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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25214 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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Off topic:

A reminder to everyone, we have a Telegram group with nearly 100 members. Join us: https://t.me/quokkas_den

Would be nicer if Telegram were not so utterly non-anonymous.

What's non-anonymous about it? One setting change to hide your phone number, then you're exactly as anonymous as any other platform, including this one.

Well, Telegram is rumoured to cooperate with authorities in most countries (and is a juicier/more likely target for the ones in mine), and I don't know how the number hiding works internally and wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be a "the official client won't render it but it's there in memory"/"no phone number is there but there is a unique user ID that it is trivial to link to the phone number" thing. Also, if I recall correctly, Telegram gives you one globally consistent alias, and the number of real-life contacts I have on it necessitates that this hint at my real name.

I haven't seen anything I regard as solid for Telegram corporate providing significant special access to any authorities. There are a few articles with vague implications, but no actual results that would require such access. Most actual results I've seen seem to be from the authorities confiscating somebody's device and getting into Telegram etc on it, which is a problem, but not a Telegram problem.

A bit conspiratorial, but I have a feeling that the legacy media enjoys writing articles implying such things for Telegram specifically because they don't give any special access to anybody. They want people to believe they do and distrust them, so they use competitors such as Meta, Alphabet, etc which actually do give authorities the keys to the castle, who they don't write scary articles about.

It does do the unique username. I suppose if you already talk to a lot of IRL friends that expect it to be close to your real name it might be weird to need to join a bunch of super-anonymous groups. I guess you could create a new account, but I think it's tricky without a new phone number. I have written a few basic apps against it, as far as I can tell, the phone number truly isn't accessible if it's locked, but there is a unique integer user ID. But I'd stick with my point that's about the same anonymity level as any other platform.

Just don't use the phrase "I am 4bpp" and you are safe unless L from death note is after you.

NYT: Trump Leads in 5 Critical States as Voters Blast Biden, Times/Siena Poll Finds

Across the six battlegrounds — all of which Mr. Biden carried in 2020 — the president trails by an average of 48 to 44 percent.

Add it all together, and Mr. Trump leads by 10 points in Nevada, six in Georgia, five in Arizona, five in Michigan and four in Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden held a 2-point edge in Wisconsin.

This is a bit of a surprise to me, considering PredictIt has Biden up 42 vs Trump 37 (the rest are Newsom, DeSantis, etc), and Biden is at 53% on Manifold. ElectionBettingOdds.com has had Trump up for weeks now, though, so make of that as you will.

But the real reason I wanted to share the NYT article is just how delusional I thought the comments are. I'll post the top five, by number of reader recommends (i.e. upvotes).

Stats about the polling:

The polls of 3,662 registered voters were conducted by telephone using live operators Oct. 22-Nov. 3. The margin of sampling error for each state is from 4.4 to 4.8 percentage points. ...by telephone using live operators. Again with the voice call polling. So in other words people answering a phone call from unknown caller. This is anecdotal but I don't know anyone under 50 who answers a call from numbers they don't recognize or don't hang up when it sounds like a telemarketer.

41 Replies 1254 Recommend

What were the demographics of those who gave their views? And these individuals contacted, were they only speaking on land line phones? Very important considerations in determining the validity of such a survey.

21 Replies 634 Recommend

Regarding the folks who voted for Biden last time, yet will be supporting Trump in 2024 that were mentioned in the article, what I can't understand is if they voted for Biden solely because Trump's behavior turned them off, how is it that they are suddenly okay with it now? I'm especially baffled by this given that Trump's worst action was the Jan. 6 insurrection in my opinion, and that occurred after the 2020 Election.

7 Replies 591 Recommend

More than anything, these polls remind me that the Republicans are vastly superior at controlling the narrative and perceptions. Terrible at actually governing, but brilliant at marketing - especially fear-based marketing.

3 Replies 551 Recommend

The actual numbers on the economy don't translate to relief for working families. 6 years ago I could buy lunch from a food cart near work for $6. Now it's $11. Rent has increased by nearly 50 percent in that time, too. My income sure has not.

The people buying lunch are feeling it. So are the food cart owners.

The unfortunate part of this is Trump (or any other Republican running) won't do a thing to curb inflation or reorient the economy in favor of normal people. He's going to give more handouts to rich friends and billionaires.

Worse yet, he's going to head an anti-labor administration whose NLRB made it almost impossible to unionize. Biden still isn't the strong labor backer we need, as we saw with the rail workers strike, but it is at least much easier to organize under a Biden NLRB.

That's the only way working people are going to fix our economic situation: a president won't do it. We have to organize and demand a fair share of what we do.

14 Replies 510 Recommend

OK let me just share the next three because they're short:

These poll results defy common sense.

7 Replies 467 Recommend

never mind just the under 50. I'm over 70 and don't answer unknown callers. All this proves is the type of personality that answers unknown calls is more likely to vote for Trump.

In Reply to Darrell J 431 Recommend

How is this even possible? What a horrible headline to wake up to on a Sunday morning.

6 Replies 404 Recommend

I don't think the reader bias will surprise anyone, but what surprised me was just how emotionally skewed it seemed to be. It's like a mass mourning, with people trying to shoot the messenger (i.e. poll methodology) rather than accepting the message. The only comment that made sense to me, highlighting the perniciousness of inflation, still had to incorporate pot shots at Trump or the GOP. Anything for that upvote, I guess.

At any rate, I don't think this means all that much when we're a year out. No one knows where the economy will go in this time, or if Haley magically nabs the GOP nom, or if the Dems pull a 5D move and get Biden to withdraw after Trump gets the GOP nomination and have Newsom step in.

Low hanging fruit to pull zealots from comments sections, it’s not like Facebook comments on Fox News articles would be any better.

Skeptical Trump will win. Far from impossible, but I’d give Trump-Biden 30-70 odds. The “‘member Charlottesville/Jan6/Roe reversal” messaging has barely even begun, lots of liberals are performatively critical of Biden now because of inflation/Palestine/not being as progressive as they want etc etc. But I see little reason to believe they won’t come out against the great satan when the time comes. These people are going to be bombarded with 6+ months of messaging saying that women will be executed for having abortions under Trump, that all migrants will be deported, that gay marriage will be reversed, that Medicare will be stopped, that POC will be (more) oppressed blah blah blah.

The problem with Trump was never him directly (at least when it came to conservatives), but that he riled up the libs to the point that voter apathy on the left/center (which the right needs) was minimized. He’s going to spend the next year riling up the Libs with ever-intensifying rhetoric. Progressives can say they don’t really care and don’t really like Biden now, but will they be saying the same a year from now? It shifted fast with Bernie too.

The betting sites do not seem to be factoring in current polling/general vibes i get. I’d say if we had a snap election in 2 weeks Trump would win big.

I’ve been extremely confused by betting markets. Either they think something will break for the Dems to get a coin flip (which Trump is less than a coin flip) or it seems like they are pricing in wide spread fraud. But I 100% agree with you noting the betting markets I’ve checked them lately and they don’t feel like they moved nearly enough.

Mean reversion probably will happen but Trump feels like a 90-95% win probability if we held elections now.

I mean, if Trump gets removed from the ballot, he can't win, and there are actual court proceedings going on about that. I wouldn't really term that "election fraud" so much as an "unfree election", but pricing that in is sound*.

*For someone who lives in the 'States and intends to continue living in the 'States, it's necessary to discount the "no Republican on ballot" situation steeply due to the "don't bet on situations where you won't be able to spend your winnings" issue, but there'd probably be enough time after market resolution to flee and cash out into a foreign currency, and foreign bettors don't have that problem.

I don't think there is any confusion to be had. Polling is exactly about whether somebody would win in two weeks. Betting is if somebody is going to win in 2024.

I am not sure why this simple fact is somehow mysterious. There is a difference betting if some sports team wins head-to-head next Sunday or late 2024. There will be some underlying similarities, but a lot of things can change between now and then.

The betting markets aren’t perfect but they seem to indicate Biden is still favored head to head. It’s possible but feels wrong to me.

It’s like if the Steelers played the Cowboys. The Steelers went up 21-0 but espn probability calculator of victory was 54% Cowboys before the game and still 54% Cowboys after the Steelers went up 21-0. You can make a story why it’s correct but from a Bayesian calculation it feels like the score changing is important news.

Mean reversion probably will happen but Trump feels like a 90-95% win probability if we held elections now.

Seems like you answered your own question? But the betting sites aren't betting on who would win if the election was today and the correlation between polls and election results decreases the farther out the election is.

(Also it always bears pointing out that PredictIt charges 10% of your profits which seriously hampers the accuracy of its predictions).

or it seems like they are pricing in wide spread fraud.

It doesn't need to be fraud for there to be a significant disjunct between the population being polled and the population whose votes actually get tabulated. Particularly with the relaxation of rules around drop-off ballots, early voting, and ballot harvesting in many states, activists have much more leeway to shape the electorate by activating particular groups of low-propensity voters than they did prior to the 2020 cycle.

I think that the prediction markets might be pricing in things like 3rd parties, which a Trump vs Biden poll doesn't account for.

Again with the voice call polling. So in other words people answering a phone call from unknown caller. This is anecdotal but I don't know anyone under 50 who answers a call from numbers they don't recognize or don't hang up when it sounds like a telemarketer.

Reddit used to say this about Bernie polls all the time

Have we considered that democrats are just down bad because voters blame them for screwing the pooch badly, even if the pooch screwing was mostly bipartisan?

I’ve seen polling results from the nov 7 elections- granted that none of them are in places that would be competitive in ‘24, unless it’s like a city council race or something equally meaningless- indicating that republicans are winning the generic ballot by a lot a lot. Trumps personal unpopularity just takes him from ‘winning Wisconsin by double digits, flipping New Mexico Virginia and Colorado, and having a decent shot at Minnesota’ to ‘ahead in every swing state but Wisconsin’.

I suppose the only mystery is why Wisconsin was the odd man out- it certainly seems like the reddest out of the rust belt swing states.

Wisconsin is one of the hardest states to poll in the country and definitely the hardest state to poll of the rust belt states because of their demographics and decentralized population. It's pretty hard to get a representative sample.

Trumps personal unpopularity just takes him from ‘winning Wisconsin by double digits, flipping New Mexico Virginia and Colorado, and having a decent shot at Minnesota’ to ‘ahead in every swing state but Wisconsin’.

No. Trump's popularity is what wins Wisconsin when he campaigns there or is on the ballot because he motivates voter turnout. When he's not or when [insert establishment GOP here] is running, they lose because they don't motivate voters to show up. Ron Johnson is an excellent example of this. Wisconsin is a Trump/MAGA state, not a GOP state. Mitt Romney lost Wisconsin by 7+ 2012 and McCant lost by 13+ points in 2008. The demos in Wisconsin didn't change much; the reason Trump won Wisconsin and won again 2020 absent illegal elections changes and obvious fraud is because the new working class/MAGA message resonates and motivate the voters there. This is the same story from the 2022 election when you compare the house seats to the state-wide offices.

which is why a dude like Dan Kelly was obliterated in the Supreme Court race 6 months ago despite the "generic ballot" looking great for the GOP at the time

This bogus claim that absent Trump the GOP would be killing it in the rustbelt states is a popular un-falsifiable belief of large portions of this forum and it's garbage and it has little support and a bunch of evidence against it. No, [insert GOP derp here] as presidential candidate wasn't going to win Wisconsin in 2016 or 2020.

Other Republicans poll worse than Trump against Biden. Trump is the only one polling a win.

Haley beats Biden by more than Trump does on current polling.

One, Haley likely loses every single rustbelt state and therefore the election. National election polling isn't the most predictive.

Two, current polling is what matters, not the average of a couple polls from months ago with one from a few weeks ago. In your own link, the one recent poll (within the last few weeks) has Biden beating Haley by 4 and Trump performing better in every single poll from the time of the last Haley Poll to now.

No, Haley doesn't beat Biden more than Trump. Not in polling and not in the state level polls which are the ones which matter.

not in the state level polls which are the ones which matter.

Has Haley even been polled vs Biden in state level polls?

Granted it's all a bit of an academic question at the moment - in practice the GOP nomination is a 1 horse race.

The question has been asked in some polls which then adjust and publish results for top-level questions like Trump v Biden or Trump v Desantis v Haley v etc. You can get that unadjusted data for these other questions in cross-tabs from some polling firms.

Oh hey, turns out NYT/Siena polled Haley v Biden in the same battleground states as they just did for Trump. So we have some recent direct comparisons from a reputable pollster.

GA: Haley +5 (equal with Trump)

AZ: Haley +9 (4 better than Trump)

NV: Haley +9 (2 worse than Trump)

PA: Haley +10 (5 better than Trump)

MI: Haley +10 (10 better than Trump)

WI: Haley +14 (16 better than Trump)

Doesn't seem like she loses every rustbelt state.

are these raw or adjusted? did you look at the poll or just link tweet?

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This is a bit of a surprise to me, considering PredictIt has Biden up 42 vs Trump 37

Prediction markets are of course reflecting not just the current polls (which are disastrous for Biden) but also the realistic prospect that Trump will be in prison at the time of the election.

Is there protocol for that? Is he even eligible at that point? Does he reign from prison? Is he released? Can he release himself? Seems like I should know these things.

Eugene Debs' 1920 run on the Socialist ticket was from prison because he was still serving a 10-year sentence he received for sedition based on 1918 speeches advocating resistance of the WWI draft. Notably, in addition to the prison term he was also sentence to a lifetime disenfranchisement, so in addition to running from jail he couldn't even vote for himself. However, he only got 3% of the vote and didn't win any states, so there was never any cause to examine the matter further.

He can pardon himself for federal crimes, which are the ones he will likely be convicted of first. The Georgia case will be a lot messier, but also it's unlikely to conclude before the election (unless Willis can get another dozen people to take plea deals).

I think it's pretty unlikely that he wins from prison though. Even if he apparently has the nomination sewn up by that point, there's still the prospect of the GOP pulling some kind of shenanigans at the convention to give the nomination to someone else. And if they really do go ahead and try to win with their candidate in prison, they probably lose.

You think the Dems will go that far versus just being an election stunt? Regardless of whether he was guilty or not it looks like a huge issue for Democracy if they put him in jail before the election.

I still work on a model that they want bad press. Winning an election thru the criminal justice system seems wrong and a threat to half the country trusting the system. I’m not sure we can come back from that which makes me think the power brokers would back off from going quite that far.

After the election there’s no reason to prosecute Trump.

Regardless of whether he was guilty or not it looks like a huge issue for Democracy if they put him in jail before the election.

If he is truly guilty (and obviously that is a big if) then not jailing him is also a huge issue for democracy. It will unambiguously show that the powerful do not have to follow the same rules as everyone else, that ex-Presidents are not held to the same standards as the common man. Which has probably always been true, but that is one reason politicians often step down at the whiff of scandal. So the curtain is not entirely pulled back.

ex-Presidents are not held to the same standards as the common man

Of course they aren't, this is priced in, it's standard wisdom. We try not to prosecute the previous president so as not to become a banana republic.

Well legal or illegal is really just breaking the rules of the current ruling class. Elections decide who is the current ruling class. Elections get to decide who wields power.

From that perspective I do think elections are > some court case. If he wins tbe election he literally because innocent because he’s now the one who decides if something is legal or illegal. That’s Democracy.

That might be kind of how democracy works in practice, but its not how the illusion of democracy is said to work so it gains support from the people.

No-one is above the law is the myth here.And its an important one for stabilities sake.

That is very much not democracy as envisioned in the constitution of the United States of America. There is a separation of powers and being elected president doesn't make you emperor. The legislature and courts determine the law. Power is deliberately separated and modeled after the Roman Republic, not the Empire.

Well lawfare exist, and with enough prosecutorial power you can find some regulation that’s broken to throw a guy in jail especially anyone whose had to make a lot of decisions. So in practice it just becomes an ability to put political opponents in jail.

Obama had Rezko. Clinton had perjury. Hillary had document management issues. Biden well has his whole crime family. Bush probably broke some war crimes if I look into it. They could all be imprisoned with control of the justice system.

Lol, no he doesn't. The legislature decides if something is illegal or illegal.

With limits. They cannot criminalize valid exercises of executive or judicial powers.

Prosecutorial discretion don't real?

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You think the Dems will go that far versus just being an election stunt? Regardless of whether he was guilty or not it looks like a huge issue for Democracy if they put him in jail before the election.

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: Who do you think is going to be the decision maker who stops this ball rolling? Do you think Jack Smith is going to suddenly drop the charges? Do you think Tanya Chutkin is going to just dismiss the case out of hand? And if so on what legal basis? Do you think the DC-based jury, pulling from a jurisdiction that voted 92-5 against Trump, is going to give Trump a pass after all the Jan 6 trials got convictions?

None of that is happening. The best case scenario for Trump is he somehow gets one diehard MAGA person on the panel to hang the jury.

"Are we really going to do this?" is a serious decision. But you don't make that decision when the trial is already underway, you make it before you bring charges. In large part that's what the Jan 6 Committee was about - not so much convincing the public that Trump was a crook, but pressuring the DoJ to pull the trigger on prosecuting him and putting him in prison.

All the choices have been made. We're now just watching them play out. It's not a stunt, they are coming to bury him.

Who would stop them? Biden/Blinken/top members of the Democrats. Tell them to pause or shut things down.

Why?

The system would be ungovernable if Trump is in jail and we have him as the GOP candidate. If he loses say with 48% of the vote then GOP has cause to break the entire system. The entire system works because of voluntary compliance. If you end that then nothing works and prosecuting Trump gives you justification. Secession becomes quite justifiable if they remove half the countries ability to participate in Democracy. It would be 1860 again. Would be equally as bad if Trump wins from prison (highly likely). Or you could see Desantis refuse extradition which he would be justified in doing.

I’d think the adults in the room like Blinken get this. And it’s a stunt. Because the alternative can’t happen.

I’d think the adults in the room like Blinken get this. And it’s a stunt. Because the alternative can’t happen.

Where do you put the odds on it happening without their say so?

Lol, Biden is not going to save Trump. You're delusional.

That seems very Danerys Targaryen of wanting to rule over the ashes. It’s not saving “Trump” it’s maintaining some part of America and Democracy.

You don’t think jailing a likely Presidential winner during an election is a constitutional crisis and an attempt to disenfranchise a significant part of the electorate?

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He can most likely release himself. I believe it has to do with The Federal government having supremacy on these matters. It would be a constitutional issue and open up a can of worms to keep him in prison. If that occurred then any rogue state could just imprison political enemies (basically what is happening here).

A felon sometimes can’t vote but they can hold office.

Seems plausible result. If people are fed-up with That Lot then it's natural they want to vote The Other Crowd in next time. Happens everywhere, and as somebody once said, "it's the economy, stupid". People who are feeling the pinch in their own pay packets don't much care if "But Bezos made another eighty million this month, so the economy is going gangbusters!" and they do blame whoever is currently in power for that.

Since Trump right now looks like the most likely Republican potential nominee, then yeah it's going to be Trump versus Biden Round II and the 'mushy middle' voters are going to switch from Team Blue to Team Red.

All that being said, there is a good point about telephone polling and how effective it is, now that everyone including Grandma has moved to smartphones and hardly ever answer their landline phones, particularly if the phone rings and you're not expecting a call. Now you simply assume it's a scammer or a cold calling sales person (but I repeat myself) since if it's family, friends, or even work, they'll ring you on your mobile. Thus you ignore the call.

They have ways around this. It's not like this type of problem isn't well known since they got the FDR election wrong with the phone book bias.

Interesting data point against the recently debated idea that Americans actually do think that the economy is doing well when it comes to themselves.

