domain:mgautreau.substack.com
Folamh3
6m ago
I wonder if others, like say antifa members, occasionally look at Proud Boys and recognize in them a shadow version of themselves.
It's a real "there but for the grace of God" situation, isn't it. It's funny when you see street clashes between Proud Boys and Antifa, and for all the talk of this being a clash between a racist organisation and an antiracist organisation, both groups look about as racially diverse as rural Sweden, or in some cases the Proud Boys are more diverse than the Antifa guys.
I read somewhere (possibly in a review of The True Believer) that the number of literal Nazis (as in, members of the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s) who were previously communists is off the charts. I also read somewhere that in the UK in the 1980s, both far-right skinheads and antifa recruited from the same pool of talent: football hooligans, young frustrated men spoiling for a fight, who could easily be radicalised into one extremist ideology or the other (or even both in succession) if there was the possibility of getting to bust some heads with impunity in it. See also my post about how being generally dissatisfied with your life is a far better predictor for endorsing an extreme ideology than anything else.
Throwaway05
7m ago
"(public policy) The principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood."
It is not literally a fence.
reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood
aqouta
7m ago
My empathy for trans people is precisely why I find the entire phenomenon so impossible to look away from. I can find in myself some ability to reason myself into what they're claiming to be going through. I can imagine myself as a kid, not particularly popular and with plenty of angst, deciding that what is really wrong with me is my gender identity and clamping down on that idea. I am privileged to know what not doing that results in and it's a good life where I get over my angst. I fear for people who might trap themselves in a false understanding of the world that will lead them to living much worse lives than they could have led.
I know that memes are powerful enough to do this people. Memes can bend people into myrters, Jihadists, self immolators kamikaze pilots, and many other forms in service of the meme. Maybe the framing where I'm cis by default is true and they really are experiencing some extra sense that I am blind to. But I know, absolutely know, that given the right circumstances growing up I could have been made to think I was feeling that sense. I know, absolutely know, that if I had convinced myself of it I would be stubborn enough to cement it into my identity. Because of this I know that there is a boy somewhere that is going to sacrifice his health and exceptionally happy future to chase being a mere mimic of a woman. I see myself in him, I recognize that for the grace of god go I, and that breaks my heart.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
10m ago
I dislike the continual minimizing/maximizing of windows and the break in flow of thought
I forgot that not everyone here is using a desktop browser. Would footnotes¹ bee a better alternative?
linking to a website instead of simply explaining in words what it is you yourself have intended in your post.
OK, I will try to explain it in words. "wow. very revenge plot. which caskete choose? argument much clever." is a description of the plot of The Merchant of Venice in the dialect associated with the 'doge' meme, for which Elon Musk has a particular fondness.
The Merchant of Venice is a play by William Shakespeare, containing the line "Thou calledst me dog before thou hadst a cause. But since I am a dog, beware my fangs.", meaning that Shylock was treated as villainous before he had done anything questionable, and therefore was not incentivised to be forgiving. (Act III, scene 3.) I was alluding to that line in the first part of my comment, in that Mr Musk was also treated as deplorable by the chattering classes prior to having thrown in his lot with the Trump campaign²; the spelling of 'doge' and 'fange' was an allusion to the same meme.
¹Like these.
²A comparison can also be made to the Dazexiang Uprising in late-3rd-century China, in which two officials realised three things:
-
The then-ruling dynasty imposed the death penalty for being late.
-
The then-ruling dynasty imposed the death penalty for rebellion.
-
The roads being impassable due to rain, they had no chance of arriving on time.
daguerrean
12m ago
If I'd been born ten or even five years later, dollars to donuts I'd be calling myself Lilith right now.
I know this feeling too. At the end of high school, around 2008 I had a friend confide in me his feelings of gender dysphoria (although he didn't word it that way, being before the whole transgender trend) thinking I shared them. Of course I didn't, but he must have taken my autistic personality traits to signal it. I wonder if others, like say antifa members, occasionally look at Proud Boys and recognize in them a shadow version of themselves.
