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Konkvistador comments on Help, help, I'm being oppressed! - Less Wrong
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How many LessWrong readers oppose gay marriage or adopting children? In any case it is possible to respect a thinker while disagreeing with him, though obviously people usually only see "yay!" and "boo!" signs that spill over to everything a person does.
Oh, I mean saying that in daily life or at a political website.
Well that's a given.
People always, always see only "yay" and "boo" signs that spill over (in everyday, relatable contexts at least), unless we do the thing Traditional Rationality tells us to: exclude all names from discussion and don't look at the thingspace cluster. Which doesn't leave us well equipped to make a transition from political discussion to political action.
These kinds of ideas and intellectual traditions don't interest me because I want to engage in political action. ;)
But if you want a purely pragmatic appraisal in this sense:
If his values are sufficiently different from mainstream conservatism, he will attract dissatisfied conservatives but repulse some of the "moderates". If the current is in your favour, and on the pro-gay issues it certainly is I think, this can be strategically pretty successful. The Paleoconservatives themselves have a sort of "enemy of my enemy is my friend" approach to the far lefts criticism of Neoconservative foreign policy (nation building and spreading democracy via war ect..).
Oh. Might I ask if the chief reason is general curiosity, their supposed explanative power over the modern world (as you've mentioned before) or a desire to use them in non-political action of some sort? Because I don't see what the latter might consist of.
Can't parse this, sorry. Do you mean that he could amass enough push to affect the issues I want him affecting, but gay rights would remain out of his league so we'd be safe? Or that his most viable method of gathering followers (creating a broad split on his political flank) would force him to change his stance on gay marriage?
I meant that public opinion has generally been consistently moving towards acceptance of gay rights despite all the sheer numbers of religious people and not negligible funds regular conservatives have been unable to do anything about this. And it is happening pretty rapidly if you look at the numbers.
How could anyone like Paul Gottfried have a measurable effect on such a strong trend of all things?
I give up; what you're saying feels quite obvious to me, so it's now evident that this wasn't my true rejection. :) My true rejection is that I do indeed lump all the facts about people together and would feel sick and wrong supporting a bigote-
OH FUCK NO I DON'T WANT ANOTHER -20 TO KARMA HELP ME SHUT MY FACE (- wow, looks like someone's already willing to provide that -20 all by themselves. And now someone voted me back to where I was. Sigh, my revealed preferences seem to indicate that I'm just here to play a MMO, not to learn any "rationality" mumbo-jumbo.)
No problem DIRTY COMMIE SCU -- oh sorry.
But seriously dude its not a crime to just dislike certain people. As long as you know you real reasons even sometimes demanding rationalists can't object to that. :)
Don't get me wrong I do agree with some of their positions, even on some social issues (from your reactions it seems like you might too). It is just that I'm profoundly apolitical.
Don't mind you asking at all, I just hope I'm not mind-killing any readers by divulging such information! For me it is a mix of these two. They often have excellent explanatory power and even predictive power precisely because of the value dissonance with most of the rest of our intellectual elites, be they "left" or "right" politically. As well as just reading enjoyable well-written books and articles, but this might just be linked to my curiosity.
They are hard to use in non-political action since they have very little influence, so there isn't much opportunity for anything like career building or lobbying if that's what you meant to imply by this. :)
Maybe, maybe; relegating all the nice non-profit stuff to hyper-wealthy hyper-efficient private charities and freedom to discriminate (including discimination against discriminators you don't like) for all non-vital jobs sound kind of weirdtopian. I'm writing up a brief sketch of a weirdtopia I could stand, in fact, and maybe I'll include the latter in it.
On the other hand, I'm shocked by how many of the "alt-right" (both the respectable old white men like Gottfried and the Internet ones: Steve Sailer*, the folks I followed home from Moldbug's comments, etc) fail the gender/sexuality issues test; I can't imagine how hard one must squint one's brain to be so contrarian and still have their instrumental (or maybe sometimes even terminal, it's hard to tell) values so screwed up. I believe that in many cases it's not genuine homophobia/transphobia/whatever, they're simply exhibiting a knee-jerk rejection of the mainstream, with which I can kinda sympathize, but still, shit's fucked up.
*I can hardly resist using the "closeted/intimacy issues" card on Sailer; what the fuck, dude, I just get a bad vibe from both my reaction and his provocations.
Alicorn would probably produce a much better and more insightful rant on this topic than me, maybe I'll ask her.
Could you, by chance, link to Sailer expressing his opinions on the topic of homosexuality? I am having difficulty finding anything conclusive.
Damn right he's got nothing conclusive. Here's some bullshit that's awful hard to interpret charitably, though:
http://www.isteve.com/Decline_of_the_Metrosexual.htm
"Straight flight", my ass.
