitating a reconciliation of white left-wingers and white right-wingers. Both have an integral part to play in the future of our civilization.

I’ve been severely behind on my effort-posting due to some professional and social obligations as of late, but I had a big effort-post planned about how a recent orchestra performance I attended, which featured a very racially diverse group of young performers, represents the sort of “best-case scenario” of multiracial elitism, as opposed to multiracial populism. I hope to write more about this dynamic in the future. I have numerous non-white friends and colleagues, and my racial views cannot possibly be summarized as simply “not liking the things non-white people bring.”

and you think non-white people invented wokeness

Again, not remotely true, and I’ve explicitly said otherwise. You’re correct that I have not laid out a comprehensive genealogy of “wokeness” because I myself am still working out exactly what I think the most useful and accurate model/explanation is. Certainly the Enlightenment is a factor, but there are lots of other ideological strains that contributed - transcendentalism, unitarian utopianism, even ancient religious traditions like gnosticism play a part. It’s a very complicated story, and in no sense whatsoever do I give non-whites any prominent part to play in it, at least not until up until the 50’s, or a bit earlier if you frame Jews as non-white. Again, you’ve assumed a ton about my worldview that is not supported by my actual statements.

Just move to a red state, join a church, get new friends, etc.” as if ripping up your entire life and starting over is just a super simple thing for people to do.

I don't often fall back on my progressive bona fides, as the only child of a lesbian mother. I had 'two moms' before there were books about it.

You don't even have to move to a red state. In our very blue state, we've joined a local traditional church, and made new friends that are on the same page regarding the madness and degeneracy of current year.

Your attachment to an urban lifestyle may be working against you here.

I totally agree on the culture part. It shouldn’t be simply abandoned because it’s been more or less co-opted by the progressive elites as if they own it. And tbh I think honestly unless it’s reclaimed, it’s going to be lost when civilization rebuilds itself in the West. Good art belongs to everyone, and I don’t see why it has to be marked as progressive to read good books or listen to good music.

The eschewing of those kinds of art by the counterculture is part of why conservatives have such a hard time making good art. They don’t learn to understand good art, and how and why it’s good, so they end up creating childish art that can’t really compare. Christian media generally sucks mostly because they have to resort to telling rather than showing and can’t create characters who disagree without having them be cartoon characters.

This is a good post, and it echoes a lot of what I think personally.

I think the future for conservatives is rescuing the blue tribe, not throwing in our lot with the red tribe. I like classical music, and museums, and old cities with beautiful car-free corridors. And conversely I am disgusted by big trucks, obesity, Walmart, and pit bulls.

If the blue tribe and the red tribe are going to different planets and I need to choose, I'm going with the blue tribe. That's who my people are. In my opinion, they are the best people, even if they are more likely to be captured by the woke mind virus. For me, the ideal outcome is for the blue tribe to return to sanity rather than to let the red tribe run things.

I used to want to be part of the blue tribe but after seeing how they treated the red tribe since around 2008 I just don't anymore. The condescension and classism is so hideous. How can you see people who you feel culturally superior to and have contempt toward them rather than compassion and empathy for their condition? Yes, walmart is a hideous place, but god so is Baltimore. The red tribe likes big trucks and guns because they're tiny scared people in a big scary country. If you're taking the bait and seeing them as some Jan 6 insurrectionist threat rather than people with decades of subpar education under a semi hostile cultural millieu that confuses them and your response is "ew, no thanks" then I think that view is morally repugnant and I don't want to take part.

Red tribers like big trucks and guns because they're fun, not because they're "tiny scared people in a big scary country" (or "bitter clingers" as Obama put it).

You can have compassion and empathy for the lower classes without wanting them to actually run things.

More comments

I don't think I do have a poor mental model of you.

I also unapologetically love the urban lifestyle, and for a number of reasons that also correlated with progressivism. It’s not the progressivism that is the appealing part.

Yes, I understand it's not the progressivism per se that is the appealing part. But for all the reasons you mentioned, the things you like are basically "white progressive culture." You don't like that it's progressive. I kind of sympathize with your dilemma (not a lot), but I think you are pointing in the wrong direction by insisting it's not white progressives responsible for the things you don't like.

My entire point is that none of those things used to be the exclusive province of progressives. Classical music was a very right-wing tradition for a long time. Ditto for literature. We find ourselves in a very odd and atypical moment in history, in which the vast majority of smart and high-human-capital people are left-wing. There’s no reason this needs to be the case now, it hasn’t been the case for very long, and my contention is that it will not continue to be the case for very much longer.

Abandoning the cities, deriding high culture as faggy elitist status-signaling (as a number of conservatives on this very site have done) and going all-in on rural populism is a toxic dead end for the right wing, and I would rather actually try and rescue those parts of our culture - the BEST parts of our culture - from the mind virus of minoritarian identity communism. Being a white identitarian is inextricably tied up with this; I believe that white people are largely doing this to ourselves, and that all we need to do is stop. However, if we don’t stop very soon, things genuinely will be out of our hands and those who hate us truly will have the whip hand. Right now, white progressives are allowing vindictive race communists, like the individuals I mentioned in my original comment, because they’ve forgotten what made white people great, and forgotten that they have the strength to fight back.