Anyway, I still don't know why I'm supposed to care so much which one of these two candidates wins. Biden would do some things to hurt democracy, would support Ukraine a bit more, would support Israel a bit less, and would yell at Russia more. Trump would do some things to hurt democracy, would support Ukraine a bit less, would support Israel a bit more, and would yell at China more. The economy would muddle along without either one being able to do much more than just cheerlead when it's good and shift blame when it's bad. Biden would make certain kinds of mouth noises about immigration through the southern border, Trump would make a different kind of noises. At the end of the day probably not much would change because the president has limited power over the issue and Americans like cheap burritos and construction work, and companies like to hire the people who make it possible.

Neither candidate is someone I could imagine ever voting for. Both parties deeply, fundamentally disgust me in different ways. Biden would make one group of annoying people online scream that the world is ending, Trump would make a different group of annoying people online scream that the world is ending. As before, the Internet outrage would overrepresent the kind of person who spends a lot of time online writing about politics and would fail to capture the fact that in the "real world", most Americans don't really care that much about politics.

The only way I can think of that either candidate could truly screw things up as president is by getting into a major war with Russia and/or China. And, while Trump's legacy in office is more peaceful than Biden's, the combination of Biden's restraint from actually directly intervening in Iran, Israel, or Ukraine and Trump's volatile chest-pounding, boomercon love of Israel / hate of Iran, and anti-China rhetoric leaves me not entirely convinced that Trump would actually be less likely to go to war. I do think Trump is probably a bit less likely to go to war, but it's not enough to make me want to go vote for him.

If Trump is somehow actually significantly leading in polls with the election a month away, despite the usual rioting and screaming about fascism from Dem-aligned news outlets that we'll probably see next year, we will be in for an interesting outcome though if Biden wins anyway. I doubt that it would be enough to make the True Trump Patriots (tm) actually get up off their couches and do anything with their gun collections other than post pictures of them online, but who knows.

I don't much bother with polls, since there's little to no way you can find out what questions they asked, how they asked them, and who they asked them; what matters is the result on the day when people go out to vote (or mail in their votes).

They can certainly give an indication of which way the wind is blowing, but I think if you pin your hopes on "polls say we're ten points ahead, it's in the bag!" then Hillary Clinton has an unused inaugural address she can give you for nothing.

I feel like attacking polling methodology is a pretty bipartisan pastime and isn’t surprising at all to me that it’s happening in the comments section.

We had multiple threads on here with challenges to official inflation data so unsure why polling wouldn’t be challenged.

All pollsters have significant errors in their models, but taken in aggregate they're the best predictor of who will win an election, particularly once the candidates are well-known. Certainly better than economic models (although economic factors are important, that signal is captured by polls), yard sign counts, donations, or people's gut instincts.

This is a suicide posts about an entrepreneur who failed and is going thru certain twitter communities.

https://twitter.com/smb_attorney/status/1720486539325587858?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

https://twitter.com/moseskagan/status/1720231141826015303?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

https://twitter.com/moseskagan/status/1720232058109469137?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

A few thoughts.

  1. Yes business owners do kill themselves when their business fails. Capitalism does have brutal aspects.

  2. I laugh when the one guy posts go talk to a therapists here’s the suicide prevention helpline. When your business is failing your issues are not lefty mental health. Your dealing with a real issue of not being able to provide for your family and seeing all your dreams disappear. It’s one of the most emasculating things that can happen to someone especially someone who is use to being able to handle stuff

  3. He shouldn’t have killed himself. I’d assume he could have found some consulting or being an employee for a bit gig.

  4. Society has very little tolerance for failed men. After the fact everyone will say he showed some signs and should have helped out. When you are failing you have the stench of failure and people honestly try to run away from you.

  5. I know someone whose dad killed themselves so when there business failed. I always thought the lefts argument that rioting and looting isn’t damaging was false. Being able to provide for your family is life and it’s something men take very personality.

  6. Females somehow survive with nothing. Not sure how but realistically society is far kinder to widowed mothers.

"I laugh when the one guy posts go talk to a therapists here’s the suicide prevention helpline. When your business is failing your issues are not lefty mental health. Your dealing with a real issue of not being able to provide for your family and seeing all your dreams disappear. It’s one of the most emasculating things that can happen to someone especially someone who is use to being able to handle stuff"

I don't understand this point even slightly. Do you genuinely think the other people calling a suicide helpline are not dealing with real issues but just 'lefty mental health'? It's the businessman who has real issues, the others are just faking it?

To rephrase the point slightly, I tend to categorize mental health issues as either mental illness or as mental injury. With mental illness you have some kind of internal, ongoing problem that needs to be fixed so you can get better. With mental injury, something clear and external happened and you just kind of need to stop poking at it and let it heal.

For example, I was in a bad car accident. I wasn't hurt, but other people were, and it gave me what I presume was PTSD. I would drop a can of tomatoes, I would have that same feeling of suddenly losing control like I did right before the impact, and I would break down in a mess.

My wife wanted me to get therapy, and I started the process of getting it organized, but in the end I didn't go. Not because I didn't have issues, but because it seemed incredibly obvious to me what the issues were. There's no broken relationship with my mother or whatever to work through, just a recent bad event. I figured I would get over it with time and couldn't see how talking about it with a stranger would help.

And, well, I did. I never had any "breakthrough" or trained my mind to think in a different way or whatever. I just got a bit of distance from the event and it stopped being so fresh in my mind. I gained the ability to think about it without feeling like I was in the middle of it.

Having a business fail, or a marriage break down, or a loved one die, are all very upsetting events. There's nothing unhealthy about being upset by them. Just as it's normal to feel pain when you break your leg - you aren't malfunctioning, you're just injured.

Wow, this is a really interesting framing, and it seems so obvious I don't know how it didn't occur to me before.

To extend the metaphor further, some physical injuries are so grave that you can't just rub some dirt on them and expect them to heal by themselves. A person severely injured in a car accident may require physical therapy to enable them to walk again. By the same token, it seems reasonable to conclude that certain psychological experiences may be so traumatic that one can't reasonably expect a person's mind to heal of its own accord without outside assistance.

I've often thought about something similar in the context of depression diagnoses. We use the same word, "depression", to describe both the emotional state of feeling depressed and the mental illness more properly disambiguated as "major depressive disorder". Feeling depressed may be an entirely expected and healthy response to certain mental injuries (hence why it was so controversial when the DSM removed the "bereavement clause" from the diagnostic criteria for major depressive order - I don't care how stoic or Buddhist you are, if you don't feel depressed after your young child dies there's something deeply wrong with you). It's only when it's a chronic sensation with little obvious relationship to any mental injury that we consider it a mental illness as opposed to simply a transient and normal human emotion.

Good post I like this model. Seems to catch a lot of what I wanted to say.

I feel like you are describing a time when you weren't suicidal and had the composure to see that time would be an adequate healer. That's great. But in a case where you are suicidal, almost by definition, you are not coping with what has happened and time may not be enough to heal you. You may die first.

In your last para you are implying that there's nothing unhealthy about being suicidal after losing your business. It's a very short step from there to saying there's nothing unhealthy about going through with it and killing yourself after losing your business. If that's what you think, then 'nuff respect, but I consider not living in that kind of shame/honour culture to be a good thing and one worth building protections against, such as we're able to do.

My point is that if you're miserable because miserable things are happening to you, you're not malfunctioning. A shrink can't fix your brain because your brain isn't broken.

That doesn't mean you should kill yourself. I don't believe anyone should kill themselves except in truly extreme circumstances. I used to work in the funeral industry and dealt with a lot of suicides, and the only one that made me think "yeah ok fair enough" was the convicted paedophile child care worker who did himself in while awaiting sentencing.

And in your last paragraph, you are implying that it's unhealthy to feel upset by a loved one dying. It's a very short step from there to saying there's something unhealthy about ever feeling upset or sad about anything. If that's what you think, then I respect that, but I consider not living in a culture that pathologises all negative feeling and affect to be a good thing and one worth building protections against.

I think it depends. I think one thing therapy and therapeutic culture get wrong is just how much place you should give to your feelings. You should have emotional responses. They just shouldn’t be the basis for deciding what to do, and they shouldn’t rule you. Most of therapeutic exercises and the culture they create is so feeling centric that people never really develop any mental toughness to deal with normal feelings. Being sad or upset for a few days at a trauma is not a problem, tbh, a lack of emotional response is probably more pathological. But it’s also not healthy to be so paralyzed by your feelings that you can’t function. At some point you need to get over it.

Thinking that someone who is suicidal due to a business failure should seek mental health assistance in hopes they don't. ---> "A culture that pathologises all negative feeling"

Wow!

I do think it's "pathological" to want to kill yourself in many circumstances, that doesn't mean I think the same about feeling sad or upset about life events.

I also don't think that having a pathology is something to be judged, rather something that it might be useful to get help with.

I'm maybe a little confused by your reply though.

On one hand; Suicide is painless.
It brings on many changes
and you can take or leave it as you please.

On the other; the Lord Lays before us blessings and curses, life and death. To live is a choice and I would encourage anyone reading this to choose life. But I am not a member of the twitterati.

Something about those Tweets viscerally disgusts me and I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe it's performativity of it all, the "Oh man I should have done something," the weird parasociality of both the OP acting like he was a person in the dude's life and the replies comforting the OP who they don't know. Something about the verbiage just feels so fake and weird and off-putting to me.

He shouldn’t have killed himself. I’d assume he could have found some consulting or being an employee for a bit gig.

The vast majority of suicides are killing themselves to avoid circumstances that are, by some standard, not that bad. There is no circumstance which leads to a large percentage of people who experience it killing themselves, to my knowledge, perhaps some dreadful diseases meet that standard. I had a friend who killed herself in college, at an Ivy, because there was a plagiarism thing about to break and she might get expelled. Most people who don't go to college at all don't kill themselves, let alone who don't go to an Ivy (she could probably have easily gone to a state school afterward). I had a scoutmaster that killed himself after his divorce, most people don't kill themselves after a divorce, and to be honest I knew his wife and if she left me I'd say she was doing me a favor. A friend of a friend killed himself a few weeks back, no reason at all, he was unemployed and desperate for years before he pulled the trigger, but nothing had changed in his life that week.

What I'm getting at is the causative element is always the suicide themselves, leaving aside certain cases where a suicide is instrumentally useful (ie if Hunter Biden had any decency). They had a knack for suicide, genetic or cultural or whatever, that was triggered by a circumstance. His business failure didn't lead him to kill himself, he was prone to killing himself already and his business failure was the trigger that lead to it. So it does no good to say "Oh

Females somehow survive with nothing. Not sure how but realistically society is far kinder to widowed mothers.

In word, not consistently in deed. We have verbal sympathy for widowed mothers, and we tend to be nice enough to them in person and for the first few months after the death of their husband, but after a year or so she'll be on her own and it will not be easy for her. Women "survive with nothing" in the sense that they suffer silently, the world doesn't just hand things to them.

Tbqh, I'd pick being a widower with two kids over a widow with two kids any day of the week. I'd find another wife ready to mother two little blonde kids (ones she doesn't have to birth) like I was selling a classic car; a single mother in her 40s is going to have a lot more trouble finding a new partner of her upper class who wants to join her pre-existing family.

perhaps some dreadful diseases meet that standard

Trigeminal neuralgia and cluster headaches, perhaps. Controversially, gender dysphoria. Although you've got to differentiate "attempted suicide" versus "died by suicide" here.

I've read a lot about this topic, but if a literal majority of people diagnosed with gender dysphoria kill themselves, that's news to me. Do you have a source?

No, I do not. As far as I know, something like 40 percent of people with gender dysphoria attempt suicide, but that's just attempts, not deaths by suicide. For mental illnesses other than schizophrenia...borderline personality disorder has a 10 percent death-by-suicide rate, anorexia a 10 percent mortality rate. Trigeminal neuralgia and cluster headaches probably have those beat. There are of course the degenerative diseases like ALS and Huntington's, but that's not exactly what we're talking about. There death by suicide might be a kind of self-euthanasia...certainly not a central example.

There are basically two kinds of cluster headaches: episodic and chronic. The former someone gets ever 3-6 months and they last for a weekish. Sucks but manageable. Can’t imagine the second kind where the relief is infrequent.

Maybe it's performativity of it all, the "Oh man I should have done something,"

People that actually feel that way (as I have once in my life) do not telegraph it to the commons. They're too busy dealing with the personal grief.

I can't imagine trading on someone's death for virtue points, but here we are.

I agree with this. But there is a reason I posted here instead of twitter. Public stuff you have to say the right words versus getting to talk about something.

I agree with most of your thoughts.

Yes business owners do kill themselves when their business fails. Capitalism does have brutal aspects.

He willingly gambled everything for the possibility of attaining what capitalism offers, and, having lost, he faced the possibility of, at worst, suffering a standard of living typical of a citizen of a communist country. So, I think his suicide is actually evidence of the brutality of communism, not capitalism.

well he hangs with other winners of capitalism.

compared to a group of Caesars, being a normal person is bad.

comparison is the thief of joy. i assume this contributed to his psyche. It definitely would to mine!

live your life, dont compare with others. ignorance truly is bliss

I agree. There’s never a perfect case to make a point for discussion. His I failed and now I have to do X doesn’t seem big enough for the point I’m trying to make.

Yes, men need to be successful to be psychologically healthy in a manner that isn't the same for women. Women also prefer to marry up. Therefore, privileging women creates a less happy society.

I laugh when the one guy posts go talk to a therapists here’s the suicide prevention helpline. When your business is failing your issues are not lefty mental health. Your dealing with a real issue of not being able to provide for your family and seeing all your dreams disappear. It’s one of the most emasculating things that can happen to someone especially someone who is use to being able to handle stuff

Half disagree. The "therapists can fix you" culture is deranged for average people as you are right about the the source of his misery. Its better for people to live and be encouraged to live in a manner that is fulfilling than trying to manage failing to live up to that with therapy.

Therapy can not fix the source of his misery, only him rebuilding and providing for his family again can. But talking him out of doing something irrevocable would be helpful.

Yes, men need to be successful to be psychologically healthy in a manner that isn't the same for women.

That’s true for certain men but is that so for a huge numbers of men who seem content to work at a dead end job, and do nothing but play video games and watch porn? I’ve met and unfortunately dated men like that, and they genuinely have no drive and no ambition, no matter how hard I tried to push them.

I’ve seen that perspective on Reddit very often, many men said that if it weren’t for women, they would be content to live in a cardboard box. Achieving a minimal standard of living is pretty easy in a modern western society, so it feels to me like the ambitious, career driven man is in the minority.

For this not to apply to the men you are talking about they must be psychologically healthy. Just cause they are willing to compromise with a different way of living, doesn't mean that they are happy and fulfilled doing so. Are the men you are referring to psychologically healthy?

Both those who were successful and lost it and those who weren't to begin with, neither are psychologically healthy.

Generally, when I am saying more successful than women, I am not referring to the atypical men like the one the OP is about.

I concede that this kind of careerism is rare in general and among men in particular. But both for OP and for men on average, success is related with self worth in a way more fundamental than for women. They are also judged in that manner, as you also have done.

I’ve seen that perspective on Reddit very often

Reddit has two selection effects. First it has more unsuccessful people around due to being the people more likely to spend plenty of time in such discussions.

And obviously it probably had even originally some leftist bias but became very leftist due to the moderators purging dissent.

It is part of leftism to signal opposition to gender roles and also to conform with discrimination in favor of women and against men. Leftists are more likely to live contrary to gender roles and lets assume that is a worse way to live your life as it goes against part of your biological programming and against behaving in a manner conductive for fulfilling success for the individual and collective. That might be a reason why the left shows greater prevalence of mental illness.

You are judging these men you mentioned negatively for example.

I’ve met and unfortunately dated men like that, and they genuinely have no drive and no ambition, no matter how hard I tried to push them.

I can't judge things from your anecdotes. You could very well be self serving there. I definitely find your general perspective self serving in favor of women and against men since in responses to opposing discrimination for women, and into deflecting with the situation as huge (i.e associated with most) amount of men being content without success. And how it is because of women that men care about success.

With the implication being that we shouldn't care about pro women discrimination.

Men abandoning their gender role is something that can change. And same applies to women.

We should also be concerned about the effects on society in general, rather than caring only about men or women as individuals.

And we have societies that are failing, in fact irredeemably so as they can't even sustain their own demographics with bellow replacement rate which alone is a huge issue, are promoting an ideology of self hatred and cultural self destruction, fail to protect their borders as they are replaced by foreigners who retain foreign identities and hostility to the natives, and the rise of authoritarianism in favor of very delusional excessive tribalism for all sorts of sexual or other identities and in favor of the current course and against opposing or modifying it.

The trend of males who don't participate much in society has also increased as has general lack of dating and sex among both men and women.

The above fundamentally proves the lack of legitimacy of the "cope" mentality and the current direction of society. Things need to change, and the obvious template to change things towards is the one with the more workable mores of before. Although we can retain aspects of modernity and going back to say the norms of some previous decades would be retaining plenty of influence from feminism for example.

I don't object to consider not going to far in one or the other direction, but we are too far in the feminist direction today. The female perspective and way of thinking is also too pervasive. It isn't acceptable to let things persist as they are.

I’ve seen that perspective on Reddit very often, many men said that if it weren’t for women, they would be content to live in a cardboard box.

Yes, male self worth is related to their relationship with good women. Ideally as a team men and women make each other better. Men and women having complimentary role is how good relationships work and society benefits from.

There are other things going on of course, men care about their hobbies and this can also be steered in a more pro social and pro individual men direction, or in a direction that is less so. Maybe men by nature as more obsessive over things than people are more prone to the influence of certain superstimuli?

So do you support, or object to institutional discrimination in favor of women?

Much of liberal/left wing discourse is deflecting from real problems and real solutions by complaining about the far right or when the issue has to do with feminism and male/female issues, the deflection is just to complain about low social status men and their conclusion is to do nothing. The liberal agenda being an oppositional agenda to right wing or pro male changes or critiques. This agenda can be supported also for directly tribal reasons. We would be better off with less one sided complaining about men.

What should be done in your view?

I want to say that, in general (and with two words, the lazy men you've dated have been rhetorically vaporized), it is proximity to women that give men the urge to achieve success, but success here does not mean an ambitious high-powered career. It simply means contributing more resources to the household than the woman does.

That's my model.

That's just a Chappelle bit: https://youtube.com/watch?v=s5hu7o2Q62k

I think that career oriented people aren't the majority among either men or women, and most of the non-career oriented are happy enough and maybe even happier than the career oriented types.

But the total returns to career success are greater for men than women in large part due to increased sexual opportunities, particularly at the high end as opposed to the mid-level corporate drone, which draws men more into the lifestyle. And when that career turns to failure, there's a greater gap in hopes/expectations dashed in men than in women, which takes a bigger psychological toll.

the cadaver hasn't even cooled yet, assuming he is even dead, and already with with the gofundme. People are so gullible for this charity shit. Yeah , his kid will need home renovations and a new SUV or takes an interest in gambling cryptocurrency.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/artem-tepler+share-sheet-first-launch

SBF should have done this. he could have started dozens of these and he'd probably still be free.

Looks like it's gone.

it is up. themotte butchered the link . this one works https://gofund.me/b72dd8f3

188k is a lot of money. He was twitter cool.

He did get a place on real deal third article from I can see. I did post here because it was blowing up on certain twitters (small businesses and real estate) and because I thought there were things not discussed here before. https://therealdeal.com/

And I’ve had some dark days so I do think talking about taking risks and failing have a lot of benefits.

One of my points was a widow can get charity easier than a failing business man.

One of my points was a widow of a dead dude people will support a man who failed people will tell him to suck it up and figure it out.

Can you make this make sense?