Also:
"Punishing." I find it impossible to believe that he performed even a crude survey upon a fair and meaningful sample of "straight men" instead of just projecting his personal tastes and prejudgices upon them.
The idea there that LGBT identification being out in the open has led to more pronounced heteronormativity signaling looks kinda interesting, actually.
On a sort-of-related subject, there are really are some unfortunate consequences for heterosexual men to being stuck in a society at the halfway point between intolerance of gays and actual equality.
In a lot of places in the developing world that are still at or close to the we-kill-people-for-being-gay stage, the (ridiculous) common wisdom is that since homosexuality is abnormal, there are no homosexuals (I have actually heard immigrants from parts of Africa claim that there are no homosexuals where they are from).
As a consequence of "nobody here is gay", straight men can hug, hold hands, share a bed (literally -- not a sex euphemism here), etc. without having their masculinity or sexual orientation challenged.
I think Western society would be better off if we could do that here too. I'm not willing to sacrifice the utility of gay people's lives for it, however, so I see it as a reason to push faster for full LGBT acceptance.
But certainly one couldn't rationally argue from a humane position that the damage from something like that could add up to the point where it outweighs the cost of outlawing gay marriage, right?
See Sailer's discussion of homosexual stereotypes, and his interview with a researcher of homosexuality.
All in all, Sailer strikes me as a fair observer of homosexuality. He's sometimes rude, and willing to accept stereotypes as evidence, but he wouldn't be in the field he's in if he weren't interested in the truth.
That's by far THE most... optimistic view of human psychology I've ever seen expressed on LW/OB. Like most of us poor sinful bastards, when he's talking about "disclosing the truth They want to stay undisclosed", he's interested in making himself feel comfortable in his hypocrisy through a self-perpetuating cycle of external and internal signaling. Also, he's awfully whiny for a Straight Old-School Manly Guy.
From your second link:
This doesn't add up on a very fundamental level. WHY on earth would homosexual "recruitment" would be a bad thing at all, if homosexuality is a legitimate and respectable trait of a person? Because of homophobic prejudices? Is setting up comprehensive re-education measures against instinctive and cultural homophobia Evil Orwellian Social Engineering according to him, so gays should just mind their own business and Keep It In The Bedroom?
Overall, I'm 95% confident that none of his caveats and asides about him being such an ardent defender of fairness and respect to gays would have surfaced if he were to investigate the same class of issues and come upon the same conclusions (for example) in 1950s US. He'd be just a usual old-fashioned inquisitor and Moral Guardian, enlightening the public about the misguided, irresponsible, deceitful perverts undermining Western institutions.
I saw you arguing with someone here about the possibility of being "apolitical". Suffice to say, I agreed with them and not you; already forgot how their line went, though, d'oh!
I didn't know anything I could be pointing at by saying that. Turns out that neither do you :)
It's probably impossible to be apolitical in the sense of being innocent of political influences, and it's definitely impossible to be apolitical in the sense of avoiding action with political implications. But it's probably not impossible to be apolitical in the sense of rejecting political identity (though it is a lot harder than that makes it sound), and even that helps eliminate a lot of important biases.
How would we know if this were true or not? Isn't there motivated cognition to support all social norms, not simply the explicitly political moral posturing?
By checking the domain-specific predictions of politically motivated people against future results, and by comparing them to the predictions of less politically motivated people. Self-assessment is probably good enough to establish political motivation, although you could probably do better with enough cleverness. If I'm not mistaken this has been done a couple of times, although I unfortunately can't find the links right now.
And yes, motivated cognition does exist to support all social norms (or at least all those incorporated into people's identities), but I'm not sure how this bears on the original point. Politics (or explicit politics, if you prefer) is a special case of that more general principle, but it's an especially salient one thanks to how intensely people cling to their political identities.
My impression is that people cling to their identities equally strongly whether or not the identities can be described as explicitly political.
Sexist (or feminist) people have just as little sense of how mindkilled they are in their own domain as Democrats or Republicans have in their domain.
It's a fairly mainstream thought - for not-very-mainstream feminists.
And I concede to Konkvistador that the definition of "political" in the saying is not the mainstream definition that references only participation in political parties and the electioneering process.
Yeah, half the people in my LJ friends feed probably think so, though; I feel at home with a crowd like that for some reasons :)
Well apolitical as in not seeing my personal actions through a political lens first but rather primarily guided by my virtue ethics approach (regardless of political strategizing). Not ignoring political consequences, but not letting politics affect my identity.
And naturally in the conventional sense of abstaining from conscious political acts like voting, supporting candidates or talking about politics in everyday life. I also avoid consuming information about current political events, since it is just brain candy, delicious but rots your teeth.
Heh, it's simply hard to visualize that; here in Russia everyone has been talking very loudly about politics to everyone else 24/7, since around 1987. I'm into that too; at least I abstain from vodka :)