Dean
13m ago
How are religious beliefs experienced differently?
A chaplain I knew once credited it as to experience the sublime in a way that changes your perspective afterwards on the world.
'Sublime' is a word that's often used as just another synonym for quality in art, but it can mean more than just 'pretty.' Something sublime is something that strikes one with awe- not simply being impressed, but the much more intense feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear and wonder. Once you experience it, you are forever changed, because while your feeling on the thing may change afterwards, the reverence / respect / fear / wonder changes how you see the relation of things.
This is not, to be clear, a 'solely' religious experience. It's a somewhat common attestation of astronauts who go into space and look down on the earth- seeing how small their home countries are puts the their formerly massive worlds into a new perspective. Astronauts, despite coming from often committed career professional paths of government cultures, often have a reputation for being more post-nationalist/more internationalist, not because they don't care about their countries but because their paradigm is shifted by the scale perception and how they view their homelands. That sense of being taken out of your previous perception paradigm and thrust into another has other analogs as well, often when dealing with items of scale- some people get put into awe by nature, or by mega-engineering, or by diving deep into conceptually massive items.
The point here isn't 'what' causes your perception shift, but rather that you have one, and what that means going forward. Just as an astronaut is never going to look at earth the same way again even when they return, or an environmentalist struck by the grandeur of nature will never be as impressed by industrial output, the very way people connect the world together has changed in a way that is not 'merely' a choice.
You do not choose to undergo the sublime experience (you can go look at something other people say is sublime and feel nothing), but likewise when you do experience the sublime you do not 'choose' to let it change you- instead, you are the one changed, because that is part of what strikes the reverence / respect / fear. And after that sort of experience, well... you can try to argue with a converted environmentalist that industrialization is good, and they might be swayed by specific arguments that industrialization may be a net positive for society despite it's harm to nature, but the underlying paradigms of how they put the world together has changed. You can't really argue people out of that any more than you can argue them out of their own visual perception.
Religion is a broad set of dynamics and relations, but the sublime religious experience is broad enough / shared enough that people who have experienced it can find enough of each other to validate and further the beliefs, in a similar sense that you and I both know what 'love' is as an experience despite not knowing eachother or eachother's experiences. For those touched by the sublime, something similar exists, and through it the sense of solidarity that the sublime experience, rather than being purely personal, is a shared sense of something else- and that something else is God, with all the fear / wonder / awe / reverence that implies.
quiet_NaN
15m ago
The justice system is not designed to handle prosecutors actively trying to thwart punishment of criminals. The solution here seems not to be to add epicycles and do retrials with special prosecutors, but to not re-elect prosecutors who offer sweet-heart plea deals. Oh, wait:
Foxx won a second term even after Smollett’s case became a topic of national outcry.
If her electorate is happy with her, then there is little one can do, I guess.
UwU
16m ago
Some people purporting to be trans could just be using it to legitimize their cross-dressing fetish, but it’s not a significant enough number to justify the framing, and definitely not in the Sarah McBride case to justify the framing in this circumstance.
Most "trans women" are autogynephiles.
If someone showed me a study concluding that "most men are autogynephiles," I wouldn't have any difficulty believing it. I have seen several studies suggesting that a significant percentage of "straight" men find male genitalia sexually arousing. There is also quite a lot of evidence that men are extremely sexually adaptable, i.e. will have sex with anything, if necessary for release--historical accounts of homosexuality at sea or on long military campaigns contribute much to this perception, but also further edge cases like the cross-cultural recurrence of bestiality. So I'm not sure where arguments like this really get you.
I am sympathetic to "empathy" arguments. I gain nothing, personally, through cruelty to others. However "be nice" cannot possibly mean "always affirm that what others are doing is good for them and/or for society." You say:
So anyway, next time you see some dude in a dress, with long hair and breasts but a face and voice obviously male despite his best efforts, think about what kind of emotions must have driven him to that place, and have a little empathy.
