> the consequences were far worse and more destructive.
This doesn't sound right - there were a few blocks in Minneapolis, and maybe Seattle and Portland, that had some damage. But not like the many square miles of Los Angeles in 1992.
And of course, none of this compares to the riots of the 1960s.
We are not yet even one year out from the date of Floyd's death. I think it's premature to say what the societal consequences of this are. (I lived in Los Angeles in 2012, and there was a lot of discussion then about how different the aftermath of Rodney King seemed in 2012 than in 1993.)
Since it's been less violent and less disruptive and less dangerous to criticize than the response to Rodney King within the first year, my assumption would be that it would turn out better than the response to Rodney King?
>All in all I'd prefer the LA riots to what we got. It's not even close.
How many people died in all the #BLM riots combined, again? Because all in all I'd prefer six dead to sixty-three dead. I was there for the Rodney King riots, and you're right, it's not even close.
The Rodney King riots occurred at a time when "anti-racism" was aligned in a more constructive direction than it is today. That's not a function of the riots; that's something that happened independently when nobody was rioting. If you have something like the Rodney King riots today, the result is not "OMG too many people died, we were wrong, we have to strive for a colorblind society", it's a more intense and more violent push towards black identity politics. Modern antiracism is much worse than 1990s antiracism(*), but the Rodney King riots were much worse than all #BLM riots combined. Both of these things can be true.
* Because 1990s antiracism was an actually good thing,
I finally stopped being lazy and went ahead and replicated your methodology, and can confirm it checks out. I'm going to give you a minor finger-wagging though, for including 5 months of partial data in a 10-month rolling average - it's a round half so certainly no accusation of skullduggery, but in this case it also happens to return the local maxima. Cutting all the partials removes half the latest spike, while including all of them suggests a decrease since February.
I think there's a methodological problem in that insofar as "transgender" only fairly recently started replacing "transsexual" in any broad-based way. I would think a combined graph of the two terms (and perhaps "transexual" spelled with one N) would give a more accurate picture.
"Transsexual" had an interesting trend in the late '00s, but the dominance of "transgender" over the past decade looks to be precisely the signal Scott's talking about. It's simply too popular to have been a substitution effect.
"While this makes a bit of sense, I’m sort of skeptical. Steve Sailer, Richard Spencer, and John Derbyshire are still on Twitter. Spencer has over 70K followers. I can’t deny that many far-right people have been banned. But it seems more like Twitter enforces the rules somewhat harder on the right than the left for PR reasons, without having a concerted campaign to ban the right in any kind of useful/consistent way."
Twitter has been less censorious than other places. Facebook doesn't allow Spencer, for example.
The banning doesn't have to be done in a "useful/consistent way" to be effective. Here's Vox gloating about how no-platforming "worked" in the case of Milo and Alex Jones.
It's clear censorship has destroyed the voices of the most prominent people of the far right, so why wouldn't it work to stop a movement?
"Also, even if they did ban everyone to the right of Ben Shapiro, why wasn’t there a mass movement in favor of Ben Shapiro and others like him?"
Because the extremists are where you get the energy from. If Ben Shapiro is the most extreme person in your universe, and all he's arguing for is going back 10 years, that's not going to be "edgy," which is what gets the cycle started. The right end of the political spectrum has been unnaturally truncated, instead of being allowed to grow organically, which is necessary for these internet cultures to rise.
Also, Ben Shapiro is a loser. I don't just mean that as an insult, it's a whole part of his shtick; look him up on youtube incredulously reciting the lyrics to "Wet Ass Pussy" and talking about how wet his wife's vagina isn't.
Shapiro is promoted by the powers that be, because he's a vision of exactly what they would _like_ the Right to be; a group of five-foot-tall castrati talking about how taxes on the rich should be lower and pop music shouldn't use so darn many swears.
"Because the extremists are where you get the energy from."
I think you're going to need to argue that at length. In terms of triggering respectability cascades it seems to matter much more whether the next slightly more respectable+influential person has access to your writing than whether a normie does. The vox article suggests that it undercut their commercial viability, but I'm sure if you or I put in the slightest effort we could find whatever they've been writing in the meantime.
As an electorally oriented dem who really wishes we could cut off talk about trans rights/defund the police/open border's" and keep the media focused on our core message of "we are going to take money from the rich and give it to everyone else" I'm kind of curious to read why my preferred approach would backfire.
However, I mean this in good faith as someone who thinks your substack is worth readingf. But in the same way the left needs to wrestle with "why do we alienate older minorities" the right absolutely has to come to terms with "how come we've alienated everyone under 30". And just as the preferred leftists answer of "corporate media is why Hispanic truck drivers oppose trans rights" just doesn't quite cut it, I have a hard time believing "our message is perfectly optimized for people under 30 if only the evil SJW's at Facebook would stop censoring us" from the right. The conservative movements reliance on older voters and large scale funders just has to be part of why its media has failed to generate an appeal to younger people and you can't completely pass this off on censorship.
