I actually agree with Arctos on the merits of his argument. I was there and intensely involved in the whole debate over gay marriage and there really never was a coherent argument or much logic on the "pro" side. It was just appeals to emotion and "look we're nice normal people who want to live nice normal lives just like you so don't be mean to us." There was never any serious reckoning with what exactly marriage was for or why it even exists as an institution, and if one can't define the function of the institution one can't analyze whether or not two married males serve that function or not. The slippery slope argument was roundly dismissed as preposterous even though every single thing predicted by the slippery slopists has come to pass and then some. NO ONE other than easily ignored hardcore religionists EVER acknowledged or were allowed to talk about the truly extraordinary levels of gay (male) promiscuity and perversity which will never in any situation be even remotely matched by heterosexual debauchery, and I don't care if you lock a squad of prostitutes on MDMA and crack into a room with a football team on steroids...there will never be a heaterosexual equivalent. And ultimately the whole war was not about any rational basis for which gay couples really had any need to get married, it was purely just their desire for the status of having a social stamp of approval.
That said, while he's correct on the merits, the position of a non religious or atheist person opposing gay marriage on grounds other than religious or personal animus is a lonely one indeed. There weren't many back then and there are virtually none now. He might be the only one. And in a sense, that is admirable and honorable in itself. And I'm certain he would not want an ally from the likes of me, because he likely views someone who marries without hiding their intention to never procreate, when they were otherwise well set up to do so, as just as much of a depraved and corrosive influence on the institution as two dudes marrying (and admittedly, no one should regard or respect a voluntarily childless marriage as being as respectable or valid or important as a procreative one -- it isn't, it's second tier).
More importantly though, this battle has been lost. It's over. He is stubbornly clinging to a belief that it could be revived like a Confederate holdout in 1890. And sticking to one's principles even when you're the only one left and all hope is lost is noble and admirable in a sense. But his "side" has lost definitively. There are way too many people with gay people in their families and networks to walk it back now, it's done. (And fwiw, my perception is that there seem to be MORE gay men in conservative families than liberal ones...likely bc they historically placed more pressure on them to marry and have kids, thus passing down a set of gay genes that otherwise would be much more rare).
I don't really understand why women like gay guys so much, though your point on that is a good one and they're going to let straight men come for their gays. I've personally never had that affinity and maybe it's just bc I enjoy and get along with straight males more than most women, because it's always struck me as a bizarre allyship and I don't think their interests are that aligned. Maybe it's just a matter of them wanting to feel accepted by men without the pressure of having to be sexually alluring to them.
While I think Arctos is correct on the merits, Walt's arguments here are fresh and insightful and well stated, while also portraying his conviviality per usual, just as Arctos acknowledges. Female tears are almost impossible to beat without coming off as a brute, but authentic good cheer, fellowship, and charisma are equally hard to resist. So I find myself once again agreeing with both. No surprise that to a Confederate holdout stubbornly drawing a line, Walt will be viewed as a carpetbagger.
"I don't really understand why women like gay guys so much, though your point on that is a good one and they're going to let straight men come for their gays. I've personally never had that affinity and maybe it's just bc I enjoy and get along with straight males more than most women, because it's always struck me as a bizarre allyship and I don't think their interests are that aligned. Maybe it's just a matter of them wanting to feel accepted by men without the pressure of having to be sexually alluring to them."
I didn't have very many gay male friends in my 20s and early 30s, and I never really understood why. All my female friends and acquaintances seemed to have at least one gay male bestie, but I did not really start making more friends with gay men until my late 30s when people got older and started settling down more, and mostly after I moved to a more conservative area. My theory about this is that, similar to you, I was mostly friends with straight guys, and gay men in their 20s were pretty stereotypically feminine in ways I wasn't back then (into fashion, went clubbing, cared about celebrities, that kind of thing).
I lived in a super liberal and gay-friendly area, so this was definitely more accepted there than it is where I live now. The gay men (who actually stay) around here act a lot more stereotypically masculine than the gay guys I knew back in Minneapolis, and they're more likely to be settled down and married, living a more traditional lifestyle, making it more likely that we have things in common nowadays. I'm not super "traditional," but I am pretty boring, so the urban lifestyle of the young and gay just doesn't appeal to me like it might have when I was younger, or if I'd ever been into that sort of thing in the first place. The one time I went out partying with some gay guys from work awhile back, I got so drunk at the gay bar that I walked face-first into a tree and bled from my head for a day lol. I'm not built for that level of partying.
In my 20s, I regularly hung out with a lot more lesbians or bi women than gay or bi men, probably due to the same kind of masculine/feminine energy preference.
Very similar. I have gay male friends now, who are married, but they're older. And I did have a few when younger but they were particularly philosophically minded. I never really liked the bitchy, catty thing with young gay guys I met. I guess I just wrote an article claiming that gay guys invented femininity, and I'm not a big fan of femininity much at all, in either men or women, so maybe this isn't a mystery. Maybe women like them because they're just sort of the ultimate mean girl to have as your friend, and I'm not attracted to those qualities regardless of who they come from. The kind of women who tend to have a gay bff are actually the kind of women I like the least and can't vibe with at all.
Otoh I totally admire lesbians. There are just so few of them. One thing I've noticed that is funny is that my husband is like on the 1% extreme of masculine and an ultra man's man type, and lesbians LOOOOVE him. Like they totally fawn and kiss up to him and act like they want to be his bff. So maybe a lot of it is just how much resonance one has with the masculine versus feminine.
I don't have and have never have had any personal animus to gay people. But I did think that marriage as a globally and historically universal institution was obviously meant to regulate and support reproduction, and that everything else is sort of ancillary. And given the inherent tensions and conflicts between the sexes, it did seem dangerous to me to mess with that or potentially undermine it. And like, I have a little quasi nuclear family with dogs substituted for children, and that's fine and people generally treat it as ALMOST equivalent. But I don't feel like they have to, and if society had decided it didn't want to recognize marriages between people who didn't intend to have children, I would have understood and been fine with that. I don't need anyone's stamp of approval nor did I need to be married, you know?
I understand what you mean about the historical reasons for marriage, but I never really disagreed with the idea of same sex marriage, likely because of the environment I was in. Besides growing up in a really gay city, I had openly gay teachers throughout school, and a couple older gay family members who were with their partners for decades. While my uncles were never interested in "gaybies" as my uncle hilariously refers to them, my lesbian cousins each had children from previous (hetero) marriages, and I knew many gay people who still wanted to adopt or otherwise raise kids with a same-sex spouse, so that point never really convinced me.
I almost always knew I didn't want kids, but I have been married twice. I don't know that I'd appreciate having my little family (only with cats instead of dogs) downgraded, and the tax benefits help since our incomes are very different, but if marriage were to be limited only to people with children, regardless of sex, it would at least be fair across the board.
I'm honestly not sure I could even articulate why I personally wanted to be married not only once, but again after the first time didn't work out. I don't know if I really know what marriage is for anymore when it comes to people like me, which is kind of funny.
I've also been married twice, though the first time was in my 20s, extremely short-lived, explosively disastrous, and is sort of locked away in a black box in my mind that I barely acknowledge.
As for the second, I really did NOT want to get married again. But I met a guy that I knew with certainty would never be topped by anyone else, and if I let him go, every man who came after would be a disappointment, so when he asked it seemed like it would be dumb to say no. Also, my mother told me she would disown me if I broke up with him. :)
But actually, I like being married to him quite a lot. The tax benefit is a good thing for sure. More importantly, people give it weight and respect when you refer to your "husband" or "wife", which they don't to your boyfriend/girlfriend, even if you are living together and everything is exactly the same as if you're married (and at a certain age, even saying "boyfriend" sounds dumb). But I guess that's the part I feel slightly guilty about. Because I enjoy that benefit but feel like it's not fully deserved.
Because the whole reason that marriage enjoys greater respect -- even if this is not really conscious to most people -- is because we recognize that it MATTERS if a family with children breaks up. Society has an interest in that not happening. Divorce is bad for children, and it's important to keep fathers tied to their children (which they have a tendency not to be, without the tie to the mother). If my husband and I divorce, it does not really affect anyone but us, and society doesn't any reason to care. When a couple with kids divorces, it should rightly be understood as a tragedy.
So I guess I just recognize that being a family with children deserves a special status. Not like I'm trying to degrade or give short-shrift to other types of families like my own, just more that raising kids and sticking together throughout it is really, really hard and therefore deserves like an extra level of respect/prestige. My family life is awesome and easy, so I don't need an extra badge on top of it.
I've never had any problem whatsoever with gay couples, I just think the Arctos type argument that it doesn't warrant the same social respect is basically correct, for the reason above. OTOH, I understand why 20 years ago, LGB REALLY wanted the "stamp of approval" because society had disrespected and persecuted them so much. So that was entirely understandable for them to want.
So will you be saying ‘Neo-Leninist are the real transphobes’ in 2050?
This whole ‘it’s lost’ is a demoralisation taunt that has been internalised by the right. It’s why the right keeps on losing on culture, because it is never prepared to roll back previous culture war victories.
You do know they really want you to think ‘it’s lost’, right? But if they were so certain of their irreversible triumph why are they so paranoid about censoring social media and undertake aggressive pride parades?
I’m not saying it will be easy, it will take a highly committed vanguard of people within the top of conservative parties in the Anglosphere, and a large cultural shift at both the grassroots and policymaking level.