I apologize. Friday is a drink and post day. And my grammar is below average as is. I edited it.

"One of my points was a widow of a dead dude, people will support; a man who failed, people will tell him to suck it up and figure it out."

Inflation has hit the once post-scarcity market for punctuation hard.

Inflation has hit the once post-scarcity market for punctuation hard.

Very good

Yeah, what's going on? This entire subthread is making me n=1-replicate that recent finding.

Tell me about it, there's a reason I don't hang out on the Indian end of the Internet 😩

Not to mention SVO ordering.

The widow to a failure is more sympathetic than the failure themselves whilst they're still alive?

I saw some things missed that I was looking for people to comment on.

  1. We have had a lot of post lately on the economy is fine. But the averages aren’t everyone. Real Estate people I could see how they are struggling now. It’s not 2008 but I saw this tweet from experience then https://twitter.com/gas_biz/status/1720481605112725782?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

  2. I do think men have a provider mentality. If you want to have a family and it fails at 40 your dating market prospects suck. I’ve seen it where the women divorces after that. What are your options then - start building again and then maybe close to 50 you can import a wife to have a family with.

  3. Americas wealth is built on this stuff. Everything he probably killed himself for are the fears that motivate people to do stuff and create wealth in capitalism.

  4. Something something about having a ton of twitter followers but not really having your busines/life going well. I know others who have a ton of followers but aren’t making money on what they say they are doing and I’m not talking those targeting lower income.

I do think men have a provider mentality. If you want to have a family and it fails at 40 your dating market prospects suck. I’ve seen it where the women divorces after that. What are your options then - start building again and then maybe close to 50 you can import a wife to have a family with.

Surely you likely already have a family at 40? If you get divorced you find another divorced or single woman in her mid-late 30s and have a mixed family or whatever it’s called, maybe one more kid. That seems to be the standard.

The average 40 year old who is going to have kids has already had them.

You're assuming that single woman is going to want to marry you.

If I had to place bets between 40 year old men who have been married before and want to remarry and 40 year old men who wanted to get married but never managed to, I'd put pretty solid money on the former getting married first. Even if they have kids and a failed business.

For what it's worth, my two most successful relatives got married and had kids in their 40s. Everyone else was married with kids by 40. The only exceptions were the ones who took a gamble by starting a business at beginning of their careers.

A lot of it is shame and embarrassment in front of peers, friends and coworkers, even employees. Heard various stories of people who killer themselves in finance, often aftermath of 2008/2009 or in a couple of cases the late 80s crash. Many must have had plenty of money saved, were under no risk of prosecution or criminal investigation, some weren’t even personally fired, they just had to lay off 50/70/85% of their teams, look friends in the eye and fire them into a job market with no jobs, etc, and they couldn’t take it. Some knew their fund/bank/etc was collapsing and couldn’t deal with their life’s work going up in smoke even if they personally had more than enough to enjoy a long retirement.

It’s very easy to get into a spiral of personal responsibility about people suffering ‘because of’ you that ends in suicidal thoughts, especially if you have a history of depression.

Yes business owners do kill themselves when their business fails. Capitalism does have brutal aspects.

yeah this is why if you have a decent net-worth, just park it in tech stocks (like QQQ or maybe add some leverage to the mix) and get a nice 20-40% yoy return. Or maybe real estate. No need to take the extra risk with high rate of failure with small biz or start-ups. For every Facebook, there are many failures. Entrepreneurship so expensive, too much failure, and too much work.

Lol is this real? Don't do this.

I almost want to asks if your joking.

If you did any leverage on tech stocks especially the best performers this year then last year 2022 your bankrupt especially since you mention Facebook.

It traded $92 last November. Even unlevered your feeling poor. Any even modest leverage and your bankrupt on that move. Tech was absolutely trash in the markets a year ago.

I agree if you can get that job that something at one of the big techs offers a nice comfortable salary. But everyone else in capitalism always has a bit of failure risks which is my main point that the rich people have always faced a brutal failure at some point.

If your a high IQ guy taking risks the best advice is to find some doctor to marry with stability.

Hard to read this post re: grammar errors but the numbers don't back what you think is happening in the market.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/QQQ

The highest QQQ ever was is 392, it's currently at 362. It's impossible to go bankrupt on this stuff

Here's Meta specifically: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/META

Where are you going bankrupt and not making a comfortable profit over a 15 year period like every other investor?

Your not going bankrupt on a move from 370 to 92 which happened in last 5 years if you have any leverage.

I don't mean to be antagonistic but I cannot understand the points you're trying to make.

best advice is to study cyclicality.

FB at 92 was a great buy.

oil stocks at negative oil price in 2020 was a great buy. uranium even now is a good buy. maybe even silver stocks?

i dont think you’d make as much, on a 5 year time horizon, if you out all into QQQ or google or something

Well he said levered. You blew out levered that shit last year at any leverage level.

Oil negative was fake. Chinese banks were long oil to a derivative contract on spot that day. We fucked them over. It only actually traded negative for a a few hours.

yeah leverage is risky. But even non-leveraged nasdaq lost 80% of its value from 2000s highs to 2002 lows. But still not nearly as risky as starting a biz with your own capital. only a quarter of small businesses make it to 10-15 years.

I agree if you can get that job that something at one of the big techs offers a nice comfortable salary. But everyone else in capitalism always has a bit of failure risks which is my main point that the rich people have always faced a brutal failure at some point.

VC is an alternative. The VC shoulders the financial risk, not the entrepreneur. But this is harder to get. Understandably, VCs are picky. Having the right connections helps greatly in this regard.

It traded $92 last November. Even unlevered your feeling poor. Any even modest leverage and your bankrupt on that move. Tech was absolutely trash in the markets a year ago.

much of the stuff has recovered all or most of the losses. QQQ closing in on new highs. Leverage adds new complications due to path dependency. The nice thing about 1.5x leveraged ETFs, which is what I am doing, is it mostly solves the path dependency problem of leveraged stock trading.

Many big techs trade in things that AI will destroy the moat for first. I’d be careful, but if you’ve made enough to retire then good for you. Just don’t get greedy.

A lot of people think buying a small business versus market exposure is far less risky. You control the cash flows.

if I had to guess, buying a business way more risky and work than diversified stock portfolio, even an all-tech portfolio. Also lots of asymmetric info: if a biz is on the up-and-up why would they sell to you? this means tons of due diligence , and having to hire auditor and attorney, which is more money and time. having control of cash flow assumes there is much margin to work with. lol I know that if I took the opposite point, you and others be telling me how the stock portfolio is way less risky than the biz

Simple answer is IQ arb. Look into search funds which have gotten popular with mba types.

A lot of small businesses have a moat in the sense that as you go down the IQ scale they are not managed well but provide useful services. But there are many that have a ton of cash flow but are sub scale for pe. So your not competing with your other Harvard mba for the next platform grad but some guy with a ged.

Today, whether its harvard business school or Cornell or Columbia, the biggest growth clubs are the small businese investment clubs.

everyone with MBAs, who dont wanna do big corps, seem to wanna buy a cashflowing mom and pop business. opportunities might have been arb’d away

The further down the scale the more the cost for diligence relative to acquisition goes up.

I do wonder if the next move though is for mid tier PE to go micro but do a lot of bolt ins to create a company of size that can then be flipped to a larger PE. Would require a longer hold compared to average. And to reduce costs you probably don’t finance your first few transactions and then when you go to purchase more add ons you fully finance those (since you can get the bank comfortable the existing portco can support the debt)

I do wonder if the next move though is for mid tier PE to go micro but do a lot of bolt ins to create a company of size that can then be flipped to a larger PE.

Already happening, but mid-tier PE is a disaster anyway, at least for now. Only reason megafunds are hanging on is self-dealing and selling to each other in a continuously growing scheme of propped up valuations that is liable to blow up at some point in the foreseeable future, as even they seem to be starting to admit.

PE is a cheap debt phenomenon, in an environment where money isn’t cheap it’s just building and operating a conglomerate / old school holding company with more steps, and you only have to go back to the 80s and early 90s to see that conglomerates are valued very differently to the kinds of multiples PE both works with, especially now.

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Yeah but as you go down the IQ scale the comparative advantages for businesses become a bit more complicated than sticking Kanban boards in and doing a weekly standup.

this is what private equity tries to do. but the risk is mitigated by having a large portfolio of companies. an individual who buys a company is putting his or her eggs in a single basket

PE also benefits from leverage. The simple truth is that it is easier to leverage a business than portfolio stock since you control cash flow meaning that PE can get outsized returns due to leverage.

If everyone does that, and they do, power concentrates into finance and you slowly stop doing anything productive as a society.

Actual rent seeking has negative externalities. Even if it's the correct choice.

I actually think PE provides value. It provides an exit for entrepreneurs especially when they can’t go public. Let’s say you build a 100m business but are getting close to retirement and your kids aren’t all that interested in building it or you have business you want to start? PE provides an exit to those kind of business starters likely increasing business formation.

There were always exits available (selling to competitors or larger players who could access financing publicly or privately) and in countries like Germany the traditional solution was simply to have the family hire a professional manager but to keep the business in family hands. The US, UK and other prime PE markets saw their skilled manufacturing sectors suffer while Germany is a net exporter that sells China the machines they use to make goods for American and British consumers.

I do a lot of PE work and most targets aren’t manufacturing.

Of course, but it’s an example of how higher liquidity for SMEs that a large PE sector offers isn’t necessarily healthy for the wider economy. In the UK PE culture (which I’d argue is stronger even than in the US) is responsible for a rotten business culture in which even attempting to build a large new business is anathema to most entrepreneurs. This is often described as a result of growth capital being much harder to access in the UK than in the US, but this only explains a small part of it. The primary reason is that PE offers founders a lottery win that is often so tempting that they abandon their ambitions. In the US, billionaire hustle culture is ironically a partial protection against this, but European founders will cash out and retire to Cannes as soon as the first PE check is dangled before then, which I consider genuinely damaging because my impression of people in operating roles in PE is very poor.

Yeah it may be cultural different. In the US, there is still hustle culture.

Also PE now often offers 5-10% mgmt equity so still incentivizes mgmt.

Going solo is not the only way; it's the worst way, becase all the financial burden is planed on the entrepreneur. A better way is with VC, such as ycombinator program or something like a16z. The VC shoulders the financial risk by effectively investing in human capital, which is the key ingredient for a start-up anyway.

They are also sharks who will manage to get all the money if you aren't really careful. The golden days of when VCs would voluntarily share success with founders are over.

Thanks for noticing the society we live in.

I know it's stating the obvious.

But if society is to look like anything else than it does now people need to remind themselves of the pricetag on the path of least resistance.

You might be better off setting your money on fire starting a risky business than giving it to bankers to fuck everyone over. It's easy to forget you're part of everyone.

To put it another way, you aren't "stuck in traffic" you ARE the traffic.

Somewhat related thought on the harm of a therapy mindset...

Recently, Scott posted about a model of the mind where people get into destructive thought patterns which are like grooves in a road. As people ruminate on these destructive thoughts, the synapses of the mind are strengthened, deepening the groove and making it more likely that a random thought pattern will end up back in the destructive groove.

In this model of the mind, talk therapy would seem to reinforce the negative pattern. It certainly seems that few people ever graduate from therapy or solve their underlying issues.

In other words, time heals all wounds, unless those wounds are torn open every week for 50 minutes.

There are many different kinds of talk therapy. For example, cognitive behavioral therapy is largely based on trying to get out of dysfunctional mental grooves and inaccurately pessimistic perceptions of reality and on establishing new, more effective ways of thinking through insight and practice.

I personally have never gone to a psychotherapist, but it's clear to me from reading various things that talk therapy isn't just the stereotypical "lie on a couch and complain for an hour" that some people think it is.

Do you have a link?

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-canal-papers

"A quick review: you can model the brain as an energy landscape . . with various peaks and valleys in some multidimensional space1. Situations and stimuli plant “you” at some point on the landscape, and then you “roll down” towards some local minimum. If you’re the sort of person who repeats “I hate myself, I hate myself” in a lot of different situations, then you can think of the action of saying “I hate myself” as an attractor - a particularly steep, deep valley which it’s easy to fall into and hard to get out of. Many situations are close to the slopes of the “I hate myself” valley, so it’s easy to roll down and get caught there."

Points 2 and 3 basically contradict each other. That is, there's the object level struggles of material providing, which therapy would not have helped with, and the irrational misperception that these issues were irreparably unsolvable to the point that suicide was the only way out. In-so-far as therapy and suicide prevention could have helped him figure this out, they would have been useful (in-so-far as some therapy and suicide prevention are lefty mental health stuff made of empty-sounding words that don't improve rational consideration of object level issues, they would not have been useful)

How many therapists actually could solve that though? It’s a practical problem and one more likely to be solved by fixing the money problems than asking him to talk about how bad being broke makes him feel.

This is a fair critique and the issue with this particular case of me trying to use it to build up the issues I’m trying to discuss. He would seem to have reasonable exit opportunities that would be something like you don’t get to have your name on the wall anymore but now you need to work for Lennar as a project manager at a fairly good salary.

Cases do exists where the exit wouldn’t be as foreseeable like if your industry isn’t doing well and you were facing structural obsolescence.

Even then, I think people underestimate the quality of life you can expect as a poor person with an intact family. If his entire industry went under and he couldn't adapt and was stuck flipping burgers for minimum wage he could still provide for his family. They might have to downgrade their home and lifestyle expectations, but they're not going to starve to death or end up homeless. And I suspect that the actual quality of life for his daughter would be higher poor with an alive father than rich with no father.

If you have serious mental health issues rendering you completely unemployable, then the object level might be unfixable, but for everyone else it's more a question of lowering standards and struggling to do as well as you can and fix as much as you can even if you can never return to the wealthy lifestyle you were expecting.

Right, an intact family with 2 or 1.5 (ie mom in part time work once all kids at school) jobs of the kind that not-particularly-skilled but also not-addicts and not-pathologically-lazy people of average intelligence can get in an averagely prosperous part of the US with a few years of progression can provide a passable life for a family. Not a hugely comfortable one, but far from something most Americans would consider ‘stereotypically poor’.

Yeah. Failure case in most Western democracies right now is not that earthshatteringly bad. It's definitely tight, but it's not like he'd be forced to go homeless 48 hours after declaring bankruptcy. Especially when he's got the contact network he ostensibly seems to have had, surely there'd be a 6-figure sinecure of some sort available somewhere as a consultant or middle manager that'd allow him to be atleast medium competitive.

The question is whether you play out the unwinnable position -- go through the rest of your life as a failure who will never do any better than you are doing now -- or just give up the game as lost.

I suppose there's an argument for that, but I just feel like 'life utility points' aren't super tied to money in the West right now beyond a certain minimum spec. You don't want to be broke-broke, I agree, but the qualitative difference between making $100k and making $300k is pretty low as somebody who's bounced around the spectrum. My net worth/earnings took a big hit a few years ago in '2021 fantasy bull market dollars' terms which probably is gonna take me another couple years to get back to, but my day-to-day existence is essentially the same. Admittedly I'm probably more frugal than a lot of guys like that, but having experienced a lot of 'rich person stuff' it's the difference between a 7.5/10 day and a 8/10 day.

If you're not a spendthrift, the difference is between making $100k and working the corporate grind until you die to avoid dropping down to the $50k-or-less lifestyle, or making $300k and being able to get out at some point. If you are a spendthrift, the difference is obvious.

Even if he would be willing to decrease his own QoL, his wifes feelings are something he has to keep in mind. If she would be be intransigent and proclaim she would find replacement husband, willing to provide her with the current lifestyle, he would be broke and on the hook for eyewatering alimony.

As people on the right otherwise often suggest, it’s very unlikely the average, say, 47 year old woman married with three kids is going to get a ‘better deal’ elsewhere unless her husband is a truly incorrigible deadbeat and/or she’s somehow either immensely attractive for her age or has low standards (in which case the problem is less likely to arise at all). If she remarries at all, it’s likely to a substantially older man.

For a woman over 35 or 40 with children, things usually have to be very bad (or one’s dating prospects uncommonly good for a middle aged single mother) for leaving a broke husband to make financial sense.

The "better deal" is to take all the joint assets and most of any of his future income in a divorce, using his failure as the reason he should take nothing.

The point still remains that he’s much more likely to be able to find another partner than she is (not, like, a hot 25 year old obviously, but someone a few years younger and also divorced). In my experience middle aged women who initiate divorce are usually pretty desperate. The reason women initiate most divorces is because men are often perfectly content checking out of the relationship, maybe fucking around or having affairs, spending money on other women, then returning home to a wife who looks after the kids, probably does most domestic chores etc. This can go on for years before she finally decides to accept the humiliation of divorce. The only time it’s usually “worth it” for a man to initiate divorce in my experience is if he finds out she’s cheating, at which point masculine hatred of the idea of being sexually humiliated typically leads to an instant divorce. But provided there’s no (known) infidelity on her part, men tend not to divorce their wives because even if they dislike her, she’s a good deal.

This fundamental disparity leads to a lot of the discourse on divorce that argues women are screwing over men. In reality, it’s just that a bad marriage is today usually a much better deal for men than women.

This all assumes that she realizes this before abandoning her husband "to get a better deal". The women I know who have done this didn't give up their high standards until after they left and learned it the hard way. Choosing to leave a partner is often more an emotional decision than a rational one and a sudden drop in QoL isn't exactly conducive to rational thinking.

This was the point I was waiting for. Yes your family often leaves you when you fail. Seen it happen enough.

Sure for a functional adult you can go manage a Taco Bell and probably get 100k or more a year but your dating market prospects are awful.

You can make $100,000 a year managing a Taco Bell??

And if so, are the dating prospects awful because despite your solid income because you work at Taco Bell? I suppose if you restrict yourself to the people that actually come into your store and buy a chalupa things aren't that bad.

Think I’ve seen far higher than that. Like 150 advertised. But that’s still falling a lot in status.

You can make $100,000 a year managing a Taco Bell?

No, but IIRC fast food managers get paid mostly in the form of bonuses for hitting the metrics that’ve been set by some jackasses with spreadsheets at headquarters(health code, budget, drive through time, etc). So there’s plenty of individual GM’s who make good salaries if not 6-figure level.

And if so, are the dating prospects awful because despite your solid income because you work at Taco Bell? I suppose if you restrict yourself to the people that actually come into your store and buy a chalupa things aren't that bad.

But nobody wants to date Taco Bell customers(and Taco Bell customers probably skew very male and very lower income, so that’s predictable).

Tbh it seems like men who make good money at low status jobs do OK on the dating market, but usually have to date a bit below them on the class ladder.

Most managers at Taco Bell would do completely fine with women of their class and background. I suppose the rare formerly PMC down in his luck upper-middle-class guy who manages a Taco Bell might not, but that person is more likely to take a (lower paid) job as a clerk or paralegal or some other bottom tier office job than work for Taco Bell.

I’d guess the average fast food restaurant manager comes from a working class background and fucked around for a few years after high school, is somewhat smarter than their peers, works hard and rises the ranks over a few years until the franchise owner puts them in charge.

At which point the suicide would seem more understandable. Still not necessarily the best option, but I would find it harder to argue against. And maybe that secretly is exactly what happened and his wife was going to leave him. But frequently that's not the case, and people kill themselves based on the derivative of their quality of life, not the actual level after the decline.

But frequently that's not the case, and people kill themselves based on the derivative of their quality of life, not the actual level after the decline.

Or even just the fear that that's what his wife would do. Suicidal people often believe everyone else sees them as unkindly as they see themselves.

I would be curious to see the efficacy of therapy on reducing suicide rates among men in particular. I imagine it's tricky to disentangle selection effects: people who go to therapy are more likely to be suicidal than the general population, but suicidal individuals who go to therapy are probably less suicidal than suicidal people who don't go to therapy.