It’s like if a huge jacked guy was allowing himself to be bullied by a scrawny manlet, simply because he had some psychological condition that caused him to forget that he has muscles. Some perceptual blindness that causes him to ignore the evidence of his own strength right before his eyes. He could snap out of it in a second and flatten the bully, but something is stopping him from doing so. And there are people like me standing off to the side yelling, “Bro, you’re fucking massive, just pummel this guy!” And he’s like, “Nah man, I’m puny and weak, and plus, even if I was super strong, it would be morally wrong of me to fight back.” That’s essentially how I see racial dynamics in this country, at least as it concerns whites and blacks.

Being a white identitarian is inextricably tied up with this; I believe that white people are largely doing this to ourselves, and that all we need to do is stop.

I'm bemused that you just wrote a long screed saying at greater length what I said above - which you claimed was wrong.

More comments

Or it could be that black progressives have different origins and I have different interactions with them.

It is hilarious when you can set them against each other.

Your mixed race white progressives are very different from the Black Hebrew Israelites I am used to dealing with.

The Internet was full of a bunch of socially awkward, socially shunned nerds, and the Internet offered them a venue not only to express themselves, but also vent their frustrations. Once Facebook arrived upon the scene, the Net was colonized by a bunch of privileged progressive whites who began imposing their cultural norms on geek culture - a form of colonization.

I disagree with this narrative a lot.

tl;dr: it's not the normies that fought the old internet and won. It's the lolcows.

Old internet places were normie-proof. The first and most simple reason for this was that normies have lives to live, no-life internet losers do not. So in any given area the internet culture was always dictated by the no-lifers since they are always there.

A secondary reason is emergent culture. When similar people engage with one another, you get a form of culture. These people were, back in the day, no life white dudes. The cultural expression was indirectly just young white men. Not being that sticks out like a sore thumb.

The third reason is that caring is weak. If you care about something you can be made fun of. If you value something it can be desecrated. So in order to be bulletproof you can't care about anything.

The thing that killed these places and led to the 'New Internet' we have today were a few things. Primarily it was different kinds of no-lifers mixed with grifters mixed with weak men with power. /v/ after GamerGate is a great example. Grifters create drama, no-lifers join in to point and laugh, weak men with power, i.e. mods and moot, side with grifters and /v/ is turned into a 'no fun allowed' zone since weak mods are enticed by grifters.

That wouldn't be enough to kill everything off though. The second nail in the coffin can be seen with reddit. Starting with places like SRS. It turns out super motivated no-lifers who obsessively care are much better than unmotivated no-lifers who have made it their entire thing to not care at all. Especially when the weak men with power are completely ready to abandon fun in favor of attention from women, since that happens to be a thing men care about a lot regardless of what they say on the internet.

The third nail in the coffin was the 'New Internet' realizing that having no-lifers on the internet laugh at you doesn't matter all that much. Sure it hurts, and the old no lifers can get under your skin and create better internet memes and whatever. But in real life they have no power. So what does it matter? Just ban, laugh, and lie. The old truth can never reach anyone that way.

The final nail is simply that you can out-no-life the old no-lifers. No one is 16-25 forever. Sooner or later real life rears its head and you stop being permanently online. And for a lot of white men that happens. But what if you are a professional no-lifer? What if you are way past thirty and your entire life revolves around modding the biggest social media sites? The ultimate NEET lifestyle so coveted by the old no-lifer. Living rent free in real life. But instead of the old idealism of just playing video games, going to the gym and buying the occasional hooker, you intend to enforce your will unto the internet with ideological fanaticism and fervor that defies reality and reaches depths of depravity so great that no shock documentaries of hoarders or maniacal weirdos even come close.

The new internet is the lolcow. And they make sure anyone who laughs gets the stick.

If you want a glimpse of the future, look at Call of Duty. A bunch of transparent grifters running around a multi billion dollar game franchise desperate to please the lolcow community managers so they can get more power, status and money to continue grifting off of the sub-100 IQ brown normie playerbase. The entire thing is so degenerate and disgusting I have no words to describe it. But it's the norm.

I think what invited the normies was the advent of apps for common media sites. Back in the day, if you wanted to be a part of a forum, you had to first find it, register and go specifically to that site. It wasn’t a sub-Reddit in a huge forum-of-forums model, it wasn’t Facebook or Twitter-X where everything was easy enough to find. And because it wasn’t app-based, you’d have to either stumble on it from elsewhere, search for something related, or be told about it. This helped protect the community from being overly saturated by outsiders with little connection and a chip on their shoulders. The community formed was tighter because it was shared interests and a small enough community where most people knew each other, and it wasn’t shot through with people drive-by posting and being drive-by offended. The internet was a series of “small towns” in a sense. You’d have people who knew each other talking to other people who knew you.

With aggregator sites (Digg, Reddit, and so on) and general social media (Facebook and X), there’s no need to become part of the community. If you type in the name of a given sub-forum, or click a link from the front page, you’ll not only be there, but able to participate even if you know nothing. With an app, you just open the app, look for the sub-forum, and if what you see is shocking or offensive or weird, you and every other tourist gets to weigh in.

Tourists coming into the space was always a thing. They would either get curious and lurk after getting told off or they would leave. That doesn't explain why old communities were culturally replaced.

It's not the normie who has the power to 'weigh' in on anything. Mod cliques do what they want to do. They enforced their rules from the top down. And it's not even that they catered to normies. They just enforced lib/progressive/leftist ideological orthodoxy because that's what the lolcows like in real life. The ultimate ideology that says you can't laugh at them anymore.