And your example about the Confederacy, well… they did fight back. They reversed black suffrage in the South and had them working low wage jobs, they completely established cultural hegemony in academia and establishment circles that the South had been noble to rebel. The Republicans went from being staunch supporters of racial equality to not daring to touch Jim Crow. When did this change? When the White South got soft, being seduced by calls of being on the ‘right side of history’, and feeling that they were doomed to lose.
I’m not saying that because I think anti-Black racism is good. I’m saying that self-belief and stubborn pride goes a long way, and when that is gone, talk of losing will always be self-fulfilling. You can fight the good fight, and maybe lose, or say ‘we’ll lose’ and always lose.
I think I gave you credit for that and I don't disagree. Really, I can't help but admire your ox-like stubbornness (though that is probably because I recognize the rigor in your arguments...if I didn't, maybe I would just think you were crazy).
But also, sometimes one really has just lost.
The thing is, when everyone opposed it 25 years ago, it wasn't on much of a reasoned argument either. It was just disgust and an "ew, gross, weird" reaction. It was only a small number of intellectuals and Catholic scholar types making deep arguments about the function of marriage and risks and incentives. And today, it's the same in reverse, and all anyone is going to hear is "you want to be mean to my gay friend/son/neighbor/sister" and they will defend them and you won't get anywhere.
And of course it's precisely because so many ordinary Americans are terribly embarrassed of their previous stance on gay marriage that they allowed the wholly deranged, extremist trans stuff to happen...they were afraid of making the same mistake twice, so they didn't think too much about it and kept their mouths shut. That's an emperor's new clothes type scandal. That fear of tainting one's bourgeoisie credibility prevented so many people from noticing that medically neutering a mentally ill young person is really sick, or from saying anything once they noticed.
So, it's not a battle I care to fight, and I think it's a lost cause. I will settle for just getting people to remember that only women get pregnant, and that pregnancy and birth are actually a really hugely important big deal that all of life revolves around and that male and female bodies are functionally entirely different and that is not a choice or a social construct. One would not think that requires a political movement, but here we are.
I can't see a path to rolling things back to the more naturalistic ethos you prefer. Perhaps in 40 years you'll be rewarded for your stubborn adherence to your convictions and get the ultimate "told you so" vindication. Though in my experience, no one ever gives you the "you were right" credit. They just drop the issue, act like they never cared about it, and move on like they always knew whatever the new thing they're supposed to think is. Making bets with people is one way around that.
Americans went from drinking like sailors all day long to a constitutional amendment banning all alcohol (that requires 75% majority in nearly every state BTW) to repealing that amendment in like a couple of decades.
They went from almost not smoking at all to a pack a day to smoking being seen as being beyond the pale outside the working class.
Who knows what the right side of history is. Most of the world thought some kind of authoritarian socialism was the right side of history for most of the 20th century.
You want your kids to grow up to be psychologically healthy people that get and stay married and give you lots of grandchildren. The gay lifestyle is the opposite of that. The more your kids hold gayness in high status the worse off your going to be.
If that isn’t your goal, and I don’t think it’s Walt’s goal, then obviously none of this is appealing. Walt’s lifestyle is pretty indistinguishable from your standard gay urbanite just his partners have a vagina. He’s correct to think that anti-gayness is anti his lifestyle.
>And your example about the Confederacy, well… they did fight back. They reversed black suffrage in the South and had them working low wage jobs, they completely established cultural hegemony in academia and establishment circles that the South had been noble to rebel. The Republicans went from being staunch supporters of racial equality to not daring to touch Jim Crow. When did this change? When the White South got soft, being seduced by calls of being on the ‘right side of history’, and feeling that they were doomed to lose.
Nah Reconstruction ended so quickly only because northern Dems (esp Irish/German immigrants) needed Dixie whites in their coalition to break the Puritans and resist crazy Yankee Republicanism, and moderate Republicans didn't care enough about black people to stop this.
Redeemers won out against the scalawags / carpetbaggers *precisely because* they compromised a lot (accepting a pretty humiliating secondary role in the Dem coalition to immigrant political machines) and thought about politics in an extremely transactional way. This was facilitated by the intransigent Cavalier aristocracy having been obliterated and replaced by ambitious and cynical Borderers.
If you want a good model for overturning gay marriage you should actually look at black people under Jim Crow and how they dealt with it. They had a pretty similar position in 1890 that you do now. But coalitions are constantly shifting and a lot can change in 75 years (e.g. the USSR trying to make diplomatic inroads in Africa...)
I was mildly pro -- I know an elderly Boomer gay couple who survived the AIDS epidemic because they had been a monogamous couple since meeting in theater grad school in the 1970s. Denying them "family" status for things like hospital visitation rights (one of them passed away from cancer a few years ago) seemed needlessly cruel.
Still, it was significant that civil unions, which were the obvious compromise position (give same-sex couples legal rights but don't call it "marriage"), never got any traction with either side. And the vindictiveness of post-Obergefell cases like Masterpiece Cakeshop and that pizzeria in Indiana proved that for at least some advocates, it really WAS about punishing and humiliating Red Team.
>fwiw, my perception is that there seem to be MORE gay men in conservative families than liberal ones
Tangential, but my strong anecdotal impression is that this is true of trans identities as well, although for cultural rather than genetic reasons (conservative areas that enforce rigid gender roles produce a bigger backlash among the people who don't fit in.) I wish there were hard quantitative data on this, but of course that's not going to be collected any time soon.
1) Conservatives have more kids, so higher chance of having a gay kid.
2) Little Brothers are more likely to be gay. It's been awhile but what I remember is that there is some hormone or chemical or whatever that accumulates in the women's body with each pregnancy. This helps with the health of the mother and the baby, but more of it makes the kid more likely to turn out gay. Hence little brothers end up gay more often. If you a conservative with a lot of kids you are going to have a lot more little brothers.
100%. Particularly for males who are trans. A disproportionate amount of whom are non white males from very culturally conservative families. I was always surprised no one noticed that bc it was/is so obvious.
Steve Sailer has a theory that a lot of high profile trans (think Caitlin Jenner) are high testerone men that see a drop in testosterone in middle age and it makes them feel trans. Since conservatives are higher T that makes sense.
That kind of "trans" is associated with a disorder where you basically want to fuck a female version of yourself. There is a term for it buy I forget. One reason female psychologists were very wary of these trans claims is they noticed the patients had no interest in anything female except sexuality.
The following was originally intended to be a reply to your post, but ended up as sort of a separate-yet-tangential mini-essay:
There are a few questions at play here.
1)What is the Telos of marriage within the context of the current iteration of Western society?
2)Public/Overt acceptance of homosexuality as a sanctioned mode of being.
There is no widely agreed upon answer to 1.) I 'd argue that in the past, marriage served as a mechanism of ensuring that children were raised by securely pair bonded parents, with auxiliary support from 2 extended families. Marriage was also a way to ensure genetic paternity for the father and father's family. Assured paternity and the expectation of indefinite marriage allowed for the father and father's family to provide resources in a stable manner over many years with the expectation that their resources will not be 'squandered', evolutionarily speaking. It also allowed for a structured and stable platform for the patrilineal inheritance of wealth/property. (This is why female infidelity is treated more harshly than male infidelity in nearly all societies....and why men are far more prone to homicidal mate guarding/cost-driving-spite behaviour.) Basically, marriage provided for a more stable, productive, and prosocial society by allowing for non-related family groups to form alliances through marriage, as both families form sentimental and economic ties and have an (genetic) interest in the the welfare of the children resulting from the union. Violent male-male competition (a surefire way to destabilize a society) was drastically reduced as marriage laws/norms prevented a winner-cucks-all Hobbesian shit-show - though this relied on extrajudicial enforcement by male relatives and through social exclusion by the female component of society.
None of the above would appear to apply to 'gay marriage'.
Marriage is serious business - or at least it was at some point. The genetic and economic union of two separate extended families was a far more serious affair when survival/mortality was a highly salient concern. What then, is marriage now? Dunno. It's something else. A legally binding security blanket? A time bomb? Given that divorce is no longer taboo, what is the point of the public ceremony? The original function of the public ceremony is to allow all to witness the mutual ascent to the contract - such that if either party should break the contract, all can ostracise them in good conscience. This mattered....when ostracism mattered and when we as a society were willing to ostracise. The support network and security functions once provided by marriage have been supplanted by the State, rendering the threat of social exclusion by the local community somewhat impotent.
Can you LARP your way into it? Dunno. I suspect that the 'serious/sacred' status afforded to the institution of marriage is dependent on an all-encompassing social web of serious consequences for those that break their vows. Currently, the 'serious' penalties are applied asymmetrically (to males), are mainly financial in nature - and are enforced by the State, rather than the local community.
It's an odd, vestigial institution. Let the gays have it. It's dumb to hoard a debased currency.
And....then there's the Gays themselves. Growing up (gen x), my (single, multiple X divorced)mom had lots of gay friends. Some were 'normal' in presentation, some were full-on mincing flamers. They were all cool, and just generally hilarious and fun to be around.
However, as an aggregate population, they are different. Removing the female 'gatekeeping' function from male sexuality has....consequences...that's how you get Monkeypox and public parks that are no-go zones after dark. No Bueno, guys. Cool it with the public deviancy. I know it's 'not all' or 'not the majority'...but still. Seriously.