Therapy-as-it-actually-exists does seem to be less efficacious for men than women. Enough to make it have no effect? Not sure.

Therapy-as-it-actually-exists does seem to be less efficacious for men than women

Is that true, or do women just actually like therapy?

Full disclosure- I think therapy works for trauma and phobia related issues, and is useful for management strategies on depression/anxiety issues, and maybe has some applicability to rarer issues(eg the vanishing penis syndrome Scott wrote about) or for managing mental health care when there’s 20 different providers, but is basically hokum outside of that. And functionally all hokum works on the basis of empathizing with the mark and then telling them what they want to hear. Women like empathy where men as often find it annoying. So women like therapy in a way men don’t, but it has the same effectiveness for both. And obviously that leads to women pointing to it as useful even when time and drugs/life changes did the heavy lifting, while men point to it as stupid and useless in the same circumstances.

I wonder what the overlap is between liking therapy and believing in other hokum (eg astrology, acupuncture).

I dunno. For people who don’t actually have a problem it seems like a one to one trade off with psychics, so I’d expect it’s actually negative.

Yeah, my understanding is that most of the therapy techniques were designed based on female patients, and therefore focus more on things like feelings rather than solutions to object-level problems. However competent ones exist, and will tailor their style based on the needs of their patient (or at least identify when they aren't a good fit and refer them to other therapists with a better-suited style). A suicidal man seeing Jordan Peterson isn't going to get a bunch of mamby pampy nonsense about "aw, I'm sorry to hear that, how does that make you feel?", they're going to get "that sucks, life sucks, but your life isn't over, let's come up with an actionable plan for how to make it suck less" and then having an actionable plan helps fix your mental state because you have a goal you can work towards (and once you enact the plan your life is objectively improved and that helps your mental state). Even a good therapist can't unilaterally fix your life for you, but they can help convince you to fix your own life and figure out how instead of wallowing in self-misery and inaction.

Why would therapy be less effective for men? I’ve heard moreso that men don’t want to start going to therapy for various reasons (associating therapy with leftism is a new one for me, which I don’t really understand) but it’s a very useful tool to have.

And there’s more than one way to practice it - cognitive behavioural therapy has been found to be effective for anxiety, depression, PTSD, ADHD, and more, and I can’t conceive of a reason it would be less effective for men.

A couple factors. One major one is the gender of the therapist: therapists are something like 3/4 female, and trending more female. This leads to several issues. For one, treatment methodologies get skewed, in terms of renown, research, and funding, toward those that female therapists prefer. Therapists are more capable of empathy toward people like them, and oftentimes patients react better to therapists who have a similar background as them.

Another, more speculative angle is that mental health issues can be intrinsic (caused by how people interpret their experiences) or extrinsic (caused by the experiences themselves). This is a bit murky: e.g. if you're depressed and traumatized because you were in a war and saw your best buddy blown to bits, that's pretty extrinsic, but perhaps some interpretative work could genuinely help alleviate the pain. But I do think it's a meaningful distinction, and therapists would be better suited to intrinsic issues. If women's issues are more intrinsic and men's more extrinsic, therapy would be less effective at effectively addressing the average male issue than the average female one.

I’m not sure there’s a difference between how the emotions from how interpret the experience vs. the experience itself? Mental issues are by definition intrinsic. Not all soldiers develop PTSD after experiencing a traumatic event - there seems to be many variables influencing its development, such as age, pre existing conditions, support network, even genes (I’m reading that PTSD is 30-40% heritable). And there’s depressingly large amounts of women that have PTSD from sexual assaults and physical abuse - while only a small minority of men become soldiers in the west.

I’m also not sure what you mean by women’s mental issues being more intrinsic? Anxiety, depression, addiction and abusive relationships would be common reasons the average westerner would go to therapy, and I don’t see how there’s a difference in “cause” there when it comes to gender?

Why would therapy be less effective for men?

One reason might be that therapists consider masculine qualities and attributes to be pathological, and thus treat men like broken women.

Therapy culture is very blue coded. Therapy culture seemingly embraces fragility as a virtue.

That hasn’t been my experience. I did CBT and there it was quite focused on tracking my emotional state and finding actions to regulate it, and more ordinary talk therapy where I was pushed to be more assertive, recognise abusive relationships and be more emotionally resilient overall. therapy does encourage you to have more self-compassion and avoid emotional repression, but to me that’s the opposite of fragility. People who bottle up everything tend to be very brittle - seeming solid until it gets too much and they shatter.

Effective forms of therapy can exist while 90%+ of therapy sessions are useless or actively harmful.

A patient who is cured might only need 5 sessions. A patient whose condition doesn't improve may have 1 session per week forever.

In this model, even if half of patients are cured by therapy, something like 99% of sessions are a complete waste of money.

Therapy culture. Not all therapy. But also I think your assumption is people can either be emotional or bottle up emotions. Stoicism is another path.

your issues are not lefty mental health...seeing all your dreams disappear...one of the most emasculating things

I don't have a lot of love for the left's frames around mental health and therapy, but this point is just silly. Or rather would be better if you just stopped wtih the real issue of providing monetarily. Are you suggesting that 'seeing your dreams disappear' is somehow a real issue, separate from and contrasted with 'mental health' concerns. Same re: feelings of emasculation. You undermine yourself by begging the conclusion.

I suspect the 'lefty' who advocates therapy very much agrees that lost dreams and feeling emasculated are real issues, and would understand them to be the exact 'mental health' issues you are suggesting aren't invovled.

It does seem like the root issue is not a business failing, but the feeling of inadequacy. A person with a strong frame doesn't update his own self worth downward for something so minor as a business failing.

That said, does "lefty therapy" ever fix these issues?

Maybe they get half way there. A therapist might help a person to realize that it is his own feelings of unworthiness, not a business failing, which is the true source of his suffering.

But then a modal therapist would seem to encourage this same patient to wallow in that sense of unworthiness every week, rather than take the steps to overcome it and, therefore, no longer have need of therapy.

That said, does "lefty therapy" ever fix these issues?

I'm mean, I am generally skeptical, though I am unfamiliar enough with something as grave as suicide that I don't want to throw support or detraction around flippanly.

That is however, not my point. slider is free to dismiss therapy as ineffective. I was noting his framing of the percieved issue to be addressed was essentially a Russell's conjugation:

Your mental health issues

My real issues of feeling inadequate and emasculated and socially maligned.

Yeah, I mean, I don't like the whole "toxic masculinity" concept when it is used as a motte-and-bailey*, but if a man hypothetically (not saying this man necessarily did) killed himself because he could not provide for his family and felt emasculated, it would be textbook example of what some leftists mean when they say "toxic masculinity hurts men as well as women".

*The bailey: "men suck!". The motte: "we want to address toxic masculinity because doing so would help men as well as women!".

It’s an especially stupid reason to commit suicide because it’s still possible to provide for your family if your business fails - you can still get an ordinary job, or do consulting work, drive an Uber, whatever it takes. The only sure way to be unable to provide is to be dead, so what does killing yourself accomplish? Your spouse now has to shoulder the entire burden on their own.

1 - What did you meant to type instead of "look themselves"? 2 - Dealing with feeling emasculated is exactly what lefty mental health and suicide prevention are equipped to del with.

4 and 5 are what the left (or at leat I) mean by toxic masculinity. If you aren't facing prison, there is no need to consider dying because you can't fulfill the roles you've given yourself.

6 - Citation needed.

Edited to add - how do we know his business failed?

The new House Speaker, Mike Johnson, is an Evangelical Christian that has positions and stances on homosexuality that I do not share (I confess, I remain a Millennial lib that has no problem with gay people doing gay things). Nonetheless, this CNN video where they discuss his positions on homosexuality and conversion therapy just seems so bizarre to me. In it, they refer to the idea of someone going from gay to straight as "debunked", quote Johnson saying, "there's freedom to change if you want to", and "homosexual behavior is something you do, not who you are".

Despite my own inclination to completely accept gay people qua gay people, I find nothing objectionable about Johnson's statements and see them as a much more accurate model of reality than what the CNN crew is expressing. I have zero doubt that sexual preferences and predilections can be substantially altered through a combination of conditioning, cognitive therapy, and repetition. I'm agnostic on whether this could allow someone who has a natural inclination towards homosexuality (or heterosexuality) to groom attraction for the sex that they didn't initially prefer, but it's not obvious to me, and I don't think there's good reason to say that it's deboonked as though this is just a common stylized fact. Likewise, even if it proves impossible to change one's underlying preference, it certainly remains true that one can elect to follow a different pattern of behavior than their natural tendency. I might have a natural tendency to hook up with a flirtatious woman at the bar while I'm on a work trip, but Mrs. O'Dim wouldn't appreciate this and I value her so much more than some stupid hookup. Were I a religious man, I might be inclined to view my religious obligations through the same sort of lens.

But really, the thing that keeps hitting me with dissonance isn't even the above points, which I can at least countenance reasonable counterarguments to, but the incongruity with the belief that gender itself is a mere social construct that is fully malleable to an individual's stated preference. A man attracted to other men cannot become a straight man, but he can become a straight woman. Do the people articulating this view not notice that this is at least a difficult pair of propositions to adhere to? Do they see no conflict? Do they understand the conflict, but believe that it's a question that's been solved by The Science, so better to just trust The Science and move on? Cynically, I think it's mostly that expressing the opposite view will get you bullied and fired.

The thing is, we're expected to believe that conversion therapy works for paedophiles (or Minor Attracted Persons, if I'm getting on the new euphemisms bandwagons):

Although roughly 42% of the surveyed outpatient therapists reported having treated at least one MAP patient, their treatment experience with this clientele was still limited (i.e., the median number of treated MAPs among therapists who had treatment experience with this clientele was two). Therapists strongly believed in the beneficial effects of secondary prevention programs for MAPs (M > 6 on a seven-point scale; Table 4) and the large majority were willing to refer patients to different treatment institutions which corresponded with therapists’ strong beliefs in non-offending MAPs’ need for therapeutic treatment.

Here are people who don't choose their sexuality, whose inclinations are fixed, and who are treated by society with contempt, fear and loathing.

Here are sympathetic people in the psychiatry, psychology, and social sciences fields who want to help these pariahs, and part of that is appealing for our understanding and to put aside our reflexive reaction of "they're criminals and perverts, lock them up!"

So what can we do to help and support them not to offend? Well, lots of (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-022-02377-6) therapy, it seems.

I know I'm a cynic, but I fully expect MAPs to go the same way as homosexuality: a lot of political influence behind the scenes to get it re-classified as 'not a mental disorder', then the PR push about "See? Experts say it's not perversion! Trust the Science!" and eventually therapy to 'help stop the MAP from acting out his attraction to those below the legal age of consent' will be considered every bit as much offensive, and we'll get the same pop culture stories of "they put a hot wire to my head/because the things I did and said/they made these feelings go away/model citizen in every way".

Give it twenty years to get across, child-fucking is a harder row to hoe than two guys wanting to fuck each other. But it'll go that way, they're already putting in the spade work about "no it's got nothing to do with child abuse" that happened with legalising and normalising homosexuality. It will undergo the same "trying to change someone's innate sexual orientation to one deemed acceptable by society is abusive" shift.

The chief treatment error made by therapists is the conscious or unconscious belief that a MAP seeking treatment inevitably has or will molest a child.

MAP-informed therapists understand that, while similarities to sexual offenders against children exist, significant differences between the two groups also exist, particularly in their management of their sexual feelings. These therapists understand the similarities and differences and treat their clients with evidence based methods appropriate to the individual client.

The preferred model of treatment is LGBT affirmative psychotherapy, which treats sexual feelings as innate, unchangeable and subject to personal acceptance. The American Psychological Association provides guidelines on its website (see below). Applied to the minor-attracted person, affirmative therapy separates sexual orientation from its expression, emphasizing personal growth and acceptance of one’s age of attraction. **This in no way endorses sexual contact between adults and minors. **

Awareness of the shame, stigma and fear of exposure that MAPs experience due to their sexual and emotional feelings is crucial to treatment. Therapists should provide a proper diagnosis but use caution in recording a diagnosis of Pedophilic Disorder, because the associated stigma can negatively affect treatment.

And before anyone jumps in with "but being gay is perfectly fine and normal, it's not the same thing at all!", weren't we told that 10% of the population was LGBT so this means it's normal and natural? Well, same goes for being MAP!

The prevalence of minor attraction amongst the general population remains largely unknown due to sampling difficulties (Cantor & McPhail, Citation2016), with it being estimated that up to 5% of adult males may engage in sexual fantasizing involving children during masturbation (Dombert et al., Citation2016).

5% is more than transgender at the moment. As we were reminded constantly during the gay rights campaigns: someone you know, someone you work with, someone in your family, is gay and you don't know it. Aren't you willing to be compassionate and loving? Love trumps hate! Change that to "MAP and you don't know it" and run the same campaigns, and I'm sure there will be "but being MAP is perfectly fine and normal, it's got nothing to do with child sex abuse" talking points put out there as well.

we'll get the same pop culture stories of "they put a hot wire to my head/because the things I did and said/they made these feelings go away/model citizen in every way".

Now that was an unexpected Public Image Limited reference. May the road rise with you, FarNearEverywhere. And remeber: "Anger isn't energy." Or "Anger is an energy." Hard to tell given Rotten's elocution...

You seem to kind of have three points shoved in there, let me see if I can get at them:

  1. 'If therapy works for pedos it should work for gays!'

Answer: 'works' means very different things in these two cases.

The claim for therapy 'working' on gay people is that they become normal straight people with happy heterosexual sex lives and etc after the end of some treatment program instead of just having happy consensual gay relationships.

The claim for therapy 'working' on pedos is that they'll be able to live a sad and unfulfilled life of permanent chastity with enough willpower and constant oversight instead of repeatedly raping people.

These are not really the same definitions of 'working'. It's easy to imagine that you could convince some number of gay people to live sad lives of chastity with enough constant and unending oversight and social pressure (see: clergy). 'Conversion therapy' is making a much stronger claim with much less support.

  1. 'If we accept gay people, pedos will be accepted next!'

Answer: we've been hearing that for generations now and it's never happened. Literally gay people are adults working at offices now who were born before people started using that rhetoric and they've grown up their whole lies rolling their eyes at it because it never happens.

Yeah there are some weirdos on the internet pushing for it, there was NAMBLA in the 80s, there's always been weirdos pushing this agenda from the fringes of society. It's a lot less accepted now than it used to be, Romeo and Juliet were 13, Stray Cat Blues was a hit in the 60s, etc.

What's always missing from this formulation of how your opponents view the world is the concept of victims. You have an analogy based entirely on sexual liberation, without any of the other context.

Which is crazy because tomorrow it will be talk of how actually the progs are total prudes who hate sex because of #MeToo and 'enthusiastic consent' and the like making modern sex and dating an impossible minefield. Progs are obsessed with sexual victimization and finding and protecting and creating through rhetoric victims of sexual abuse, but you completely overlook that when trying to blood libel other sexual minorities by talking about how the progs are totally going to love pedos and make them the next big thing.

This is, charitably, extremely silly.

Your first link is broken.

I don't agree with your prediction. The trend over the last 50 years or so has been an increase in opposition to sexual relationships between children and adults. The age of consent has been going up. The penalties for sexually abusing minors have been increasing. The general concern over paedophilia has been increasing. Age gaps are becoming taboo. The gap in general expected behaviour between adults and children has been increasing while the age at which people are considered to be full adults is getting later and later.

The standard definition of a mental disorder is based on whether the behaviour causes harm. I don't see how paedophilia would not be considered a mental disorder in a society that considers sexual activity between a child and a much older person causes immense psychological harm.

Well we can look at the facts, which are that since the 1980s gay rights have become widely accepted, gay marriage legalized across the West; homophobia seriously reduced, and yet at the same time ages of consent have risen (substantially in parts of Canada and Europe), punishments for abuse of children have hugely increased, many more people are in jail for these crimes, and - perhaps most significantly - it’s much less socially acceptable for a 25 or 30 year old man to have a 15/16 year old girlfriend in 2023 than it was in 1973 or 1993. That’s a good thing (in my opinion), but it suggests that things are moving further against the direction you suggest is likely.

The French tried that in the 70s; it didn't work great for 'em. (Some) Westerners have been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

Ages of consent may have risen, but we're much more accepting of sexual activity at younger ages. Think of "Romeo and Juliet" laws, or the constant tub-thumping over "we must teach sex education at [age whatever] because by age [a couple years more] they're going to be experimenting with sex". That used to be "by sixteen", now it seems to be trending down to "by twelve".

While repugnance around thirty year old man has sex with six year old child will persist, I'm not so sure that "thirty year old man has sex with sixteen year old" will. After all, if some are pushing to reduce the voting age to sixteen, and we accept that a sixteen year old can have a twenty year old boyfriend, then that means we think 'legal minor' may indeed be mature enough to decide such things.

I'm not saying it'll be easy or fast, but I do think there will be a swing back, as with many things, so that the rise in age and the reset of it that you mention may be seen as an over-reaction, and we must correct in the opposite direction, so if Judy is seventeen and eight months of age, why shouldn't she legally be able to have a relationship with thirty year old Tom, what magic happens with waiting just another four months for her to be legally adult at eighteen?

but we're much more accepting of sexual activity at younger ages. Think of "Romeo and Juliet" laws,

Laws distinguishing between young people having sex with each other vs with older ones seem to be rather supporting that increasing acceptance of sexual practices does not imply increased acceptance of paedophiles?

Are they capable of consenting to having sex with one another?

...because right now, 'consent' is the only tool in the toolbox of the Moral Police.

Sex education works at reducing teenage sex and pregnancies, as advertised, by emphasizing the consequences of having sex. If you wanted to encourage teenage sex you wouldn't tell them anything and let nature take its course.

While repugnance around thirty year old man has sex with six year old child will persist, I'm not so sure that "thirty year old man has sex with sixteen year old" will

This is ironic because your second scenario is legal in most of the world, including most of the US and has always been so and in the places where it isn't it's because of feminist campaigning.

The progressive movement that exists today is overwhelmingly sex negative: they are in favor of raising the age of consent (to 25), against age gaps, against workplace relationships, against flirting in public, or in bars, or everywhere except designated dating apps, against prostitution, against pornography (except onlyfans), against sex comedies, against sexy women in video games, against revealing clothing in movies.

Play some of the wokesploitation games (Dream Daddy, Goodbye Volcano High), for example: everyone is some kind of queer but no sex, not even hinted at, maybe a (one) kiss, maybe the farthest they get is holding hands.

The trans kids stuff is the second most successful mass sterilization project in the world. Puberty blockers likely cause permanent inability to orgasm, what has your church done that's as effective as that at preventing teenage sex?

This is ironic because your second scenario is legal in most of the world

It may be legal, but as you point out, there is campaigning to make it repugnant. That's what I mean by the swinging of the pendulum; from 'sure a thirty year age gap between marriage partners is okay, even if it's unusual' to 'he took advantage of that poor twenty-five year old young woman' to, in future, back again to 'yeah she's sixteen and he's forty but hey if she's mature enough to make up her own mind, who are you to say it's wrong?'

The trans kids stuff is the second most successful mass sterilization project in the world.

The irony there being that the extremes of liberalisation have done more than the most conservative attitudes, indeed.

So your evidence for the pendulum swinging in direction X is evidence that it is going in the opposite direction?

to, in future, back again to 'yeah she's sixteen and he's forty but hey if she's mature enough to make up her own mind, who are you to say it's wrong?'