This seems fair, but what is the actionable content of that empathy? When I see a homeless person passed out in the street, filthy, half naked, and clearly stoned out of his mind, surely the empathetic response is not, "aw, look at that guy living his best life. It's not what I would choose, but hey--different strokes for different folks!" Similarly, if I see a man wearing a dress, I'm unlikely to say anything to him about it--but if I see a man walking into a ladies' changing room, I might quite reflexively say, "Hey, do you know that's the ladies' room?" So: what should I do if I see a man in a dress walking into a ladies' changing room? Do I try to help him the way I would try to help any man making that mistake, or do I exempt him from the care I normally afford to others, to help them avoid embarrassing and possibly dangerous errors?
("How do you know he's a man!?" Well, if a man in a dress really looks like a woman, then it would not occur to me to stop him from entering the ladies' room. It's true that I am not always a perfect judge of an individual's sex, but I generally do not permit my own fallibility to stop me from helping others when it seems warranted to do so, and see no reason to deviate from that policy in response to the existence of edge cases.)
I have no reason to defend moralizing busybodies who make a hobby of policing even the tiniest of deviations from the social status quo. But I think there are many reasons to, politely but firmly, refuse to go along with trans advocacy of this kind. For one thing, I suspect that for every person with serious gender dysphoria, there are at least dozens of people whose lives will be made worse by indulging trans advocacy--for example, by giving edge cases a nudge to behave in ways that will actually make their lives worse, than if they had just not. When I read that "28.5% of Gen Z women and 10.6% of Gen Z men identify as LGBTQ+," but in 1992 "3.2% of men and 1.6% of women aged 18–49 identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual," I find it very unlikely that this is the result of people being more free to behave as their "true selves." Rather, that looks to me like a serious mental health crisis born of a toxic memetic environment. That is: it looks like social contagion. How does one treat social contagion? I don't know, but I feel pretty confident that acting as if there is just nothing wrong or bad or sad or regrettable or even worth mentioning about transsexuality is the opposite of helping.
Not accidentally, your entire post could just as easily have been written about drug addicts, schizophrenics, preppers, Nickelback fans... people like what they like. Tautologically! People do what they do. I don't think there's any reason to be cruel to any of those people. I think it's a better world where we are all kind, and thoughtful, and polite, and treat others with humanity and respect. But that doesn't free us from the hard work of making value judgments, and finding ways to act on those judgments. There is a large-breasted man I see on my walks, sometimes. I have never commented on the fact that he looks like an especially tasteless parody of a woman; I'm pretty sure he knows, and I suspect it's even deliberate. There is also an anorexic woman I see on my walks, sometimes, and I don't comment on her obvious mental issues, either. But if either of them were a family member or particularly close friend--I would definitely comment, and it wouldn't be to affirm the validity or goodness of their choices.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
19m ago
Agreed. I also prefer two spaces of indentation to four, four is just such a waste of space for (imo) no readability benefit.
07mk
21m ago
I actually recall watching this film back when I was a teenager, under the belief that it would feature Jennifer Love Hewitt running on a treadmill with just a bra on top (I learned an important lesson at that point that movie studios lie in their marketing). Was a decently funny comedy with its share of laughs, otherwise.
But your question about the fraud reminds me of the real-life fraud conviction in Japan earlier this year of a "sugar baby" who baited lonely men into giving her money. I recall learning of the details of her scam and also wondering why that was illegal, since there was no business transaction, not even implicitly. There was no contract, no sales, no storefront, no promises, nothing of the sort. It seemed akin to a college student asking his parents for money to buy books with the plan to spend it on beer (obviously parent-child relationship is different from this, but also, I don't know why the law would treat it differently). IANAL so I have no idea if I'm just not well versed enough at fraud law, or if Japanese law is different from American.