I don't like the idea of excluding or sanctioning gay guys. As a population, on average they are disproportionately kind, intelligent and thoughtful people.....and yet, they are radically predisposed to paedophilia and general micl. perversions and paraphilias. I'm very high openness...but - gay sex is just gross. (as is all Butt Stuff) Not 'sick to stomach' gross, more like 'disgust facial expression'.... I shudder to imagine how the CHUD feels about it. The word 'abomination' comes to mind.
I suggest we go back to the 'confirmed bachelor' polite fiction model of gay social integration, wherein the gay could be viewed as a valuable-if-eccentric member of society...with legal provisions for civil unions.
I have never seen any evidence that gay guys are more predisposed to pedophilia than straight guys. It seems much more likely to me that they don't have as much gatekeeping if they're trying to get with a gay teenage boy than a teenage girl, and that if they're going younger than that, that they would have access to be around groups of boys alone (in a way grown men would never be trusted alone with groups of girls). Like priests...there's never been an institution that allowed adult men unfettered, secluded access to large numbers of young girls, that's all. And the few times they have (sports coaches for example) we HAVE seen similar abuses.
I agree with much of the rest of what you said. Though I'd note that divorce law does not discriminate against men, it discriminates against the higher earner, and plenty of women are paying alimony these days. And anyone who doesn't get a prenup is crazy.
Edited for clarity. Thing was a mess. I need to lay off the RedBull, apparently. Ugly topic…but Inquiring minds Got 2 Know.
I meant paedophilia according to the clinical definition: sexual attraction to children lacking secondary sex characteristics. There are a few papers out there (search PubMed) which examine its co-morbidity with male homosexuality. The incidence of paedophilia appears to be significantly elevated in the homosexual male population in comparison to the heterosexual male population. If I were to hazard a vague recollection (Weasel-y I know) we are looking at roughly 7-12 paedophiles per 100 homosexual men vs 3-5 paedophiles per 100 heterosexual men - for a comparison, this is similar to rate of occurrence of clinical psychopathy in the White male population (2-5%). These papers were published in the field of experimental psychology, so they were not reliant on criminal offending data which is an inherently incomplete picture of the prevalence of paedophilia within the wider male population as most paedophiles are not going to offend during their lifetime (provided we exclude viewing/possessing Child Porn from the definition of 'offending') and that only a fraction of offenders are ever arrested and charged. This is a highly sensitive topic (hard to get funding), and journals are skittish about publishing work on it, so published peer reviewed studies are few and sample sizes are small.
The stronger case lies in the Arrest/Social Services referral/investigations) datasets. In roughly 80 -90% of all cases of abuse, the offender is male. The victims are typically 50-60% male and 40-50% female. I don't recall if the offense category was narrowly restricted to cases involving paedophilia, or if it was defined as 'sexual offences against minors' which could include victims aged 0-17 depending on the state. Male on male victimization accounts for a surprisingly large proportion (50+%) of total cases given the tiny pool of hypothetical potential offenders (1-3% of the male population is homosexual) even if we allow for the the 'gay 16-year old boy/30 year old offender’-type scenarios (gross and immoral, but not nearly as horrifying as clinical paedophilia) and if we accept the ‘high relative prevalence/accessibility of opportunities for male offenders seeking young male victims’ hypothesis. I'm not sure that we should accept it, given that child sexual abuse offenders are most often relatives, neighbors, or friends of the family. If we were to analyse the male and female victim - case categories separately and we had good information on the aetiological differences between these 2 categories, your hypothesis might well be at least partially explanatory. If, hypothetically speaking, the majority of female victim cases involve the standard 'relative as offender' pattern while the male cases are split 50/50 between your 'serial offender operating from a church, school, etc' hypothesis model and the standard 'relative as offender' model, this might reduce the magnitude of homosexual/heterosexual offending rate differential.
Another possible attenuating factor is the following: In a given paedophile, the orientation of their paedophilic impulse and the orientation of their adult-targeted impulse are not necessarily congruent. The paedophile can have a homosexual attraction to male children and yet have a heterosexual orientation in relation to female adults. Other possible combinations: female child/female adult, male-child/male adult, female-child/male adult(rare?)…..and the various ‘bi’ permutations. Some paedophiles are attracted to children only, (they have no sexual interest in adults)….and can be same sex, opposite sex, or both in ‘orientation’. I don't recall the relative prevalence order of the above 'orientations' within the broader paedophile population. Given the above, Some percentage of 'hetero presenting’ men will be male on male offenders, reducing the proportion of male on male offense cases nominally attributable to the homosexual male population.
In summation: Given the basic offending data, it looks like bad news for the male homosexuals regarding the relative prevalence of paedophilia related offending within their population when compared with that of the heterosexual population. However, the magnitude of this discrepancy in offending rates may prove smaller than the basic analysis would suggest, pending further fine-grained analysis of offender characteristics and offending patterns.
>More importantly though, this battle has been lost. It's over. He is stubbornly clinging to a belief that it could be revived like a Confederate holdout in 1890.<
One could've easily said the same about the abortion issue until recently.
In the short term, sure, a lot of things aren't going to be revived next year, or in the next 5, or even the next decade.
But it took 50 years to overturn Roe, and the pro-life movement never decided during all that time "you know what, this isn't going to change in the next decade, why bother? It's over."
In the long term, very few things are truly "over," certainly not on very high-impact issues like sexual morality.
For this analogy to work properly though, Roe not only would have had to be overturned, but they would have to start arresting (or somehow publicly penalizing) not just every woman who tries to get an abortion, but every woman who has already had one.
If that had been the implication of overturning Roe, it never would have been overturned in the first place. Because suddenly everyone would have had moms and daughters and wives and bosses and employees and friends going to jail.
That's the proper analogy, because almost everyone has a family member, friend, neighbor, or work/school colleague who is gay and out now, including many who are married or aspire to be. And most people are not going to support something that would nullify their marriages/prevent them from marrying, when they'd have to face said family members/friends/neighbors. Too much personal relationship destruction.
>For this analogy to work properly though, Roe not only would have had to be overturned, but they would have to start arresting (or somehow publicly penalizing) not just every woman who tries to get an abortion, but every woman who has already had one.<
This assumes that overturning Obergefell would require that all "gay marriages" performed since Obergefell must also be immediately invalidated and the homosexuals involved in them somehow punished. I'm not sure where you're getting that assumption from, since you recognize that this is not how the overturning of Roe has played out.
>That's the proper analogy, because almost everyone has a family member, friend, neighbor, or work/school colleague who is gay and out now, including many who are married or aspire to be. And most people are not going to support something that would nullify their marriages/prevent them from marrying, when they'd have to face said family members/friends/neighbors. Too much personal relationship destruction.<
A lot of bad assumptions here as well.
1. "Almost everyone?" Perhaps among circles you travel in. Remember that the country is only 60% white at this point and going down fast. Among that soon-to-be-minority white population, some meaningful percent still reside in communities that are conservative and/or religious enough that gay marriage is not readily accepted. People sort heavily based on associations like these. I have no doubt that your statement is true for urban liberal professionals. I assure you it is not true for "almost everyone."
2. Many policies are decided aside from or actively against popular opinion. Roe was not overturned based on a popularity contest. Likewise, polls constantly find that Americans want less immigration, and especially less illegal immigration, and yet the regime remains completely unconcerned about the issue.
3. People destroy personal relationships over politics *all the time*. If your viewpoint were true in a general sense, gay marriage never would've been accepted, because everyone who supported it in the past would've been too scared of "personal relationship destruction" to go against the then-majority opinion.
I used to be soft on gays all the time. Then I realized that my inability to achieve an erection was most likely due to the fact that I am not attracted to men.
>I won’t tolerate consensus-building behavior in any of the spaces I directly control.
>there are certain courtesy norms expected of everyone
This is a good strategy. There's a cyclical pattern that inevitably happens in any online political space (left as well as right), and I think it relates to the issue of generational knowledge transfer and 5-10 year gaps that you've been discussing re: the Zoomer Question. A high-openness discussion group comes up with an interesting new idea; group members with an ideological bent start defining it as a formalism; a younger cohort, with less life experience, adopts the formalism and takes it up as an identity marker. (This happened to "neoreaction" way back when; over on the rival team's side, something like this happened to gender theory.) Maintaining a high quality of discussion means consciously trying to disrupt this cycle.
Great stuff - again, it is hilarious how much our political journeys mirror each other. "Nobody's autistic manifesto is ever implemented" is a great turn of phrase to encapsulate the shift. /Doing/ politics matters far more than /having/ politics. All these autists bubbling themselves off into niche utopian ideologies of how the world "should" be are irrelevant. Marxism is perhaps the exception that proves the rule—once, a bunch of people in a stupid bubble wrote enough theory to actually meme themselves into relevance. Now every dweeb with an pseudonymous internet persona thinks they can do the same for their stupid political compass ball.
For the most part, doing politics means making allies, building coalitions, and getting the next marginal achievable thing done. I don't really care if Joe Biden and Democrats at large have a utopian vision for society that aligns with my carefully considered moral philosophy. I care that they are competent adults who understand governance, and who aren't encouraging populist resentment, conspiracy theories, and political violence. I'd love to have more coalitional partners across the spectrum, but in the actual halls of power, competent and honorable people have been purged from the Republican party, and so that party needs to be disciplined by losing repeatedly until the MAGA/populist wing loses power.
I also know that I have vanishingly little power over national politics, and so I increasingly care about turning my political energy towards local politics. A city councilor will actually read your email. An off-hand comment at a dinner party about a particular candidate or local policy issue could really inform someone or change their perspective, because lots of people are oblivious about local politics, or even if they're somewhat informed, they're not so dogmatic about things.