I don’t think that pendulum will swing, because it’s not tenable to get there. Very young women(such as teenagers) being able to have serious relationships, especially relationships with older males, with a rate of it all ending in tragedy that society considers acceptable depends on the power that the parents of very young women exercise over them both formally and informally.

everyone is some kind of queer but no sex, not even hinted at, maybe a (one) kiss, maybe the farthest they get is holding hands.

Ironically, some queer people do complain about this trend of "sexuality without sex," I believe.

The progressive movement that exists today is overwhelmingly sex negative: they are in favor of raising the age of consent (to 25), against age gaps, against workplace relationships, against flirting in public, or in bars, or everywhere except designated dating apps, against prostitution, against pornography (except onlyfans), against sex comedies, against sexy women in video games, against revealing clothing in movies.

The progressive movement that exists today can be summarized as "Straight male sexuality bad, everything else good!". They are in favor of raising the age of consent, but deny that women actually need to get consent from men. They are against age gaps, but deny behavior of older women toward younger men is sexual. They are against men flirting with women unless the women desire it, but think women should be free to flirt with men whenever they wish. They are against any media that panders to the sexual desires of straight men, but are okay with media that panders to the sexual desires of others.

"Sex positivity" has always been tied up in Feminism and thus has always only cared about ensuring sexual outcomes are positive for women.

Sex postive feminists existed at one point, it's just that after they lost the feminist sex wars, the sex negs flayed them and wore their skin to hide their puritanical, hypocritical nature.

Sex positive feminists won the feminist sex wars though. Sex positive feminists were never supportive of male sexuality except so far as it could be exploited by women.

No, that's what "they" say. My conspiracy theory is that the sex positive feminists actually lost. Modern feminists do not like porn and prostitution. They are very fond of sex negative terms like rape culture and objectification.

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I'd say they were mugged by reality, and not-quite-realized but painfully found out that the wall isn't there to keep them in.

The trans kids stuff is the second most successful mass sterilization project in the world. Puberty blockers likely cause permanent inability to orgasm, what has your church done that's as effective as that at preventing teenage sex?

It's almost like the church wasn't aiming for mass sterilization.

PS. I'm glad that the religious right is making a comeback because maybe they can succeed in making sex negativity uncool again.

"The comeback of the religious right" is a lot more wishful thinking by disaffected liberals poking the pendulum with a stick asking it to make a swing back, than it is something happening in real life. Sorry, but the 90's aren't coming back anytime soon, they were the point when the rubber band was about to break, not a stable equilibrium.

Anecdotally, I think this would track with my experience? Some time ago I knew a trans person in her thirties who was enthusiastically seeking to date a seventeen year old, and fully intended to have sex with them at the first opportunity. I expressed concerns and did not get that far.

We are in a period of category collapse, it seems to me, and the elevation of individual will and preference, with consent and harm as the sole acceptable guardrails. It's hard to see how that doesn't lead to some pretty disastrous outcomes.

Seventeen isn't quite a minor (legally maybe) and thirty isn't that old, but yeah. Not a good augury. The types who chase seventeen year olds will be doing that when they're thirty, and forty, and fifty, and...

Leonardo DiCaprio is getting a lot of stick on that front. Now, it's understandable that "men like young women" and "why is this young woman dating this twenty years older than her rich, famous guy, who can know the answer to that?" but after a certain point, it goes from "uncomfortable" to "downright creepy".

What is category collapse? What are some examples of disastrous outcomes you foresee?

We've become much more accepting of extramarital sex, but I don't think there has been much change in the acceptability of having sex at a young age, other than indirectly in that teenagers are usually not married. But it used to be common for teenagers to be married. Romeo and Juliet were 16 and 13.

The trend has actually been away from there being legal minors. The age of consent was traditionally around puberty while the age of majority was originally 21. So there used to a huge gap between reaching an age where you could have sex or marry and when you became a full adult with full rights. This gap is now completely gone in some jurisdictions and where it remains, it has been shrinking.

Romeo and Juliet were 16 and 13.

Romeo and Juliet was also a cautionary tale. They’re portrayed as idiots who create an entirely preventable tragedy by not listening to their elders who think they’re young, impulsive, and need to be restrained, and the ongoing feud between the two families prevents them from intervening effectively. It’s a plot point that Juliet’s father rejects a marriage proposal from an ally of the family on the basis of age and Romeo is portrayed as a young, ignorant hothead.

Romeo and Juliet is an Object Lesson in the importance of a functioning postal system.

but we're much more accepting of sexual activity at younger ages

Maybe in theory, but not really in practice. Average age of virginity loss is rising, not falling- this is also a reaction to "oh no, every kid has seen porn by 12" (and more recently, "kids have to know they're trans before they hit puberty or Bad Things will happen, so we should be trying to force the issue at 6-8"). [Also, there is very little "experimenting with sex" today anyway; the state of modern gender relations combined with easier alternatives to sex for young men has seen to that.]

what magic happens with waiting just another four months for her to be legally adult at eighteen?

Well, brain chemistry says she's not a human being adult until 25, so she deserves the rules we give her. (That is what The Science says- it's not like we've ever used brain size comparisons to oppress other kinds of people in living memory or anything like that.)

and we must correct in the opposite direction

Gender and sexual politics follows (and slightly lags) economic conditions. Traditionalist-conservatives should fear an improvement in economic conditions as much as progressives do, because with better times comes more demand for sex that is usually met by relaxing the conditions around it (which tend to push the average age of first sex down).
As times get worse, we should expect more desperate flail by the faction that still needs to wear the concept of sex-positivity as a skinsuit- so while you'll probably see more examples of successful predation because of that flail (almost always male -> male), it's not going to meaningfully improve access to straight sex for men (or boys).

[Johnson]: "homosexual behavior is something you do, not who you are".

I'd like to soapbox a bit about this.

Johnson is absolutely right on this, maybe more than he knows. One of the more insidious things about the prevailing culture is the way that it encourages people, almost to the extent that it is unthinkable to do otherwise, to identify with their desires -- especially if those desires are sexual. People make fun of the Evangelical thing where they insist on saying "same-sex-attracted" instead of "gay", as if it's some shibboleth, but the reason for this is that "gay" carries with it an assumption that it is, and ought to be, part of one's identity, and the Evangelicals are right that it's a big part of the problem.

Having sexual attraction to other men may be (generally is) involuntary, but engaging in homosexual activity is absolutely a choice, and so is making your desires such a core part of your identity that you automatically interpret any discouragement from gratifying them as an attack on your self. Yet that last choice is, in the prevailing culture, the water that the fish don't know they are swimming in. They are told, "Those people hate you, they want to deny you the right to even exist" because of their opposition to behavior.

People with disordered desires need a narrative other than "you are a disgusting pervert" or "your desires are innate and good and self-actualization means fulfilling them". The bit about "same-sex-attracted" is a (somewhat awkward) way of trying to supply that other narrative.

I think the same is true about "trans". A boy or man who desperately wants to be female, and/or who experiences discomfort at being male, may not be choosing to have those feelings (though they can certainly be fed and encouraged by dwelling on them), but "I am trans" is a decision to adopt those feelings and desires as as an identity. I can't think of any non-awkward way of encapsulating those underlying feelings and desires (yeah, "gender dysphoria", but that carries its own set of assumptions and also doesn't capture the full range here), but the discourse really needs one.

I'm very sympathetic to people saddled with these disordered feelings -- this is not really to my credit, but out of personal experience, as my other posts on the "trans" subject attest -- but I get really angry at the activists who encourage people to see them as a core part of their identity, and accuse opponents of wanting to "deny [their] right to exist". It's like telling an alcoholic that being a "drunkard" is a core part of their identity and that anyone who wants them to stop drinking hates them.

"Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea."

The purpose of identity labels is political organizing and political rhetoric for the purposes of obtaining and protecting civil rights and social respectability.

I agree that, without understanding that purpose for the labels, teh labels are kind of silly and unnecessary. People can just do what they want and say what they do and not need a label about it.

And it's true that gay people specifically have sort of made enough progress at this point that they don't desperately need the political organizing function of the label anymore, which is letting people notice where the label is restrictive or counter-productive or misleading. That seems to me like a natural evolution of this process and what we would expect/want to happen; I strongly believe Gen Z doesn't use orientation-related labels in the same way and with the same context that Gen X and millennials did, and it'll be interesting to see hwo that evolves over a few more generations.

But trans people, fr example, still desperately need a unified label for purposes of political organizing. That label is the shield that gets used to create a unified narrative and cultural and political defense to protect their rights and place in society and give htem all something collective to refer to instead of having to explain and justify themselves each individually. Don't expect them or their allies to put down that shield until they stop facing credible attacks.

One of the more insidious things about the prevailing culture is the way that it encourages people, almost to the extent that it is unthinkable to do otherwise, to identify with their desires -- especially if those desires are sexual. People make fun of the Evangelical thing where they insist on saying "same-sex-attracted" instead of "gay", as if it's some shibboleth, but the reason for this is that "gay" carries with it an assumption that it is, and ought to be, part of one's identity, and the Evangelicals are right that it's a big part of the problem.

I want to chime in to absolutely agree with this, particularly from the perspective of a somewhat conservative Christian, though I'd argue it's an insight that you'll find much more broadly as well. You are not your desires. Put like that, it has a very Buddhist ring to it as well, and I daresay you might find similar ideas in psychotherapy. A desire might be a passing thing, or it might be something that you need to tame and control, or it might be something like a sickness or a pathology. At any rate, it is something that passes through your mind, not your mind itself.

I suppose a gay activist might reply here with the claim that same-sex-attraction isn't a desire as such, but rather it's a permanent disposition. A desire is something in the moment, e.g. "I want to have sex with that hot guy". A permanent disposition over time or even an attribute is different. It's not about specific individual desires, but rather about an overarching framework, the structure in which individual desires rise and pass away.

There's a sense in which that's obviously true, I suppose. By way of comparison, a desire to have a beer could arise in anyone, for all sorts of reasons, but the state of being an alcoholic is more than that. Being an alcoholic is some sort of resilient-across-time tendency which may produce the desire to have a beer on a regular basis, but which is nonetheless more than just the first-order desire.

However, while I accept this precisification as a fair description of the nature of desire, I don't think it changes the central point here - whether we're talking about desires or dispositions, there's still a claim about identity that's being made.

Christians sometimes argue that the core of our identity should be in the confession of the risen Christ - it's being joined to him that forms who we are. They then go on to criticise groups like Spiritual Friendship for getting the order wrong. You aren't a gay person who happens to be a Christian - you're just a Christian, and while you may have some struggles in the flesh (as do we all), those struggles in no way change or reorder your fundamental identity, which is to say, a child of God, a sinner, forgiven, redeemed by Christ's blood. It would be absurd for people to identify as 'gluttonous Christians' or 'proud Christians' or 'Christians tempted to adultery'. The same applies. Christ comes first - he will not accept being made a hobby or an extra.

That might be valid there, but if we want to make a wider critique, we probably need to say something that's understandable even for secular people. I suppose for them what I would say is that identifying with one's desires seems like it carries with it the hidden implication that it's the fulfilment of one's desires that's the key to long-term happiness or to spiritual meaning or whatever else. That, I would argue, is a dangerous mistake. As far as I'm aware, even quite basic pop psychology has retreated from the idea that happiness comes from the fulfilment of desires. Instead, it typically arises as a byproduct of something else - the best advice for how to be happy is generally to focus on doing something else meaningful.

This is by no means saying (from a secular perspective, at least) that one shouldn't be attracted to one's own sex, or that one shouldn't live as the other sex, or generally that one shouldn't be LGBT. LGBT identity may well be compatible with all of this! Just be gay or be trans and then go and live a meaningful, other-oriented life. Rather, it's that one's desires, whether sexual or otherwise, should not be at the heart of your identity. They are not what produce long-term happiness or welfare.

I mean, but conversely, who should have the right to determine what feelings are or aren't part of an identity? I mean conversely, if I start saying "divine-attracted" or "people who experience a religious impulse" and note that they don't have to raise their children to believe in Hell, they can't help that they perceive the divine but pushing it on others is a choice- I suspect some of the same people would become very angry at me.

Hell, being grossed out by gayness also doesn't need to be part of people's identity. As they say, "you are not immune from propaganda identifying with your impulses."

The investment and divestment of impulses from your identity is to some extent voluntary. However, it also serves as a signal as to which impulses you value the highest. To say that "SSA do not have to make that a part of their identity" is close to saying "SSA should not make that part of their identity" which is itself approximately equivalent to "society should not try to fulfill or support SSA". At which point I start disagreeing: so what if men have impulses to have sex with men? Society is a system to arbitrate the fulfillment of impulses with minimal friction. The religious impulse or the purity impulse should not get primacy over the gay impulse.

I mean, but conversely, who should have the right to determine what feelings are or aren't part of an identity?

Clearly, the individual.

Of course having the right is very distant from every exercise of that right being good and healthy. I can choose to identify myself by my sexual interests, I can also choose to eat three pizzas a day. Neither is good for my long term wellbeing - even with sexual interests as mild and vanilla as mine.

A society that celebrates gluttony is similarly grotesque to one that celebrates lust or anger or greed or any other vice. And indeed, there are various cultures and subcultures that do celebrate those things, to the detriment of their members.

I am not inclined towards gay sex, but I am inclined towards promiscuity - like most men, I find the idea of sleeping with lots of women to be attractive. But that would not be a good way to maintain a life and a family, so I deny those baser desires. Similarly, I deny my impulses towards anger and violence.

How much worse off I would be if I decided these desires were "simply the way I am" and constructed a worldview where any effort to improve my behaviour was "not being true to myself".

Society is a system to arbitrate the fulfillment of impulses with minimal friction.

If that is what society really is, I say to hell with it. The amorphous blob of "the formless mass that was Ubbo-Sathla reposed amid the slime and the vapors. Headless, without organs or members, it sloughed from its oozy sides, in a slow, ceaseless wave, the amoebic forms that were the archetypes of earthly life".

If that's society, I'd honestly rather be an earthworm. At least I'd be performing a useful function.

Useful to who? Useful in what way?

How do you reckon with the fact that the only reason the earthworm does anything is to fulfill it's impulses, and it leverages it's billion year evolutionary history and nonstick skin to do so with minimal friction?

I don't think that people who are grossed out by gay sex think of that as part of their identity, though. They think that their emotions are tapping into something real on that topic, but they don't make an identity out of grossed-out-by-gayness. For the most part, at least, they trust those emotions, not identify with them.

But on the meta level, the object level matters (heh). Yes, I think that adopting some identities is good, and adopting others is bad; that sexual desires are bad things to have as identities; that people would be better off if society discouraged people from adopting these bad identities -- or at least didn't put its thumb on the scale the other way as currently.

Or for those who prefer quotations on the subject, from Heretics by G.K. Chesterton:

Somebody complained, I think, to Matthew Arnold that he was getting as dogmatic as Carlyle. He replied, "That may be true; but you overlook an obvious difference. I am dogmatic and right, and Carlyle is dogmatic and wrong." The strong humour of the remark ought not to disguise from us its everlasting seriousness and common sense; no man ought to write at all, or even to speak at all, unless he thinks that he is in truth and the other man in error. In similar style, I hold that I am dogmatic and right, while Mr. Shaw is dogmatic and wrong.

Why though? Why not attraction as identity, instead of race as identity or job as identity or cult as identity or gender as identity?

They are all equally valid and equally worthless way to construct yourself; I don't see why we should say "This cultural hallucination is good but this one is bad" without reference to either outcomes or principles. Those can be argued, at least.

I'm thinking it's fair for attraction to form a core part of your identity if it's a long-lasting constant. I'm sure even the retvrners might include attraction to one's spouse as essential to identity.

But I don't think it's valid to assume that this applies to everyone, equally, as the wokes do.

And I especially don't think that it should be the only or chiefest element of one's identity, since it's only a small part of the human experience.

As a gender abolitionist, I agree. I think attraction, sex, and gender being part of identity is fucking stupid; anything that you don't choose for yourself as part of your identity likewise.

That said, society at large down to the legal system doesn't agree.

Basically; Until nobody gives more of a shit if it's adam and steve instead of adam and eve it will be a core piece of identity because enough people around said gay dudes will make it plain that THEY consider them diferent.

anything that you don't choose for yourself as part of your identity likewise.

Now this I tentatively disagree with. Do you think that only what you choose for yourself should be essential to your identity?

Basically; Until nobody gives more of a shit if it's adam and steve instead of adam and eve it will be a core piece of identity because enough people around said gay dudes will make it plain that THEY consider them diferent.

Because Adam and steve would have failed to sire so much as Cain and Abel, nevermind the rest of humanity. Society and law should treat gay couples differently because they are different. This seems entirely obvious.

Now this I tentatively disagree with. Do you think that only what you choose for yourself should be essential to your identity?

Yup. Anything else is loser shit in my mind. It's laying the cornerstone of your personality on being tall or having the gene that makes cilantro taste like soap. I allow that in society as it is, your identity will be based off of stuff that has the same value as those examples; things that have nothing to do with your choices or history or efforts and everything to do with the genetic lottery. In an imagined perfect world people going around being all "I am a ciltrosoaparian" will be rightly ridiculed as FOOLS and JESTERS.

Basically; Until nobody gives more of a shit if it's adam and steve instead of adam and eve it will be a core piece of identity because enough people around said gay dudes will make it plain that THEY consider them diferent.

I believe this is true the second people also treat couples that don't have children, the infertile, anyone who remains married to a woman past menopause, people that use birth control, and priests with the same level of scrutiny and antipathy as they do gay people (or the opposite, from some parts of the population.)

As the view I outlined does not exist outside the most terminally online spaces and never extends out of them into real life where it might get you made fun of, I empirically deduce the issue with homosexuality must come from something else.

Sure, but then the argument is on who is right, and I am not aware of a strong reason for why who you love should be wrong to be.

I think that sexuality as an identity is either a very narrow and selfish identity, when it's separate from a culture and community, or when it is part of a community, it is not very healthy to center that community around sexuality.

As @07mk said below, you have absolutely thought about this at least an order of magnitude more in one paragraph than anyone on CNN has in all their lives put together. Society didn't come to their beliefs on this subject via rational scientific exploration and explanation. They did so through pure cultural power and intimidation. "You don't want to be an X-ophobe? Then mouth these words and make sure not to think about them too much." Two examples come to mind.

First, I was in grad school at the time. Hung out with a bunch of other overly-educated folks, but at least we're mostly all technical people who value rigor and stuff, not like those fru-frus on the other side of campus. Anyway, I had been taking some neuroscience classes, and so I'd been thinking a lot about how good arguments are constructed in this space and had seen a variety of examples. So, when the topic of sexuality comes up at the bar, I ever so gently and ever so carefully express the slightest of possible concerns that I've been seeing all this really interesting work in neuroscience, and I'm just not quite sure I've really actually personally seen all that much conclusive work on sexuality that entirely supports Dogmatic Position. You know, so, surely it's out there, and someone can probably link me to it or something.

I was expecting, or I guess at least just hoping for, some kind of rational response that either brought to light some form of evidence or argument that was relevant. Maybe a, "Huh, I'll have to actually go through the literature, and see what I can find before I make up my mind." Nah. You get stared at like you're an alien. Like they can't possibly believe that you'd even entertain the idea... not even the idea that Dogmatic Position isn't true... but that you'd even entertain the idea that Dogmatic Position isn't trivially true and needs no evidence and why would you even think about trying to gather evidence on this topic.

The second example is the APA's brief in Obergefell. Here, we had the most prestigious group of experts with the opportunity to make the absolute best scientific case for Dogmatic Position. If it were so abundantly clear from mounds of literature, surely they could at least start us down the path of understanding how the argument/evidence works. You know what they brought? An opinion poll. I shit you not. They also took a review that said, "Research into conversion therapy is shit-tier and tells us basically nothing," and converted it into a form of, "Conversion therapy doesn't seem to work," but otherwise that was it. An opinion poll and research that we think is so bad that we can't really get anything out of it. That's their best scientific evidence for Dogmatic Position.