Take any regular reddit post that gets locked because too many users are noticing something about black people. You get the typical condescending reddit mod "I guess we just can't play nice today" or whatever. Normies just put up with it because they are normies, they have a real life to live and care about, after all. The mods see themselves as curators of comments that the normies can be allowed to see.

/v/ was a great example of how extremely top down things are. Moot bans discussion on GamerGate because of his real life social circle. This was so contrary to the wants of the userbase that it spawned an entire splinter site.

Same thing, to a lesser extent, with reddit and voat.

I think it would be much fairer to say normies don't actually have opinions. They just read them. In a war of internet minorities, no-lifers lost to the lolcows.

If you want a glimpse of the future, look at Call of Duty. A bunch of transparent grifters running around a multi billion dollar game franchise desperate to please the lolcow community managers so they can get more power, status and money to continue grifting off of the sub-100 IQ brown normie playerbase.

I'm aware of CoD but never played it. What is the phenomenon you reference here? It sounds interesting.

It's hard to give concrete examples. It's a feel you get from being in the feed or the bubble so to speak. Compared to games I used to spend a lot of time with CoD just feels dumber. The way people talk, how they type, how they reason.

But the easiest example would be the classic of developers inviting streamers to go play the game early, the streamers then rave about how amazing it is, then the game is released and it's crap. An apology is made by the streamers. Then you repeat the process for the next annual release after having complained along with your following that the previous game was actually bad even though you recommended everyone part with their money before it was even out. Despite the exact same thing happening last year.

This isn't an issue isolated to CoD, but the way it plays out in CoD is so extremely brazen and ridiculous it's just beyond any reason. The timescale is just so short. If you are not stupid you recognize the process and stop buying the game. The cycle of buying, complaining and then just a year later doing it all again is pathetic. But as far as I know it's the biggest gaming franchise in the world and it's been doing this for years.

a historic flame war against rival operating system engineer Andrew Tanenbaum

This is good stuff.

While I could go into a long story here about the relative merits of the two designs, suffice it to say that among the people who actually design operating systems, the debate is essentially over. Microkernels have won... it is now all over but the shoutin`.

This reminds me of how I compared the US Constitution to an open-source microkernal, and the US Code to all the other operating system items necessary to support the microkernal, and the individual states to various Linux distros.

Unlike actual microkernels, the constitution is actually running in production.

So what sort of reeducation/disciplinary actions are the Canadians imposing on Peterson? It sounds like we’ll get to see the course content, however will he have to take a test at the end and falsify his beliefs to pass?

My understanding from having seen a couple interviews with him is that he will refuse to attend the training regardless of whether he wins or loses the court appeals. In which case it's likely they will escalate and revoke his professional license as punishment for refusing to comply.

But the article says he said he will take the training publicly, maybe a live stream.

Liberals read, conservatives watch Youtube live.

If only Linus, who was in a more powerful position, had the stones to just refuse.

You know, for years now I've felt like the internet of old that I grew up with had been completely ruined by normies. The flame wars, the shit talking, the profoundly creative obscenity, the irreverence and iconoclasm. The Internet that gave us goatse, stile project, or "I Like to Watch", and honest to god classic I highly recommend not watching around children or at work.

Then I started spending some time at Kiwi Farms since they documented the schizophrenic decline and eventual suicide of an old associate of mine. Many community members who knew him blamed Kiwi Farms for "bullying" him, but I mostly blamed them for enabling his obvious mental decline. For giving him the illusion that he's not mentally ill, but instead a special snowflake who is misunderstood. It eventually followed the arc of many schizophrenics where he lost his job, his marriage broke up, he violently assaulted his parents who took him in, and then he died on the streets. The final straw was clearly going off his prescription meds, self medicating with god knows what, and attacking his parents. Not Kiwi Farms noticing.

Regardless, everything I used to love about the internet of yore still survives on Kiwi Farms as it turns out. I highly recommend it.

The hell, you knew Terry A. Davis IRL?

You forgot your (pbuh)

Nah, a different schizophrenic. They're basically all the same it seems.

Kiwi Farms

Where would you go to find it now? Ever since it antagonised that politically influential anime enjoyer I haven't been able to find a trace of it.

kiwifarms.st the .pl domain was seized by a german provider.

Think the onion link generally still works with TOR to my knowledge. He had a .pl site up for a while but checking now it looks down at the moment.

Also very relevant: https://haleynahman.substack.com/p/138-are-we-the-robots

Seems to reverse causality. We're not becoming robots or acting like them, we developed polite speech first and then insisted the robots follow it. As they say, it never costs you anything to be kind, and a robot fundamentally doesn't care in the same way we do. You can hurl abuse all you want at it and there is no satisfaction in the possibility that it might go home and cry that day.

There's no conflict between being polite and expressing yourself with creativity and individuality. Nahman isn't complaining that corporate communications require politeness (indeed, an absence of politeness would be a big red flag for an unpleasant work environment), but rather that corporate communications in the Anglosphere tends to be extremely dry and deracinated and heavily reliant on prefab canned phrases ("going forward", "if you could just circle back to me", "per my last email"). In other words, corporate drones are NPCs. Politeness isn't an inherent hallmark of robotic speech (it would be fairly trivial to make a ChatGPT knockoff which swears like a sailor), but speaking in canned phrases absolutely is, because a computer program can only do what it's instructed to.