(Also: "...Arcto dedicates a few paragraphs in the first half to explaining how much of a Chad I am, and it’s crucial that you guys internalize this." 💀 lmao)
Fighting gay marriage is pointless because it will only make the LGBT movement stronger without addressing any of the issues that it is a symptom of. Young people gravitate towards being LGBT today because it is Schrodinger's narcissism - you can be so special you get your own parade and so oppressed you're at the top of the progressive stack - at the same time! Going after gay marriage will just strengthen this victim narrative while annoying the normies who feel like this question is settled and they don't care to rehash it anymore. The real question is why young people feel so strongly that virtue is in weakness that they're trawling for victim identities. This LGBT mania is a symptom of a broader societal disease, and if we treated the disease, it would go back to being a rare, weird proclivity among a small fraction of the population.
I think it's less about identifying with victimhood and more that "queer" serves as an ersatz ethnic identity for middle class white kids who are otherwise disallowed any sort of positive group identity. You get your own holiday, your own flag, your own set of historical heroes and martyrs to look up to...
I see a lot of victim language from this group online (claims to be personally in danger from Christians, conservatives, and TERFS, "protect queer kids" rhetoric). But the idea that it's also a "safe" identity to take pride in is interesting. White immigrant groups that have a lot of ethnic pride - Greeks, Armenians - have no interest in this stuff, though they're typically religious, which could also explain it.
Walt, you wrote a War and Peace length post to tell everyone circuitously that you are not really on the Right. While I respect your openness to discussion somebody like Dave, by your own logic has no reason to talk to you because you have nothing to offer. Your viewpoints are just lukewarm 2000's libertarianism, and honestly most of us on the right see that being just as bad as the left. A key element of the new right is the rejection of the normiecon focus on open markets and secularism.
The thing is, most of them don't want anything to do with a gay furry shitlib, people like Dave aren't trying to get invited to Red Scare parties, they are going to church, and building communities with their own people. The right already has new coalitions, Protestants and Catholics being on the same page for one, they don't need to court the gays or anyone else.
You can be flexible in how you approach alliances and situations but you must have some sort of core belief that you us as a compass to guide you, without that you are at best an entertainer at worst a juggling clown.
He said what he's guided by: personal honor, trustworthiness, good faith, and reciprocity. Why are those things not good enough as guides? I'd say they're critically important, and certainly much moreso as a guide for personal interactions than adherence to a national or global-level policy stance with a vanishgly small likelihood of ever coming to fruition in any event.
"What if I could shitpost my way to not needing a day job?"
When Richard Hanania proved this could be done, it was inevitable there were going to be a lot of copycats.
There really isn't any core to it all other then "how can I generate subscriptions." You've got to be provocative and fresh. There doesn't have to be much substance, you don't need to accomplish much, and you can change positions pretty quickly (Hanania went from being against "invade the world, invite the world" to being in favor of it in short time).
It doesn't matter if the ideas are incoherent and dumb. It's not like this shit is going to make policy, and if a stopped clock is right twice a day plenty of other people were pushing the idea anyway.
Arcto's right that this fags denying children a mother and probably buying these little boys to molest them is pretty evil. But a guys got to bang physiologically damaged chicks, and subscriptions pay for some flashy shit.
Back in the 1950s and 60s William F. Buckley, Jr. was sometimes criticized by his more humorless and dogmatic allies for publishing writers in National Review who were not hardcore conservative enough (e.g. Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion). He would say that the most important thing was that the writing in the magazine be as good as possible. He had well-founded faith that good writing reflects reality, and that reality is consistent with sound politics. Also, he wanted to keep ideas and insights open, so it didn’t decay into a lifeless orthodoxy. As we would say today, WFB, Jr. was high openness.
Your approach, in that sense, is profoundly Paleocon. Congratulations.
Not especially interested in Arcto’s taxonomy or this particular policy thrust from him.
For the longest time, I have been trying to figure out a label that fits me or a group that I belonged to. I used to firmly be a NeoCon, but I was open enough to look at the evidence of how NeoConservatism worked in the real world and realized it was a failed ideology. At that point I drifted around reading a lot of true conservatives, libertarians, and liberals, and realized they all made good points occasionally. Only Leftists were making points worse than the NeoCons.
This post helped me realize I do not have to pick a single consistent ideology, I can just take the best ideas from all of them. I don’t need an ideology, just a meta political framework. And what I really value is openness, civility, and liberty.
Bryan Caplan writes that the Left is Anti-market and the Right is Anti-Leftist. When I first read that, I dismissed it, but at this point I think it adequately reflects my view. I will be happy if conservatives, liberals, or libertarians control the government, but I never want leftists in control.
I don't want to answer for Walt, but in my estimation, elite is more of a disposition or an 'existential stance'; not something tied explicitly to material circumstances. Obviously, a destitute crack-addict who lives in a gutter is probably not elite. But past a certain point, the hallmarks of elitism are not straight-forwardly trackable to explicit measurements of money, sexual prowess, social influence, etc.
I think a good one-sentence summary that captures being elite is the ability and desire to: "Fuck around, find out, pick yourself up, and keep going". And, to go through that cycle in increasingly impactful and creative ways.
Fuck Around = A strong sense of sovereignty or agency; this comes from a certain baseline degree of disagreeability or rebelliousness; it is not a rejection of others, but a sense of trust or faith foremost in oneself to figure out and navigate situations. Especially when it comes to cooperation. An unwillingness to unreasonably submit. A thirst for pushing on interesting things.
Find Out = A high baseline of opennesses, curiosity, and intelligence. This may be the most important quality. First of all, it indicates that you can learn from complexity and novelty. Second of all, it balances out the 'fucking around': 'finding out' enables you to have to humility to understand where you are weak or lacking. And also to learn from others who are better than you are in certain areas. Knowing when to give up or back down.
Pick Yourself Up = A sense of cultivation of resilience; the opposite of fragility, or even explicit anti-fragility – becoming a beast when the going gets rough. 'Fucking around and finding out' will involve a lot of banging one's head into walls and breaking your fingers. You need be able to embrace the pain of that process in a way that's energizing if you want to ascend to some top level. Loving your haters, internal and external.
Keep Going = Propagating the elite orientation; widen, spread, expand. Obviously, this is immediately clear in the type of people who you seek out to associate with – friends, colleagues, mentors. But, there's also an understanding that who you are goes beyond you. You establish a family in which you teach your kids these ways; or cultivate many disciples who carry on your work; you encourage society to rise to your level.
These are all the qualities and behaviors that mirror vitality, too, because this the way that life itself exists and operates.
I agree with what you’re saying. I will hash this out in a forthcoming post but essentially feel that if every time you walk into a room you notice there is a cool kids table that always has a different cast from the last room you were in and you never get to sit there, it says something about your status, an inability to convince people that you are elite or enviable in any way at all.
Just read it. It’s great. I agree. I can feel an anxiety in the air from people who hold elite status (doctors, law professors) if you mention any news of urban decay or the economy.
I think you hit the essence of the issue when you said "if we let them come from the gays, they'll come for the guys who get laid [i.e. they'll come for me and my BPD Jewish bedmates] next."
The core distinction is views on sexual ethics/family formation/etc. If you are "pro-family" and want sex to be about procreation + family formation, yes, you are going to want to "come for the gays," and also for the promiscuous heterosexuals. Encouraging casual, non-procreative sex clearly works against family formation, whether it's gay sex or two uncommitted heteros using a condom and the pill. These are two sides of the same coin.
On the other hand, if you would rather that sex be about hedonism and pleasure, well then, you won't have much interest in policing sodomy. To do so would be to condemn your own behavior after all. If sex is just about making the penis feel good, what difference does it make how people go about getting that done, so long as it's being done privately at least?
If one wants to engage more on "the gays," that would be the debate to have, I think. "Religious extremists" favor the family formation side and correctly perceive sexual liberty as a threat to that goal, although they mostly all suck at articulating and properly selling their viewpoint, which is a big reason they lose.
Oh, and wasn't one of your things that you wanted to roll back sexual liberation so that degeneracy is actually transgressive again, and all the stupid proles would quit thinking it's cool? It seems to me like ending "gay marriage" would be exactly the sort of thing to pursue in service of this goal, striking a symbolic cultural blow against sexual deviancy while leaving The Gays free to sodomize each other without dressing it up as "marriage." It would be a step back towards your preferred world in which sexual deviancy is culturally taboo yet legally allowed.
Point number 22 needs a separate analysis unto itself. Your comparison between Jews and Gays in terms of power is an apt one but you may find it worthwhile more thoroughly explicating not just the similarities but also the alliances. Lay bare the Homo-Judeo gayplex and many of the other points you make will fall right in line.
Dave Greene and others don't like you because you're obviously on the ziocon payroll tasked with helping to create a kosher coalition, not because they're "low in openness".
I actually agree with Arctos on the merits of his argument. I was there and intensely involved in the whole debate over gay marriage and there really never was a coherent argument or much logic on the "pro" side. It was just appeals to emotion and "look we're nice normal people who want to live nice normal lives just like you so don't be mean to us." There was never any serious reckoning with what exactly marriage was for or why it even exists as an institution, and if one can't define the function of the institution one can't analyze whether or not two married males serve that function or not. The slippery slope argument was roundly dismissed as preposterous even though every single thing predicted by the slippery slopists has come to pass and then some. NO ONE other than easily ignored hardcore religionists EVER acknowledged or were allowed to talk about the truly extraordinary levels of gay (male) promiscuity and perversity which will never in any situation be even remotely matched by heterosexual debauchery, and I don't care if you lock a squad of prostitutes on MDMA and crack into a room with a football team on steroids...there will never be a heaterosexual equivalent. And ultimately the whole war was not about any rational basis for which gay couples really had any need to get married, it was purely just their desire for the status of having a social stamp of approval.