Moving forward to the Year of Our Lord 2023, very few people actually bother defending Dogmatic Position anymore. Fewer still even attempt to bring actual scientific evidence. The vast vast majority still view Dogmatic Position as just unquestionable first truth, and if you're questioning it, it must be because you have evil right wing political ends.

So before any of those people pounce on my comment, I'll leave you with a third example. I also took a queer theory course back when. I was seeing the beginnings of the woke thing, but didn't know what it was about, wondered if there was some real academic core to it, figured I'd have the best chance of finding some interesting academic core if I just went straight to the academics. In any event, when it came to the question of "biological determinism", my prof said flatly that she was agnostic. So, if you're about to rush to accuse me of evil right wing political ends, please instead formulate your comment as accusing her of having evil right wing political ends.

I have zero doubt that sexual preferences and predilections can be substantially altered through a combination of conditioning, cognitive therapy, and repetition.

this seems like denial or repression though. does the underlying urge ever go away?

Worth telling you: I got this post on the volunteer queue. I'm not the original reporter, so I don't know exactly why it was reported, but at a wild guess your lack of capital letters probably strikes some people as "low-effort".

this seems like denial or repression though. does the underlying urge ever go away?

I think this is kinda irrelevant. The underlying urge to bang Perkins waitresses certainly never went away for Tiger Woods, but his executing on that urge was not good for him or the rest of his family.

There is also an open question as to homosexual urges as to how much their development itself is conditioned. As we saw with the Catholic Priest scandal, it was a bunch of priests sodomizing teenage boys, simply replicating the behavior they had been taught as a different priest sodomized them 20 years earlier. And because no one much cares to police the sexual adventures of teenage boys (except those they have with teenage girls) this dynamic seems both common and accepted in the gay community.

I am again agnostic. While homosexuality isn't among them, I can say that I have had strong impulses and preferences regarding various things in life that I no longer have. Certainly, fetishes and kinks can come and go (heh) and often seem to be the product of conditioning. I honestly haven't done any meaningful reading on mechanisms or extent for these sorts of things, but it would be surprising to me if there isn't quite a bit of variance in just how much fluidity and control over that fluidity people have.

To be clear, I am not coming at this from any sort of prescriptive perspective.

'Ex-gay' and 'gay but desperately repressing it so you can lead a miserable life of permanent chastity' are qualitatively different claims.

The people that CNN is claiming to be debunked call themselves the 'ex-gay movement'. That's the level of claim at question here, at least at the top level.

Is this purely an academic discussion over whether homosexuality is innate/controllable, or is there an additional implication that homosexual acts should be avoided? If the latter, I’d be interested in hearing reasons why.

I (very quietly)consider myself to be, well, not quite ex-gay but certainly ex-bi, and the median representative of the camp which hates conversion therapy has never quite figured out what they’re actually saying, while the median conversion therapist does less than a homeopath. There is an extremely broad range of things covered under the label ‘conversion therapy’- ranging from electric shocks while looking at gay porn to forced non-sexual same sex bonding to talk therapy. There’s a typical motte and Bailey, obviously, but the electric shocks thing is genuinely both stupid and harmful. And lots of cranks and charlatans are genuinely happy to tell you they can turn you straight, for a price. But conversely most of the opponents of conversion therapy seem to honestly not care one way or another if it works, it should be banned because fewer homosexuals is an inherently bad thing.

For the record, I used a sort of variant of courage international(the one Antonin Scalia’s son is a chaplain for) without going through courage international the organization. I certainly think it worked well enough and was probably good for me in ways other than just no longer wanting to have gay sex(which, whether or not it’s morally evil, is very definitely an unhealthy habit which is worth discouraging).

I don't know why you chose to try to eliminate that desire in yourself, but much respect. It's really difficult, in our culture, to reject seeing that kind of desire as part of one's identity, both because of how these desires present themselves and because of the way that the culture insists on talking about them. You did a difficult -- and IMO praiseworthy -- thing.

I'd also love to see an effortpost on this if you are comfortable with it. In particular I'd like to hear why you think it worked so well for you, when a lot of people, including many who sincerely tried, seem to have met with less success. (I have some theories but they are not particularly well founded.)

I realize this is a deeply personal matter but have you considered a much longer effort-post on this? I've never heard of conversion therapy working before outside of some thathappened-style stories.

To you and @dovetailing; this is indeed a deeply personal matter. As I said, I used a version of the Courage international program, although run independently rather than institutionally, and courage international claims a higher than average success rate. Take that claim with as much or little salt as you prefer. I do not particularly like dwelling on it, but I think that I probably benefitted psychologically in ways other than changing my sexuality. I do not have the therapy workbook nor do I intend to try to dig up the journal I kept, but there was a companion book called, I think, Battle for Normality and written by a Dutch psychologist which explained much of the theory, at least. Everyone involved was male, although that would have been different had I been female(or at least, so I was told), and my same sex attraction was treated as an ordinary character flaw similar to a propensity to overeat or to excessive drinking.

As for motivation, it was really twofold- I found(and still do) ‘LGBT culture’ a creepy, offputting, fetishistic, hypersexualized, and just generally kind of gross exercise in putting on a performance of doing things that would get heterosexual men arrested, and also for religious reasons(as one would expect from having used courage international). I consider it to have been successful, and that this success was probably in part because I was bisexual, not gay. It was at the time difficult, occasionally caused distress, but in the way that difficult things worth doing often do. And I think having the attitude that it would be a difficult but worth doing way to improve also was an important reason; I did not think I was taking a magic pill.

  1. Why not simply disengage from LGBT culture, as opposed to disengaging from homosexuality? I dislike many aspects of “straight Chad culture,” for lack of a better term, but that doesn’t put me off from having hetero sex.
  2. Apart from your religion, why do you consider gay sex an unhealthy habit?

predilections can be substantially altered through a combination of conditioning, cognitive therapy, and repetition

And if this isn't true then we should seriously consider making pedophilic urges result in irreversible life imprisonment (but I bet a popular alternative would be execution).

I dislike the idea of thought crimes, even if they are heinous thoughts.

Agreed.

But if predilections are indeed not mutable by conditioning or therapy, then at the very least all convicted pedophiles must never be released from prison.

Under a nation of laws, this not exactly how it works. In practice, my understanding of the legal system in the United States is that pedophiles convicted of a serious sexual crime are imprisoned according to the letter of the law, and then upon release shifted into some kind of permanent* detention in a institution for the criminally insane. It is of course, not legal to imprison people simply based on the say so of a psychiatrist that they are a pedophile.

We can make new laws. If sexual predilections are not influenced by therapy or conditioning, then it could be made a legal requirement to hold child molesters in prison for many decades or for them to be involuntarily committed.

In other contexts people can be involuntarily held on the say so of a cop or a psychiatrist. If they are a likely danger. I don't want thought crimes, but being a pedophile is a real danger to children. This is not inherently legally impossible.

You don't want thought crimes, but you do want to put people in prison based on what they think and feel, and in the absence of them actually having done anything, based on the say so of a cop.

I don’t believe any state in the union involuntarily institutionalizes sex offenders, even for crimes against children. After being released from prison, such criminals are almost always put on a permanent, publicly-available sex offender registry; is that possibly what you’re thinking of?

Minnesota does:

The majority of these offenders served prison time and were then civilly committed because they were deemed too dangerous to release. Some came straight from juvenile custody.

The patients claim the Minnesota Sex Offender Program offers little rehabilitation or chance of release from facilities at Moose Lake and St. Peter. And, they say, the indefinite detention violates their constitutional right to due process.

In the history of the program, no one has been unconditionally released, Gustafson said. One man was granted provisional release two years ago. And as the experts evaluate more patients, he expects more orders.

EDIT: More background:

State courts have sent more than 560 high-risk sexual predators to the Minnesota Sex Offender Program for indefinite treatment since 1995. The only person ever released was later pulled back inside for a violation and died there.

Thanks for the correction. According to this article, 20 states allow for the involuntary commitment of sex offenders, which my previous Google search failed to pull up.

Also, the article I linked to is a bit more up-to-date than the two you quoted from. According to it, 15 inmates have been released completely and 135 transferred to “less secure facilities” over the past several years, following complaints about the program. On the other hand, 6% of the 741 inmates (all men) haven’t even been convicted of a crime, which raises serious red flags in my mind.

I’ll admit to being a bit torn about this. I tentatively support committing some fraction of criminals (both sex offenders and otherwise) whose crimes were particularly gruesome and who seem particularly likely to reoffend. Not knowing exactly what these 741 men did, I can’t say whether they would fit my (nebulous and ill-thought-out) criteria.

Not just this, but by not imprisoning high propensity to pediophilia people there are children who will end up getting abused who would not have been abused in the counterfactual. Now you can say that's fine and accept the background level of child abuse this causes as you believe this is less damaging than mass incarceration but you actually have to make an argument about the tradeoff between potential pedophile's freedom and the rights of children to not be abused, and I do not see anyone in modern western society being willing to touch that with a 100 ft barge pole.

The majority of child abuse, including sexual abuse, is committed by non-pedophiles so society is apparently already on board with such trade-offs. Advocating the incarceration of pedophiles simply due to their attractions is just a way for lazy self-righteous people to feel like they are protecting children without having to do the work of actually looking into the causes of abuse and thinking seriously about the trade-offs that would be required to avert it.

Not every slope is slippery. Pedophiles are reviled in a much different manner than internet contrarians. Some guy posting about how he votes libertarian isn't in danger of imprisonment.

what about an internet contrarian posting about holocaust denial? or maybe one posting a meme?

not only is this slope slippery, we already slipped off and fell down quite a ways with no bottom in sight

I really don't think defending pedophiles is a good way to avoid being perceived as causing societal problems. But even if it was, I would rather go to prison.

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you actually have to make an argument about the tradeoff between potential pedophile's freedom and the rights of children to not be abused, and I do not see anyone in modern western society being willing to touch that with a 100 ft barge pole.

Oh, you're just clinging on to some scraps of believing in general sanity. They're already working on that trade-off:

Results from these broader healthcare practitioner studies revealed that MAPs’ abovementioned skepticism concerning therapists’ willingness to treat them and MAPs’ fear of being stigmatized or (unnecessarily) reported to legal authorities may not be unfounded. Mental health professionals and students in training indicated to being willing to report MAPs to legal authorities due to explicit stigmatization and/or a lack of knowledge about the administrative framework concerning reporting standards (e.g., Beggs Christofferson, 2019; Stephens et al., 2021; Walker et al., 2022). For example, clinicians’ decisions to officially report a client who disclosed sexual interest in children were a function of the number of client risk factors (i.e., child sexual exploitation material use, access to children), although, even in the absence of any risk factor, 12% of the clinicians indicated that they would report their client (Stephens et al., 2021). In a study by Beggs Christofferson (2019), 14% of the surveyed therapists considered reporting a client who disclosed sexual interest in children, even if this meant to break the relevant confidentiality law. Among social service students, 54% agreed to report “a pedophile” client (no sexual offense was mentioned) to the police (strikingly, this rate was reduced to 7% when the case in question was labeled as someone with sexual interest in children but who never has committed any offense against children; Walker et al., 2022).

You see? Minor Attracted Persons (please do not say 'paedophile', that is incorrect terminology) are reluctant to go to therapists because of fears around mandatory reporting. And the therapists we surveyed said they'd be willing to report clients they deemed dangerous. So the conclusion is... therapists have to learn to be more understanding and accepting, stop stigmatising, and drop the threat of reporting people to the cops.

In terms of therapist competency, only between roughly a quarter and 43% of practitioners answered correctly that pedophilia is a sexual attraction to children below the age of 11 and such general knowledge deficiencies about aspects related to minor attraction were associated with stigmatizing attitudes (Lievesley et al., 2022).

Even among the more enlightened Swiss, there are still those bad old stigmatising attitudes:

In terms of non-offending MAPs’ perceived dangerousness to children, the majority of Swiss therapists (58.8%) affirmed that a strong link exists between sexual interest in children and child sexual abuse and roughly one in five agreed that sexual interest in children will sooner or later lead to child sexual abuse (20.1%) or that many who have sexual interests in children will also have sex with children (19.4%; Table 2). Concerning punitive attitudes the large majority (84.7%) agreed that non-offending MAPs should not be allowed to work with children, and 40.3% believed that they should undergo mandatory psychotherapy. Roughly a quarter (26%) affirmed that citizens should be informed in case sexual offenders against children move into their neighborhood. However, only a minority opted for psychopharmacological “castration” (8.7%), preventive detention (6.8%), or openly accessible sexual offender registries (4.7%). Finally, aspects that related to deviancy were strongly affirmed by Swiss outpatient therapists: 80.3% believed that non-offending MAPs needed treatment, 57.1% agreed that these patients were sick, and 48.9% ruled out that they were normal with just rare sexual inclinations.

Therapists should be trained that MAPs are the No True Scotsman:

Rather than pondering the yet dominating question in MAP treatment of whether someone with pedohebephilic sexual interests will victimize children, therapists should focus on the question under which specific boundary conditions their clients might (or, importantly, might not) pose a risk to children and how these specific dynamic risk factors can be therapeutically dealt with – if necessary at all in an individual case. Given the fact that child sexual abuse is prevalently committed also by non-pedohebephilic individuals (e.g., Schmidt et al., 2013), this implies adequate knowledge about relevant risk factors. Such basic criminal psychological facts, however, are not part of current general clinical training curriculae in psychology or medicine and should help to keep the prevailing risk focus in check. This may be conducive to setting the stage for recognizing other concerns that lead MAPs to seek therapeutic help.

See? If someone abuses a child, then he was never a real MAP to begin with, and no MAP is likely to go on to abuse children (or at least, very unlikely except under specific circumstances which you should recognise and help them manage). So don't think about "are children at risk here?" when dealing with a client, or else you're just a big ol' meanie!

Definitely someone struggling with this, who hasn't done anything yet, and who is seeking therapy to change or at least sublimate their attraction should be able to get help and shouldn't be scared off by "They'll tell the cops and I'll be labelled a sex offender and my life will be ruined and a mob will try and beat me up or even kill me". But "shift to thinking about dynamic risk factors" will lead to the same attitudes that resulted in "violent rapist who assaulted two women and still has all functional genitals of course should go into a woman's prison as she was a real woman all along, even while raping cis women with her feminine penis and even though she didn't come out as trans until being prosecuted for those crimes". Yeah, no.

Long before you put paedophiles in jail, you should argue for the much cheaper approach of a special arm of the police whose job it is to surveil every house for child abuse. You could probably even farm most of it out to AI. So since we don't even do this, it's not just that society accepts the current level of child abuse in trade for not having to put an unknown fraction of the populace in jail, it accepts the current level of child abuse in trade for not providing every household with a Child Abuse Safety Siri, which is much lower. We don't even do this with schools or churches! In other words, just the cost of implicitly accusing every member of society of being a potential child molester is already too high to be worth stopping the vast majority of abuse that happens. In conclusion, society seriously does not care very much about the background noise of child suffering.

Would you support locking up anyone who feels the urge to commit violent crimes, even if they have succeeded in keeping this urge in check?

The premise here is the claim that sexual predilections are not subject to therapy or conditioning. So in the narrow context of sexuality you can't cure pedophiles or "cure" gay people through conversion therapy.

I don't mean this as fully general advocacy of thoughtcrime.

Re: first two paragraphs:

So, I think you have to sort of take claims in the context they're being made, rather than trying to universalize them. I do wish people were more careful with their language so that this type of interpretation isn't needed, but we'd be living in a very different world if people actually talked that way.

Is it possible that a thousand years from now, we'll have advanced neurosurgical techniques that can totally rewrite any part of your personality or preferences into anything you want, including making you gay or straight or whatever? Sure, that seems likely to me.

Does that mean it's wrong to say that the idea that you can change your sexuality has been 'debunked'?

Not when the context of that statement is on a political reporting show talking about a politician and his links to a specific group, Exodus, that made specific claims about specific ways to change sexuality that have been debunked.

Not when the larger context of the statement is about modern-day politics and public policy and lifestyle choices and culture war and all teh ex-gay and conversion therapies people actually have tried and actually are advocating now, rather than what scifi devices we might have in a thousand years.

I will admit to being somewhat hypocritical here, in that I just made a comment denouncing blanket statements because they're always wrong, and advocating more careful language. Saying 'the idea that you can change your sexuality has been debunked' is the type of blanket statement that will always be wrong, because it's too broad and anything is possible.

But really, that means that the sentiment they're trying to convey was stated informally, not that the sentiment they're trying to convey is wrong. Normal people can appreciate the context and understand what they're saying. Being rational is great, but it shouldn't lower your ability to comprehend communications below that of normal people just using their intuition.

Re: third paragraph:

There's certainly a conflict there, but the conflict is in the map, not the territory.

It's absolutely true that there are different ways of using language and different ways of modeling sexuality that are at odds here. But the disagreements are all about semantics and models, not the reality.

The reality is that most people are pretty stably attracted to certain categories of people.

The gay rights movement built a taxonomy to talk about that around the terms man/woman, but now the trans rights movement wants to build a different taxonomy around those same words. That makes it hard to talk about coherently until one side 'wins' and new language gets ironed out; maybe we'll settle on 'masc' and 'fem' for orientation stuff, I hear a lot of young people using those these days. Or maybe people in 15 years will just say 'I like dicks or 'I don't like dicks' and cal it a day. I don't fucking know anymore.

But the point is, that's all about language, not about which people are attracted to which people. That's just a stable thing in reality, and there's no particular conflict about it in regards to any of these issues.

if I want to call every song I like 'Rock and Roll', and someone else wants to call a song they sing 'Jazz' even though I like it, then we have a semantic conflict. And if for some reason politics gets involved, maybe we'll get incredibly angry about that semantic conflict and scream about it for decades and pass laws about it.

But I still like their song and they still like singing it. There's nothing weird or inconsistent happening in reality there.

In it, they refer to the idea of someone going from gay to straight as "debunked"

Without even touching the gay/trans contradiction, this quoted part is one of my bugaboos. As journalism has firmly become more focused on persuasion over reporting, I hear this kind of unsubstantiated statement-of-worldview-as-fact so often from journalists and it always makes my head ache. Very often, concrete statements like this will be done absent of any actual investigation. I listen to a handful of daily short-form headlines podcasts from major organizations, and the base-stealing that goes on is nearly criminal.

For example, very often in news stories about Trump's election claims, the claims will be described by reporters as lies, whereas they are really claims without sufficient proof, which is different. They may in fact be lies, but the statement that they are lies is also often a claim without sufficient proof. Now, I happen to think that they are likely fantasy/wishful thinking, so I am on the side of those who by default disbelieve them, but I also try to maintain some epistemic humility. Most of the claims, as I understand it, have never actually been investigated beyond superficial questioning of motivated participants and taking or rejecting their word as befits the reporter's pre-established narrative.

You see this a lot in environmental reporting, where causality is assigned to "climate change" without attribution. We also saw in a lot of COVID reporting the annoying new pattern of new stories with headlines in the pattern of "No, (insert party) didn't (insert dissenting claim)..." which smugly "corrected" assumed misinformation without ever investigating the veracity of the claim. This example, No, Science Clearly Shows That COVID-19 Wasn’t Leaked From A Wuhan Lab (https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/05/20/no-science-clearly-shows-that-covid-19-wasnt-leaked-from-a-wuhan-lab/?sh=41cb66e65585), discusses why the claim is likely not true, and lists the weakman arguments it purports to debunk, but even then it equivocates quite a bit more in the article than its definitive headline indicates.

