(Part 3) Top products from r/TheMotte

A high-profile prize like the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences is not just about the accomplishments of the recipient; it signals what is valued in economics community. The prize committee considers not only the contributions of the nominees to economics as a field of inquiry, but also whether the economics community would benefit from a signal-boost for the approach that the nominees use, or the particular sub-field or topic the nominees research. If the prize was only awarded for big ideas and grand narratives, that would signal that those are the only kinds of contributions that really matter to economics--or, alternatively, that the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences is really a niche prize dedicated to a small subset of what the economics community cares about.

I agree with you that some of the most influential economists are the ones who presented big ideas and grand narratives. Big ideas and grand narratives give a framing to an otherwise too complex world, so if along comes a well-expounded grand narrative with a core big idea at just the right time, it can take over the world--even if it's demonstrably wrong. (See: Karl Marx, "Das Kapital".)

Speaking of Karl Marx: Despite the massive misery that his works supported in the 20th century, I agree with those who say that he was actually a pretty good sociologist. He masterfully described the misery that permeated the factories of his day, and he presented a framework that attempts to explain its causes. His weakness, both as an economist and as a sociologist, is that HE DIDN'T TEST HIS THEORIES WITH A FREAKING RCT.

Sorry for finger yelling. I guess I am still raw about Karl Marx, having lived under communism.

My point is that causal relationships that appear obvious, aren't. This observation underlies the entirety of social sciences. It is also very difficult to demonstrate causal relationships. While it's possible to do so without intervention, the approach requires one to already have a good model to account for confounders, and of course measurements of all the confounders. RCTs don't. That's why they are still regarded as the gold standard of demonstrating causality.

I apologize in advance if I don't do this right, first time posting here. I think this is culture since this is part of an ongoing arguementation between "Classical Liberals" and "Liberal Conservatives" vs "Religious/Social Conservatives" to "Post-Liberals"

The True Con

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>Though Will still claims to be a conservative, he has radically changed what he means by that term. In 1983’s Statecraft as Soulcraft, Will argued that government inevitably does legislate morality, and indeed “should do so more often.” He rejected “the idea that governments should be neutral in major conflicts about social values.” He denied that “the public interest is produced by the spontaneous cooperation of individuals making arrangements in free markets.” He confessed his “deviation from laissez-faire orthodoxy,” and announced, “It is time to come up from individualism.”
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>In 2019’s The Conservative Sensibility, Will employs the same gentlemanly prose—to opposite ends. He states that government should refrain from “imposing its opinions about what happiness the citizens should choose to pursue.” He maintains that men should be “free to maximize their satisfactions according to their own hierarchy of preference.” He concludes that the public interest can, after all, be achieved “in the spontaneous order of a lightly governed society.” He frets over the fact that the poor pay no income tax, and describes the rich and corporations as “unpopular minorities.” He champions “individualism and the rights of the individual.”
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>Will has remained remarkably consistent in his self-styling. In 1983, he lamented that America contained “almost no conservatives, properly understood.” Today, he again calls conservatism “a persuasion without a party.” His positions have changed, but his pose has not. He is still the lone True Conservative.
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>In both, America is conflated with liberal individualism. In Statecraft as Soulcraft, Will therefore concludes that America was “ill founded.” In The Conservative Sensibility, he instead celebrates the founding as the first inbreaking of Hayek’s transcendent philosophy. In both cases, America is not so much a nation as an idea. This is Will’s one fixed point—and his fundamental error.
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>Our foundations are broader and deeper than a single “founding” moment, tendentiously identified with the views of a few deistic slavers. William Bradford was one of our founders. So was Lord Baltimore. These men were communalists, not individualists; Christians, not liberals. For Will, they might as well not exist. He has spent his otherwise incoherent career propounding what Barry Shain, a professor of political science at Colgate University, calls “the myth of American individualism”—a myth that cannot survive contact with reality … the overwhelming majority of Americans at the time of the founding considered the individual “radically incomplete living outside an enveloping and ethically intensive community.” They believed that “the common or public good enjoyed preeminence over the immediate interests of individuals.”
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>These Americans believed that property was not an absolute right, but a trust received from God to be used for all. The Vermont Declaration of Rights stated that “private property ought to be subservient to public use.” Benjamin Franklin, the most commercial of the framers, believed men had a natural right to whatever property was necessary “for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species.” But he also believed that “all property superfluous to such services is property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it.”
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>...
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>Will labors to discredit Chambers and Kirk because they challenge his claim that America is univocally liberal and ultimately secular. Like many other True Cons, he has chosen to ignore ... what Shain calls the “enduring, democratic, Christian, and communal” tradition of America.
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>...
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>Will's praise of liberalism would be more convincing if he did not claim for it the virtues of other things. He opens his book by describing the Battle of Princeton as an “illustration of the history-making role of individual agency.” The selfless deaths of American patriots are thus enlisted for the ­ideology of self-interest.
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>He says that the universe itself is a testament to the godless miracle of spontaneous order, thereby giving his economic ideas an unearned religious sheen. He questions tradition, hierarchy, and religion, but seeks to drape their prestige around his ... philosophy