That said, while he's correct on the merits, the position of a non religious or atheist person opposing gay marriage on grounds other than religious or personal animus is a lonely one indeed. There weren't many back then and there are virtually none now. He might be the only one. And in a sense, that is admirable and honorable in itself. And I'm certain he would not want an ally from the likes of me, because he likely views someone who marries without hiding their intention to never procreate, when they were otherwise well set up to do so, as just as much of a depraved and corrosive influence on the institution as two dudes marrying (and admittedly, no one should regard or respect a voluntarily childless marriage as being as respectable or valid or important as a procreative one -- it isn't, it's second tier).
More importantly though, this battle has been lost. It's over. He is stubbornly clinging to a belief that it could be revived like a Confederate holdout in 1890. And sticking to one's principles even when you're the only one left and all hope is lost is noble and admirable in a sense. But his "side" has lost definitively. There are way too many people with gay people in their families and networks to walk it back now, it's done. (And fwiw, my perception is that there seem to be MORE gay men in conservative families than liberal ones...likely bc they historically placed more pressure on them to marry and have kids, thus passing down a set of gay genes that otherwise would be much more rare).
I don't really understand why women like gay guys so much, though your point on that is a good one and they're going to let straight men come for their gays. I've personally never had that affinity and maybe it's just bc I enjoy and get along with straight males more than most women, because it's always struck me as a bizarre allyship and I don't think their interests are that aligned. Maybe it's just a matter of them wanting to feel accepted by men without the pressure of having to be sexually alluring to them.
While I think Arctos is correct on the merits, Walt's arguments here are fresh and insightful and well stated, while also portraying his conviviality per usual, just as Arctos acknowledges. Female tears are almost impossible to beat without coming off as a brute, but authentic good cheer, fellowship, and charisma are equally hard to resist. So I find myself once again agreeing with both. No surprise that to a Confederate holdout stubbornly drawing a line, Walt will be viewed as a carpetbagger.
"I don't really understand why women like gay guys so much, though your point on that is a good one and they're going to let straight men come for their gays. I've personally never had that affinity and maybe it's just bc I enjoy and get along with straight males more than most women, because it's always struck me as a bizarre allyship and I don't think their interests are that aligned. Maybe it's just a matter of them wanting to feel accepted by men without the pressure of having to be sexually alluring to them."
I didn't have very many gay male friends in my 20s and early 30s, and I never really understood why. All my female friends and acquaintances seemed to have at least one gay male bestie, but I did not really start making more friends with gay men until my late 30s when people got older and started settling down more, and mostly after I moved to a more conservative area. My theory about this is that, similar to you, I was mostly friends with straight guys, and gay men in their 20s were pretty stereotypically feminine in ways I wasn't back then (into fashion, went clubbing, cared about celebrities, that kind of thing).
I lived in a super liberal and gay-friendly area, so this was definitely more accepted there than it is where I live now. The gay men (who actually stay) around here act a lot more stereotypically masculine than the gay guys I knew back in Minneapolis, and they're more likely to be settled down and married, living a more traditional lifestyle, making it more likely that we have things in common nowadays. I'm not super "traditional," but I am pretty boring, so the urban lifestyle of the young and gay just doesn't appeal to me like it might have when I was younger, or if I'd ever been into that sort of thing in the first place. The one time I went out partying with some gay guys from work awhile back, I got so drunk at the gay bar that I walked face-first into a tree and bled from my head for a day lol. I'm not built for that level of partying.
In my 20s, I regularly hung out with a lot more lesbians or bi women than gay or bi men, probably due to the same kind of masculine/feminine energy preference.
Very similar. I have gay male friends now, who are married, but they're older. And I did have a few when younger but they were particularly philosophically minded. I never really liked the bitchy, catty thing with young gay guys I met. I guess I just wrote an article claiming that gay guys invented femininity, and I'm not a big fan of femininity much at all, in either men or women, so maybe this isn't a mystery. Maybe women like them because they're just sort of the ultimate mean girl to have as your friend, and I'm not attracted to those qualities regardless of who they come from. The kind of women who tend to have a gay bff are actually the kind of women I like the least and can't vibe with at all.
Otoh I totally admire lesbians. There are just so few of them. One thing I've noticed that is funny is that my husband is like on the 1% extreme of masculine and an ultra man's man type, and lesbians LOOOOVE him. Like they totally fawn and kiss up to him and act like they want to be his bff. So maybe a lot of it is just how much resonance one has with the masculine versus feminine.
I don't have and have never have had any personal animus to gay people. But I did think that marriage as a globally and historically universal institution was obviously meant to regulate and support reproduction, and that everything else is sort of ancillary. And given the inherent tensions and conflicts between the sexes, it did seem dangerous to me to mess with that or potentially undermine it. And like, I have a little quasi nuclear family with dogs substituted for children, and that's fine and people generally treat it as ALMOST equivalent. But I don't feel like they have to, and if society had decided it didn't want to recognize marriages between people who didn't intend to have children, I would have understood and been fine with that. I don't need anyone's stamp of approval nor did I need to be married, you know?
I understand what you mean about the historical reasons for marriage, but I never really disagreed with the idea of same sex marriage, likely because of the environment I was in. Besides growing up in a really gay city, I had openly gay teachers throughout school, and a couple older gay family members who were with their partners for decades. While my uncles were never interested in "gaybies" as my uncle hilariously refers to them, my lesbian cousins each had children from previous (hetero) marriages, and I knew many gay people who still wanted to adopt or otherwise raise kids with a same-sex spouse, so that point never really convinced me.
I almost always knew I didn't want kids, but I have been married twice. I don't know that I'd appreciate having my little family (only with cats instead of dogs) downgraded, and the tax benefits help since our incomes are very different, but if marriage were to be limited only to people with children, regardless of sex, it would at least be fair across the board.
I'm honestly not sure I could even articulate why I personally wanted to be married not only once, but again after the first time didn't work out. I don't know if I really know what marriage is for anymore when it comes to people like me, which is kind of funny.
I've also been married twice, though the first time was in my 20s, extremely short-lived, explosively disastrous, and is sort of locked away in a black box in my mind that I barely acknowledge.
As for the second, I really did NOT want to get married again. But I met a guy that I knew with certainty would never be topped by anyone else, and if I let him go, every man who came after would be a disappointment, so when he asked it seemed like it would be dumb to say no. Also, my mother told me she would disown me if I broke up with him. :)
But actually, I like being married to him quite a lot. The tax benefit is a good thing for sure. More importantly, people give it weight and respect when you refer to your "husband" or "wife", which they don't to your boyfriend/girlfriend, even if you are living together and everything is exactly the same as if you're married (and at a certain age, even saying "boyfriend" sounds dumb). But I guess that's the part I feel slightly guilty about. Because I enjoy that benefit but feel like it's not fully deserved.
Because the whole reason that marriage enjoys greater respect -- even if this is not really conscious to most people -- is because we recognize that it MATTERS if a family with children breaks up. Society has an interest in that not happening. Divorce is bad for children, and it's important to keep fathers tied to their children (which they have a tendency not to be, without the tie to the mother). If my husband and I divorce, it does not really affect anyone but us, and society doesn't any reason to care. When a couple with kids divorces, it should rightly be understood as a tragedy.
So I guess I just recognize that being a family with children deserves a special status. Not like I'm trying to degrade or give short-shrift to other types of families like my own, just more that raising kids and sticking together throughout it is really, really hard and therefore deserves like an extra level of respect/prestige. My family life is awesome and easy, so I don't need an extra badge on top of it.
I've never had any problem whatsoever with gay couples, I just think the Arctos type argument that it doesn't warrant the same social respect is basically correct, for the reason above. OTOH, I understand why 20 years ago, LGB REALLY wanted the "stamp of approval" because society had disrespected and persecuted them so much. So that was entirely understandable for them to want.
So will you be saying ‘Neo-Leninist are the real transphobes’ in 2050?
This whole ‘it’s lost’ is a demoralisation taunt that has been internalised by the right. It’s why the right keeps on losing on culture, because it is never prepared to roll back previous culture war victories.
You do know they really want you to think ‘it’s lost’, right? But if they were so certain of their irreversible triumph why are they so paranoid about censoring social media and undertake aggressive pride parades?
I’m not saying it will be easy, it will take a highly committed vanguard of people within the top of conservative parties in the Anglosphere, and a large cultural shift at both the grassroots and policymaking level.
And your example about the Confederacy, well… they did fight back. They reversed black suffrage in the South and had them working low wage jobs, they completely established cultural hegemony in academia and establishment circles that the South had been noble to rebel. The Republicans went from being staunch supporters of racial equality to not daring to touch Jim Crow. When did this change? When the White South got soft, being seduced by calls of being on the ‘right side of history’, and feeling that they were doomed to lose.
I’m not saying that because I think anti-Black racism is good. I’m saying that self-belief and stubborn pride goes a long way, and when that is gone, talk of losing will always be self-fulfilling. You can fight the good fight, and maybe lose, or say ‘we’ll lose’ and always lose.