I'd argue that people just don't care enough to express their creativity in corporate communications. Once you have a phrase that people understand, no one is going to bust their heads in coming up with a better one. Doesn't seem like a case of people being robots as much as it is people being lazy. Or perhaps those two are really the same.

I've thought about this a lot in the context of the observation "the left can't meme". The idea is that memes (or jokes more generally) advocating a woke or leftist worldview tend to be less funny than apolitical memes, or memes advocating an anti-woke, classical liberal or conservative worldview. An alternative phrasing applies it to creators of memes rather than the memes themselves, so that even an apolitical meme created by someone known to be woke or left will tend to be less funny than an apolitical meme created by someone who isn't. Anecdotally I think this is a very accurate description, and most leftist memes (and jokes and comedy more generally) seem intended to provoke clapter rather than actual laughter. In some cases, "stand-up comedy" in which the audience isn't supposed to laugh (which we might have traditionally called "spoken-word performance" or "lectures" or "sermonizing") is the explicitly intended point.

For argument's sake, let's assume the premise of the meme. Why is woke/leftist comedy less funny than other kinds of comedy? Your point is essentially my explanation for the phenomenon. Effective comedy and humour depends on creativity and the element of surprise. Wokeness depends on absolute ideological conformity and rigorous adherence to a set of linguistic prescriptions which are essentially arbitrary ("coloured people" is out; "people of colour" is in), vary depending on the perceived identity of the speaker (who has "N-word" privilege? Does the one-drop rule apply?), and subject to a euphemism treadmill which seems to accelerate every year. It should come as a surprise to no one that comedians cannot reasonably be expected to serve two masters.

And it's no good telling these comedians "just write the funny jokes, then go through them with a fine-toothed comb and replace all the naughty words with items from this official list of PMC and HR-approved ones". Replacing a single word in a punchline can be the difference between uproarious laughter and dead silence, as any skilled standup comedian knows. But at a deeper level than that, we're talking about habits of mind. Once you get into the habit of obsessively overthinking and analysing everything before you say it, walking on eggshells for fear of saying anything which could be taken as offensive, the funny jokes simply won't occur to you anymore. It's impossible to write a funny joke when you're living in mortal fear of your career being destroyed because you couldn't remember whether you're supposed to say "unhoused person" or "person suffering from unhousedness" this month.

Comedy is, by its nature, subversive. It doesn't have to be politically subversive necessarily, but it needs to subvert expectations. Taken to its extreme, like Andy Kaufmann, it can even subvert the idea that a comedian is supposed to tell jokes.

The problem with woke comedians is that they are limited. Their worldview is dominant. So woke comedians like Amy Schumer are boxed in. They can't tell jokes about politics. They can't tell jokes about society - not funny ones at least. So they try to mine the existing sources of taboo they can find, for example toilet humor. But it's all been done a million times. We basically expect female comedians to make jokes about their vagina nowadays. That's why those jokes never land and Amy Schumer is cringe as fuck. But it was probably mind-blowing in the 1970s or whatever.

Being against the current paradigm lets you be funny in a lot of different ways. Being for whatever's cool now is by definition not funny.

By and large no-one can meme, at least if the goal is to meet the exacting humor standards of extremely online weirdoes who have fried their brain with a mental diet of years of image boards and other social media.

Your modal right-wing meme is not "dissident humor", it's a boomer uncle posting a picture of laughing Minions with a Comic Sans text "How is it that the Left wants to tell you what to think, when they can't tell a girl from a boy?"

Speaking as an extremely online weirdo who has fried his brain with a mental diet of years of image boards and social media, it really isn't that hard to make me laugh, chuckle or smile. If I scroll through my Instagram feed for ten minutes, I can reliably expect to laugh at at least one image I see, whether it's a meme or a screenshot of a tweet or a silly video. (I would say the overwhelming majority of content that makes me laugh isn't political at all.) And yet this is a bar that explicitly woke/leftist memes, jokes and standup consistently fail to meet. Oftentimes the purpose of the ostensible joke seems less about making the audience laugh (even in a supercilious "ha ha our opponents are so lame and stupid" way) than merely signalling allegiance to the cause i.e. clapter.

Even assuming wokes and dissidents are equally endowed with humour, the political domination of the former creates a selection effect. Any leftist joke, funny or not, is allowed to spread. People repeat it, if only to signal conformity and obedience. But non-cathedral-approved funnies face suppression, and only the most laughable survive. One will share them only if their quality outweighs the social cost imposed on the sharer for outing themself as enjoying egregious entertainment.

Speaking from my own experience in the corporate world I have experienced enormous cognitive load trying to pick and choose every single word I utter on the web, for fear of angering some white progressive who will deliberately misconstrue my words and read offense into even the most benign terminology, presumably to gain some sort of moral ammunition to volley in my direction when the opportunity presents itself, and can then return victoriously to the tribe for having felled another deplorable.

Even themotte isn't safe from such behaviour. Our well-read Russian friend (currently in exile in Turkey) accidently used the Russian notation for quotation («I am a Berliner.»). After an accusation of anti-semitism (ironically, not by a leftist) due the second poster mistaking guillemet for the triple parenthesis, a third poster explained the difference. Someone reported the third poster to the admins and his post was [removed]. This was the straw which broke the camels back and led JabbaTGreek to lead his flock to independent pastures.

