I feel this leads into a rabbit hole where everything beyond photons striking the retina becomes a "theory".

EDITED: It took me several minutes to guess what the s/ syntax probably meant.

Otherkin (or transgenderism, as discussed in previous posts) is an identity. It refers to who you are. Homosexuality is an orientation. It refers to whom you desire. They are different categories, but they can and do intersect (for example, if a person was born with lady parts, and only finds feminine people attractive, and identifies as male, that person is a transman, and not homosexual).

there is a familiar phenomenon here, in which a certain kind of would-be economic expert loves to cite the supposed lessons of economic experiences that are in the distant past, and where we actually have only a faint grasp of what really happened. Harding 1921 “works” only because people don’t know much about it; you have to navigate through some fairly obscure sources to figure out [what actually happened]. And the same goes even more strongly — let’s say, XII times as strongly — when, say, [Name] starts telling us about the Emperor Diocletian. The point is that the vagueness of the information, and even more so what most people [think they] know about it, lets such people project their prejudices onto the past and then claim that they’re discussing the lessons of experience.

Paul Krugman on the use of examples to obscure rather than clarify

If RichardKennaway's meaning is "ha ha, Azathoth123 is using this as support for a neoreactionary view, when in fact Chesterton had something entirely different in mind" then I don't think that's altogether fair.

Something along those lines. What makes Azathoth123's recent Chesterton quotes rationality quotes? Chesterton wrote:

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

and of course neoreaction is something that is going against a stream, and in its eyes progressivism is, well, I'm not sure how the metaphor works out from here, because what neoreaction is going against is progressivism, which makes progressivism the stream itself, rather than a dead thing floating down some other stream. But anyway, why should we take Chesterton's quote as real wisdom? As a literal statement about the physics of floating bodies, it is true but uninteresting. As a metaphor, he is applying it to Christianity, or to his preferred form of it, everything else being either the stream or the flotsam (the metaphor has the same problem here).

So just what truth is being asserted here, that for Chesterton supports Catholicism and for Azathoth123 supports neoreaction? Contrarianism, the view that the majority is always wrong? That is all the metaphor amounts to. This sits oddly with the contention, also made by neoreactionaries, that their preferred view of society is actually the great stream within which progressivism is a historical anomaly, a trifling eddy that will not last (e.g. Anissimov and advancedatheist in recent comments on LW). I'm sure that if that metaphor had suited Chesterton in making some point, he would have elaborated it at no less length. But a metaphor proves nothing: it is a method of presentation, not of argument.

But could you reliably make money knowing that LTCM will fail eventually?

Just LTCM, no. But (if we ignore the transaction costs which make this idea not quite practicable) there are enough far-out-of-the-money options being traded for me to construct a well-diversified portfolio that would allow me to reliably make money -- of course, only if these options were Black-Scholes priced on the basis of the same implied volatility as the near-the-money options and in reality they are not.

I'm inclined to think that non-ideological autocracy (we're in charge because we're us and you're you) is the human default. Anything better or worse takes work to maintain.

Yes, this is true. Consensus is largely that language can certainly influence thought in language-specific domains, and that it can influence aspects of cognition in other domains, but only to the extent of shifting probabilities and defaults around --- not to the extent of controlling how speakers think or preventing some types of thought according to languages spoken.

Most "grammar nerds" I know are linguists, who think this is neat because they're more interested in how language works on a more fundamental level than individual grammars (though of course those are interesting too). I guess it's possible that conlang types have the opposite view! I was just amused by the distinction between what we think of when thinking "grammar nerd".

Nothing prevents a straight man from having a night of experimentation, and he may or may not end up liking what he finds.

I couldn't care less whether sexual orientation is innate or a choice. If it's innate, the debate is over. If it's a choice, you're free. In both cases, nothing wrong has happened.

Why exactly Neoreactionary? Why don't you talk about the chance of fundamental Muslims dominating?

I've started to question the assumption that the social ideology we've inherited from the Enlightenment

Our social ideology changed a lot in the 300 years. The fact that it hasn't is one of the more central misconceptions of Neoreactionary thought.

Even in 200 years we went from homosexuality being legal, to it being illegal because of puritans, then being legal again and now gay marriage.

It's just ridiculous to say that the puritians that got homosexuality banned have roughly the same ideology as today's diversity advocates.

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man