ControlsFreak
29m ago
That is later then when the fence was erected. What information am I lacking concerning the how/why of the fence being erected?
Throwaway05
30m ago
Great sure, some suggested avenues of exploration-
"How much has the number of drugs increased since then? How much has polypharmacy increased since then? How much has comorbidity increase since then? How much has personal behavior in response to healthcare changed since?"
ControlsFreak
37m ago
Please just explain anything to do with Chesterton's fence. I don't understand, and I want to understand. Perhaps you can bring more information that I am missing about the period of time when this fence was erected, if it is information I am lacking.
SerialStateLineXer
37m ago
1mg is a good dose, you cannot come off it ever btw, once you start.
Sure you can. You'll start losing hair again, but it's not like you become dependent on it.
ControlsFreak
37m ago
After a nice sleep last night, I tried really interpreting my interlocutor's most-recent-at-the-time argument about Chesterton's fence, with as much charity as I could. I went on to produce what I thought was almost a quality contribution.
So let me ask you for some advice. I would like to be able to have a productive conversation with this person. I have tried to bring us back to productive conversations and put in effort on my side. What I've gotten in response is accusations of sophistry, that I don't know anything about anything relevant, and claims that if I even consider the questions asked, it will magically become clear to me. I suppose I will trust your read that those comments are actually me becoming more antagonistic, and I will have to review it in time to understand, but can you provide any advice for how I can bring such a conversation back into the realm of being productive? Or do I really just need to give up when this is the type of engagement I'm getting?
Crowstep
39m ago
SerialStateLineXer
45m ago
I've never failed a test before :(
Folamh3
47m ago
But what would he sue them for? Fraud? What exactly is fraudulent about the scam?
You're correct that aspies, nerds or whatever tend to display more feminine traits. In terms of their interests, I would argue they're "hypermale" not just in terms of statistics but also in terms of their character. Men tend to be high-systematisers and interested in abstract systems, while women are more interested in interpersonal relationships. "Intensely interested in abstract systems but utterly lacking in social skills" is about as pithy a definition of "nerd" as you can get, whereas more typically "bro" males tend to be jacks-of-all-trades: they'll have a passing interest in abstract systems (e.g. have memorised Nomar Garciappara's on-base percentage or the acceleration on a '67 Ford Mustang), but without sacrificing the ability to "read the room" and charm people. Most of the stereotypically nerdy interests (systems-heavy video games, hard sci-fi, fantasy universes with elaborate magic systems, conlangs and extensive worldbuilding electrical engineering, tabletop gaming, computer programming, progressive/technical death metal, IDM, math rock) are about complex abstract systems first and human beings/interpersonal relationships a distant second, if at all. Even saying "nerds like video games" doesn't really sell the distinction I'm getting at: plenty of ordinary dudes will play a little Call of Duty to unwind in the evening, but it takes a certain kind of nerd to log thousands of hours in high-level grand strategy games from Paradox Interactive or learn the entire metagame for Starcraft II. The reason nerds don't have much of an interest in team sports isn't because they're more interested in traditionally feminine interests, but the same reason they don't like playing Call of Duty: they find these activities mechanically shallow and uninteresting from a systems perspective, and are usually not shy about expressing their contempt for the knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers who do derive enjoyment from these activities (the latter clause is "in character" and not what I personally believe, in case it wasn't obvious). Show me a nerdy dude or trans woman who's into knitting, astrology and murder podcasts, and then we can talk about how feminine their interests are.
I am once again asking you to have a little empathy for people you find disgusting
While trans issues are something of an obsession of mine, I usually steer clear of the whole AGP debate, partly because "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people", and partly because some sense of compassion is indeed stopping me from piling on people who are having a hard enough time going through their life, but the charge of lack of empathy is valid.
Sorry, I just can't understand it, and not for lack of trying. Like you said, empathy for gay people is easy. Love, infatuation, and sexual attraction have largely been involuntary in my experience, so it's not hard to imagine that the target of these feelings ends up being another dude, through some twist of fate.