I suppose I just don't see his behavior as that of the mindless arsonist and critic. He did try to sincerely make a good game. A niche one, to be sure, and I'm quite certain it wouldn't be to my taste, but nobody makes an Atari 2600 poetry game decades after the console faded from relevance out of cynicism. Nor is the arsonist likely to write a whole book on transferring the joy of games to life. Again, I don't think that book would be thoroughly to my taste, but it strikes me as nothing if not sincere.

As he said: he liked Goose Game. He'd better like games in general, given the amount of breath he's spent praising them and the time he's poured into development. He seems to be genuinely looking to analyze what is remarkable in gaming and apply it elsewhere.

Creation is absolutely harder than destruction, and it sends a much more meaningful signal. That strikes me as a point in Bogost's favor, not against, whether for creating his first game as a labor of love, creating and then destroying a popular entire game just to make a point, or writing a positive book on games as a whole. His works aren't always my style, but they do seem to be about as genuine as creative work can get, and that's my primary request of a creator.

> I also dearly wish there were a way to encourage wealthy and educated people to fucking reproduce

Cutting education is a promising start. Not only does school directly delay family formation, but the whole premise of education is that successful people are made through an expensive, arduous training process, when all the evidence shows that genes are more important.

You can't pay a 30-year-old MA enough to settle down and have kids in the next few years, when she's just been through 25 years of school, and been brainwashed into thinking that she has to put her kids through the same, as well as act as their personal servant for decades in order to instill the "love of learning" responsible for her own success (because it definitely wasn't genetic!). You especially can't pay people with high earning potential enough to do this.

We should reassure people that their children will turn out similar to themselves, due to genetics, with no special effort on their part. See Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. And while you're agreeing with Bryan Caplan, you might also want to check out his case for open borders, especially the part focusing on IQ heritability.

>Boys Don’t Cry was about a trans man pretending to be a cis man to seduce a woman, and had hardcore-enough sex scenes to receive an NC-17 rating on its first cut.

There's a film called "this film Is Not Yet Rated" that examines the MPAA and how subjective it is as a control system for what gets into the public's eye. A segment of this film discussed the MPAA's issues with Boys Don't Cry.

From a blogger:

>In addition, the MPAA system often fails to take context into account. For instance - as director Kimberly Peirce comments in "This Film is Not Yet Rated" - the MPAA threatened Peirce's brilliant "Boys Don't Cry" with an NC-17 rating based in part on the very rape scene that is directly central to the movie. In the scene, the protagonist is raped as a brutal "punishment" for what her attackers see as her impersonation of a boy. Here, the MPAA's rating seems especially senseless: How could it hurt a sixteen-year-old's psyche to see a depiction of a brutal hate crime, presented as exactly what it is? If anything, the film is rightly educational.

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From Roger Ebert:

>"This Film Is Not Yet Rated" is a catalog of grievances against the MPAA: The membership of the ratings board is anonymous, so the filmmakers have no right to appeal directly to the people who are judging their work. The ratings board is supposed to be comprised of "parents" -- but hardly any have children under 18, which is the only age group to whom the ratings apply. Although the MPAA ratings were allegedly created as a way of heading off government censorship, some say that has always been a ruse -- and, besides, a government system would actually require rules, documentation, transparency, accountability and due process. These are not things the secretive MPAA is fond of.
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>And although the MPAA ratings are supposedly "voluntary," agreements between the studios that fund the organization, the exhibitors who show their films, and the media in which those films are advertised, make it something less than optional for most films. Check your newspaper to see if "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" is playing in your town. If that newspaper accepts advertising for unrated films ("This Film" was originally awarded an NC-17 for "graphic sexual content," but the rating was "surrendered"), you'll see that "This Film" is not playing at one of the studio-owned theater chains.
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>The whole kangaroo court is founded on a doozy of a Catch-22: The MPAA insists that it has procedures that it applies evenhandedly. But the procedures are secret so nobody can tell what they are. If something is not allowed, it's because it's against the invisible rules.
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>So, how do you make sense out of the MPAA's decisions? As "This Film" demonstrates, you don't. The Kafkaesque absurdity behind the movie ratings is beyond belief. Matt Stone ("South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut," "Team America: World Police") testifies from experience that studio pictures are treated a lot more kindly than independently financed and distributed ones. Kimberly Peirce ("Boys Don't Cry") and Wayne Kramer and Maria Bello ("The Cooler"), intuit that the raters are uncomfortable with depictions of female sexual pleasure, while Allison Anders("Grace Of My Heart") suggests that orgasms of any kind are frowned upon (although women's do tend to last longer, and may therefore make the raters more uncomfortable), and that the male body is even more verboten that the female body. And everybody agrees that the MPAA is very liberal when it comes to violence, and conservative when it comes to sex.

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the MPAA is important to this discussion largely due to their rating influence which affects the marketing and release of a film. This is why you hear so much about the studio trying to get a 'PG-13' rating instead of an 'R' (or in the case of Boys Don't Cry, trying to get an 'R' rating, settling for 'NC-17' after making cuts to shake the 'X' rating). The biggest issue issue sin't necessarily the rating system, but the power enshrined in a select group of anonymous and unaccountable influencers. It's pretty eye opening to see how much power they have over culture.

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link to film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpbxzP2mkoA

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Great write up!

Also, I'm a Gen-Xer and recall all of thee films and the milieu very well. It's interesting to see analysis from a younger viewer.

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If you like this topic I'd also suggest "Pictures At a Revolution" which discusses the 5 Best film nominations of the 1967 Oscars, and how these films changed the Hollywood. It's a nice context for how we got to 1999.

>In the mid-1960s, westerns, war movies, and blockbuster musicals like Mary Poppins swept the box office. The Hollywood studio system was astonishingly lucrative for the few who dominated the business. That is, until the tastes of American moviegoers radically- and unexpectedly-changed. By the Oscar ceremonies of 1968, a cultural revolution had hit Hollywood with the force of a tsunami, and films like Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night, and box-office bomb Doctor Doolittle signaled a change in Hollywood-and America. And as an entire industry changed and struggled, careers were suddenly made and ruined, studios grew and crumbled, and the landscape of filmmaking was altered beyond all recognition.

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As a supplement, I also suggest Tim Wu's "The Master Switch" which goes into detail about the rise of various media, how they supplanted the old media (i.e. telephone vs. telegraph; broadcast tv vs. Cable tv) and were in turn supplanted by other technological industries. There is a bit about the various takeovers of the film industry in the mid 90's that set the stage for the making of these films and the subsequent dawn of the Internet age. It's probably in need of a new edition now, but I really enjoyed reading about media and technological history in this context.

Very cool article. As someone who's passionate about meditation and has studied it intensely I think it's important to realize that meditation is (1) not for everyone and (2) to be very cautious about what mindfulness has actually been able to help with. Mindfulness Based Stress Relief and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy have repeatedly been shown to be effective. However, these types of studies rarely have adequate controls so it is difficult to make the strong claim that mindfulness itself is the cause of these seen benefits. Likewise, claims that mindfulness can treat more extreme disorders like PTSD are often banded about, but the research on these claims is thin.

Two books on this I would recommend:

Mindlessness: The Corruption of Mindfulness in a Culture of Narcissism:

>Practicing mindfulness can be an effective adjunct in treating psychological disorders such as depression, anxiety, and addiction. But have we gone too far with mindfulness? Recent books on the topic reveal a troubling corruption of mindfulness practice for commercial gain, with self-help celebrities hawking mindfulness as the next "miracle drug." Furthermore, common misunderstanding of what mindfulness really is seems to be fueled by a widespread cultural trend toward narcissism, egocentricity, and self-absorption.