How much do you want to bet that the CNN panelist asserting that conversion therapy has been "debunked" could not cite a single study to that effect, but would more likely point to popular culture, like books/movies such as "The Miseducation of Cameron Post," "But I'm a Cheerleader," and "Boy Erased?"

even then it equivocates quite a bit more in the article than its definitive headline indicates.

In particular, the article concludes with "There is no compelling reason to believe that P is true," while the headline says "There is compelling reason to believe that P is false."

It is worth remembering that reporters do not write the headlines that appear above their articles. The headline over an article in the "Science" section is written by a generalist sub-editor who knows even less about science than a science journalist does.

That is merely a defense of the reporter in question, but not at all a defense of the media source. If they let their employees systemically tell falsehoods, then that media source systemically tells falsehoods.

The headline over an article in the "Science" section is written by a generalist sub-editor who knows even less about science than a science journalist does.

That doesn't seem to hold them back from substituting the actual claims in the article with their own beliefs, always in the same politically correct direction. That goes beyond incompetence.

A man attracted to other men cannot become a straight man, but he can become a straight woman. Do the people articulating this view not notice that this is at least a difficult pair of propositions to adhere to?

"A man, who is born attracted to men, should be allowed to date/see/marry/sex with men" and "a man who is* born in the wrong body and should be able to transition to a women" don't seem contradictory to me, thought I do admit that they do seem in conflict.

Isn't the explanation: "both are innate, and should be allowed"? They are both a quality/innateness you're "born with" and cannot change.

If you can change your mind on these things, then they aren't innate.

Thus why detransitioners (and people who "decide" not to be gay anymore?) are seen as such traitors?

Isn't the explanation: "both are innate, and should be allowed"? They are both a quality/innateness you're "born with" and cannot change.

The point is not what should/shouldn't be allowed. The point is that progressives say that one reason gay conversion therapy is bad is because it doesn't even work.

However gender identity is more biological than sexual preferences but progressives belive societal conditioning is so strong it is able to get women in men's bodies to behave like men for decades of their lives, to the point that they often didn't even realise they were women in men's bodies until they were like 25+.

In that case what stops the possibility of societal conditioning being used to get people who are actually gay to behave like they are straight, especially for those people who are questioning their sexual preferences and are unsure (i.e. gay conversion therapy should work)?

Note that this argument is completely distinct from whether we should be doing gay conversion therapy or not, it's just arguing about the efficiency of it, it's a "can" vs "ought to" distinction.

huh. thats a good argument, thank you for replying. It does make me think.

though idk if i can use this as an argument in a SF party, but at least personally this makes a lot of sense.

Basically, we need to accept trans cuz conditioning is really strong to remain in your born-with gender (or is it sex?). So if it’s so strong that you are convinced you are born in the right body, despite internal claimed incongruities, then….

yeah it makes sense to me

for ex. I did theatre, and even the straights were bicurious and kinda convinced that “don’t knock it until you try it”. but mostly everyone was in straight relationships.

the few that were convinced to try, man or woman, all honestly remained straight and date/married straight partners. Looking back, I honestly think their even experimenting was some pressure, but mostly result of so called “gay propaganda”.

Childhood as gay conversion therapy does work: some people only realize they are gay in college. They gather the usual evidence, "women don't interest me" plus "wow that man makes me feel things", but without gayness as a model it just gets lost in the evidential noise of daily life.

The problem is that once you have the model of gayness, you can't exactly erase your memory and redo childhood. So it is a viable conversion therapy, possibly the only viable one, but it is not one that can be applied to a person it has already failed for.

Some people are born pedophiles, they should still be locked up and at the very least heavily monitored if they ever molest children.

good point. born psychopaths are still psychos and are bad for society

That seems unrelated: there's a difference between a partner and a victim.

I thought Born This Way was supposed to be about "can't you just not be gay?"

I think it's worth looking at the answers to that question when it's posed for other sexual orientations or desires. "Can't you just not be a public masturbator?" "Can't you just not be a pedophile?" "Can't you just not be a sadistic murderer, Ted?" If he says, "No! I was born this way, and I can't change!" then... well, so much the worse for him, right? Innateness is a crap argument for accepting a behavior.

One of these things is very much not like the other, as pedophilia isn't a behavior. One can avoid being a public masturbator by not masturbating in public. One can avoid being a sadistic murderer by not murdering anyone. How does one avoid being a pedophile? Not molesting a child is not sufficient. Not interacting at all with children is not sufficient. Engaging in sex you don't particularly enjoy with adults is not sufficient. Avoiding sex altogether is not sufficient. Saying "I was born this way and I can't change!" is a call for recognizing that it goes a lot deeper than simply "don't have sex with kids" and affects a lot of things that aren't necessarily obvious to people who only think of pedophilia in the context of child rape.

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I think it's worth looking at the answers to that question when it's posed for other sexual orientations or desires. "Can't you just not be a public masturbator?" "Can't you just not be a pedophile?" "Can't you just not be a sadistic murderer, Ted?" If he says, "No! I was born this way, and I can't change!"

I mean, first of all yes, I think that applies to all of those as well. I think people back then were conflating "can't you just not do the thing you like" and "can't you just like the normal thing instead." One of those is possible, the other isn't. But also, I genuinely think there's a difference in that most kinks, I believe including pedophilia, tend to be optional, not obligatory: you can get off without them. This does not apply to gayhood. I think there's maybe genuinely two separate categories here.

I’ve never liked born that way as an argument for allowing things. It’s irrelevant. People can be born with proclivities to all sorts of behaviors— drug use, thrill seeking, self isolation, intellectual pursuits, and taste in food and clothing. That they’re attracted to something doesn’t answer the question of whether it’s good. It’s good to be studious. It’s bad to be a drug user. Drug use costs the user, his social network, and society quite a bit.

good point. In the same vein, I remember the “even some animals are gay, so being gay is natural and fine” argument.

even as a kid I remember reading about how wild ducks rape, their their vaginas become more “anti-rape” and male penises also evolved to overcome that and can still rape.

I remember saying “oh so since animals rape, rape is natural and fine?” and of course it was kind if a shut-down argument, no real retort there. Need to bring it back!

I think maybe the appearance of conflict comes from imagining someone who says 'I am attracted to women, but that person who is calling themself a woman is not the type of person I am attracted to, they are faking and must be a man'.

Of course, stated like that, the answer is pretty obvious: you don't have to be attracted to every woman, and your attraction is not necessary to validate their identity.

Look at this meme.

It was made in the 2000s, an era in which it was totally legit for liberal people to make fun of fat people and their motivated reasoning and mental (certainly not physical!) gymnastics. Nowadays body positivity is the order of the day and liberals can only make fun of fat people if they're wearing MAGA hats.

The point of the joke, obviously, is that the fat woman in the photo claims that the shape of her body is entirely genetic in origin while ignoring the obvious dietary choices she makes which contribute to her body shape.

Perhaps the defining characteristic of modern progressivism is a wide-ranging assertion that social influences shape people's identities and desires. Men aren't naturally more interested in STEM than women, they've just been socialised to want to pursue careers in STEM, and were it not for this we'd see them going into childcare and education at the same rates as women. Men aren't naturally stronger and faster than women, it's just that women are systematically discouraged from playing sports. Most people aren't straight because that's their natural inclination, they've just been brainwashed by the heteropatriarchy and in the state of nature we'd all be bisexual. Stereotype threat, power posing, "internalised" Xism etc. etc. The apparent goal of many progressives is to undo the cultural conditioning (borrowing here from Marxist "false consciousness") which causes women to believe that they're more interested in childcare than computers. This false consciousness is unidirectional: a man can mistakenly believe that he's more interested in computers than childcare, but not vice versa; a repressed gay man can be in denial about his sexuality, but no straight man can mistakenly believe he's gay.*

This is the worldview underpinning the fury and rage surrounding the ROGD/social contagion model of transgender identity. I used to (by which I mean, at the time I started writing this comment) think that the tenets of gender ideology made for odd bedfellows with the rest of woke ideology. When I first heard about it, I was like "why are you guys so mad that social influences affect one's gender identity? You think social influences affect everything!" I thought that woke people had made a weird little carve-out for trans people, whose gender identity is assumed to be unresponsive to social influence in the way that their career aspirations or physical fitness might be.

But now that I think about it further, it makes sense from the false consciousness perspective. A trans person who mistakenly believes that they're cis until the moment their "egg hatches" is like a factory worker in Victorian England who, in a horrifying epiphany, realises the extent to which he is the victim of exploitation and alienation at the hands of his boss: they are to be commended, praised, welcomed with open arms. But a cis person who mistakenly believes they're trans: that's like being a strike-breaker. It's no accident that trans activists have nothing but contempt for detransitioners: they're traitors to the cause, scabs. This is one reason they resent the term "groomer", as that's not what they see themselves doing. If you're in a trans subreddit and you find yourself thinking that the list of "possible signs you might be trans" is so exhaustive that everyone alive must have at least one - that's a feature, not a bug. They don't think they're persuading children to be trans - they think that every child is already trans (and queer, and interested in topics associated with the opposite sex, and feminist etc.) and has simply been brainwashed into believing otherwise - if they lived in the state of nature then no "grooming" or education would be required.** Just like Marx thought that every proletariat already supported communism and had simply been tricked into thinking otherwise.***

So no, gender ideology and sexuality aren't carve-outs from the general woke assumption that social influences affect who you are (but only in one direction), they're central examples. But such a carve-out does exist within the woke framework. For whom, you ask? Look up top! Fat acceptance activists, as a group, do not acknowledge any social influences on their condition whatsoever. Hence all the hysterical caterwauling about how diets don't work and teasing fat people just makes them sad and I'm just big-boned and so on and so forth. I suspect quite a lot of fat acceptance activists wouldn't even recognise the joke in the meme above, they literally believe that diet and nutrition have zero impact, none, on how much you weigh. In the woke framework, genes may not determine how smart you are, or strong, or fast, or your career goals, or who you like to have sex with - but they damn sure determine whether you're a size 16 or an 8.

*People talk a lot about how Friends "aged poorly" and so on, but more than anything I think the B-plot here from which the episode derives its title would make woke people furious if it came out today, not least because it's still funny and more relevant now than at the time of release.

**Hence the historically tenuous claims that the gender binary is a recent artifact of Western capitalism and ancient civilizations had a more fluid conception of gender - "two-spirit" etc.

***This can get kind of Gnostic the more you think about it. It's not revisionist of the Wachowskis to claim that The Matrix was always intended as a trans metaphor - the reason this interpretation doesn't jump out at most people is because they're approaching gender ideology from the perspective of "most people are cis, but some people are trans and that's okay and they deserve respect and compassion" as opposed to the perspective of "everyone is trans, but most have been brainwashed into believing they're cis - freethinkers whose eggs have hatched see the truth". Cypher is a detransitioner and also a cowardly traitorous villain: not a coincidence.

"everyone is trans, but most have been brainwashed into believing they're cis"

But if everyone is trans, then there is no trans. Female brain in male body is female normal, male brain in female body is male normal. They can't be trans because they're not changing anything (except "yeah just need to take my puberty blockers" the same way there are multivitamin supplements for kids and teens). Maybe you don't even need to change your body; in that world it is perfectly true that men can get pregnant and women have dicks.

Vagina, uterus, ovaries, breasts, six months' pregnant? That's a guy and everyone accepts it, that's society's definition of what "male/man" means. Beard, penis and testicles, six foot six tall, built like a brick shithouse? That's a woman, that's what "female/woman" means.

The only trans people in that society would be those insisting "yeah I've got tits and a belle chose, but I'm really a woman!" or "yeah I have a dick and body hair like a yeti, but that doesn't mean I'm not a man!"

And it’s hard not to notice that virtually every example of false consciousness is being more functional, prosocial etc. strictly speaking it is better to be cis(gender identity lines up with your birth sex) than trans(gender identity does not line up with your birth sex). It is better to be able bodied than disabled, fit than fat, etc, etc.

Why do you think that is?

Absolutely, voted in favour in the referendum.

I was going to tepidly vote "yes" on the grounds that eh, civil marriage, why not? But the "Vote Yes" rainbow-farting campaign (with both our formerly traditional attitude parties going all-in on love, love) converted that to white-hot "Hell NO" vote because of the brain-melting stupidity.

The definitive moment for me when I flipped was when I was on a bus to our local city, the usual ads were playing on the radio, and on comes another one of the endless "Vote Yes For Love Love" referendum ads. And it was [expletive deleted] Mrs. Brown talking about her [expletive deleted] fictional son who does not exist and is not real and is only a character in a TV sitcom and how if he was gay and wanted to marry his partner and so forth and that's why we should all vote Yes for Love Love.

(Mrs. Brown isn't a woman, by the way; it's a character created and played by a guy in the tradition of pantomime dames). If it had been the actor talking about his real-life gay son - which so far as I know, he doesn't have - then I'd have shrugged and tuned it out. But it was the sitcom character talking about a fake child which didn't exist, and that was the same thing as all those real gays and lesbians just panting to march down the aisle (allegedly) and whose lives were blighted because sure they could have sex with whom they liked how they liked, they could live together, they could even be in domestic partnerships, but no - not being able to go down to the council registry office was plunging them into despair and fear, from which only our 'yes' vote could deliver them. Even, apparently, if they were figments of the imagination.

That's the exact moment I figuratively hit the roof and decided that I was definitely going to vote, and definitely going to vote "No". Because the glurge about "we only wanna be free to love" was bad enough, but now they were taking us for such idiots led around by whoever could tug on the heart-strings the hardest that fake fictional not-real characters wanting to fake fictionally not-real gay marry their fake fictional not-real lovers was supposed to convince us to junk all human tradition that "men and women marry" (whether that's one man and one woman, or one man and three hundred women, or one man and one woman in a short-term marriage or one woman marries five brothers or any other combination).

Like I said, the brain-melting stupidity of that just flipped me solidly to "Hell will freeze over before I ever again give in a millimetre on any of this shit".

Hold on, they subject you to audio ads on the bus?

They play radio stations, and the commercial ones run ads. Depending what station the driver picks, it can be "general AOR and talk radio" or "help I am going to jump out of this moving vehicle".

I never encountered that Mrs. Brown campaign, but you're dead right, that's very cheap and manipulative.

You were lucky. I only heard it the once, and couldn't believe my ears. I'd been getting the full "Love Love Campaign" ads on the wireless ad nauseam leading up to that, and my first reaction was "hang on, surely this is meant to be Brendan O'Carroll talking about one of his real life sons?" but no. Mrs. Brown and her fake son.

I went "how. effin'. stupid. do. they. think. we. are." and switched from tepid, didn't really care one way or another 'meh probably vote yes if I vote' to steam out of my ears 'damn straight I am going to vote and it'll be NO with bells on'.

You do understand that meme is false. Epistemic status - I do not excercise, diet, or abstain from alcohol. I am older than her and while obese, nowhere near her level.

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So you don't exercise, diet or abstain from alcohol, and you're obese.

Struggling to see how this contradicts the thesis presented by the meme.

I am much less obese than that woman you enjoy laughing at. I could not reach her weight if my life depended on it.

But you are still obese. Are you denying that your diet, lack of exercise and alcohol consumption contributed to your obesity?

Simply: lots of work by libs is a sort of gay conversion therapy for straight people. Pride parades, public school education, pride month, trans day of visibility etc. all exist to glorify homosexuality and, explicitly to help straight people easily “come out of the closet” as gay.

I don’t expect ideological consistency here, but it should be obvious that this implies the reverse should be true. Could you be a closeted…normie? I feel like many people go through this transition in their 30s anyway. They have children, regret not doing it earlier, move to the suburbs, and take the grill pill.

I think if we are going to have actual IRL trans/sterilization clinics for children, then at the very least straight people should be allowed to have therapy sessions where they talk about how they wish they werent gay.

Edit: it’s annoying to say this so forgive me but I just feel the need to say it: I have 0 problem with gay people. Many of my closest, and most loved friends are happily married gay people who just want to be left alone to have their families. They’re loving fathers, and seriously cherished members of my community. It routinely brings me to tears thinking about people being mean to them, and I end up feel a sort of parental desire to protect them from the world. I understand why they hear gay conversion therapy and instinctively recoil, but this is approximately how I think most people feel when they hear about trans conversion clinics, or children at pride events.

Simply: lots of work by libs is a sort of gay conversion therapy for straight people. Pride parades, public school education, pride month, trans day of visibility etc. all exist to glorify homosexuality and, explicitly to help straight people easily “come out of the closet” as gay.

I find this a very dubious assertion. It seems to me, both in terms of public assertion as well as mildly uncharitable questioning of their inner motivations, that the aim isn't to convert straight people, but to have people who are already gay (or at least not a zero on the Kinsey scale) to feel free to express their sexuality.

Would many activists prefer that their campaigns result in everyone turning bisexual or gay? Maybe, probably. Doesn't mean that's what they expect.

This is distinct from the odd grifter who painlessly claims to be gay for the sake of diversity points, since it's verboten to question them even if they've never sucked an actual dick in their lives, but even then they're more likely to claim to be trans or non-binary. While some activists might grudgingly tolerate this (or feel helpless to call it out according to the standards of self-identification they espouse), I don't think they approve of it per se.

but even then they're more likely to claim to be trans or non-binary.

Or even more nebulously, "queer".

What percentage of people going to gay conversion clinics do you think believe themselves be straight be afflicted with something they find undesirable?

I doubt it’s zero.

In their minds they are straight people who need help overcoming a psychological condition.

Would many activists prefer that their campaigns result in everyone turning bisexual or gay? Maybe, probably. Doesn't mean that's what they expect.

I don't think a significant fraction of them think being straight is bad, and even if they did, that's not likely the reason why they endorse Pride. And the tendency of many gays to take pride in "converting" "straight" men is more of a fetishization of the unattainable.*

Of course, I'm trying to interpret the question I think you're trying to ask, because as of the time of writing, what you said:

What percentage of people going to gay conversion clinics do you think believe themselves be straight be afflicted with something they find undesirable?

Makes no sense! I presume you meant "to be straight to be afflicted".

*Many gay people mock the straights, but or ask questions along the lines of "are the straights OK?" but that's more of an in-group catechism and bitching, rather than a genuine belief that being straight is somehow inferior.

Note that I'm specifically addressing gay men (or maybe lesbian too), the trans activist community has an unhealthy obsession with cracking eggs.

To make no sense! I presume you meant "to be straight to be afflicted".

His question was how many people go to conversion therapy go there with the intent of relieving themselves of homosexual attractions so they can live their preferred lives.

It is a bit of a tautology.

I think you’re missing my point, or maybe your being cheeky and I don’t realize it.

A straight person unconverted to gay, and a gay person unconverted to straight are equivalents.

It seems like the assumption is that you can only ever find out that you’re gay, as if that is an evolution. I’m saying it goes both ways. Consider a 20-something who experiments with homosexuality in college and then realizes that they don’t like it later in life.

This is the same as a gay person experimenting with heterosexuality and “coming out” later in life.

We seem to be socially okay with helping straight people convert to homosexuality, but not okay with the opposite.

Yeah. Be married to a woman for thirty years, have kids with her, then come out as gay: you were gay all along, baby!

Straight guy might have once-off sexual encounter of some kind with another guy: Okay dude, that means you're gay. No take-backs.

Gay guy might drunkenly have sex one time with a woman: No, that doesn't mean he's straight or bi! It was just the one time!

It really is a one-way street where you can only move towards and never away from full gayness; if you're bi, you're faking it or too chicken to come out as really gay.