"self-belief and stubborn pride goes a long way"
I think I gave you credit for that and I don't disagree. Really, I can't help but admire your ox-like stubbornness (though that is probably because I recognize the rigor in your arguments...if I didn't, maybe I would just think you were crazy).
But also, sometimes one really has just lost.
The thing is, when everyone opposed it 25 years ago, it wasn't on much of a reasoned argument either. It was just disgust and an "ew, gross, weird" reaction. It was only a small number of intellectuals and Catholic scholar types making deep arguments about the function of marriage and risks and incentives. And today, it's the same in reverse, and all anyone is going to hear is "you want to be mean to my gay friend/son/neighbor/sister" and they will defend them and you won't get anywhere.
And of course it's precisely because so many ordinary Americans are terribly embarrassed of their previous stance on gay marriage that they allowed the wholly deranged, extremist trans stuff to happen...they were afraid of making the same mistake twice, so they didn't think too much about it and kept their mouths shut. That's an emperor's new clothes type scandal. That fear of tainting one's bourgeoisie credibility prevented so many people from noticing that medically neutering a mentally ill young person is really sick, or from saying anything once they noticed.
So, it's not a battle I care to fight, and I think it's a lost cause. I will settle for just getting people to remember that only women get pregnant, and that pregnancy and birth are actually a really hugely important big deal that all of life revolves around and that male and female bodies are functionally entirely different and that is not a choice or a social construct. One would not think that requires a political movement, but here we are.
I can't see a path to rolling things back to the more naturalistic ethos you prefer. Perhaps in 40 years you'll be rewarded for your stubborn adherence to your convictions and get the ultimate "told you so" vindication. Though in my experience, no one ever gives you the "you were right" credit. They just drop the issue, act like they never cared about it, and move on like they always knew whatever the new thing they're supposed to think is. Making bets with people is one way around that.
Americans went from drinking like sailors all day long to a constitutional amendment banning all alcohol (that requires 75% majority in nearly every state BTW) to repealing that amendment in like a couple of decades.
They went from almost not smoking at all to a pack a day to smoking being seen as being beyond the pale outside the working class.
Who knows what the right side of history is. Most of the world thought some kind of authoritarian socialism was the right side of history for most of the 20th century.
You want your kids to grow up to be psychologically healthy people that get and stay married and give you lots of grandchildren. The gay lifestyle is the opposite of that. The more your kids hold gayness in high status the worse off your going to be.
If that isn’t your goal, and I don’t think it’s Walt’s goal, then obviously none of this is appealing. Walt’s lifestyle is pretty indistinguishable from your standard gay urbanite just his partners have a vagina. He’s correct to think that anti-gayness is anti his lifestyle.
>And your example about the Confederacy, well… they did fight back. They reversed black suffrage in the South and had them working low wage jobs, they completely established cultural hegemony in academia and establishment circles that the South had been noble to rebel. The Republicans went from being staunch supporters of racial equality to not daring to touch Jim Crow. When did this change? When the White South got soft, being seduced by calls of being on the ‘right side of history’, and feeling that they were doomed to lose.
Nah Reconstruction ended so quickly only because northern Dems (esp Irish/German immigrants) needed Dixie whites in their coalition to break the Puritans and resist crazy Yankee Republicanism, and moderate Republicans didn't care enough about black people to stop this.
Redeemers won out against the scalawags / carpetbaggers *precisely because* they compromised a lot (accepting a pretty humiliating secondary role in the Dem coalition to immigrant political machines) and thought about politics in an extremely transactional way. This was facilitated by the intransigent Cavalier aristocracy having been obliterated and replaced by ambitious and cynical Borderers.
If you want a good model for overturning gay marriage you should actually look at black people under Jim Crow and how they dealt with it. They had a pretty similar position in 1890 that you do now. But coalitions are constantly shifting and a lot can change in 75 years (e.g. the USSR trying to make diplomatic inroads in Africa...)
But Black people did not overturn Jim Crow. It was overturned by pressure from Yankee media and Federal judges.
I was mildly pro -- I know an elderly Boomer gay couple who survived the AIDS epidemic because they had been a monogamous couple since meeting in theater grad school in the 1970s. Denying them "family" status for things like hospital visitation rights (one of them passed away from cancer a few years ago) seemed needlessly cruel.
Still, it was significant that civil unions, which were the obvious compromise position (give same-sex couples legal rights but don't call it "marriage"), never got any traction with either side. And the vindictiveness of post-Obergefell cases like Masterpiece Cakeshop and that pizzeria in Indiana proved that for at least some advocates, it really WAS about punishing and humiliating Red Team.
>fwiw, my perception is that there seem to be MORE gay men in conservative families than liberal ones
Tangential, but my strong anecdotal impression is that this is true of trans identities as well, although for cultural rather than genetic reasons (conservative areas that enforce rigid gender roles produce a bigger backlash among the people who don't fit in.) I wish there were hard quantitative data on this, but of course that's not going to be collected any time soon.
1) Conservatives have more kids, so higher chance of having a gay kid.
2) Little Brothers are more likely to be gay. It's been awhile but what I remember is that there is some hormone or chemical or whatever that accumulates in the women's body with each pregnancy. This helps with the health of the mother and the baby, but more of it makes the kid more likely to turn out gay. Hence little brothers end up gay more often. If you a conservative with a lot of kids you are going to have a lot more little brothers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraternal_birth_order_and_male_sexual_orientation
100%. Particularly for males who are trans. A disproportionate amount of whom are non white males from very culturally conservative families. I was always surprised no one noticed that bc it was/is so obvious.
Steve Sailer has a theory that a lot of high profile trans (think Caitlin Jenner) are high testerone men that see a drop in testosterone in middle age and it makes them feel trans. Since conservatives are higher T that makes sense.
That kind of "trans" is associated with a disorder where you basically want to fuck a female version of yourself. There is a term for it buy I forget. One reason female psychologists were very wary of these trans claims is they noticed the patients had no interest in anything female except sexuality.
Autogynephilia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanchard%27s_transsexualism_typology#Autogynephilia
The following was originally intended to be a reply to your post, but ended up as sort of a separate-yet-tangential mini-essay:
There are a few questions at play here.
1)What is the Telos of marriage within the context of the current iteration of Western society?
2)Public/Overt acceptance of homosexuality as a sanctioned mode of being.
There is no widely agreed upon answer to 1.) I 'd argue that in the past, marriage served as a mechanism of ensuring that children were raised by securely pair bonded parents, with auxiliary support from 2 extended families. Marriage was also a way to ensure genetic paternity for the father and father's family. Assured paternity and the expectation of indefinite marriage allowed for the father and father's family to provide resources in a stable manner over many years with the expectation that their resources will not be 'squandered', evolutionarily speaking. It also allowed for a structured and stable platform for the patrilineal inheritance of wealth/property. (This is why female infidelity is treated more harshly than male infidelity in nearly all societies....and why men are far more prone to homicidal mate guarding/cost-driving-spite behaviour.) Basically, marriage provided for a more stable, productive, and prosocial society by allowing for non-related family groups to form alliances through marriage, as both families form sentimental and economic ties and have an (genetic) interest in the the welfare of the children resulting from the union. Violent male-male competition (a surefire way to destabilize a society) was drastically reduced as marriage laws/norms prevented a winner-cucks-all Hobbesian shit-show - though this relied on extrajudicial enforcement by male relatives and through social exclusion by the female component of society.
None of the above would appear to apply to 'gay marriage'.
Marriage is serious business - or at least it was at some point. The genetic and economic union of two separate extended families was a far more serious affair when survival/mortality was a highly salient concern. What then, is marriage now? Dunno. It's something else. A legally binding security blanket? A time bomb? Given that divorce is no longer taboo, what is the point of the public ceremony? The original function of the public ceremony is to allow all to witness the mutual ascent to the contract - such that if either party should break the contract, all can ostracise them in good conscience. This mattered....when ostracism mattered and when we as a society were willing to ostracise. The support network and security functions once provided by marriage have been supplanted by the State, rendering the threat of social exclusion by the local community somewhat impotent.
Can you LARP your way into it? Dunno. I suspect that the 'serious/sacred' status afforded to the institution of marriage is dependent on an all-encompassing social web of serious consequences for those that break their vows. Currently, the 'serious' penalties are applied asymmetrically (to males), are mainly financial in nature - and are enforced by the State, rather than the local community.
It's an odd, vestigial institution. Let the gays have it. It's dumb to hoard a debased currency.
And....then there's the Gays themselves. Growing up (gen x), my (single, multiple X divorced)mom had lots of gay friends. Some were 'normal' in presentation, some were full-on mincing flamers. They were all cool, and just generally hilarious and fun to be around.
However, as an aggregate population, they are different. Removing the female 'gatekeeping' function from male sexuality has....consequences...that's how you get Monkeypox and public parks that are no-go zones after dark. No Bueno, guys. Cool it with the public deviancy. I know it's 'not all' or 'not the majority'...but still. Seriously.
I don't like the idea of excluding or sanctioning gay guys. As a population, on average they are disproportionately kind, intelligent and thoughtful people.....and yet, they are radically predisposed to paedophilia and general micl. perversions and paraphilias. I'm very high openness...but - gay sex is just gross. (as is all Butt Stuff) Not 'sick to stomach' gross, more like 'disgust facial expression'.... I shudder to imagine how the CHUD feels about it. The word 'abomination' comes to mind.
I suggest we go back to the 'confirmed bachelor' polite fiction model of gay social integration, wherein the gay could be viewed as a valuable-if-eccentric member of society...with legal provisions for civil unions.