Yes, that's the way YouTube radicalization works, as everyone who's written about this know. It's basically people just watching video, getting recommended something else, etc. The internet is often about people getting sucked into things. Censorship therefore works, even if someone already committed can find whatever they want online.
As I thought the preceding sentence indicated that was not a contention about how virality works, but a contention about how fringes influence the elite. My mental model is that the power of fringes is in their ability to generate new styles and positions which influence marginally more respectable elites until at some point the normie piano teacher/youth pastor I had in 2nd grade starts talking about anti-imperialism and intersectionality.
Banning virality hurts the ability of Milo et al to financially support themselves, but doesn't interrupt the cascade of support for identitarian ideas from far right internet figures -> Tucker Carlson writers -> rest of Fox News & normie conservative media. I'm not saying the cascade has already successfully happened, I'm saying it is ongoing and contested. This suggests that censorship hasn't totally disrupted the ability of fringe groups to influence aligned elites. The problem for the right fringe is that there just aren't enough mainstream right-of-center figures popular with the under 30 set for the fringe ideas to cascade down to.
I think the left actually has been pretty successful channeling the energy of their extreme wing to move the country towards them. Yes, it hurts them in elections, but when they do win they get a much more liberal policy direction.
So if Democrats were moderate, I think they'd win say 50% of elections and govern like moderates. They've been taken over by their left wing and now maybe win 40% of elections and go much more radical, while always moving the Overton window (Republicans fighting trans women in sports has them giving up on gay marriage, Republicans fighting critical race theory includes them giving up on affirmative action, etc). I think partisanship is really strong and each side will portray the other as extremists no matter what, so for an ideologue the rational thing is just to enact policies you prefer.
On almost everything, the Biden administration is far to the left of Obama, look at size and scope of their stimulus bills if you're only interested in economic issues.
I don't think that the conservative message is actually optimized to win young people, of course it's not. But, even though it's not my politics, I think idenitatrianism could have won the youth if allowed to grow, and you can look at Europe for an example where the far right often does best with young people.
I'm a big fan of the Biden stimulus and I hope the child allowance is made permanent. But Biden didn't have big enough coat-tails to win statehouses, get anti-gerrymandering legislation or PR statehood. If politics proceeds as normal, R's will control congress from 2022 to the next realignment or crisis, and a stimulus bill will be the only major progressive legislation passed this decade. To consistently get 52-53% of the popular vote and not be able to do anything outside of emergency measures is just deeply frustrating. I kind of hope the supreme court overturns Roe because I think that's our only shot at congressional majorities.
The left has been (too) successful at channeling its fringe's energy into controlling speech norms in professional environments, but in terms of policy, we're going to get a temporary stimulus then nothing for a decade, while conservatives will have a 6-3 (or 5-3) Supreme court for the foreseeable future. Trump is a defeat for Trumpism in that he failed to satisfy the cultural/demographic concerns that animate the GOP base, but the party superstructure exists to cut taxes and prevent economic redistribution and the 2016 realignment + 2020 statehouse victories will let conservatives stand athwart congress yelling stop for a long time.
I don't think it's the platform that's 'wokified' it is the messaging. Biden's stimulus gave $350 billion to local governments. Local government budgets are 90% schools and *police*. This was a major sticking point and something Pelosi wanted included in the second Trump stimulus but R's fought it. So when it comes to actual policy Biden's presidency resulted in expanded police funding (or at least cities hit by Covid not having to cut back) opposed by Republicans, but would anyone hearing endlessly about "defund the police" and BLM think that's the case?
The democratic party needs to tone back on the woke messaging and win in rural areas because we have a constitution designed to govern a collection of agrarian republics and the senate isn't going anywhere. That said, places like Wisconsin where Democrats in 2018 got 53% of the vote for state assembly and only 36% of the seats are engaged in outrageous levels of gerrymandering that can't be attributed to geographic efficiency. State governor elections are purely popular vote affairs, and we get some moderate D's in red states and moderate R's in blue states. It's the malaportioned statehouses and legislature that are most polarized.
I have some sympathy for cultural conservatives, but at some point they just have to realize that their entire media ecosystem seems to exist to convince them that state power is an effective way of redressing cultural losses, and then delivering corporate tax cuts when they win. But, I'm sure the next round of kicking out the RINO's, and electing fighting politicians that are maximally offensive to young/educated people will reverse decades of cultural drift to the left.
Hidden in that "$350 billion to local governments" is the fact that "local governments" that are getting the aid money are mostly large, extremely progressive cities that spend lots of money on progressive policy.