It typically isn’t LGBT activist types who say that a man who has a one-off sexual encounter with another man is gay, though. That’s a ‘masculine’ or red tribe adjacent thing in the modern west, it’s more likely to be a homophobic person who thinks that a guy who fucked another guy once is 100% gay. Progs would say it means he’s bi or queer or whatever.

"Queer" seems to be the new catch-all phrase. And that's what I'm getting at: it's not considered "okay, you're straight, you just did that thing" but "hey dude, you might be queer, have you considered that?" from some of the progressive types.

It typically isn’t LGBT activist types who say that a man who has a one-off sexual encounter with another man is gay, though.

They do though. I've seen people declare others are self-hating gays for being slightly effeminate. They do the same thing with transgenderism nowaydays, and throw abuse at people who say it was just a phase for them.

It seems like the assumption is that you can only ever find out that you’re gay, as if that is an evolution. I’m saying it goes both ways.

There are plenty of people who experiment in college and then end up (almost entirely?) straight. They get a few jokes about them (Lesbian until Graduation and Gay until Graduation), but they aren't particularly subjected to much opprobrium that I can tell.

Is someone who had same sex relationships then went back to different sex relationship straight? or are they bi? I think it might be logically true that if you have been attracted to same sex people and acted upon said attraction, that even if you go back only to opposite sex relationships for the rest of the life, you might not be considered straight.

In other words it might not be equivalent. Especially if, ironically enough we consider straight the default. You either are forever (super) straight or you are not. You don't find out you're straight, you just are.Even the gayest guy I know, who realised he was gay very early in life, originally had the same ideas about romantically rescuing princesses in so on.

Your assertion is they are equivalent, but is it actually the case?

Equivalent for the purposes of my point, which is that “conversion therapy” is morally near to pride, LGBT holidays, trans therapy, etc.

But that only matters if going straight to gay or gay to straight are actually equivalent. If it's impossible to be made gay but possible to be made straight (for example) then they are not the same (and indeed vice versa). Assuming for the moment both attending conversion therapy and Pride are both consensual for now.

I think you’re missing my point, or maybe your being cheeky and I don’t realize it.

While I'm fond of sarcasm, in this case I presume it's the former.

Consider a 20-something who experiments with homosexuality in college and then realizes that they don’t like it later in life.

This is the same as a gay person experimenting with heterosexuality and “coming out” later in life.

We seem to be socially okay with helping straight people convert to homosexuality, but not okay with the opposite.

Even after you've offered a clarifying example, I'd have to disagree.

It's exceedingly common for women (if not men) to "experiment" with each other in college or school. Usually it's just the odd drunken kiss, but it can go further. I know this is true for a fact both because I've heard of it in the West and a friend of my ex drunkenly admitted that we were Eskimo siblings (the friend was a girl). They're otherwise straight, and go on to exclusive have heterosexual relationships and might not even think of a woman romantically again.

This has little in the way of repercussions or even anything beyond mild disapproval from the more staid, nobody I'm aware of advocates for reconverting them after they ceased to experiment with the same team.

I would agree with the Pride activists that any guy who was convinced by a Pride parade or other advocacy to start sucking dick or taking it in the rear wasn't particularly straight to begin with, leaving aside what they identified as.

Female sexuality mores are different than male sexuality.

The real rate of male homosexual experimentation is very hard to figure out and seems to vary by environment.

How much of that is cultural, though?

Girl-on-girl is a bit of raunchy fun. Guy-on-guy experimentation is likely to ick every woman who ever hears of your involvement, without even getting into man-on-man homophobia.

More comments

I can't say I disagree. But they both are presumably relevant here, and most guys don't even try experimenting with other men, so it's not like I can point at them.

This seems to be a very charitable read of what Johnson is saying here. The broad evangelical position is not a nuanced conception of sexual behavior and how it can be influenced, it is a belief that homosexuality is morally wrong, disgusting, and dangerous to society. Johnson is not expressing that sexuality is malleable, he is saying that sufficient religious prayer will remove wickedness from a sinner.

I’m sure sexual behavior and desire can be changed in all kinds of ways, (I doubt that there were Mesopotamians with a latex fetish) but I think giving Johnson credit on this is misunderstanding his position.

But really, the thing that keeps hitting me with dissonance isn't even the above points, which I can at least countenance reasonable counterarguments to, but the incongruity with the belief that gender itself is a mere social construct that is fully malleable to an individual's stated preference.

Isn't the current thinking something like the following:

  • The gender we each feel ourself to be is something we don't have control over.
  • The preferences we feel are also something we don't have control over.
  • Both are externally given to us, whether as a result of biology or socialisation or a complex mixture of factors. The only choice we are able to make is how we ask people to regard us.
  • In both cases, gender and sexual preferences, people should be allowed to seek to resolve any mismatch by changing their outer actions to line up with their inner realities.
  • Seeking to change one of these inner realities, however, is discouraged because gender and sexual preference are supposed to be basic, fundamental human qualities that will eventually push themselves to the fore and create inner turmoil if denied.

Not sure what I think about these issues personally but I'm not too sure if any of the the above statements contradicts any other.

Despite my own inclination to completely accept gay people qua gay people, I find nothing objectionable about Johnson's statements and see them as a much more accurate model of reality than what the CNN crew is expressing. I have zero doubt that sexual preferences and predilections can be substantially altered through a combination of conditioning, cognitive therapy, and repetition. I'm agnostic on whether this could allow someone who has a natural inclination towards homosexuality (or heterosexuality) to groom attraction for the sex that they didn't initially prefer, but it's not obvious to me, and I don't think there's good reason to say that it's deboonked as though this is just a common stylized fact.

I'm 99% certain that, in writing this paragraph, you thought about this issue at least one order of magnitude more than anyone you saw on CNN has in all their lives put together. For at least the past 2 decades, the dogmatic consensus has been that someone's sexuality is a part of their inner essence, that someone doesn't become gay or straight, they merely discover it. If you think about it empirically, it becomes immediately clear that we simply lack the mountains of scientific research in order to conclude this, much less have any confid in the conclusion, but why think about it empirically when thinking about it empirically can get you accused of homophobia?

More generally, there's a tendency of people to reject the effectiveness of what they consider morally abhorrent. You see this with other CW topics like death penalty (obviously it's barbaric AND it doesn't deter crime any better than the alternative) or torture (obviously it's excessively cruel AND it doesn't give us good info). The mirror image is the case too, such as affirmative action (obviously it's morally correct to give individuals belonging to oppressed categories extra opportunities, AND this will enable schools/companies to be better/smarter/richer by being able to make use of previously overlooked individuals from those categories).

I don't know if there's some psych term for this, but it's just incredibly common in all realms of politics, I think. Very often, they're even true. But also very often, people just jump to unwarranted conclusions by falling prey to this pattern.

i thought this was referred to as 'mood affiliation' in some circles but i'm not sure if that's the right term. maybe it's just confirmation bias. see: https://www.econlib.org/mood-affiliation-or-confirming-evidence/

The scientific evidence, from what I’ve read, seems to say that both sexuality and gender identity are influenced by the exposure to prenatal androgens and other hormonal factors. Gay men and trans women would have less androgen exposure than straight men - resulting in different physiological traits such as higher digit ratio and the infamous “gay face”. A gay man will be involuntarily aroused by homosexual sexual stimuli and there’s no evidence that psychological interventions can change that baseline physiological response. All kinds of men (bisexual, or straight men in prison) can have sex with men, but for gays, their attraction is fundamental physiological trait.

Meanwhile a trans woman is a biological male with some degree of gender dysphoria that takes steps to alter their gender presentation and goes on cross-sex hormones to alleviate that dysphoria. Again, gender presentation is a choice, but the gender dysphoria itself is an involuntary (possibly hormonally caused) condition, and psychological interventions will also have limited success - trans repressors will attest to the psychological toll it takes.

One difficulty I see is distinguishing between one’s inner state and one’s actions. A man is not gay because he has sex with men, he is gay because he is attracted to men. A gay man can be married to a woman and need to fantasise about men to have sex with her, and a straight man can have sex with men (e.g. in prison, on a ship) while thinking about women. There are people that will argue that if you’re a man who has sex with men, then you’re gay, but then does that mean that men who masturbate are attracted to their own hands? That teenage boys are attracted to couches, apple pies or whatever objects that they stereotypical use as masturbation aids?

Same with gender identity, except there definitions get even more controversial (i.e. “what is a woman”). The mainstream trans orthodoxy, from what I understand, says there is an inner “gender state” that can be reflected by your gender presentation, and the inner state is what we should call man/woman/non-binary/etc. Conservatives say there’s just biological sex and someone that’s an adult human male is a man, and someone that’s an adult female human is a woman. Personally I’m not sure there is really an inner “gender identity” in the same way there’s an inner sexual orientation, but gender dysphoria is definitely a thing, and it’s possible to change your gender presentation so that other people see you as the opposite sex and consequently call you a man/woman.

The scientific evidence, from what I’ve read, seems to say that both sexuality and gender identity are influenced by the exposure to prenatal androgens and other hormonal factors.

I think that this is what I have read the scientists wish the evidence showed. But instead it shows little if any of that, and instead shows nothing of the sort. To the extent there is any scientific inquiry on this question (and there is little, for reasons most people understand), it appears more to show that we know basically nothing. The brain scan stuff that was hyped up early on is totally bupkiss. For both homosexuality and transness. As has the small amount of research into things like hormone imbalances. Also, both being nit very highly heritable does point to environmental causes, but whether that is in the womb, early home, puberty, etc is simply not known to any real extent.

a trans woman is a biological male with some degree of gender dysphoria that takes steps to alter their gender presentation and goes on cross-sex hormones to alleviate that dysphoria

What about trans-identified males who profess not to experience gender dysphoria of any kind, do not medically transition, and make little if any effort to alter their gender presentation? In your opinion, are these people noncentral examples of trans women, or are they not really trans women?

People with no dysphoria who don’t medically transition but ask to be considered the opposite sex, well, I’m fairly suspicious of their motives. I’ve personally seen people like that on dating apps, and it seems to be either men who want to hook up with female-attracted trans women, or women that want to hook up with gay men; both think that just stating they’re trans but doing nothing else is enough.

I don’t think it’s useful to gatekeep trans identity too much, but I think mainstream trans views have gone too far and made the definitions useless. If you’re trans you should at least want to transition. Allowing sexual predators and fetishists to claim the label is hurting actual trans people, who just want to be seen and function as normal members of the opposite sex.

Agreed.

One difficulty I see is distinguishing between one’s inner state and one’s actions. A man is not gay because he has sex with men, he is gay because he is attracted to men.

Objective tests in the form of penile plethysmography exist, though they're most commonly employed to assess pedophiles in niche situations or the unlucky men with erectile dysfunction, but I agree that forcing people to take it for the purposes of giving them a certified gay card is out of the Overton Window for the foreseeable future!

The scientific evidence, from what I’ve read, seems to say that both sexuality and gender identity are influenced by the exposure to prenatal androgens and other hormonal factors.

Indeed. The anthropological evidence appears to tell a different story, though.

Gay men and trans women

There are 3 "genders": women, tops (as in 'dominant partner': men attempting to perform their standard sociobiological role 'properly'), and bottoms (as in 'submissive partner': all boys, and men not attempting to perform their standard sociobiological role 'properly'). One can transition between the latter two (and some men may find a niche that allows them to be successful despite not operating as a man should- but it's still an edge case for which the conditions that enable its prosperity -> visibility don't arise outside of highly dense urban areas), but never between the latter two and the first, because that is not how human bodies work.

This is why men who fuck boys in societies where that's a thing don't identify as "gay" (and why medical systems say "men who have sex with men" and not "gay"). The gender role of men is, after Maslow's Hierarchy has been mastered, to pursue whatever/whoever catches their fancy and so long as they're doing that we (provided your personal risk tolerance for disease is high enough and your culture lacks certain memes; Abramic religion being the most famous) usually don't care all that much about what that is. And while it's still somewhat of a duty to acquire a wife and maybe some kids of one's own too, dom men fucking sub men (outside of the confines of the financial relationship of marriage, or if the man is powerful enough that he doesn't have to worry about that) is not a property crime the same way fucking a virgin woman is, so it's more a curiosity than anything else.

Of course, this equilibrium can be disrupted by things like human ingenuity inherently creating conditions for an ever-shrinking top/male gender role while advancing the one for women (and the few bottom/males, but that's more a coincidence). But I can't see how putting the interests of a gender whose incentive structure is completely different on par with the gender that's still wired to work for a living would in any way change how society understands gender dynamics. If women are sufficiently incentivized to see themselves in the top/bottom structure as men do, there will be a lot more women in the bottom category, and they might completely destroy this compact in favor of... something else.

They also would, understandably, treat boys and bottom/men as women rather than their own distinct thing, but in fairness their parents didn't fully understand it either due to a meme or because they lived through the transition and didn't know what to make of it, so...

I know someone who actually went to one of these camps. From their description the only person who might have found the experience torturous would have been a straight male. It was a barely restrained Gay hookup camp.

You gotta remember who signs up to run and work at these camps: gay men.

To be clear the practical consequences of conversion therapy being legal/accepted is parents imprisoning their children in facilities against their will and subjecting them to unbelievable cruelty for months or sometimes years at a time.

I'm rather skeptical this is a common occurrence. One could point to this 2018 NYT editorial by Sam Brinton and plenty of other press of their accounts, but the author has since been fired from the Office of Nuclear Energy after being caught stealing women's suitcases from airports in Minneapolis, Las Vegas, and Washington, DC, and even queer-friendly publications have published pieces doubting those conversion therapy stories.

Like many things, I don't doubt that bad examples have happened somewhere, but I've seen far more stories claiming nebulously abusive therapy and surprisingly few examples of people naming names and testifying in court about their published accounts of what I can't imagine a jury finding to be anything other than child abuse.

Given the wide variation in homosexual practices by culture, it seems pretty evident that cultural pressure/conditioning/therapy/whatever can actually effectively change the sexuality of a significant portion of people

Homosexual practices may vary, but the existence or not of some homosexual minority does not seem to. The priests and kings that proscribed homosexuality were not making up a guy in their head to get mad at.

it seems pretty evident that cultural pressure/conditioning/therapy/whatever can actually effectively change the sexuality of a significant portion of people

Presented sexuality.

A gay man forced into pantomiming being straight on threat of execution is still gay.

Actually, sexuality as well I would think. Any time I've viewed a particular strain of porn over an extended period, it's certainly influenced my inclinations and attractions in the real world as well. I won't give specifics, but some of these went rather far. I believe the porn treadmill is a decently well-known phenomena.

The imprisonment per se doesn’t seem to bother anyone who is okay with public schools.

If you have any substantiation for the unbelievable cruelties (which you seem to have no trouble believing) or why it’s so obvious gay people will be perpetually unable to resist anal sex as a matter of course, you’re welcome to expand on those points.

is comparable with being sent to a lockdown facility

If I, biological adult or not (though a second-class citizen in either case), leave public school on my own accord, men with guns will be dispatched to return me to it. Should I proceed to defend myself from those men effectively enough they will summarily execute me.
For an institution that I'm supposed to want to attend because it's good for me, that's pretty extreme.

and having conversion therapy performed on you

The education system will throw me in "the hole" (they usually refer to this by another name though) should I fail to sufficiently venerate things contrary to (my) nature- buttsex, crossdressers, certain skin colors, and even simply sitting still for 6 hours are very important to the education system. And that's assuming you have a decent set of fellow inmates; some people don't.

And sure, "yes, institutionalization is good for subhumans, because subhumans need to learn what's right and wrong and about various aspects of the world we live in", but at the end of the day we're just haggling over the price (and the values of those running the institution).

Should I proceed to defend myself from those men effectively enough they will summarily execute me.

Nonsense. Do you have evidence of this happening at a statistically-significant rate?

I think he considers "effectively enough" to encompass having a gun and shooting at the police or social services worker who came to check on why he hasn't been attending school lol

Oh god, is this EuphoricBaseball's resurrection?

No, IME it's a bog-standard "taxation is theft" doctrinaire Libertarian/Ancap talking point: that if you keep defying the law and resisting those who try to enforce it on you, you eventually end up shot by agents of the state (therefore, since all law is ultimately backed by force and violence, all law is nothing but force, all governments are just mafias, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam).

No, it's just a sound argument for which there is no rebuttal except: "and that's a good thing because..."

The ink laws are written in is the first link in a chain of escalation that ends either in obedience or, finally, at some point, physical force.

They will win or he will die; those are the choices. That the vast majority of people surrender rather than die does not change that.

If I, biological adult or not (though a second-class citizen in either case), leave public school on my own accord, men with guns will be dispatched to return me to it.

No, the people responsible for your attendance will cook the books to claim you have been in school.

I have a story for this. I was a good but lazy student in primary school. I once received a report card in which, in the official "Absences" section, I was listed as having missed 5 days of school. Scrawled by hand on the back of the page was "SophisticatedHillbilly has missed over 3 weeks of school."

It was rather funny to see the contrast all in one place like that, though I appreciate their willingness to bend the rules for me. It definitely did me more good than sitting in school a bit longer.

Gotta get that per pupil state funding.

The last time I heard of truant officers actually enforcing truancy laws was when the D.A. of San Francisco (wonder whatever happened to her) started threatening parents with misdemeanors if their kids missed a couple dozen school days. It was unpopular because it was said to disproportionately impact different demographics.

I don’t know what to tell you.

I can’t say I disagree with that.

My use of the phrase “per se” was deliberate, and it has, I think, the effect of making my comparison much more precise than you seem to think.

To my knowledge, imprisoning children and subjecting them to unbelievable cruelty for months or sometimes years at a time is broadly illegal.

I am under the impression that the vast, vast majority of the troubled teen industry has nothing to do with homosexuality and that the overwhelming majority of conversion therapy is outpatient, frequently of dubious efficacy, and not harmful, with examples of people being shocked while watching gay porn being mostly advertised to, and used by, adults.

In any case, the solution to ‘some conversion therapy takes place in the troubled teen industry, which is bad’ is actually ‘ban the troubled teen industry’.

Any medical professional/social worker who worked at them or still does that took any sort of oath to "do no harm" knowingly and deliberately failed that promise and is a disgrace.

Why? If we Truly Believe that teenagers are still developmentally children, then if this sort of approach works on smaller children it's only natural to assume it'll work exactly the same on larger children too.

As such, these efforts are "doing the least amount of harm" by our definition of "harm", since we depend on that particular bifurcation of human/subhuman for other reasons and won't let it go even though there's evidence (and hundreds of thousands of years of doing it some other way) that suggests it's wrong: this definition cannot fail, it can only be failed. (Kind of like the modern Western understanding of homosexuality, for that matter.)

"the approach" rarely if ever works and generally only causes harm

Punishments can work to change the behavior of children as they're generally unable to meaningfully resist (both physically and mentally); that's part of why we've used this approach all the way back into antiquity.

Once they're adults, it's a different story.

Parents believe in (and society tolerates) TT instititutions because (they are conditioned, encouraged, and occasionally forced at gunpoint by society to believe that) the way you change a 7-year-old's behavior and the way you change a 17-year-old's behavior are identical. After all, "they're still 'children'".

if you assert that physically and psychologically torturing children for the crime of not being what you want them to be is good

I assert you only read the first sentence.

The TTI seems like a meme for attention-seeking victimhood-chasers on TikTok. I would definitely be interested in such a post because my instinct is to dismiss all their claims as general “trauma” nonsense

There exists a set of cruel practices for which the state would forcibly remove my child from my custody, but which are permissible for a "treatment center?"

I will take the bold stance of being against torture and thinking it should be broadly illegal.

Having taken this stance, I find that it does not seem to alter my perspective on whether sexuality is malleable.


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