What effects does needing to change the way you speak, your accent, the language(s) and vocabulary you use, have upon your own internal notions of self, the external representations of your identity to the world at large, and indeed, the way you think?

Orwell's thoughts on this topic are well-known, inability to express dissent leads to an inability to even think dissentient thoughts. But on the second hand, lingusts today think that while the Strong Sapir-Whorf (language determines thought) is false, the Weak (language influences and shapes thought). Mathematicians also agree that in their field at least, their version of WSW (notation influences mathematics) is also true. Correct notation makes it easier make generalizations which are true, and correctly obscures feneralizations which are false.

JabbaTGreek to lead his flock to independent pastures.

Where?

This website that you're currently posting on.

Having charity and kindness being rules here was a mistake. Our great enemy has no concept of truth as we'd understand it. I'd accuse them of being habitual liars, but the dichotomy of truth and lies simply is not in their world view. In this environment where you are required to take their truth-void statements "charitably", it's impossible to grapple with them. Think of Darwin.

Furthermore, they have hacked our empathy to such an extend that our truth is offensive to them and cannot be spoken under rules dictated by "kindness". We are constantly forced into using their terminology. It's not mutilating and sterilizing children, it's "Trans health care".

If this place in an experiment, it's failed.

  • -15

If you want this place but without the charity and kindness rule, then what's that supposed to be?

Oopen discussion without charity and kindness rules? You'll get shouted down by the more numerous party.

Bilious contrarians heaping abuse upon absent bien-pensants? 4chan still exists, enjoy.

Supposedly very intelligent contrarians organizing to topple woke orthodoxy? Ask yourself why that is not happening already.

I disagree with kindness, charity is worthwhile though something of a hopeless cause. Someone else said it here but kindness is an insidious term that has been weaponised politically, eg COVID and trans issues.

The term I favour is civility. Civility is a form, so isn't as loaded, and doesn't require people to hide any of their views or fail to call people out, it just requires that it's done with style, panache even. As in a debate where someone says someone is stupid but with a witty retort.

I thought kindness meant kindness towards debate opponents, not the kindness towards the entire world that modern orthodoxy demands. But sure enough, civility should be sufficient in its stead.

I'm sure it does mean the narrower definition but even then I think for certain people it might encourage a certain holding back. Any term has the problem of where the agreed threshold is and they also overlap, the duty of civility derives from some consideration that is a kindness.

But kindness is deeper and sometimes it's not clear what is kind, ie giving a streetperson money that you are sure they will buy drugs with, or the tradition of fierce wisdom-telling people what they might need to hear even if they will find it unkind. Now, we're not in a spiritual or personal community here so I don't advocate for fierce wisdom, there should be protocols that understand the nature of the space. But this fits better with the less loaded term of civility in my view.

Who is "our great enemy", here? Personally, I'd say that my great enemy are people unwilling or unable to extend charity and kindness to those holding viewpoints or values they disagree with.

Having charity and kindness being rules here was a mistake.

Not sure what you mean by this. Charity and kindness in debate have been norms that have been useful for far longer than wokeism, even if wokeism is taking those rules to the extreme. Baby and the bathwater, and all that.

Charity is one of those things where some people need more, some people need less, and you can't aim the advice at the people who need it. And the reason we've come up with the quokka idea is that rationalists have a habit of not understanding that attacks are attacks and treating them with excess charity, like Scott not thinking that Cade Metz was malicious from the very start and if he had only been nicer to Metz, Metz would have written a completely fair article, or like this post.

It's not always bad to be a quokka.

Scott's star has never shined brighter. How many billionaires read his writing? I think I remember he's making 600k/year from Substack. Probably more now.

Scott may be a quokka but it's working for him.

Meanwhile nobody cares about this Cade Metz creature except that he wrote about Scott. That will probably be his epitaph: "Wrote a hit piece on a beloved and respected public intellectual". Writing that just now makes me feel sorry for the guy. Scott crushed him like a bug without even meaning to.

What does 'quokka' even mean here? Scott intentionally hides his belief in [thing about race] while still hinting at it once in a while (e.g. in the Galton Erlich Buck post). I don't think he has any illusions about the media being good and nice on that topic.

Scott's star has never shined brighter.

At what cost?

When was the last time he wrote anything people here bother quoting anymore? Besides "Scott wrote a thing which is a good opportunity for my more interesting post on the topic" type deals.

When was the last time he wrote anything people here bother quoting anymore?

I think there's something to this, but >80% of scott's old posts that I like the most aren't about the culture war. Control Group Is Out Of Control, Different Worlds, etc. Those seemed to have slowed down too (probably?) so I'm not sure if that's the cause.

I thought Radicalising the Romanceless was some of his best work to be perfectly honest, and I think that gets incredibly culture-warry. But to continue being honest I haven't been reading Astral Codex Ten nearly as much as Slatestarcodex and the writing seems less compelling when I do.

Scott Alexander went from being one of the best writers in the world writing the most interesting articles with a comment section of gold attracting the best thinkers in the world getting to the naked causes of many problems we now face to Scott Siskind, a forgettable content producer who makes good money on substack.

If Cade Metz is a forgettable nobody, it makes this story all the more tragic. I think in a couple decades, people will still talk about Scott Alexander and some of the articles he wrote. I do not think the same is true of Scott Siskind.