>Thomas Joiner's Mindlessness chronicles the promising rise of mindfulness and its perhaps inevitable degradation. Giving mindfulness its full due, both as a useful philosophical vantage point and as a means to address various life challenges, Joiner mercilessly charts how narcissism has intertwined with and co-opted the practice to create a Frankenstein's monster of cultural solipsism and self-importance. He examines the dispiriting consequences for many sectors of society (e.g., mental health, education, politics) and ponders ways to mitigate, if not undo, them. Mining a rich body of research, Joiner also makes use of material from popular culture, literature, social media, and personal experience in order to expose the misuse of mindfulness and to consider how we as a society can back away from the brink, salvaging a potentially valuable technique for improving mental and physical wellbeing.

Joiner is one of, if not the most famous researcher on suicide in the world. One of the things he talks about, for example, he talks about how many depressed individuals struggle greatly with rumination, and not much has been done about the fact that meditation tends to make rumination worse for many people.

I also greatly enjoy Daniel Goleman's Altered Traits. Many are quick to point out that "thousands" of research articles have been published on mindfulness meditation. These guys are upfront and critical of the fact that, well, most of these studies are absolute trash with either biased experimenters, poorly defined definitons, and lack of proper controls (They're extremely critical of their own somewhat sloppy mindfulness research in the 70's - a refreshing moment of humbleness). They review over 1,000 studies and do a literature review of the 50 or so highest quality ones.

There really does seem to be an effect at work here with mindfulness. However, people often fail to differentiate between state effects and trait effects. For many beginners, Mindfulness is no different than a drug - you get a bump of relaxation and positive feeling when you're meditating, and then no difference when you resume your life. Real, permanent, lasting change is seemingly, but only after long, continued practice - not just glancing at a 10-minute mindfulness app on your phone three times a week.

They also mention how easy the news media and other snake oil salesmen can misrepresent research: a famous finding like meditation can increase the length of telomeres, a process related to cellular aging is reported as "Mindfulness is going to make you live much longer!!" And of course there's always companies trying to make a quick buck: A related example is the company Luminosity, a company that vaguely throws around the word "neuroplasticity" as proof playing their games will make you smarter, a claim not supported by much evidence.

Above all I think it helps to have a skeptical eye. Mindfulness has become an extremely hot topic in the past 15 years. Unfortunately, there is a bit of a self selection effect where most researchers really, really want mindfulness to be scientifically valid, and so they aren't really as critical of the research as they should be. Combine that with the fact that science journalism generally isn't great at actually reporting science, and marketing companies even less so, and that leads to a lot of misinformation floating around.

>Shepple

Did anyone else enjoy the amusing coincidence that her name is one letter from the Internet-word for "unwitting follower"?

>developed a script for masculinity that I was comfortable performing

Would you mind elaborating on this a bit? Or pointing towards a source that might help me make sense of the "everything is performative" mindset in less than 10,000 pages of overblown prose? Perhaps there's some factor to it that is fundamentally impossible to communicate, but I've long found that phrasing strange and uncomfortable, likely because I associate it with performing-as-acting, and thus as-lying.

>I wonder if there's some kind of body or gender dysmorphia that leaves certain people uncomfortable with whatever body they find themselves in

Almost definitely. I think a dose of Haidt's Happiness Hypothesis or maybe even Irvine's Guide to Stoicism would do people with this "generalized discomfort" much more good than the solutions they're finding (and regretting) now. Or since you mentioned the title phrase, John Kabat-Zinn's famed guide to mindfulness meditation. I say that as someone who found these books quite helpful over the years, dealing with my own concerns, and retrospectively quite glad of the culture in which I was raised rather than one more "do as thou wilt."

Edit: Thank you for sharing your story.

This all sounds correct to me.

Miller is gunning pretty hard for a particular kind of poly configuration, one with a committed primary partnership and rotating secondary partners. One problem is that this seems like a much better fit for men's average-case sexual preferences than it does for women's. In particular, this argument of Miller's does not sound like a realistic account of most cishet women's preferences to me:

>Polygyny makes it harder for lower-mate-value men to find partners, but polyamory actually makes it easier, because these guys don’t have to be good enough to be a woman’s primary partner.

As Regnerus observed, gay male sexuality resembles straight male sexuality, and lesbian sexuality resembles straight female sexuality. So it's not a coincidence that Miller is citing the popularity of Dan Savage's "monogamish" norm among gay men, as opposed to lesbians, as a model for straight marriage.