I have never seen any evidence that gay guys are more predisposed to pedophilia than straight guys. It seems much more likely to me that they don't have as much gatekeeping if they're trying to get with a gay teenage boy than a teenage girl, and that if they're going younger than that, that they would have access to be around groups of boys alone (in a way grown men would never be trusted alone with groups of girls). Like priests...there's never been an institution that allowed adult men unfettered, secluded access to large numbers of young girls, that's all. And the few times they have (sports coaches for example) we HAVE seen similar abuses.
I agree with much of the rest of what you said. Though I'd note that divorce law does not discriminate against men, it discriminates against the higher earner, and plenty of women are paying alimony these days. And anyone who doesn't get a prenup is crazy.
Edited for clarity. Thing was a mess. I need to lay off the RedBull, apparently. Ugly topic…but Inquiring minds Got 2 Know.
I meant paedophilia according to the clinical definition: sexual attraction to children lacking secondary sex characteristics. There are a few papers out there (search PubMed) which examine its co-morbidity with male homosexuality. The incidence of paedophilia appears to be significantly elevated in the homosexual male population in comparison to the heterosexual male population. If I were to hazard a vague recollection (Weasel-y I know) we are looking at roughly 7-12 paedophiles per 100 homosexual men vs 3-5 paedophiles per 100 heterosexual men - for a comparison, this is similar to rate of occurrence of clinical psychopathy in the White male population (2-5%). These papers were published in the field of experimental psychology, so they were not reliant on criminal offending data which is an inherently incomplete picture of the prevalence of paedophilia within the wider male population as most paedophiles are not going to offend during their lifetime (provided we exclude viewing/possessing Child Porn from the definition of 'offending') and that only a fraction of offenders are ever arrested and charged. This is a highly sensitive topic (hard to get funding), and journals are skittish about publishing work on it, so published peer reviewed studies are few and sample sizes are small.
The stronger case lies in the Arrest/Social Services referral/investigations) datasets. In roughly 80 -90% of all cases of abuse, the offender is male. The victims are typically 50-60% male and 40-50% female. I don't recall if the offense category was narrowly restricted to cases involving paedophilia, or if it was defined as 'sexual offences against minors' which could include victims aged 0-17 depending on the state. Male on male victimization accounts for a surprisingly large proportion (50+%) of total cases given the tiny pool of hypothetical potential offenders (1-3% of the male population is homosexual) even if we allow for the the 'gay 16-year old boy/30 year old offender’-type scenarios (gross and immoral, but not nearly as horrifying as clinical paedophilia) and if we accept the ‘high relative prevalence/accessibility of opportunities for male offenders seeking young male victims’ hypothesis. I'm not sure that we should accept it, given that child sexual abuse offenders are most often relatives, neighbors, or friends of the family. If we were to analyse the male and female victim - case categories separately and we had good information on the aetiological differences between these 2 categories, your hypothesis might well be at least partially explanatory. If, hypothetically speaking, the majority of female victim cases involve the standard 'relative as offender' pattern while the male cases are split 50/50 between your 'serial offender operating from a church, school, etc' hypothesis model and the standard 'relative as offender' model, this might reduce the magnitude of homosexual/heterosexual offending rate differential.
Another possible attenuating factor is the following: In a given paedophile, the orientation of their paedophilic impulse and the orientation of their adult-targeted impulse are not necessarily congruent. The paedophile can have a homosexual attraction to male children and yet have a heterosexual orientation in relation to female adults. Other possible combinations: female child/female adult, male-child/male adult, female-child/male adult(rare?)…..and the various ‘bi’ permutations. Some paedophiles are attracted to children only, (they have no sexual interest in adults)….and can be same sex, opposite sex, or both in ‘orientation’. I don't recall the relative prevalence order of the above 'orientations' within the broader paedophile population. Given the above, Some percentage of 'hetero presenting’ men will be male on male offenders, reducing the proportion of male on male offense cases nominally attributable to the homosexual male population.
In summation: Given the basic offending data, it looks like bad news for the male homosexuals regarding the relative prevalence of paedophilia related offending within their population when compared with that of the heterosexual population. However, the magnitude of this discrepancy in offending rates may prove smaller than the basic analysis would suggest, pending further fine-grained analysis of offender characteristics and offending patterns.
>More importantly though, this battle has been lost. It's over. He is stubbornly clinging to a belief that it could be revived like a Confederate holdout in 1890.<
One could've easily said the same about the abortion issue until recently.
In the short term, sure, a lot of things aren't going to be revived next year, or in the next 5, or even the next decade.
But it took 50 years to overturn Roe, and the pro-life movement never decided during all that time "you know what, this isn't going to change in the next decade, why bother? It's over."
In the long term, very few things are truly "over," certainly not on very high-impact issues like sexual morality.
For this analogy to work properly though, Roe not only would have had to be overturned, but they would have to start arresting (or somehow publicly penalizing) not just every woman who tries to get an abortion, but every woman who has already had one.
If that had been the implication of overturning Roe, it never would have been overturned in the first place. Because suddenly everyone would have had moms and daughters and wives and bosses and employees and friends going to jail.
That's the proper analogy, because almost everyone has a family member, friend, neighbor, or work/school colleague who is gay and out now, including many who are married or aspire to be. And most people are not going to support something that would nullify their marriages/prevent them from marrying, when they'd have to face said family members/friends/neighbors. Too much personal relationship destruction.
>For this analogy to work properly though, Roe not only would have had to be overturned, but they would have to start arresting (or somehow publicly penalizing) not just every woman who tries to get an abortion, but every woman who has already had one.<
This assumes that overturning Obergefell would require that all "gay marriages" performed since Obergefell must also be immediately invalidated and the homosexuals involved in them somehow punished. I'm not sure where you're getting that assumption from, since you recognize that this is not how the overturning of Roe has played out.
>That's the proper analogy, because almost everyone has a family member, friend, neighbor, or work/school colleague who is gay and out now, including many who are married or aspire to be. And most people are not going to support something that would nullify their marriages/prevent them from marrying, when they'd have to face said family members/friends/neighbors. Too much personal relationship destruction.<
A lot of bad assumptions here as well.
1. "Almost everyone?" Perhaps among circles you travel in. Remember that the country is only 60% white at this point and going down fast. Among that soon-to-be-minority white population, some meaningful percent still reside in communities that are conservative and/or religious enough that gay marriage is not readily accepted. People sort heavily based on associations like these. I have no doubt that your statement is true for urban liberal professionals. I assure you it is not true for "almost everyone."
2. Many policies are decided aside from or actively against popular opinion. Roe was not overturned based on a popularity contest. Likewise, polls constantly find that Americans want less immigration, and especially less illegal immigration, and yet the regime remains completely unconcerned about the issue.
3. People destroy personal relationships over politics *all the time*. If your viewpoint were true in a general sense, gay marriage never would've been accepted, because everyone who supported it in the past would've been too scared of "personal relationship destruction" to go against the then-majority opinion.
And I could probably go on.
I was quite libertine in my youth and still support sexual freedom, but I don’t make it a part of my identity. Otherwise, dead on.
I used to be soft on gays all the time. Then I realized that my inability to achieve an erection was most likely due to the fact that I am not attracted to men.
So now I just do oral.
You’re welcome.
>I won’t tolerate consensus-building behavior in any of the spaces I directly control.
>there are certain courtesy norms expected of everyone
This is a good strategy. There's a cyclical pattern that inevitably happens in any online political space (left as well as right), and I think it relates to the issue of generational knowledge transfer and 5-10 year gaps that you've been discussing re: the Zoomer Question. A high-openness discussion group comes up with an interesting new idea; group members with an ideological bent start defining it as a formalism; a younger cohort, with less life experience, adopts the formalism and takes it up as an identity marker. (This happened to "neoreaction" way back when; over on the rival team's side, something like this happened to gender theory.) Maintaining a high quality of discussion means consciously trying to disrupt this cycle.
Great stuff - again, it is hilarious how much our political journeys mirror each other. "Nobody's autistic manifesto is ever implemented" is a great turn of phrase to encapsulate the shift. /Doing/ politics matters far more than /having/ politics. All these autists bubbling themselves off into niche utopian ideologies of how the world "should" be are irrelevant. Marxism is perhaps the exception that proves the rule—once, a bunch of people in a stupid bubble wrote enough theory to actually meme themselves into relevance. Now every dweeb with an pseudonymous internet persona thinks they can do the same for their stupid political compass ball.
For the most part, doing politics means making allies, building coalitions, and getting the next marginal achievable thing done. I don't really care if Joe Biden and Democrats at large have a utopian vision for society that aligns with my carefully considered moral philosophy. I care that they are competent adults who understand governance, and who aren't encouraging populist resentment, conspiracy theories, and political violence. I'd love to have more coalitional partners across the spectrum, but in the actual halls of power, competent and honorable people have been purged from the Republican party, and so that party needs to be disciplined by losing repeatedly until the MAGA/populist wing loses power.
I also know that I have vanishingly little power over national politics, and so I increasingly care about turning my political energy towards local politics. A city councilor will actually read your email. An off-hand comment at a dinner party about a particular candidate or local policy issue could really inform someone or change their perspective, because lots of people are oblivious about local politics, or even if they're somewhat informed, they're not so dogmatic about things.