Maybe I'm being harsh, but watching Scott cower and slink away to come back different was such a disappointment to me.

Meanwhile nobody cares about this Cade Metz creature except that he wrote about Scott.

We're in a bubble. Scott seems important only because of that. And Metz is a Times writer. This inherently means that a lot of people care about what he says.

That will probably be his epitaph: "Wrote a hit piece on a beloved and respected public intellectual".

Plenty of people told similar lies about Gamergate. It's pretty obvious by now that none of them will be chiefly remembered for those lies. We don't control the discourse, and in most places where it's relevant you can't even suggest that anything said about Gamergate was a lie. And yes, it still gets brought up every so often.

And this pattern extends back in time. "White Flight", the history of race relations generally, erasure of the anti-suffragettes, and so on. The control has existed for much of the last three hundred years; what changed is that some few people have become aware of it.

Scott's star has never shone brighter.

His star shone brighter when he was, briefly, one of the best writers in the world, looking directly at the nature and causes of the core problem eating our society.

I'm sure he's making more money now, but then he had a solid shot at making a difference. Not many draw that hand, and he folded.

I think charity is fine, but it must be in service to telling the truth. That’s where the liberals have weaponized kindness and charity. In the hierarchy of speech values, truth must weigh much higher than charity. You can insist that people not be antagonistic about the way they tell truth as they understand it, but the truth is often unkind and makes people uncomfortable. It’s not kind perhaps, to suggest that jumping off the roof won’t result in flight, but it’s absolutely true that gravity will pull the roof jumper back to earth. There can even be a sort of backhanded cruelty in withholding truths in the name of kindness. Telling a middling student with a C- average who doesn’t read on grade level to go to university and major in whatever they want is absolutely not kind, because the truth is that such a student is unlikely to be gainfully employed in white collar work. You don’t have to call them stupid, but if telling them that maybe they won’t make it as a lit major is unkind, well, letting them face the consequences without a warning is cruel.

But you aren't describing the kind of "kindness" we enforce here. This is why periodic complaints like @WhiningCoil's annoy me. They complain that they aren't allowed to "tell the truth." The fuck? We have Holocaust deniers here. We have white nationalists here. We have hard HBDers here. People openly talk about dumb people not being fit for university educations, trans women being men, and all kinds of other unkind "truths" here. None of that gets people modded. Going annoyingly on and on and on about the same thing over and over (like our resident Joo-poster), yes. Snarling insults, yes. Strawmanning your enemies as zombies, yes. But you are mischaracterizing what "charity" means the same way Whining does.

My comment was more based on the general concept of the kind of kindness that pervades much of the rest of the internet. It’s always felt a bit patronizing to me to kindly pat people on the head and tell them exactly what they want to hear and that they’re wonderful even if they’re terribly flawed and refusing to work on those flaws. Such things are not only lies, but unkind in more ways than one. It’s patronizing to assume that a person is so weak that they’ll crumble at the first hint of challenge to things they believe in. It’s flawed because allowing untruths to continue often hurts the very people that it’s intended to help. And I think just society-wise, it prevents us from dealing with problems straight on.

I don’t believe for a minute that happens here. I’m sure you like every other human have biases. But I think an honest person would see that we’re at least trying to get it right. Other places aren’t like that. Even if you’re being nice, saying something other people don’t like is going to get modded.

I absolutely agree. Postmodernism and the idea that there is no objective Truth is probably the most pernicious thing that has happened to our society. It's difficult to stop however, precisely because the postermodernists define the entire battlefield.

I think that something like Jordan Peterson's view is the right way to fight back, although I also believe we can build a lot further on his basic ideas. He claims that even if we can't tell there's objective good, most people aren't willing to bite the bullet and will call the Nazis, or Japan's rape of Nanking, or other horror stories objectively evil. From there, even if we can't necessarily agree on what's good, we at least have an idea of what not to do.

And if you take evil being a real force seriously, that means that every time you tell a lie, even to yourself, you contribute to the downfall of us all. You push us back towards the concentration camps, the torture, madness, and genocide. Truth is what keeps us from those things, and as you say charity cannot become an end in itself. Like rationality, it's an excellent tool but a malevolent master.

He claims that even if we can't tell there's objective good, most people aren't willing to bite the bullet and will call the Nazis, or Japan's rape of Nanking, or other horror stories objectively evil. From there, even if we can't necessarily agree on what's good, we at least have an idea of what not to do.

The Nazis and invading Japanese would likely strenuously agree with you that objective good exists, and furthermore, that their actions are objectively good. Pushing ethical relativism to the point that you're reserving judgment on genocide is a recipe for disaster, but having such conviction in the objective righteousness of your cause that you're willing to commit atrocities in the name of the greater good is just the mirror image failure mode. See the people in this thread ranting about our Great Enemy - do you think that attitude is any more conducive to a thriving society than the people they loathe?

Planting a flag wholly in the objectivist or relativist camps is fraught for different reasons, in my opinion. Perhaps planting a flag wholly in any camp is fraught, and everything in moderation (except for moderation) remains the wisest course.

The Nazis and invading Japanese would likely strenuously agree with you that objective good exists, and furthermore, that their actions are objectively good.

Well, they're wrong. Part of moral objectivism is that people can be deluded, yes, but their opinions are wrong. And the world came together and agreed that they were wrong.

having such conviction in the objective righteousness of your cause that you're willing to commit atrocities in the name of the greater good is just the mirror image failure mode.