I do think you're romanticizing and overestimating the extent to which other countries have a coherent 'natural' ingrained ethnic/national identity by so rashly describing
> Nowhere else in the world is your identity conferred through bureaucracy

I mean, read a book like The Discovery of France that talks about the mapping of France and construction of the French national identity by the government. Up to WWI, the majority of the population wasn't even fluent in French, all the little villages had their own dialects. Spain still has smoldering independence movements and unique languages besides Spanish, from in Catalonia to the Basque region. Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson is another great book that talks more broadly about the beginnings of the concept of nationhood, tying it in Europe to the rise of the printing press which enabled a national language for the first time.

And you mention India, which probably wouldn't even be a unified country if it weren't for the conquest under the British empire and subsequent independence. India is culturally and ethnically divided in the extreme, up to and including their caste system.


Not to mention the great success and relative stability of very divided multi-ethnic societies in countries such as Switzerland or Singapore in the first world. Many of these peoples have a longer shared history than the ethnic groups in the United States do, but I don't see why that makes a huge difference in terms of the strength of identity. In either case, the memory of that shared history has to be constructed anew for each generation. Our shared history up to this point is more than enough to serve as a basis to construct national identity on; these days few Italians or Irish descendants of immigrants have any other primary identity than 'American'. Imagining a shared national community such that it is a primary identity isn't easy but the American government has played a large part with mandatory public schools and other measures. Bureaucracy is a large part of forging national identity, no doubt, your mistake is thinking that this is isolated to America.


So your description of America as

> not a serious country

on these grounds says more about your unique antagonism to it than anything else. If America is particularly notable on these grounds it is that as a relatively young nation compared to many of these older countries, our national identity ambiguities and contradictions stand out more. You're doing a negative version of American exceptionalism, which I think is just as incorrect.

> However, as humanity gains more scientific insight there's less need to retain old traditions that mix bad along with the good. We should be able to design a better society that captures the good without the bad.

I think I've read that book.

>Elite private education in America is on the cusp of this new era. The controversies over free speech, safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions and the like are symptoms of this shift. . . Once the transition is complete, the “correct” side of the controversies will become central to a school’s identity. . .

This post from Instapundit earlier today just seems apropos: Prosperity breeds idiots

" At the start of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel In the First Circle, a Soviet diplomat on home leave in Moscow tries to make an anonymous call to the U.S. embassy. His purpose: warning the Americans of a Soviet theft of atomic secrets. But he gets a dull-witted, indifferent embassy staffer on the line, and the call goes nowhere. Or almost nowhere. The call is monitored by Soviet security. Arrested and imprisoned at the end of the novel, the diplomat’s final thought about Americans is that “prosperity breeds idiots.”

Solzhenitsyn’s diplomat channels views that were clearly held by the author himself. Comfort and safety, enjoyed too long in the West, invite complacency—and complacency leads to stupidity. As a gulag survivor, Solzhenitsyn had a barely disguised disgust for Western elites with little experience of political murder and repression. Nor could he abide the legion of fools who seemed fascinated, from a secure and prosperous distance, with socialist thought. "

Surprised not to see reference to philosopher Brian Skyrms' book titled The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure. It's a great overview of how this game (in particular as opposed to traditional prisoners' dilemmas) is relevant for understanding the challenges involved in the evolution of cooperation.

>I, along with many others, have been concerned about Trump's behavior here. Gary Brecher has been shouting that the long-awaited betrayal of the Kurds is upon us (to be fair, he's said that before several times).

I don't have anywhere else to share since no one in real life knows who Brecher is so this sub gets to be subjected to my random factoids.

My girlfriend was reading a horse training book. Knowing these type of communities I was sure there are people who hate Monty Roberts and his methods, and that interested me for some reason. One of his greatest nemesis is John Dolan, they have hated each other for decades. I google John Dolan and my mind is blown to find out that John Dolan is Gary Brecher's real name.

TLDR: The War Nerd has been in a decades long feud with my girlfriend's favorite horse trainer.

Back in the 1950s, certainly, some women who wanted to work in professional jobs were prevented from doing so based on a combination of social pressure and employment discrimination.

Today, as Elizabeth Warren extensively documented 15 years ago, many families struggle to make ends meet with two incomes, when their parents and grandparents made do with one. The result is that many women who would prefer to stay home with the kids instead are forced to enter the workplace due to economic pressure.