The right didn't alienate everyone under thirty. It wasn't facebook that did it either. The answer is quite simple: University education is mandatory, and complying with Leftist praxis is mandatory at most universities implicitly if not explicitly. This is a project that has taken the Left decades to complete, and calling it whining over facebook *both* discredits the Right as being sore losers about a real structural disadvantage the left created for themselves, and discredits the political ability of the Left for being able to manipulate liberal institutions so well.
Man I sure hope so, that would be great for those of us on the left if the right doesn't cement minority rule through constitutional technicality in the next decade. I'm only kind of joking.
To be more serious I do think way back in the 60's the right started on a path of defecting from mainstream academic/journalistic/cultural institutions and constructing parallel institutions. Right wingers frame this as a victimization by lefties, but I it was also facilitated by the fact that electoral politics/donor money meant that they never really needed to cultivate a version of their ideology that could persuade intellectuals and creatives. The rise of Limbaugh and Fox in the 90's cemented the dominance of anti-intellectualism in the GOP, and then Trump/Hillary in 2016 accelerated education polarization even further.
For weird reasons I got into a google group with a bunch of formerly centrist 60+ STEM professors/lawyer (and one truck driver who is somebody's cousin). Some of these old dudes voted for Romney and they're mostly weirded out by BLM/Trans stuff. But Trump's election sent them down the "piss tape is real rabbit hole". These are tenured profs at top 20 research universities who are spending most of their time doing legit research and the rest of their time speculating on what the server at Trump tower was sending to Russia. It's possible I'm over-extrapolating from anecdotal evidece, but the extent to which Trump was just maximally offensive to even older normie educated types goes underappreciated in discourse about what happened to blue tribe epistemological bubbles.
Competition in a hierarchical group can only really exist along one axis and with one winner. If the competition is social, the winner is often determined by who complies best to that standard, not who is most correct in an objective sense. See the replication crisis for example. Scientists who intentionally or unintentionally made huge errors that resulted in false findings thrived in many fields, while conscientious scientists lost. The scientific competition in many fields wasn't to produce correct scientific findings, but to produce content that make journals more interesting (so boring, unfashionable, etc correct science lost out to more entertaining, fashionable, etc incorrect science).
When people compete on ideology, only one ideology can be successful.
If your theory was right, the data would show that it is rightists who were leaving academia, while centrists remain. However, in reality, centrists were leaving/replaced just as quickly as people on the right. This is far more consistent with a competition to be the most left-wing, rather than Limbaugh and Fox anti-intellectualism being off-putting.
Besides, the left have their own absurd beliefs that are extremely off-putting to many and this is often merely palatable to the people in academia because they have intellectual rationalizations or because they pretend that those beliefs don't exist ('no enemies on the left'). There is no reason why you could not have a right wing-dominated university that is accepting of crazy right wing beliefs like the current universities accept crazy left-wing beliefs.
Many popular beliefs among the left are extremely wrong and if you look at how they behave, many people on the left may not even truly believe them, rather than want to believe them for moral reasons, social acceptance, etc). Are those beliefs really accepted because they are 'intellectual?'
Your argument is as correct, and as wrong, as arguing that social-democracy lost in the Soviet-Union because social-democracy was not appealing to the soviet party, because social-democracy was not intellectually persuasive. In reality, social-democracy wasn't competing on intellectual grounds, but all ideas were measured against communism. So social-democracy lost not because it was bad at creating prosperity, at running a country or was inherently offensive to bureaucrats, but because it was poor at being communism. Similarly, many academics are now losing in academia not because they are incorrect, but because their beliefs/work fails to measure up to ideological standards.
I think it's an exaggeration to say that the left totally dominates the social sciences today. I have been a human sciences aficionado for the last 49 years. And I haven't seen any decline in social science findings supporting my general worldview, in part because I constantly adapt to new findings, but largely because new advances have typically validated the best old research. For example, the genetic revolution of the 21st Century has largely vindicated the best human scientists of the second half of the 20th Century.
Granted, naive journalists tend to not get that tropes like "Race does not exist" are scams to keep scientists from getting persecuted by know-nothings. But if you read the scientific journals carefully, you will know what's what.
"The rise of Limbaugh and Fox" was an effect of left-wing antiscientific ideological competition. Marx and marxist thought has been in serious fashion *ever since* 1960, despite both him and Adam Smith having their primary economic worldviews absolutely and fully debunked.
Actual unhinged leftist terrorists had no problem acquiring prestigious posts at universities.
Consider the following, that instead of the Right rejecting intellectual thought, that intellectual thought has been to lesser or greater degree captured by the Left and was (slowly at first - but increasingly now) used to provide statistical and scientific argumentation for the correct beliefs.