You see my moral objectivism is more like: "committing atrocities in general is wrong, for any ends whatsoever, whoever uses those means is evil."

The people ranting in this thread about a Great Enemy are hopefully not evil, but I'm sure some of them are. I'm not sure we understand each other very well - can you clarify your arguments against moral objectivism?

I apologize that personal circumstances don't allow me to get back to this promptly, or as extensively as I'd like.

You see my moral objectivism is more like: "committing atrocities in general is wrong, for any ends whatsoever, whoever uses those means is evil."

So what then, a Kantian categorical imperative against 'atrocities?'

The people ranting in this thread about a Great Enemy are hopefully not evil, but I'm sure some of them are.

Oh, I doubt very much that they are. The person in question (if memory serves) posts fairly regular wholesome updates about their woodworking, book reading and other hobbies. If they didn't realize I was a Great Enemy we could likely share a few beers without issue.

I'm not sure we understand each other very well - can you clarify your arguments against moral objectivism?

1 - I'd likely agree that an objective 'truth' exists, I'm just pessimistic that it is knowable by you/I/anyone short of God. Some cases are egregious enough that it doesn't take much beyond a fifth grader, let alone God, to label something as wrong, but the vast majority of the issues we wrangle don't fall into this bucket. We've built such horribly complex social, economic and political structures that understanding them in a meaningful way to influence policy is virtually impossible. What is the objective truth of the CHIPS act? Even beyond that, should we compete with China at all or give them their sphere of influence? I could list a hundred other policy questions from the last decade that I lack the answer to, and I'd argue anyone trying to sell you an 'objective' answer is lying.

You might argue that I'm agreeing with you and simply think that most moral questions are hard, but my rejoinder would be that if we're making all our decisions based on vibes, values and feelings isn't that a lot of subjective bullshit that exists in relation to our cultural norms?

To be clear - this doesn't mean I think we should throw up our hands and abandon trying to base our decisions on evidence. I'm just mighty suspicious of the folks who claim to be doing so objectively, and doubly so of people who have strong convictions when it comes to complex issues.

2 - The moral relativists have strong arguments of their own without having to lean too much on criticisms of objectivism. A decade or so ago, some areas of Canada were debating banning burqas. I read an op-ed written by an immigrant from the middle east who'd worn a burqa her whole life and argued she felt naked and vulnerable without one even when given the choice. The public wasn't particularly swayed, and Quebec ended up banning public servants from wearing certain clothes.

On the flip side, I had a friend tell me about her experience in the Peace Corps. She was stationed in a country where women weren't allowed to wear shirts or bras and felt profoundly uncomfortable for the entirety of her stay. Not to mention her pale skin did really poorly with the tropical climate.

As an objectivist, what's your judgment here? Are Middle Easterners brutal oppressors, or are we? Is the objective truth that everyone should be free to choose their own garb without judgment from their peers? But how would you enforce the latter without some brutally oppressive state banning wrongthink/speech?

3 - I'm running very short on time, so this won't be particularly well fleshed out. Many, including our resident theocratic fascist, argue that people are happier with these social norms and restrictions on their behavior. And while I don't share his utopian vision where the gays get thrown in prison, it is clear that there is something to the idea that people require these social structures to be happy, and furthermore, that they are often built in such a way that not everyone can be happy. I also wonder how much of this is biologically hardwired.

What would your prescription be in that scenario?

More comments

I kind of tend toward the Kantian view of ethics most of the time. I recognize the limits of course, but I agree that without firm limits on what may and may not be done — regardless of the reasons given — you really can’t prevent bad things from happening. It’s like a person who doesn’t set boundaries for themselves, it ultimately comes down to the other person choosing the right words to make that hesitation go away.

Ironically, you are the mirror image of your "enemies." When I hear leftists say "Punch Nazis," my initial reaction is "Sure, fuck Nazis." Except we know that their definition has ever-expanded until now "Nazis" is basically "anyone who's not a leftist."

You whine here all the time about how you're "not allowed to speak your truth." That's because your truth is "Everyone not politically aligned with me is an Orwellian monster" and you think our charity rules are bad because we allow people not politically aligned with you to talk too, and we don't allow you to shit on them just because you really want to.

You just want to war, war, war. Your praise of KiwiFarms is very revealing. Yeah, KiwiFarms is fun for what it is, but it's not some shining beacon of Truth and Realness from "the old Internet," it's a collection of people who really like watching trainwrecks, pointing and laughing, mocking, bullying, and driving people into a rage. It appeals to the basest impulses. I don't say this judgmentally - I like reading the lolcow threads too. But if your complaint is that the Motte failed because we're not more like KiwiFarms, well, you misunderstand and apparently have always misunderstood what this place is and isn't.

Yeah, KiwiFarms is fun for what it is, but it's not some shining beacon of Truth and Realness from "the old Internet," it's a collection of people who really like watching trainwrecks, pointing and laughing, mocking, bullying, and driving people into a rage.

People forget that being a goon would get you kicked out of much of the old internet because of places like helldump.

I never knew helldump was a thing back in the day but the circles I hanged out in mostly mocked them for being Lowtax's paypigs.

My reaction to "punch Nazis" is "please don't empower the Nazis."

Without the brownshirts squabbling with the communists people would have been less welcoming for someone, anyone, to step in and provide order. Unchecked political violence is good for the people that want to destabilize the status quo and put authoritarians in power.