Dysphoria? Not seeing it. The idea of discomfort at being the wrong gender is alien to me. I'm quite comfortable in my male body, and if you put me in a woman's body tomorrow, I can't think of anything deeper to say about it than "it is what it is", and moving right along.
AGP? Sorry, but your attempts to explain it name it sound even weirder than just leaving it be as an unknown:
Let's say you develop an infatuation with a girl. You enjoy thinking about her. You want to spend time with her. Being near her is pleasant, and comforting, and a little exciting. You want her, just her, not instrumentally, not to do anything in particular, just her, for no reason and every reason. Holding her hand is electric. You just want be with her forever, to sweep her into your embrace, and damn it, why the f&!k are you getting a boner right now, you were having this pure and chaste and beautiful reverie and now you're thinking about sex.
So yeah, it's kinda like that.
Can't relate. That the feelings of infatuation and love end up intertwined with sexual desire is quite expected. Indeed, I'd say that is the very point for either of these feelings to lead to the other, and I'm as skeptical of "pure" infatuation as I am of raw animalistic lust, so I can't at all understand where the thought of "why the f&!k are you getting a boner right now" is coming from.
But actually you lost me right at the start, if there's anything valid to the analogy of infatuation, even the "pure" kind, that just sounds like a very advanced case of narcissism. These feelings are meant for others, not for yourself.
Like I said, far be it for me to add to your burdens, but asking that I understand where you're coming from feels like a tall order.
Throwaway05
48m ago
You keep accusing me calling you stupid, I'm not. I'm saying you don't know what you are talking about...because you don't. These are not the same thing. Intelligence is not required to make a judgement on this, information is, and you haven't exhibited any evidence of training or knowledge that would address that absence.
Arguing in the way you are now may be evidence of lack of intelligence or character flaws...so don't do that.
Passion on a topic is not a substitute for information or understanding, I've given you a significant number of rabbit holes you could go down to educate yourself on considerations you seem unaware of, and you are resistant to doing that. I also simplified my argument to the bare bones premises and tellingly, you made no effort to engage with those.
Ultimately you've fallen into the same trap that the overwhelming majority of patients who bring up this kind of thing do you, you want to make your own decisions, damn the consequences, without awareness that consequences may even exist and when told "no, you must actually think about this" you become upset and sling mud.
It's fundamentally the same conversation I have every time a patient demands an antibiotic for a viral infection.
These conversations, for the record, are what establishes our stance - because most people become riotously upset when told they need to learn.
AlexanderTurok
52m ago
I said "Griggs v. Duke Republicans" which are a subset of urban, educated, irreligious voters. RFK Jr., who supports reparations and throwing "climate deniers" in jail is not part of that. He's more a Dale Gribble voter:
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-rise-of-the-dale-gribble-voter
See, to me there’s the “I hate people who do this” thing where everybody just dunks on whoever we’re talking about, calls them gross and disgusting, and tries to make them miserable. I think life is too short for that. And sure, there’s nothing to be gained by saying to a gay couple that they’re disgusting people, degenerates, and so on.
But the other side of tha5 is some bad behavior simply shouldn’t be normalized due to the knock on effects on society. The trans issues especially come with a lot of real, serious baggage. The WPATH files more or less show this, as does the literal explosion of kids under 15 or so suddenly deciding they’re trans and being given drugs. There might well be a case for “okay, fine, if you’re of legal age, you can do whatever with your genitalia and we’ll leave you alone for the most part.” I have reservations about restrooms and trans people being in positions of power over children. But I think for the most part, I’m like okay, this guy wearing a dress is 40 and shopping at Walmart, I don’t need to get out the pitchfork here, he’s not hurting anyone. I might not hire him to babysit, but beyond that, I think there’s something weird about people spending too much energy on it. Once the bad policies that open up the door to harm are closed, there’s not much to talk about here.
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