Book Post for May

Tags

drugs cw, martha wells, naomi novik, neoreactionaries cw, neurodivergence, ozy blog post, seanan mcguire, sex positivity

Rising Out Of Hatred: This book– about former white nationalist Derek Black and how he stopped being a white nationalist– takes place at the college I attended as a undergraduate, while I attended. For that reason, I’m not sure I should give much of an opinion on the book; gossip about my college acquaintances is not of public interest, and my book on the story is going to be fundamentally affected by the fact that I took classes with Derek Black, in a way that makes it less useful for other people. I can, however, state that as far as I’m aware its description of events is accurate. There were a couple of places where I’d quibble with the description of New College, but nothing I’d consider generally unreasonable.

The Sober Truth: “There isn’t great evidence that AA works. Despite its pretensions of secularism, AA is a clearly Christian-influenced organization, which makes it problematic for both devout members of non-Christian religions and atheists. AA is prescribed over and over again for people for whom it clearly isn’t working. THEREFORE, we should use the true evidence-based treatment for alcoholism, which is psychodynamic psychotherapy.”

Inside Rehab: I started internally screaming in the first chapter, when someone described how one of their rehabs only gave you Suboxone as a reward for good behavior. I did not finish internally screaming until I finished the book.

Interesting facts: Your chance of receiving evidence-based treatment is generally higher if you’re poor or homeless and lower if you pay for rehab out of pocket, because NGOs and governments have leverage to demand that rehabs implement evidence-based treatment, while private rehabs can just do whatever sounds good (equine therapy, Reiki) even if there is no evidence behind it. Rehabs (particularly for people with mild substance abuse problems and teenagers) can make drug addictions worse by introducing the client to more severely addicted friends and teaching them about new drugs and ways of hiding them. AA specifically leads to binges in some people by teaching them that if they have one drink they might as well go on a binge. Thirty percent of people have had an alcohol use disorder at some point in their lives; this is because alcohol use disorder is defined very broadly and essentially includes anyone whose use of alcohol has ever caused a problem in their lives. As you might guess, most people with mild alcohol use disorders are capable of drinking moderately.

One thing I’m confused about is that the author complained that rehabs are very expensive, and then complained that addiction counselors are untrained people whose only qualification is being former addicts, and then complained that rehabs almost never offer much individual therapy (often less than once a week). Presumably the last two things would make rehabs less expensive? Are rehabs directing money in a useless way (towards equine therapy or administrator salaries or nice bedrooms)? Or are rehabs inherently very expensive for some reason? If it is the second thing, maybe we should transition to outpatient therapy, which is less expensive.

Highly recommended both for people who want to gain a better understanding of the rehab system in the United States and for people considering rehab for themselves or their loved ones. The lists of questions to ask rehabs seem very helpful.

Sex Addiction: A Critical History: I was really excited when I bought this book, because I think sex addiction is a problematic concept and I was really looking forward to an in-depth history of how it came to be, along the lines of (say) David Valentine’s excellent Imagining Transgender. (Incidentally, if you’re interested in the social construction of transness, Imagining Transgender is an absolutely invaluable book and I highly recommend it.)

Unfortunately, the authors have Szaszian sympathies, so instead of enjoying the book I spent the entire time raging about their terrible, terrible politics. “‘Sex addiction’ is bad because it’s another example of the psychiatric industry medicalizing normal human behavior, the way that depression medicalizes normal sadness! You can tell, because there’s a continuum between sex addiction and normal behavior and you can’t draw a non-arbitrary line between ‘sex addiction’ and ‘normalcy.’ How negatively sex addiction affects you depends as much on your environment as it does on your objective symptom severity. In some contexts sex addiction can be neutral or even conducive to your flourishing.”

But the problem is that all those things are true of literally every psychiatric condition. Psychosis is on a continuum with normal hallucinations that ordinary people experience, and it’s hard to draw a non-arbitrary line between psychosis and normal voice-hearing. How negatively psychosis affects you depends as much on your environment as it does on your objective symptom severity. In some contexts psychosis can be neutral or even conducive to your flourishing. Either you bite the bullet and go “psychosis is fake, the homeless schizophrenic guy is exactly like everyone else”– which, to his credit, Szasz does– or you realize that we have to have a way to think about psychiatric conditions that features the social model of disability and the fact that psychiatric conditions are all on a continuum with normal human behavior.

Unfortunately, the authors are so busy having stupid opinions about psychiatric diagnosis that they didn’t do anything more than touch on the genuine incoherency and thorny ethical issues associated with the ‘sex addiction’ concept.

The behavior highlighted by the PATHOS screening for sex addiction– preoccupation with sexual thoughts, hiding some sexual behavior from others, seeking treatment for sexual behavior, sexual behavior that hurts others emotionally, feeling controlled by your sexual desire, feeling depression after sex– just doesn’t have one simple set of causes. Some people might have hypersexuality symptoms associated with mania or a personality disorder. Some people might be closeted gay people in a homophobic environment, or kinky people in an environment where kink is stigmatized. Some people might use sex as a quick source of pleasure when they’re depressed. Some people might have a history of sexual trauma. These are all different problems with different solutions and I don’t think it makes sense to treat them all as one thing.

(And what’s with that “hiding sexual behavior from others” thing. I hide sexual behavior from others because I have boundaries.)

The concept of ‘sex addiction’, I think, highlights a particularly thorny ethical problem. If a system of sexual ethics is particularly demanding– in particular, if it demands that a person not masturbate, or not masturbate when in a relationship, or not masturbate using porn or erotica or sexual fantasies of people other than their partner, or only have sex with people they aren’t oriented towards– a certain percentage of the population will find themselves engaging in sexual behavior they don’t endorse. But those people are not going to have sexually compulsive behavior in general. If they stop believing that gay sex, pornography use, or masturbation is wrong, they’ll probably use porn, have gay sex, or masturbate a perfectly reasonable amount that is in balance with the rest of their lives. They certainly won’t escalate to nonconsensual behavior, adultery, or pedophilia (as is sometimes implied by sex/porn addiction discourse).

I’m not sure what we should do about that. On one hand, some part of me says that the problem here is clearly not the masturbation or porn use or gay sex, the problem is the stigma, and the therapist should destigmatize the sexual behavior in question. On the other hand, it seems to me that therapists should not impose their ethical beliefs on their patients. I certainly wouldn’t like it if a therapist tried to do CBT to my demanding ethical beliefs! The therapist should let the patient set their own goals according to their own values instead of imposing the therapist’s values. I think this is a legitimately complicated ethical issue, and saying “if you masturbate when you don’t endorse masturbating then you are a sex addict which is exactly the same sort of thing as an alcoholic” elides it. This is exactly the sort of issue I hope would be addressed by a critical history of sex addiction, and exactly the sort of issue that was not addressed.

Artificial Condition: Murderbot is back! Murderbot is on a quest to figure out whether, last time he’d hacked his governor module, he’s committed mass murder instead of his current occupation of binging TV shows. He stumbles across some humans he feels like he has the duty to protect, and much to his grave irritation has to stop watching TV in order to protect them from their own suicidal tendencies. Murderbot is one of the most likeable and engaging protagonists in recent SF, and every novella he is in is a delight. ART, a television-obsessed spaceship, is equally likeable and a delightful foil. Pick up the series next time you have a bad day and need something fun and not too deep.

Spinning Silver: A fast-paced and page-turning fantasy novel. A moneylender boasts that she can turn silver into gold catches the attention of a gold-loving fairy, who threatens to kill her if she doesn’t turn his silver to gold and marry her if she does; a noblewoman uses the fairy silver, which makes others see her as beautiful to marry the tsar, but there is more to him than it seems. Lots of fascinating plot twists; it manages to be very gripping without having any fight scenes, which is always something I like in a novel. The secondary world is Russian-influenced, which is an interesting variation on the stock European fantasy novel. Highly recommended.

Beneath the Sugar Sky: Down Among The Sticks And Bones was so good! And this was so not good! WHY.

The protagonist’s sole personality trait is being fat. She is insecure and feels bad about her body because she is fat. She is bullied because she is fat. She is an endurance athlete because fat athletes exist. She is magically transported to an alternate world and turns into a mermaid, and suddenly becomes an athlete because being fat is actually helpful in ultraendurance swimming. (This is legitimately pretty cool and I would have hella appreciated it if the character had had at least three non-weight-related personality traits.) She expects to be bullied for being fat, but everyone is tolerant. She has to go to a magical world made out of candy, where the villainess surrounds herself with candy and never eats any of it in order to stay thin, and talks to her about how if she diets she will be thin. Every five pages we get some “and Cora was tired but she couldn’t ask for a rest because people would assume it was because  she was overweight.”

I get it! I’m on board! We should be nice to fat people! PLEASE GIVE YOUR FAT CHARACTER ANOTHER PERSONALITY TRAIT.

At one point Cora is like “the only thing people see in me is fat fat fat” and I was like “yes! that’s so true it’s even affecting your author!”

There were some really interesting ideas. The “nonsense world” made out of candy felt like a real world from a genuine children’s portal fantasy novel. Kade, a transgender male side character, had some really lovely and interesting characterization (which is unfortunately a spoiler). But overall this is a very weak entry in the series.

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Book Post for December

Tags

all cops are bastards, effective altruism, neoreactionaries cw, ozy blog post

Mate: Become The Man Women Want: When I started the dating advice book by Tucker “I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell” Max and Geoffrey “Dear obese Ph.D. applicants: if you didn’t have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won’t have the willpower to do a dissertation” Miller, I was not expecting that my primary complaint would be that the book was irritatingly politically correct. And yet here we are.

The primary thesis of the book is that if you acquire a bunch of generic, common-sense good qualities– volunteering, having a clean house, exercising regularly, getting enough sleep, treating your depression, learning to appreciate the small things in life– then women will be more attracted to you and you will be able to parlay your attractiveness into lots of casual sex or a relationship with a woman who similarly has a bunch of generic common-sense good qualities. I’m not necessarily opposed to this dating advice. It seems pretty harmless. Even if it fails you’ll end up with an exercise routine and a clean kitchen. But it is also obviously not how human sexuality works.

Like… there are lots of beautiful, intelligent, kind, and in every way desirable women (and men, and nonbinary people) who will ignore a dozen potential partners with many generic common-sense good qualities and zero in on the sad three-legged puppy that they need to rescue with the power of their love. Of course, if you want to date an emotionally healthy person with good boundaries– and you do– you probably want to have a handle on your mental health shit. But it is just not true that everyone is more attracted to people who have a handle on their mental health shit than people who don’t. Lots of those emotionally healthy people with good boundaries have gone through a long process of personal growth in which they realize that, regardless of what their heart and/or boner say about the matter, they should stop trying to save wildly dysfunctional people with the power of their love.

Romance novel heroes are standardly issued with a dark and tragic past! Mr. Darcy is one of the most iconic romance novel heroes of all time! Loki fangirls exist! This is because being a complete garbage disaster is in fact a thing many people find attractive!

This book is also peppered with a variety of baffling statements. Depressed people aren’t funny! (Have you ever met a stand-up comedian?) Jason Statham would have an easier time getting laid than Johnny Depp! (I admit that I am too gay to appreciate Jason Statham, a person with a continual air of being thirty seconds away from talking to me about grills, but I think even straight women have to agree that, setting aside the ‘is an abuser’ issue, Johnny Depp is more attractive.) Women paradoxically want both assertive and competent men and kind and sweet men, and it is baffling because those things are basically opposites, but she really wants you to be sweet to her and assertive to other people! (What.)

In conclusion, you should instead read Models. Models is good.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty: Should be renamed Dictators Behaving Badly, because much of the charm of this book comes from learning about all the different ways in which dictators behave badly. (I now have strong feelings about the former president of Uzbekistan. Fuck the former president of Uzbekistan in the ear.)

Acemoglu’s thesis is that institutions can be divided into “extractive institutions” and “inclusive institutions”. (Of course, there are also nations with totally nonfunctioning institutions, such as Somalia during the Civil War.) Inclusive institutions enforce property rights, treat people equally, incentivize economic activity, create law and order, and give everyone a say in government. Extractive institutions are structured to extract resources from the many to the few. In general, extractive institutions result in less growth. Extractive institutions oppose the destabilizing force of innovation, which might make it more difficult for elites to get all the money, and which is necessary for economic growth. And extractive institutions tend to be politically unstable, because the primary way to earn money is to control the institutions.

In general, both extractive institutions and inclusive institutions tend to persist in a particular location. Revolutions that overthrow extractive institutions tend to just install a new set of people in charge of the same old extractive institutions. However, major events that disrupt the existing political and economic balance in a society can cause institutions to shift from extractive to inclusive, or vice versa. Historical examples include the Black Death, the Industrial Revolution, and the opening of Atlantic trade routes.

Highly recommended. I think this sort of economic history approach is one of the best ways for me to learn history– it helps me understand not only what happened but also why.

The Little Book of Restorative Justice: I always kind of thought the thing I believed about criminal justice was called “restorative justice”, and I have read this book and now I know it’s definitely called that, so that’s good.

The conventional criminal justice system focuses on offenders getting what they deserve. Restorative justice is focused on victims getting what they need and on offenders taking responsibilty to repair the harm they caused. For example, victims often need to understand exactly what happened, to tell their story, to have a sense of empowerment, and to receive restitution. In a restorative-justice framework, offenders if necessary are at least temporarily restrained, take accountability for their actions, change their behavior so they don’t commit crimes again, and reintegrate into the community.

It’s simultaneously very surprising and not surprising at all that restorative justice was invented by a Christian. On one hand, it’s a very Christian set of beliefs. On the other hand, I rarely expect Christians to behave in a particularly Christian way. The author is Mennonite, and I have a vague sense that Mennonites are better on the radical forgiveness thing than most Christians.

Book Post for September

Tags

diets cw, disney descendants, god bothering, neoreactionaries cw, neurodivergence, parenting, pregnancy cw

When I was depressed, I read a lot of books and didn’t write reviews of them and now there is Too Much Backlog and I won’t ever get around to it. So you guys are just going to have to imagine what I thought of Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-Of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life. (Not a big fan.)

Damaged Goods: New Perspectives On Christian Purity: I am a terrible audience for this book because I am very interested in both purity culture and sex-positive feminism and thus nothing she has to say is new to me. “Saving your first kiss until your wedding day is bad! Instead, you should try to figure out when you’re emotionally ready for kissing. It is bad when social pressure makes people ashamed of their decisions to kiss people or not to kiss people.” I mean, I agree and I suspect it will make a lot of people’s lives better if they believed this book, but I don’t feel like I got any new or interesting insight.

Mal’s Spell Book 2: This is the first piece of Descendants expanded universe material that I enjoyed as much as I enjoyed the original movie. (If this sentence doesn’t thrill and excite you, skip to the next review.) The premise is that the villain kids use Mal’s spellbook to write notes to each other, presumably in class. I was particularly charmed by Jay and Evie’s attempts to give Carlos romantic advice (at one point Jay is like “ASK. HER. OUT” which to be honest is also what I feel when I am giving romantic advice). I also enjoyed the excerpts from Auradon etiquette books which Mal pasted into the book and commented on (“apparently you are supposed to eat bananas with a fork? is that a thing?” “how would I know, I only just found out what comes in the peels”). Unfortunately, the second half of the book takes place during the plot of the movie, which both is kind of boring and makes the conceit of the book somewhat implausible. (Why are they passing notes in Mal’s apartment? Surely they can just talk.)

Fuck Love: One Shrink’s Sensible Advice for Lasting Relationships: I actually gave up on this book half of the way through. I bought it because it had a truly amazing title. I had vaguely hoped the content would be about debunking the myth of the soulmate and encouraging people to marry people they’re compatible with even if that person isn’t their One True Love. Sadly, this is not the case. The actual content doesn’t seem to be bad, it is just targeted at a very different group of people than me. All of the first four chapters are different ways of saying “don’t meet someone hot and charming and let that blind you to the fact that they’re kind of a terrible person.” I, who have never dated a charming person in my life unless you could “charmingly awkward,” feel I am not the target audience for this advice. Also, at one point it advised that men cut their hair which I feel is a crime against male beauty.

Note that it does include a brief passage bashing people with borderline personality disorder. And the author’s a shrink? This is why it’s so hard to find a good therapist.

Postpartum depression and anxiety: a self-help guide for mothers: Did you know that postpartum depression is very common and not your fault or a sign that you’re a bad mother? Did you know that mild cases of depression can be treated with self-care, exercise, eating good food, getting enough sleep, and talking to your support system, but in severe cases you may need therapy and medication? Did you know that to help depressed people it is best to be supportive and nonjudgmental and to encourage them to develop a routine and to take care of themselves physically and mentally? If any of these facts sound novel to you, maybe you should pick up this book. Otherwise, skip it.

This Isn’t What I Expected: Overcoming Postpartum Depression: This book might be useful to read if you expect to have postpartum depression, even if you’ve been depressed before. It addresses a lot of postpartum-depression-specific concerns, such as coping with common postpartum stressors, dealing with your grief that parenthood isn’t what you expected and resolving your concerns about turning into your mother. There are a variety of helpful CBTish worksheets. I expect to be referring to this often when I have postpartum depression. While it says it is intended for postpartum depression, in reality it covers a variety of postpartum conditions, such as postpartum OCD, postpartum anxiety, postpartum trauma, and postpartum stress syndrome. Sadly, postpartum psychosis is mostly addressed in terms of “you probably don’t have it” and “if you do you should go to the hospital.”

Honestly, this book made me feel like I have so much of a handle on postpartum depression. They devoted pages and pages to no-fucking-shit stuff like “you cannot take care of a baby while depressed on your own” and “it is important to be able to talk to people about your depression” and “you need to have lower standards for yourself while depressed.” But when I think about it if it’s someone’s first time being depressed then they might not know this stuff! I am clearly an expert depressed person and going to do great.

Origins: How The Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives: A combination memoir and pop science book, the author discusses her pregnancy while reviewing fetal origins research. As always, much of this research probably won’t replicate and should be taken with a grain of salt; the author has a little bit of a tendency to write about salacious rat research without providing the caveat that rats are not human beings and many such studies fail to generalize. Nevertheless, much of the advice– about weight gain, stress, alcohol consumption, exercise, and so on and so forth– seems reasonable and solid, and she more-or-less manages to write about the actually important things without going into “well no one can PROVE hair dye doesn’t hurt your baby!” nonsense.

[The next two reviews discuss dieting.]

Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program that Works: I actually have a very healthy relationship with food (I got almost a perfect score on their intuitive eater quiz, and the one thing I got dinged on was something they explicitly said later in the book is okay.) So I enjoyed this book a lot because it was full of neuroses I don’t have. For once I get to feel like the sane person who doesn’t crave chocolate cake, eat sixteen different things because chocolate cake is Forbidden and Not Allowed, continue to want chocolate cake, and then finally end up eating it anyway.

I have practiced intuitive eating for most of my adult life, although it is only in the past few years I knew to call it “intuitive eating” rather than “common sense.” My weight is consistently in the normal range, and over the course of my pregnancy I’ve gained the recommended number of pounds without tracking calories. (Only a third of pregnant people gain within the recommended weight range.) On the other hand, I might simply be the sort of person whose weight regulation happens to function properly, in which case I’d maintain a weight set point no matter what I did and no one should listen to me.

The ten principles of intuitive eating are as follows:

1. Reject the diet mentality (commit to never dieting again, and refuse to allow others to comment on what, when, or how much you eat or what your body looks like)
2. Honor your hunger (notice when you are becoming peckish and eat)
3. Make peace with food (allow yourself to eat anything that sounds appealing, without guilt)
4. Challenge the food police (replace negative self-talk about food, your body, or your diet with positive self-talk)
5. Feel your fullness (notice when you are moderately full, and stop eating; don’t feel like you have to finish everything on your plate)
6. Discover the satisfaction factor (eat pleasurable food; if you don’t love it, don’t eat it, and if you do love it, savor it)
7. Cope with your emotions without food (develop ways of self-soothing and distraction that don’t involve eating)
8. Respect your body (don’t insult your appearance; accept your body; stop weighing yourself; buy flattering clothes; allow yourself to be touched)
9. Exercise (find a way to exercise that is fun and feels good; build opportunities for activity into your everyday life; include strength training and stretching)
10. Honor your health with gentle nutrition (practice variety, moderation, and balance in your eating; eat whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and dairy; eat protein, carbohydrates, and fat; drink enough water; incorporate play foods into your eating, allowing some of your eating to be for health and some for physical pleasure)

Raising A Healthy, Happy Eater: A Stage-by-Stage Guide To Setting Your Child On The Path To Adventurous Eating: Basically the same thing as Ellyn Satter’s Child of Mine, and I honestly recommend that book instead. However, the authors do provide some interesting advice about causes of pickiness. Some toddler picky eating is caused by the child being incorrectly positioned in a high chair. Really look at how your child is sitting and imagine how much your muscles would be straining, and if it looks at all uncomfortable change it. Some picky eating is caused by poor development of gross, fine, and oral motor skills or of the sensory systems. To fix it, offer opportunities to develop those skills.

[The next review is about the Red Pill.]

Saving a Low Sex Marriage: A Man’s Guide To Dread, Seduction, and the Long Game: I spent six dollars on this book and honestly I think it was the most entertained I’ve ever been for six dollars.

This book can be roughly summarized as Horrible Rapey Misogynist Gives Reasonable Marriage Advice. It honestly gives me whiplash. There’s actually a lot of good stuff here! One page explains that you should accept “nos” gracefully and if you whine about how your partner won’t fuck you then they’re unlikely to want to fuck you. The next page declares that men get literally nothing out of marriage unless they are allowed to fuck their wives regardless of their wives’ opinion on the matter, and that it is evil man-hating feminism that men are no longer allowed to rape their wives. One page informs you of the startling redpill truth that your wife is more likely to want to fuck you senseless if you lift weights, dress well, and have your shit together socially, financially, and parentally. The next page explains that this is because you are scaring your wife into thinking you might leave her, because literally the only reason a well-dressed fit man who has his shit together is sexy is that someone else might fuck him. Also, preselection only works on women, because they are Mysterious Incomprehensible Woman Creatures. Please ignore the entire industry of advertising.

It is correctly pointed out that if you have set a boundary, and your partner continues to ignore your boundary, then the next step is to spend more time away from them and pay less attention to them, while continuing to be affectionate and interested in their lives. Then the author says that literally the only boundary you should bother to do this for is a “hard no” for sex (basically, a “no” that means your wife doesn’t want to have sex with you, rather than a “no” which means that she does but the circumstances aren’t right). You should not do that for things like your wife yelling at you, insulting you, or being disrespectful. (“My wife has to want to have sex with me” is not even a real boundary. You can’t set boundaries about other people’s sexual desires! Aaaaagh.)

One thing which is actually a useful concept from this book is the idea of covert contracts. Basically, a covert contract is when you make up a contract with another person inside your head: “if I do the dishes then you’ll fuck me,” “if I help you move then you’ll help me move,” “if I do something that makes me miserable then you’ll be proud of me,” “if I never disagree with you then you won’t ever be mad at me.” The other person only fulfills their end of these contracts by chance, because (a) they have no fucking idea that this contract even exists and (b) you gave them no chance to say “hey, wait, I don’t agree to this deal.” Instead, you should only do nice things you actually want to do for their own sake, and if you doing something is conditional on other people doing something you should make that clear to them. I think this is a super-useful idea which should be rescued from Misogynyland.

I do think it is probably true that many cases of someone’s partner no longer fucking them without any sort of explanation are caused by that partner becoming unattractive, and that marriage counselling is uniquely awful at addressing this situation, because it’s considered rude to admit you kind of find your husband ugly. Not sure what a good solution is.

Abundance Mindset

Tags

neoreactionaries cw, ozy blog post, PRECIOUS sexual energy

So there’s this concept which seems to have been independently invented by poly people and the red pill, which is fascinating to me whenever it happens. In More Than Two, abundance mindset is described this way:

In the starvation model, opportunities for love seem scarce. Potential partners are thin on the ground, and finding them is difficult. Because most people you meet expect monogamy, finding poly partners is particularly difficult. Every additional requirement you have narrows the pool still more. Since relationship opportunities are so rare, you’d better seize whatever opportunity comes by and hang on with both hands—after all, who knows when another chance will come along?

The abundance model says that relationship opportunities are all around us. Sure, only a small percentage of the population might meet our criteria, but in a world of more than seven billion people, opportunities abound. Even if we exclude everyone who isn’t open to polyamory, and everyone of the “wrong” sex or orientation, and everyone who doesn’t have whatever other traits we want, we’re still left with tens of thousands of potential partners, which is surely enough to keep even the most ambitious person busy.

The redpillers describe it this way:

Abundance thinking is the root of Plate Theory [casually dating multiple people]. A lot has been written about approaching women (and really life in general) from a position of Abundance. People often make the mistake of assuming that having a wide variety of choices tends to cheapen the commodity, and to a degree this is accurate, but it also allows for a better, learned awareness of which choice amongst the pool is common and which is of higher quality.

,…but Rollo, I’m so busy that I have no choice but to ignore and postpone. They sense it and seek me out. I worry that I’ll create crazies. My weekends are jammed. At what point do we stop?

This is a the best problem you can have. You’ve successfully flipped the script; you’ve gotten to a point where it becomes instinctive and your plates actively seek out your attention. By default, you’re creating value by scarcity. At what point do you stop? How old are you? If you’re under 30 stay in the game. If you’re over 30, stay in the game, but cool things off occasionally – the only time a man should even contemplate monogamy is after experiencing abundance. If you’re inundated with women occupying your weekends, consider hooking up with a proven plate on a Thursday evening and reserve your weekends for your other pursuits.

Weirdly objectifying terminology aside (…plates?), they seem to me to be essentially describing the same thing.

Which makes sense. Abundance mindset is incredibly useful. You can take rejection easily, because you know that you can find someone else you like just as much as that person. You can relax and let flirtation just be flirtation instead of your one last desperate attempt not to be alone forever. Because asking people out is less terrifying, you do it more often. Other people don’t feel guilty for rejecting you, which means they’re a lot more comfortable around you. You seem like a confident person that lots of people want to date, which is generally attractive. In relationships, you don’t become controlling and distrustful, making your partner miserable by trying to keep them from slipping away.

There are subtle differences, however. In general, polyamorists seem to take more of a “you are a unique person who is utterly unlike any other person I could date. However, if you’re not into me, I can find another unique person who is utterly unlike any person I could date” stance. (There’s a reason we all think this song is super-romantic.) Conversely, redpillers seem to take more of a “all women are like that, no woman is special and unique, they are all basically interchangeable and easily replaced.”

The redpillers’ philosophy is quite misogynistic, and therefore I have obvious objections to it. But more than that, it doesn’t seem particularly conducive to the happiness of the person who believes it. In general, when you love someone, you love their individuality: you love the look of their hair, the way they laugh at their own puns, their passion for sex work decriminalization, their habit of spending weekends building GURPS characters for campaigns they never play. To reduce all that down to HB6 is to lose a lot.

However, a problem with the polyamorist abundance mindset is that it is really easy when you’re already sexually successful… and mind-bogglingly difficult when you aren’t. Telling a forever alone or involuntarily celibate person “rejection will be less painful, you’ll get more dates, and your relationships will be way happier if you believe that there are lots of potential partners available for you to love!” is sort of like informing a poor person about all the great investment opportunities you have available– starting as cheaply as $10,000! It’s honestly just sort of taunting them.

The solutions I’ve seen to this conundrum are “just take a leap of faith and believe it even though it doesn’t seem true!”– effective, but probably not psychologically possible for many or even most people– and “become sexually successful!”– gee, thanks, that’s so much help. I suspect that sexually unsuccessful women who are open to casual sex can acquire an abundance mindset through putting an ad on Craigslist Casual Encounters; however, this option does not work nearly as well for heterosexual men.

However, you don’t need to currently be sexually successful to adopt the viewpoint that women are basically interchangeable. And it seems to me it would have a lot of the same beneficial effects: if Interchangeable Woman #1 rejected you, that’s mildly annoying because it means you’ll need to put in more effort before you get one, but Interchangeable Woman #3554 is just as good. If Interchangeable Woman #2666 rejected you, that’s not a personal insult, it’s just a sign you need better game. So in that sense the Red Pill is doing something genuinely good by giving sexually unsuccessful men an abundance mindset they can actually reach.

Ideally, men could bootstrap themselves to sexual success by believing that women are interchangeable, then switch to the “gosh! There are so many beautiful and unique snowflakes!” abundance mindset once they were getting laid more. However, it looks like the red pill doesn’t really offer strategies to do this, and the knowledge that women aren’t actually interchangeable seems like it would make it a very difficult act of doublethink to believe they are.

A Post That Is Not Not About Moldbug

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neoreactionaries cw, ozy blog post

There isn’t actually any way you can be inclusive of both me and Mary Daly.

I discover Mary Daly is attending our local theology conference. I go up to the conference organizer and say “If she attends, I’m not going. Mary Daly hates me and people like me, and she is going to misgender me.”

The conference organizer says, “Our conference has a rule against transphobia, so if Daly does something transphobic, then we can kick her out, but we’re not going to censor her based on her viewpoints.”

I say, “okay, but I don’t exactly trust your ability to figure out whether people are being transphobic or not. For one thing, you just invited Mary Daly. So rather than have her call me “she”, which will cause me a lot of pain, and then go through the process of complaining to you guys, who may or may not think that this was just a mistake or a legitimate expression of Mary Daly’s views or whatever, I am just going to give your conference a miss and stay home in my pajamas with my cat. My cat is definitely not going to misgender me.”

They say, “okay, but what if we express a promise from Mary Daly that she is not going to misgender anyone and she is going to be totally polite to trans people the whole time and not say anyone is living in a contrived and artifactual condition or anything?”

I say, “even assuming she does that, I’m not super-comfortable with being in the same room as her! She calls people like me necrophiliac Frankenstein’s monsters! Even if she is totally pleasant the entire time, she is going to be thinking awful things about me, and I don’t want to go to this conference. And I know I’m not the only one– there are a lot of trans people, certainly not all trans people but a lot of trans people, that are going to go through the same thought process I’m going through, and if you invite her you’re in effect disinviting all of us.”

The conference organizers say, “okay, but how many theology-interested trans people are there? Y’all are less than one percent of the population.”

“But men are fifty percent,” I say. “She literally advocated genocide against men. Are you seriously arguing that there are no men who are going to want to avoid a conference where one of the speakers thinks they should be cleansed from the earth?”

I am not certain that we can say it is unethical for the conference organizers to decide that, all things considered, that they would rather have all the people who are made uncomfortable by the presence of Mary Daly than Mary Daly. Certainly if all the conference organizers make this same decision– perhaps because I am a kind and pleasant individual and Mary Daly has never met a horrifying multilingual dad joke she didn’t like– it would be unfair to Ms. Daly, who perhaps has some tremendously interesting things to say about theology that are totally unrelated to genocide. Perhaps we decide that the risks of banning people for their ideas are too large, so we have to let Ms. Daly speak at the theology conference.

But my point is: ideas hurt people sometimes. There is no option where you get to include everyone. There is no option where everyone wants to attend your conference. There are tradeoffs. Weigh them, and choose.