(Also: "...Arcto dedicates a few paragraphs in the first half to explaining how much of a Chad I am, and it’s crucial that you guys internalize this." 💀 lmao)
Fighting gay marriage is pointless because it will only make the LGBT movement stronger without addressing any of the issues that it is a symptom of. Young people gravitate towards being LGBT today because it is Schrodinger's narcissism - you can be so special you get your own parade and so oppressed you're at the top of the progressive stack - at the same time! Going after gay marriage will just strengthen this victim narrative while annoying the normies who feel like this question is settled and they don't care to rehash it anymore. The real question is why young people feel so strongly that virtue is in weakness that they're trawling for victim identities. This LGBT mania is a symptom of a broader societal disease, and if we treated the disease, it would go back to being a rare, weird proclivity among a small fraction of the population.
I think it's less about identifying with victimhood and more that "queer" serves as an ersatz ethnic identity for middle class white kids who are otherwise disallowed any sort of positive group identity. You get your own holiday, your own flag, your own set of historical heroes and martyrs to look up to...
I see a lot of victim language from this group online (claims to be personally in danger from Christians, conservatives, and TERFS, "protect queer kids" rhetoric). But the idea that it's also a "safe" identity to take pride in is interesting. White immigrant groups that have a lot of ethnic pride - Greeks, Armenians - have no interest in this stuff, though they're typically religious, which could also explain it.
Walt, you wrote a War and Peace length post to tell everyone circuitously that you are not really on the Right. While I respect your openness to discussion somebody like Dave, by your own logic has no reason to talk to you because you have nothing to offer. Your viewpoints are just lukewarm 2000's libertarianism, and honestly most of us on the right see that being just as bad as the left. A key element of the new right is the rejection of the normiecon focus on open markets and secularism.
The thing is, most of them don't want anything to do with a gay furry shitlib, people like Dave aren't trying to get invited to Red Scare parties, they are going to church, and building communities with their own people. The right already has new coalitions, Protestants and Catholics being on the same page for one, they don't need to court the gays or anyone else.
You can be flexible in how you approach alliances and situations but you must have some sort of core belief that you us as a compass to guide you, without that you are at best an entertainer at worst a juggling clown.
He said what he's guided by: personal honor, trustworthiness, good faith, and reciprocity. Why are those things not good enough as guides? I'd say they're critically important, and certainly much moreso as a guide for personal interactions than adherence to a national or global-level policy stance with a vanishgly small likelihood of ever coming to fruition in any event.
"What if I could shitpost my way to not needing a day job?"
When Richard Hanania proved this could be done, it was inevitable there were going to be a lot of copycats.
There really isn't any core to it all other then "how can I generate subscriptions." You've got to be provocative and fresh. There doesn't have to be much substance, you don't need to accomplish much, and you can change positions pretty quickly (Hanania went from being against "invade the world, invite the world" to being in favor of it in short time).
It doesn't matter if the ideas are incoherent and dumb. It's not like this shit is going to make policy, and if a stopped clock is right twice a day plenty of other people were pushing the idea anyway.
Arcto's right that this fags denying children a mother and probably buying these little boys to molest them is pretty evil. But a guys got to bang physiologically damaged chicks, and subscriptions pay for some flashy shit.
1-9 is a welcome articulation of what are up to.
Sounds potentially good.
Back in the 1950s and 60s William F. Buckley, Jr. was sometimes criticized by his more humorless and dogmatic allies for publishing writers in National Review who were not hardcore conservative enough (e.g. Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion). He would say that the most important thing was that the writing in the magazine be as good as possible. He had well-founded faith that good writing reflects reality, and that reality is consistent with sound politics. Also, he wanted to keep ideas and insights open, so it didn’t decay into a lifeless orthodoxy. As we would say today, WFB, Jr. was high openness.
Your approach, in that sense, is profoundly Paleocon. Congratulations.
Not especially interested in Arcto’s taxonomy or this particular policy thrust from him.
For the longest time, I have been trying to figure out a label that fits me or a group that I belonged to. I used to firmly be a NeoCon, but I was open enough to look at the evidence of how NeoConservatism worked in the real world and realized it was a failed ideology. At that point I drifted around reading a lot of true conservatives, libertarians, and liberals, and realized they all made good points occasionally. Only Leftists were making points worse than the NeoCons.
This post helped me realize I do not have to pick a single consistent ideology, I can just take the best ideas from all of them. I don’t need an ideology, just a meta political framework. And what I really value is openness, civility, and liberty.
Bryan Caplan writes that the Left is Anti-market and the Right is Anti-Leftist. When I first read that, I dismissed it, but at this point I think it adequately reflects my view. I will be happy if conservatives, liberals, or libertarians control the government, but I never want leftists in control.
https://www.betonit.ai/p/my-simplistic-theory-of-left-and-right
What is the name of the complex that would prompt you to label others as elite? What must be true of your own situation?
I don't want to answer for Walt, but in my estimation, elite is more of a disposition or an 'existential stance'; not something tied explicitly to material circumstances. Obviously, a destitute crack-addict who lives in a gutter is probably not elite. But past a certain point, the hallmarks of elitism are not straight-forwardly trackable to explicit measurements of money, sexual prowess, social influence, etc.
I think a good one-sentence summary that captures being elite is the ability and desire to: "Fuck around, find out, pick yourself up, and keep going". And, to go through that cycle in increasingly impactful and creative ways.
Fuck Around = A strong sense of sovereignty or agency; this comes from a certain baseline degree of disagreeability or rebelliousness; it is not a rejection of others, but a sense of trust or faith foremost in oneself to figure out and navigate situations. Especially when it comes to cooperation. An unwillingness to unreasonably submit. A thirst for pushing on interesting things.
Find Out = A high baseline of opennesses, curiosity, and intelligence. This may be the most important quality. First of all, it indicates that you can learn from complexity and novelty. Second of all, it balances out the 'fucking around': 'finding out' enables you to have to humility to understand where you are weak or lacking. And also to learn from others who are better than you are in certain areas. Knowing when to give up or back down.
Pick Yourself Up = A sense of cultivation of resilience; the opposite of fragility, or even explicit anti-fragility – becoming a beast when the going gets rough. 'Fucking around and finding out' will involve a lot of banging one's head into walls and breaking your fingers. You need be able to embrace the pain of that process in a way that's energizing if you want to ascend to some top level. Loving your haters, internal and external.
Keep Going = Propagating the elite orientation; widen, spread, expand. Obviously, this is immediately clear in the type of people who you seek out to associate with – friends, colleagues, mentors. But, there's also an understanding that who you are goes beyond you. You establish a family in which you teach your kids these ways; or cultivate many disciples who carry on your work; you encourage society to rise to your level.
These are all the qualities and behaviors that mirror vitality, too, because this the way that life itself exists and operates.
I agree with what you’re saying. I will hash this out in a forthcoming post but essentially feel that if every time you walk into a room you notice there is a cool kids table that always has a different cast from the last room you were in and you never get to sit there, it says something about your status, an inability to convince people that you are elite or enviable in any way at all.
Oh, that reminds me! @saipandit wrote a really great essay on her perspective of elitism. https://saipandit.substack.com/p/perspective-on-true-elitism
Just read it. It’s great. I agree. I can feel an anxiety in the air from people who hold elite status (doctors, law professors) if you mention any news of urban decay or the economy.
This is perfectly true.
You have a talent for metaphors. This is great (and true), and so's the one upthread about "one of the guys" women as simultaneously players and refs.
I don't have much time to listen to podcasts, so I haven't listened to your conversation with Walt yet, but I look forward to reading your blog.
I think you hit the essence of the issue when you said "if we let them come from the gays, they'll come for the guys who get laid [i.e. they'll come for me and my BPD Jewish bedmates] next."
The core distinction is views on sexual ethics/family formation/etc. If you are "pro-family" and want sex to be about procreation + family formation, yes, you are going to want to "come for the gays," and also for the promiscuous heterosexuals. Encouraging casual, non-procreative sex clearly works against family formation, whether it's gay sex or two uncommitted heteros using a condom and the pill. These are two sides of the same coin.
On the other hand, if you would rather that sex be about hedonism and pleasure, well then, you won't have much interest in policing sodomy. To do so would be to condemn your own behavior after all. If sex is just about making the penis feel good, what difference does it make how people go about getting that done, so long as it's being done privately at least?
If one wants to engage more on "the gays," that would be the debate to have, I think. "Religious extremists" favor the family formation side and correctly perceive sexual liberty as a threat to that goal, although they mostly all suck at articulating and properly selling their viewpoint, which is a big reason they lose.
Oh, and wasn't one of your things that you wanted to roll back sexual liberation so that degeneracy is actually transgressive again, and all the stupid proles would quit thinking it's cool? It seems to me like ending "gay marriage" would be exactly the sort of thing to pursue in service of this goal, striking a symbolic cultural blow against sexual deviancy while leaving The Gays free to sodomize each other without dressing it up as "marriage." It would be a step back towards your preferred world in which sexual deviancy is culturally taboo yet legally allowed.
Sounds to me like you’re very hard around gays, given how often you’re picturing them having anal sex any time you encounter them.
Good post. I’m with you - for now
Point number 22 needs a separate analysis unto itself. Your comparison between Jews and Gays in terms of power is an apt one but you may find it worthwhile more thoroughly explicating not just the similarities but also the alliances. Lay bare the Homo-Judeo gayplex and many of the other points you make will fall right in line.
Dave Greene and others don't like you because you're obviously on the ziocon payroll tasked with helping to create a kosher coalition, not because they're "low in openness".
I fucking wish