= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Konkvistador comments on Help, help, I'm being oppressed! - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (141)
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.
I strongly suspect that one of the other consequences of the "there are no homosexuals" social norm in such cultures is that under certain circumstances same-sex pairs can also have sex with one another without having their sexual orientation "challenged." (Similar things were true of opposite-sex pairs in cultures with the "there is no extramarital sex" cultural norm... e.g., bundling.)
But I agree with you that as long as queer visibility is noticeably higher than queer acceptability, there's a class of previously acceptable behaviors that become less acceptable (e.g., certain expressions of affection), and I agree with you that that's unfortunate, and I endorse closing that gap.
Further benefit of full queer acceptance: people of different genders could also hug, hold hands and share beds without summoning a chorus of "He liiiiikes her".
Not necessarily. I went to college in a very queer-accepting social context, and the general assumption was that any couple, or group, that shared a bed was having sex (for some unspecified value of "sex") regardless of their stated preferences. And rather a lot of good-natured teasing took place in consequence.
I'm really much more concerned with assault and murder than I am with teasing, though.
Why would that follow? I don't think it would.
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?
Well, one could certainly argue it.
For example, one could argue that refusing to recognize any marriages and therefore, implicitly, refusing to recognize (aka "outlawing") same-sex marriages was a net benefit.
Or one could argue that common forms of heteronormativity signalling include anti-queer violence, bullying, discrimination in employment and residential selection and etc., and various other more substantial issues, and that those things are worse than discrimination in the recognition of marriage, so if official recognition of queer marriages results in more heteronormativity signaling and thus more violence, bullying, discrimination, etc. it causes more harm than good.
In fact, people do argue these positions in the real world.
As always on this issue, I feel a certain compulsion to reference my husband. He's actually completely irrelevant here, but I generally expect people to be so primed to pattern-match on heteronormative privilege when I talk abstractly about queer equality that they don't actually read what I say unless I do something to break that pattern.
Oh. Well, I admit that my bottom line is "Steve Sailer betrays his attitude of disgust and holding straight men above queers in many separate and unconnected phrases (like the "punishing" gaffe above) while taking care not to leave larger handholds to his critics."
(nods) I haven't read Sailer, but it's not unlikely: lots of people do that.
Some years ago, I ran into someone at a party who was arguing essentially this position (that increased queer visibility/equality leads to increased straight anxiety which leads to increased violence and discrimination against queers, and therefore that working towards increased queer visibility/equality is a bad idea on the grounds that it makes things worse for queer people, and don't we care about queer people?) and clearly getting off on the yummy contrarian goodness.
As I recall, I pointed out (calmly but loudly) that he was missing an opportunity to tailor his message to the group he was talking to, as this group was sufficiently accepting of trans folk that he could cause far more trouble more efficiently if he argued specifically that trans folk, as a more visible and vulnerable subset of the queer community, would receive the majority of the negative consequences of straight anxiety, and therefore queer equality was really just another way for gay folk to abuse and take advantage of trans folk. He could use the same strategy to divide gay men and lesbians and more generally to fragment the queer community to the point where we didn't stand a chance of achieving our political goals.
It was kind of a funny moment, as I wasn't following his script and he had to scramble a little to change tack.
I should have added, but didn't, that it was important to get everyone upset enough in the process that nobody thought to ask why, if the only problem with queer equality was the threat posed by anxious straight folk, we shouldn't deal with that by acting to minimize the power of anxious straight folk to hurt us.
Heh.
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 contest both the factual assertion and the implications. The number of times I've seen 'save the world' sentiments expressed seriously on this site should make any cynic grumpy. As for the implications, I admit I could be giving Sailer too much credit. Do you think you could be giving him too little?
...what? Where are you going with this?
Notice that the pro-gay comment is Michael Bailey's line, not Sailer's.
To me, 'pro-gay' implies "I want homosexuals to live fulfilled lives" not "I want there to be more homosexuals," though 'anti-gay' does imply "I want there to be less homosexuals." Suppose homosexuality is worse then heterosexuality, in a manner similar to how, say, deafness is worse than hearing. If deafness were contagious, there would be strong arguments for quarantining the deaf, whereas if deafness were not contagious, there would be strong arguments for accommodating and including the deaf.
That is, the questions "homosexuals are here, what do we do with them?" and "how many homosexuals should we have?" are very different questions.
Where is this coming from?
It doesn't look like that's the case for race, though, so I'm not clear on why you believe this.
A relevant data point should perhaps be that Steve Sailer actually seems to genuinely not dislike African Americans. This is very impressive for someone who discusses what he does. I don't think he's faking it either. Perhaps his fascination with sport statistics lets him pump enough warm fuzzies to maintain a balance.
Indeed. (I linked to a number of articles pointing towards that in my last line, but thanks for the independent summary.)
I suspect that it is difficult to make progress from that point without first clarifying whether what is meant is "I want fewer people to have same-sex sex," "I want fewer people to want same-sex sex," "I want fewer people to endorse same-sex sex," something else, or some combination.
Agreed, but it's not clear to me progress needs to be made from that point. To my knowledge, no one who is participating in or a topic of the conversation is anti-gay in any of those senses, if we measure wants by expended effort to achieve those wants.
Nowhere much, just pointing out another reason for why his writing is so unappealing to me.
I can't visualize that in any way at all, if the "Society will never be tolerant enough" card is dropped.
Well, he can't write an article without mentioning the authoritarian, utterly clueless feminists who are trying to reshape the poor unwilling America into their image.
Never said or implied or insinuated that he was racist; hell, in practice he might well have less prejudices on the race front that you or me. Don't you consider that a person's bigotry might be restricted to one issue, neither propagating outward nor fading away but supported by fairly elaborate rationalization, some examples of which I'm sensing here?
Hey, in the Discussion thread I made Nornagest is, right now, telling me that I might be exhibiting quasi-intellectual bigotry of a similar sort regarding race, hiding behind a few lofty sentiments - so how unlikely is it that Sailer might have this towards sexuality?
I agree that it's more pleasant to read the writing of satisfied people than unsatisfied people.
I'm having trouble parsing this. Do you mean "homosexuality cannot be a detriment in a society where homosexuals are respected equally with heterosexuals"? Off the top of my head, I can think of three significant detriments in such a society, and could come up with more if I needed to. If you can't come up with three, I don't think you're thinking about this issue clearly enough.
But... he can and does?
Can you elaborate please?
Heterosexuality as a norm (In the sense of being the majority preference) may in the long term be the only thing keeping the sexes from splitting off into different species and civilizations with diverging values. Note that as with encountering an alien civilization there is no guarantee whatsoever that peaceful coexistence would be viable in the long term. Bisexuality could also work, depends on how different the extrapolated desires of the genders really are.
Before you say "I don't think gender will remain a viable concept in transhuman space", consider the starting point. In the first approximation each half of mankind have been wired for millions of years in a systematically slightly different fashion. So what if civilization A happens to have 10% of "in pre-singularity times self-identified as female" people on the census, instead of 0%, this dosen't change the fact that most former male or female brains might eventually find a future tailored more to their tastes than to those of the other group (if civilization A or B wins).
Some of the psychological differences between males and females do have roots that go back millions of years.
Well, don't you think something this would be more or less a clear win for both sexes?
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.
I don't disagree. Politics doesn't need to be a uniquely strong source of bias to be worth looking at, it just needs to be a strong one.
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 :)