It's not at all clear to me that the feminist revolution has led to any decrease in the net amount of coercion exercised on women. It has simply changed who is getting coerced and what they are getting coerced into doing. It's entirely possible, depending on what percentage of women would prefer to be stay-at-home moms, that the net amount of coercion has actually increased.

>I have trouble processing the idea of something being a generic insult, but becoming racist if it's targeted at a specific group

I think this misunderstands what I am saying. I am making a factual claim about how that particular statement was perceived in the United States at the time it was made. There was a long, long, history of not just referring to African Americans as monkeys and the like, but as actually equating them to monkeys, and hence stating that they are inferior. As a result, by the 1970s, anyone who made such a statement was seen at a virulent racist. So, although I agree that it is unlikely that any particular generic insult becoming racist if it is targeted at a specific group, that is precisely what happened in this particular case, in the United States. In fact, this book https://www.amazon.com/Images-Savages-Ancient-Prejudice-Western/dp/0415188555 has an entire chapter entitled, "The 'Negro' and the Ape."

Moreover, so engrained in American society was the notion that referring to African Americans as apes that, in 1973, Mad magazine used it in a piece entitled, "You can never win with a bigot." https://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/8024797.html Note that in the first panels, the same character who calls an African American baseball player a "nigger" subsequently refers to African Americans as being "strong as apes" because of "all those years in the jungles." That would not have made sense to readers unless it was commonly known that racists in the United States were wont to use the "black people are like apes" trope.

Right-wing news sources are running with Ronan Farrow's assertion, in a panel on Real Time with Bill Maher, that Bill Clinton "has been credibly accused of rape." Clinton's exploits are old news, of course, but in the interest of not talking about Epstein, I don't actually want to talk about what Bill did or didn't do.

My question for the Motte is: does anyone have a good handle on the history of the locution, "credibly accused of rape?"

I feel like I've seen it a lot lately, though I first noticed it during the Kavanaugh appointment hearing. I found its epistemology extremely troubling at the time. To refer to someone as having been "credibly" accused of anything is to embed a question-begging assertion into what might be taken on the surface as neutral reporting. Traditionally, American news media avoids suits for libel by reporting the allegation of criminal acts. There are probably some interesting arguments for why they shouldn't even be allowed to do that, but set those aside for now; assuming we're okay with the news media reporting allegations so long as they are clearly labeled as allegations (and remember that by "okay" here I mean "should not be held liable in tort"), doesn't the phrase "credibly accused of rape" violate the rule?

After all, "credibly" means believably or plausibly. But the plausibility of an accusation is precisely what juries are supposed to determine in a criminal prosecution.

In fact the phrase "credibly accused" seems like a linguistic troll on the order of "it's okay to be white." It is an invitation for people to express disbelief, which is outside the Overton framing of "believe all women," and so it is a locution people generally allow to pass without comment. It seems like a sneaky way to shift people's priors.

So I think it is pretty clever, as rhetoric goes, but it seems like a relatively recently-weaponized phrase--

--until I check Google Ngrams, anyway. And then I notice that it was and is a common phrase in the discussion of Catholic clergy and sexual abuse (appearing e.g. here in 2007). In this context, "credibly accused" looks like a way of saying, in effect, "yes, we know that sometimes people make spurious accusations, but these don't look spurious and so we are giving them our full attention." But the epistemic problem still seems to be there: the word sounds like a way of saying "we are taking these accusations seriously," but--is it possible to take an accusation seriously without putting the burden of persuasion on the accused to, essentially, prove a negative? The "credibly accused," in short, are not merely accused--they are nudged into the territory of "presumed guilty."

So, I was able to determine to my own satisfaction that "credibly accused" (of sexual misconduct) was not a phrase invented for today's culture war battles, though the roots of its current popularity do seem to be in the 60s or 70s. But its current associations with sexual misconduct, I can't find a clearer history on. I do seem to recall seeing the phrase recently deployed against Donald Trump in connection with extant impeachment inquiries, also, but I can't find that article now, likely thanks to Ronan Farrow. So whatever its origins, it does seem to be steadily increasing in popularity.

But it does look like rhetorical sleight-of-hand to characterize allegations as "credible accusations." And I am left wondering when the phrase made the transition from "a way of distinguishing between spurious and plausible stories" to "a way of taking the victim's side." The timeline seems to very roughly track America's coming apart. If we assembled a list of similar rhetorically-weaponized phrases from today's culture wars and ran them through Google Ngrams or similar, would it parallel these charts?