Maybe. Or maybe I understand perfectly well, and it's still failed. When I think about what this place was supposed to be, the phrase that most comes to mind is "Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came". It was this utopian vision of curating a rationalist garden of eden where nice people were nice to each other and came up with solutions to problems rationally, and promoted pro-social norms of continuing to be nice and solve problems rationally.

This has clearly failed, and the rules have become the boot on the neck of people trying to find actual workable solutions, because people have weaponized our empathy against finding solutions. The most fragile perspective dictates what is "charitable" or "kind", and the most dysfunctional deeply felt priorities prevents any solutions.

Turns out it's even worse when they start a war and nobody shows up.

It was this utopian vision of curating a rationalist garden of eden where nice people were nice to each other and came up with solutions to problems rationally, and promoted pro-social norms of continuing to be nice and solve problems rationally.

Maybe that was Scott Alexander's vision, but as far as I know that was never TheMotte's vision. For the most part, the mods here do not censor people for being not-nice, they just censor people for writing in a not-nice way (and even there, the mods give a lot of leeway). Which makes sense, because without some kind of standards for effort-posting, posting in good faith, and being civil this place would just turn into 4chan or, at best, rdrama. Both of which are places that I enjoy, but they already exist and we are free to go post there as well as here. It's not like you have to pick just one. If you want to go post with almost no rules, you have other options.

"But," you might object, "I want both! The effortposting and at least pretense of intellectual standards that TheMotte has, and the freedom of 4chan."

Ah, that is an understandable desire. Who of us here wouldn't? The problem is that in practice it is probably not possible. If you allow the freedom of 4chan, it then follows according to what one might almost call an iron social law that, in the current world political context, your site will become just like 4chan, a place that is shaped by Darwinian competition over who can get the most (You)s by crafting the most juicy bait and forcing stale memes, where every other thread devolves into people just unimaginatively trying to insult each other, and where the politics discussion is a stale echo chamber (just right-wing, not left-wing).

Not that I hate 4chan. Like I said, I enjoy it. But I would not want to spend all my time there, it can get tiring to wade through the 90% of repetitive shit over there to find the 10% of content that is interesting plus it also gets tiring to be somewhere where so many people have a fundamentally loser, defeatist, and constantly angry attitude about reality (which TheMotte also kinda has, but not nearly to the same extent).

When I think about what this place was supposed to be, the phrase that most comes to mind is "Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came".

There's a famous invocation of the line (though a misquote) which follows up with Why then, the war would come to you.

It was this utopian vision of curating a rationalist garden of eden where nice people were nice to each other and came up with solutions to problems rationally,

No. I don't think that's what Zorba or anyone else ever envisioned this place being. That's purely a projection by you. Funny, you and Hlynka are sounding awfully alike lately.

This has clearly failed, and the rules have become the boot on the neck

There is no boot on your neck. There are rules like in almost every forum about not just slagging people off and shitting the place up with low-effort hot takes.

of people trying to find actual workable solutions, because people have weaponized our empathy against finding solutions.

Seriously, what "workable solutions" have you ever proposed? Raging about how much you hate your enemies is not a solution. If you were proposing solutions, you would not be modded (unless your "workable solution" is something like "treat my enemies like the zombies they are, with headshots").

The most fragile perspective dictates what is "charitable" or "kind", and the most dysfunctional deeply felt priorities prevents any solutions.

You are trying to characterize us as letting wokes and snowflakes dictate the norms of discourse here? Bullshit. Give me specific examples.

As someone who does run against the rules fairly often for being too spicy, it isn't something I have any complaints about. I just sometimes forget which ruleset I am under.

My only complaints are what would happen when new mods come up, but that hasn't happened yet.

When I think about what this place was supposed to be, the phrase that most comes to mind is "Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came". It was this utopian vision of curating a rationalist garden of eden where nice people were nice to each other and came up with solutions to problems rationally, and promoted pro-social norms of continuing to be nice and solve problems rationally.

This is definitely not true, and if you had those inflated expectations then clearly you haven't been paying attention to the history of the Motte. This place has always been a haven for witches, and the mods and long term folks have been very clear eyed and open about that.

This has clearly failed, and the rules have become the boot on the neck of people trying to find actual workable solutions, because people have weaponized our empathy against finding solutions.

You're being extremely dramatic here. Sure the Motte could be bigger, have better discourse, etc etc. But you're still here aren't you? Where else on the internet can you have the same quality of conversations, be able to tell the truth without worrying about being banned immediately?

I'm sure there are other pockets of free speech and truth-seeking on the internet, but the Motte is still one, and an important one. What we're doing here is worth it, and again if you truly felt like this whole endeavor has failed then I don't think you would be here.

be able to tell the truth without worrying about being banned immediately?

Are the list of bans still publicly available? You should see my name their amply. Sometimes justified. Too often not IMHO.

That's the answer to your question. Not here.

You have a ton of warnings, and two bans here. I defy you or anyone else to defend those as being anything other than low-quality shit-takes. You have never been banned because you were speaking truths that we can't handle. You've been banned because you want to do exactly the same thing that raging wokes do everywhere else - scream and spit venom.

I stand by my thoughts that the first ban was absolutely unjustified, and my response was perfectly valid and called for. After that I stopped giving a shit and the second was on purpose.

More comments

What is this place?

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats