Toggle's Symposium

absolutely true in a competitive market of infinite size! but in such a market business profits will quickly drop to zero 😐

(you can also make profit in situations where market participants have different time horizons, like if I am old and will die soon and you are young and wish to invest in your future then I may sell you a productive asset for cash I can spend on my care right now).

But one day, sooner or later, we will learn how to extend our lifespans greatly; and the Church will ask us to die anyway, despite having the means not to

I tend to envision the Catholic position in its uttermost result as closer to "Remember that you (still) will die, and that ten thousand years is not the Lord's eternity".

It'll be interesting to watch this unfold; I certainly hope we have the chance to see it!

To expand the comment with a bit more space and nuance, I expect the doctrinal position on life-extension technologies to be contingent on the methods in play, with an on-net tendency to increase human mortality.

Certainly the Church in its present form would take issue with anything that you might call post-biological immortality: mind uploading most prominently, but also weaker forms like deliberately replacing bulk organic tissues with technological replacements in vivo. So if the lowest-hanging fruit ends up being something in this mold, we'll see some pretty serious social conflicts along religious lines.

From what I understand, genetic manipulation is presently accepted for therapeutic uses only: that is, you can alter DNA to restore or protect a person's health in a normative sense, but not to improve outcomes. "Curing Huntington's" yes, "blonde-haired blue-eyed children that can run a four-minute mile while solving open mathematical lemmas" no. Extending that to future technologies, it's not super obvious to me that 'extended lifespan' will be treated as a therapeutic subject. I'd give maybe 3-to-1 odds against? But the response to genetic (especially in vitro) life extension technologies are imo likely to be pretty historically contingent- which Pope is in place when the technology is popularized, which countries use the technology and how, what the second-order social consequences and sub-technologies have been used for.

The most likely to be accepted by the Church would be something in the vein of modern mRNA vaccines: modifying the ways that our existing genes express themselves without making deeper edits to the cell. I can imagine, for example, a treatment that simply permeates normal human tissues in such a way as to re-extend our telomeres. A cocktail of a few different therapies like that could plausibly extend human lifespan dramatically (or indefinitely, if repeated), and I can definitely see a Catholicism that embraces those tools enthusiastically and even helps provide it to poorer populations.

It's notable that this latter type is by far the 'weakest' form of life extension. Partly in the sense that it still leaves people vulnerable to accident, disease, and other such misfortunes; partly in the sense that it's most likely to require active maintenance or an ongoing schedule of treatment; partly just in the sense that it has fewer second-order implications, and implies a more familiar human experience.

The broader theme here is just bioconservatism, right? The Church will push for outcomes that keep our species embedded in the present state of nature, and avoid technologies that rework the human experience in more fundamental ways. They understand 'nature' in such a way that this is compatible with some forms of life extension, up to a point. But life extension is not, in the Catholic framework, an obvious moral good in itself*. It's just something that is going to happen because humans are good at science and some of them want to do it, and the Church will offer moral guidance on the specifics. In many of the most plausible cases, that will be a total ban, in others, restrictions that limit scope and effectiveness.

I agree with this on its face.

But here's the thing: certain quirks indicate a high likelihood of wanting to do something that is harmful. Someone believing that they are a dragon, it would seem, is much more likely to have the delusion that they can fly, which comes with obvious hazards, or that when they breathe on raw meat they're cooking it (or the eating-virgins thing you mentioned, I suppose). That is, unless they believe they're actually a dragon but somehow live exactly as a human, which is incoherent unless it's a more abstract spiritual sort of belief (which a lot of the time I suppose is the case for otherkin), to which I have about the same attitude as I do to most religious beliefs which is standing for tolerance of them but to some degree regretting their prevalence and certainly bristling if I'm required to give positive affirmation of them.

(Compare to Sam Harris and others arguing, in the context of free will and ethics -type discussions, that character/intentions/motivations matter when we compute moral judgments, because while in themselves they don't decrease utility, they are indicators of whether a person is likely to do a utility-decreasing thing. Also compare to the general verdict around Chickengate -- I'm referring to an explosion in rat Tumblr discourse instigated by Nostalgebraist during my earliest years here (can't remember if you were also around) about how we should judge someone knowing that they f***ed a dead chicken, the idea being that while the act doesn't directly do harm, it indicates something about the person doing it that suggests they might do harm in other ways.)

A variation on the above: even if for most individuals an untrue or incoherent belief isn't leading them to do harm, I (and I think most other people) generally see beliefs in falsehoods as a Bad Thing compared to beliefs in truths and want to increase the latter at the expense of the former within society.

In other words, the material world is simply not under dispute here; it's a question of taxonomy. A typical trans person is in fact asking far less of you than, say, a religious person who thinks that you should politely bow your head during a pre-game prayer. The religious person asks you to go along with (or at least, not dispute) the idea that there is a God or some other animating spiritual force, which is a fact about the world you believe is false. But the trans woman who asks for she/her pronouns isn't asking you to pretend that she has XX chromosomes or anything like that- almost the exact opposite, in fact. She's asking you to expand your category of 'woman' to include her, even though you and her are both aware that she has a body that does not always merit that category.

Almost invariably, when you meet someone with a more unusual identity- therians, otherkin, etc.- they will be doing much the same sort of thing, in much the same sort of way. Just as 'trans' is tautologically exclusive of women who think they have physiologically female bodies, 'therian' is exclusive of people who sincerely believe they are physiologically draconic. There are, I assume, people who suffer from genuine confusion about the state of the material world, who imagine quite sincerely that they have an actual dragon body, but I can't imagine that they spend much time typing on keyboards. As you say, it seems hard to avoid self-harm for long, under that misconception.

When you run across someone who identifies as a dragon or an attack helicopter, they are almost never delusional in the sense of being confused about their physical capabilities. Rather, they're saying that they extend the category 'dragon' to cover 'the thing that they are,' (possibly with the help of spiritual or metaphysical ideas, possibly just by reading lots of Foucalt), and will generally have a pretty clear understanding of what the properties and limits of their physical body actually are.

(Here is my every-so-often reminder that I consider a lot of the rhetoric on the other side of this culture war battleground, particularly that of Republican politicians, to be garbage. And unless you've come across my posts criticizing figures like Jordan Peterson and Helen Joyce, which are harder to find because they generate much less in the way of follow-up posts, you may have trouble imagining a side of me that aims my characteristic long-windedly argumentative tone against anti-trans rhetoric. A lot of it can only be witnessed IRL in a non-written context, for instance when I'm visiting my parents and find myself, on top of my usual style of argumentation, hurling a lot more "If you want to be argue these things and be taken seriously, actually do some research and learn the terminology and maybe get to know some trans people and understand their desires and views!" and, to the point of the above paragraph, "That's not a question of basic facts; it's a question of definitions!")

But here's the thing. Your point about it being a matter of definitions instead of facts about physical bodies only goes so far in the discussion over whether someone is being compelled to actively voice a belief they don't hold, or the debate over whether someone is under a delusion, because definitions have to capture some aspect of objective reality (even if it can only be measured subjectively). Others have written much more articulately than I can on what we should all expect of definitions (all the "carve reality at the joints" essays by Yudkowsky, for instance), and I'm very tired now and feeling kind of "written out", but hopefully it's clear what I'm getting at.

Identifying as a certain gender is supposed to mean something beyond the tautological (i.e. "a person who identifies as a gender is defined to be one who says 'I identify as a gender'" or "the material event of gender-identification is the chemical process in the brain that makes someone say 'I identify as a gender'"), even if the something that it means can only be experienced subjectively rather than objectively measured, so that we have to take the word of the person claiming to experience it. I have, at some point(s) in the past, criticized the trans movement as a (spontaneous social) movement for not having any kind of consistent definition or message about what the something is, but I'm pretty sure most individuals in a context of talking about a trans identity imagines it to be something beyond the tautological. (That is, even though now and again one does see what I saw recently on International Women's Day: a sequence of memes together, each consisting of a slogan about how awesome women are and then ending with the slogan "A WOMAN IS ANYBODY WHO SAYS THEY'RE A WOMAN"... in combination, an interesting set-up of social incentives!)

And wherever there's a claimed something, one can believe that the something is true or that it's false. One proposed something is that everyone has parts of the brain that are aligned to sex/gender and in some individuals they're misaligned to the body's physical sex. Or, I don't know, the something could be a difference in hormones, or something psychological quirk that causes intense distress directly from the sensation of being in a dress (or not being in a dress), or it could be a sort of autogynephilia or autoandrophilia, or any number of things. And someone could claim a certain gender identity in the context of our understanding that it's supposed to reflect a certain specific sort of psychological state beyond whatever is tautologically required to utter "I'm Gender X" -- a certain something, that is -- while someone else could hear that and feel highly skeptical that that person is really experiencing that psychological state. They could say, for instance, "To be trans is supposed to mean experiencing X and Y but actually, in almost all the cases I know, I don't think they're experiencing X and Y and it just seems like a proxy for autism instead." Or, I kind of hate to bring this up, but a lot of very concerned parents -- parents who maybe believe that transness is definitely a thing involving persistent dissonance with one's body and prolonged intense suffering from it, and favor helping people who have that condition -- are pretty sure that a lot of today's young people who claim to be trans aren't actually experiencing that and are instead mistakenly interpreting particularly awkward pubertal body feelings or homosexual feelings or temporarily discomfort with one's gender role or difficulty navigating a social world that feels alien with autism, combined with intrigued observation of their five classmates who are transitioning. And so they believe those children/teenagers are trying to make them linguistically validate something that they consider not to be true, that is, a self-deception or a delusion.

Moreover, leaving aside delusions, someone can simply disagree in the first place with the choice of a definitional categories that others have decided "man" and "woman" are; definitions are supposed to separate clusters of characteristics according to which commonalities are most relevant, and so there's always some subjectivity and room for disagreement on choices of terminology. Someone can understand that a person claiming a gender identity isn't making a direct factual claim about the world but is only asking for a definition to be expended to include them, but can also feel that their definition would be a lousy choice of definition. Maybe someone has a strong conviction that any choice of definition of gender beyond the simple biological sex one is useless or ill-defined or destructive -- maybe that is their opinion (even if it's a bad and very reductive one), and so they feel they're being compelled to voice something they don't believe in by using pronouns and trans-inclusive language and so forth.

So, I contend that pointing out that the trans movement isn't trying to convince anyone of a material untruth about their physical body but is only trying to get a definition expanded, while important, doesn't let us avoid the issue of gender self-identification being a statement that someone else may consider untrue or ill-defined.

I think one can find an analog to all of this for therians and otherkin (though that is vaguer and murkier, partly because my knowledge of those groups is vaguer and murkier), unless perhaps we relegate them purely to the realm of religion, but I'm too tired at the moment to put it together.

This is well taken, and I agree with you more than I disagree, I think. Or, to put it a different way- when I say that trans identity isn't a material claim, that isn't to say that trans identity is beyond debate. In many ways it's the opposite! There's a deep vulnerability here to Hitchens' razor: that which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.

A person who just yells over and over again about how men can't get pregnant is failing to contribute to the conversation. But there's plenty of room to say things like "this actively privileges your worldview and culture over mine, and I'm not inclined to play along in my own subordination," or "this extreme relativism proves too much; if being a woman had no qualities, you wouldn't care about whether or not I called you one," or any of a wide variety of arguments that don't depend on physical claims.

The root challenge, in many ways, is that it's profoundly difficult to implement 'atomized individualistic gender.' Both traditional and leftish constructions of gender aren't something that one person does in isolation; gender tesselates, and depends on the people around us following a script as well. (Pronouns are an obvious example, but really only the tip of the iceberg.) And so when we encounter variations on gender, we often end up in a state of low-grade conflict as we try to make sure our preferred gender practices are the ones replicated by our community.

I don't mean this in the modern culture war sense, even. The 'traditionalist' culture is still permanently embroiled in this conflict as a part of daily life: "a young lady does not collect bugs and bring them home," says the mother. "Real men don't need to go to the doctor for every little scratch," says the friend. For all that 'man' and 'woman' are theoretically descriptive of the sexual dimorphism evident in human physiology, socialized gender emerges the world over as a primary site of ongoing and contemporary cultural conflicts, just because people are so heavily invested in how their community builds those social roles. Leftish-versus-traditionalist gender norms are a new expression of this tendency, but hardly the first flash point in the space.

If anything, debates about what gender ought to be are one of the few universal cultural elements of gender. I always laugh about the first time I picked up a 12th century Arthurian tale and it started with "this is set a long time ago, back when people did gender correctly." This is just what you get when such a profound element of personal identity can only operate by way of sustained community effort, no?

And I think this is my primary objection to your discussion of trans identities above, and the weaknesses and limits of that model. Yes, there is definitely a gap between the identity and the reality, and room for errors of many kinds, but that gap and those errors are also a feature of traditional gender. It's why gender norms have to be actively enforced and taught, rather than taken as given. It's why gender is such a prominent and explicit feature in social norms and in law, the world over- because the 'manhood' and 'womanhood' that traditional gender constructions point at has never been an attempt to 'carve reality at the joints', but rather to impose order on it.

What this means for trans rights as an ideological movement is that it's caught on the horns of a dilemma where it (1) understands itself as inheriting a tradition of personal liberation, radical self-determination, and individual freedom, but (2) can only actualize self-expression in gender by proscribing universal norms that are followed at the community level. It's just a really tricky medium in which to be a progressive, and there's a lot of hurt downstream of those contradictions.

Ideally, the solution here would be pluralism, that is, the curation of separate communities where gender could be realized in a variety of ways, embedded in a mostly-gender-neutral framework for shared spaces. And I think, like, ugly political debates notwithstanding, we haven't totally failed in achieving that. Opening a bank account is no longer a gendered practice! That's huge!

But there is an enormous amount of coercion necessary to maintain any construction of gender, and we apparently lack either the means or the inclination to build fully gender-neutral public spaces. Within those constraints, the 21st century 'a woman is anyone who calls herself a woman' mantra at least has the merit of being less coercive overall, relative to the alternatives that cis and trans people alike are beholden to under more traditional gender regimes.

I agree with this on its face.

But here's the thing: certain quirks indicate a high likelihood of wanting to do something that is harmful. Someone believing that they are a dragon, it would seem, is much more likely to have the delusion that they can fly, which comes with obvious hazards, or that when they breathe on raw meat they're cooking it (or the eating-virgins thing you mentioned, I suppose). That is, unless they believe they're actually a dragon but somehow live exactly as a human, which is incoherent unless it's a more abstract spiritual sort of belief (which a lot of the time I suppose is the case for otherkin), to which I have about the same attitude as I do to most religious beliefs which is standing for tolerance of them but to some degree regretting their prevalence and certainly bristling if I'm required to give positive affirmation of them.

(Compare to Sam Harris and others arguing, in the context of free will and ethics -type discussions, that character/intentions/motivations matter when we compute moral judgments, because while in themselves they don't decrease utility, they are indicators of whether a person is likely to do a utility-decreasing thing. Also compare to the general verdict around Chickengate -- I'm referring to an explosion in rat Tumblr discourse instigated by Nostalgebraist during my earliest years here (can't remember if you were also around) about how we should judge someone knowing that they f***ed a dead chicken, the idea being that while the act doesn't directly do harm, it indicates something about the person doing it that suggests they might do harm in other ways.)

A variation on the above: even if for most individuals an untrue or incoherent belief isn't leading them to do harm, I (and I think most other people) generally see beliefs in falsehoods as a Bad Thing compared to beliefs in truths and want to increase the latter at the expense of the former within society.

In other words, the material world is simply not under dispute here; it's a question of taxonomy. A typical trans person is in fact asking far less of you than, say, a religious person who thinks that you should politely bow your head during a pre-game prayer. The religious person asks you to go along with (or at least, not dispute) the idea that there is a God or some other animating spiritual force, which is a fact about the world you believe is false. But the trans woman who asks for she/her pronouns isn't asking you to pretend that she has XX chromosomes or anything like that- almost the exact opposite, in fact. She's asking you to expand your category of 'woman' to include her, even though you and her are both aware that she has a body that does not always merit that category.

Almost invariably, when you meet someone with a more unusual identity- therians, otherkin, etc.- they will be doing much the same sort of thing, in much the same sort of way. Just as 'trans' is tautologically exclusive of women who think they have physiologically female bodies, 'therian' is exclusive of people who sincerely believe they are physiologically draconic. There are, I assume, people who suffer from genuine confusion about the state of the material world, who imagine quite sincerely that they have an actual dragon body, but I can't imagine that they spend much time typing on keyboards. As you say, it seems hard to avoid self-harm for long, under that misconception.

When you run across someone who identifies as a dragon or an attack helicopter, they are almost never delusional in the sense of being confused about their physical capabilities. Rather, they're saying that they extend the category 'dragon' to cover 'the thing that they are,' (possibly with the help of spiritual or metaphysical ideas, possibly just by reading lots of Foucalt), and will generally have a pretty clear understanding of what the properties and limits of their physical body actually are.

But it’s easy to accidentally use a relative standard, not a fixed one- “good at articulating themselves” is in danger of being a sliding scale that means something like “can express themselves as well or better than people who I particularly respect for their artistry with self-expression,” which is to say, people who are unusually good at it.

(It's kind of interesting what topics are and aren't present in the amateur vs. professional discourse. Like I've been attending these seminars for a few years now and I don't think I've heard anything remotely similar to "your book must, if you want any prayer of getting published, promote progressive political ideals that identify you as a right-thinking person", and that's the black hole that 90% of internet lit discourse revolves around, whether it's pro- or anti-.)

To write is to captivate. And everything, everything, is downstream of that. If you understand this fact well enough, you can deduce every other rule of writing from first principles. Pacing, style, character development, worldbuilding, it's all hiding in there.

Sometimes people give good advice, sometimes people give bad advice, sometimes people try to present moral claims as if they were writing advice... What makes that 'the best writing advice I ever got' rather than 'technically always true but not very useful' is that it's a standard that you can use to filter out the good advice from the non-advice, and read writing tips in the most useful way and in their proper context.

More seriously, I tend to think of the appeal of science fiction as often being rooted in something along the lines of “mutually transformative encounters between nature and the human subject.” Obviously the signifier is going to swallow the actual thing to some extent, and a lot of sci-fi will end up just throwing space ships and laser guns around because those are the tropes… but as far as what ‘motivates’ the genre as distinct from other storytelling, it feels like one of the things most at the heart of it is just trying to understand what nature becomes, and what we become, in the admixture. You can see it as far back as the 19th century precursors that were basically just a bunch of British Gentleman Explorers having adventures in unexplored environments.

(It's kind of interesting what topics are and aren't present in the amateur vs. professional discourse. Like I've been attending these seminars for a few years now and I don't think I've heard anything remotely similar to "your book must, if you want any prayer of getting published, promote progressive political ideals that identify you as a right-thinking person", and that's the black hole that 90% of internet lit discourse revolves around, whether it's pro- or anti-.)

To write is to captivate. And everything, everything, is downstream of that. If you understand this fact well enough, you can deduce every other rule of writing from first principles. Pacing, style, character development, worldbuilding, it's all hiding in there.

lol who scrolled my "live" stream 😂

This isn't really a democratic vs. anti-democratic issue because even a widespread social consensus can be wrong in such a way that experiments with violating it existing at all even if highly marginalized is ultimately to the good.

The main problem of course is just that the incentives all run towards making every violation 'large scale' or 'institutional', so even if you somehow got such a system in-place and legitimized, you'd only have a few decades tops before it reverted to "they did a badthink on the internet, this puts Earth at risk and we must use our LLM-powered surveillance network to root out dissent". If you're ancap-minded, I suppose it would be pretty funny to have a public auction for exclusive rights and access to surveillance data, so that private citizens would have the chance to buy up incriminating evidence before the cops could get it.

Actually, you might be able to arrange something similar in more of a socdem way, by just mandating financial penalties for accessing surveillance information (to be paid immediately, recouped by the private citizens thus violated after a year or so). If the police department or the FBI has to pay me fifty bucks inflation-adjusted every time they access a video or audio record, I think they'd be reluctant to do broad-sweep surveillance of any kind, and reserve it for the cases they actually cared about. Twenty bucks for the metadata.

I finished the main story last week. (Finally, I can do expert level cap roulettes with my girlfriend.) Took me about 1700 hours by Steam's count, in about year of playing. I'm very much enjoying it, but perhaps too much, since I played for 1700 hours in a year.

But I'm having a lot of feelings and thoughts about the plots of Endwalker and the second half of Dawntrail that fit right into my Tumblr circles, so I want to share them. Obvious major spoilers for the main story.

I take it, then, that you haven't played any of FromSoft's SekiDarkEldenBorne games. Pretty much all of those have - as a central narrative thesis - "immortality is nightmarish, and people's obsession with unnaturally avoiding death is responsible for the world being fucked up."

I mean, I agree on the facts; DS is absolutely about a setting that slowly descends in to a hell of its own making as everyone from its ruling elites to its subaltern exiles all use unnatural and often depraved means of extending their time and authority in the world, rather than accept their own mortality. But I don’t interpret that authorial choice in a reductive or didactic way at all.

The series (and particularly DS1, which I think has the ‘purest’ thesis) is a meditation on the will to live, and on the deeper meanings and ironies of the question that anybody who plays video games has seen a thousand, thousand times: will you continue?

It pursues that goal by ruthlessly, patiently, relentlessly paring away almost everything that you thought was your reason to keep existing in the scope of the game. The longer you go on, and the more you see of the world, the more 'easy answers' you lose, and you're left with the raw, naked, thing-in-itself.

In Dark Souls, you spend time during chargen designing your character’s appearance and identity, as one does in many rpgs. But the very first thing that Dark Souls does is rip that face away from you. You’re a horrifying zombie creature; your face (your humanity?) is a fragile illusion or a lie. You can only get it back even temporarily if you inflict horrific violence on the world around you. Will you continue?

The Undead Quest that gives you your only sliver of purpose and direction in the world is, bit by bit, shown to be a willful manipulation by those who are happy to destroy you just to preserve their own power. The gods are false idols, dead or in hiding, and their heaven is a rotted husk. Will you continue?

Civilization is dead, and you will have no community. Everyone around you is a fool, a madman, or a predator; even the item vendors are untrustworthy and often fade away in despair or wander off to die. And you’re no hero either. You kill the best and most noble alongside the villains, in pursuit of… whatever it is that keeps you going. Even the HUD gives you the option to ‘pillage’ instead of ‘get item.’ Will you continue?

There’s no resolution at all, no closure, no final answer. The setting is evocative, but clear stories about most of what’s going on will always be absent. And when you finally get to the final boss arena, and finally slaughter your way past the biggest bad, then it will simply dump you right back in your cell in the Undead Asylum, without explanation and without permission- a cycle you cannot escape, except by putting down the controller and walking away. Will you continue?

It’s certainly true that the game presents many, many object-level examples of the quest for immortality; it's certainly true that many of them produce horrifying results, in one way or another. But the player's own immortality isn't a scheme, or even volitional; characters variously describe this as either a 'curse' or as our 'true nature.' I'd venture that most players never read the thing deeply enough to even understand the lore of their own reanimation- it's something that 'just happens,' and the primary question is simply what you as the player do in response. And almost as quickly, we're introduced to a death-like equivalent, 'going hollow,' which is a synonym for giving up, deciding not to struggle any more. Something much like death still exists for us, but only when we lose the will to live.

And because the material causes of your own immortality is such an open mystery throughout your experience of the game, the player's own decision to keep struggling, again and again, becomes the primary lens through which you read all these other attempts: primarily Gwyn's linking of the flame of course, but also Seath's experiments, the Witch's demon city, and everything on down to lesser powers like Pinwheel and Quelaag. The more persistent you are, and the more all your justifications fall away, the more similar you become to these characters, who are all defined by their choice to have more life, at any cost.

And I think this would completely fail as an artistic exercise, if the game tried to be even remotely didactic about it. All the horrors of the game spring forward from the refusal to give up that struggle, but so does the game itself! The null case of a player who says "no, I will not continue," is that they don't play Dark Souls. So it's a game for, and about, the people who say "yes."

-at least for a while. The game would fail if it scolded the player for saying 'yes,' but it would be just as impoverished if it rejected the moment that the player finally answers 'no.' It knows that, eventually, the player will put down the controller and move on to other things. At least textually (the western marketing mucked this up a little), it doesn't really valorize the choice to keep living, or treat those who stick through it as 'better.' You play for a while, and then, eventually, you don't.

It’s not just the creativity, either. With numbers like that, Roblox is functionally a center of youth culture- if not ‘the’ center, given the lack of other options for them. And it’s entirely dark matter to the rest of us! It’s a place where the kids can experiment with language, identity, and cultural formation with fairly thin oversight; Roblox is just too far off the radar for most adults to even *have* a moral panic about, so they’re only really having to worry about oversight in the form of a few mods in a company that’s almost certainly wildly understaffed for this kind of thing. You and I have no idea what kind of proto-ideologies are developing in there, and no reasonable way of finding out.