The parallel platforms and institutions were created because frankly, any institution that has to deal with Title IX will eventually be captured by the left - all of the things that were warned about (hiring quotas, deliberate discrimination against white people) when the CRA and Title IX were being debated are here today.
You may be able to say that "the Right has an anti-intellectualism problem" - but when the prominent intellectuals are erasing papers because they say the wrong thing and establishing ideological litmus tests for entry into the intellectual life of our country - there is no actual valid intellectual life in the country, just a class using the vestiges of old reputations to secure privileges.
""we are going to take money from the rich and give it to everyone else" I'm kind of curious to read why my preferred approach would backfire." You don't see how your socialist, and not in the "Strong safety net" sense, but in the "No one can accrue wealth without worrying whether the government will take it away" and "One's economic security is entirely dependent on who manages to take control of the government" sense, platform could backfire?
I consider myself on the right. I think the issue we have is not people getting deplatformed, but the fact that we're reliant on people on Milo Ywhatever and Alex Jones for "energy" in the first place. Both were largely just provocateurs. Jones is an outright embarrassment. Milo seemed like an okay guy at some times, I guess, at least when he was calling BS on obvious BS, but there was always a bit of juvenility to his shtick. Perhaps we could find someone semi-serious, next time, to try to red-pill earnest, intelligent young people with? I won't be holding my breath, but one can dream.
Intellectually, I'm basically an heir to the debates in the early 1970s among data-driven social scientists, with me being closer to the neoconservatives like James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein, but carefully reading centrists like Daniel Patrick Moynihan (the four-term Democratic U.S. Senator from New York) and James Coleman and socialists like Christopher Jencks. Indeed, the first thing I ever published was a letter in National Review when I was 14 in 1973 in which I made a joke about Jencks' book-length meta-analysis of the Coleman Report, "Inequality." My role model as a statistics-driven opinion journalist has alway been Daniel Seligman, who more or less invented blogging with his "Keeping Up" column in "Fortune."
Way back then, it was not considered extremist to be well informed about basic social science data.
"Nutpicking" is a real word in the blogosphere, and it means exactly what it sounds like: criticizing a movement by picking apart its nuts-est supporters. It's basically strawmanning, except the strawmen are real and just non-representative.
As I understand it, strawmanning is when you attribute a position to your opponents which they do not actually hold, and weakmanning is when you pick a small and nonrepresentative subset of your opponents and pretend that they are the norm. E.g. see section II here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/
I think both words are of comparable age but came from different communities - weakmanning being from the rationalist community and nutpicking from the political blogosphere.
Even before dating apps got big, I didn't know many couples that met the "sitcom way" of the guy asking out the girl at random (i.e. seeing someone at a grocery store, gym, etc.). There are a few cases here and there, but it's primarily friends that are on the far, far right hand of the extraversion bell curve. The vast majority of couples I know (pre-dating apps) came about from hanging out as a part of a friend group, drunkenly hooking up one night, then going further from there.
Hmmm. I feel very bad for all of you looking right now (I'm older and missed this change). Approaching women was never easy, but if what I'm reading here is true, it's basically gone from scary and humbling to "why bother?". I'd say the apps don't sound so bad, but the men and women I know who used them didn't have a lot of positive experiences. They (we, I suppose; I used It's Just Lunch briefly, and that's sort of an app) met their spouses in more traditional ways. My wife and I went on a blind date. One of our friends got knocked up after a drunken night with a guy she went to high school with back when. Good thing he turned out to be an awesome guy. My sister asked her boss out on a date and they got hitched. Good times.
Mostly: people in my orbit met at work, got set up, or, in a distant third, met at a [thing, usually a bar]. I'm putting this here as a levee against the inevitable "oh, things don't ever actually change. Approaching a girl at a bar is unthinkable now, it must never have happened" type of comment. It happened, it went from scary to kind of depressing as you aged, and you scored once in 50.
Dunno - I think the "meet at bar" think still happens - what I virtually never ever see is the sitcom style "guy randomly approaching a stranger in a sober setting and asking them out" - that's really the "why bother" scenario.
It was never really a thing, but was for a time heavily promoted in pickup blogs. I think it started out more as shock therapy for the kind of clueless pickup-blog-reader who was afraid to talk to women at all for fear of rejection.
It does happen. I've done that quite a few times before so I know it happens for sure. A brief list of places I was able to either make out/get dates/get numbers from women where nobody was drunk: yes bars (people in bars aren't always drunk), on planes, in airports (arrivals and departures), a car rental desk, dancing lessons, coffee shops, technical conferences (multiple times). Some I've forgotten.
I do have the feeling though, that if I lived in the USA I'd have been much less likely to try this due to the prevalence of the type of feminism that Scott has talked about. Living here in central Europe I never really was scared that I'd chat up or date a woman, she'd not be interested and decide to communicate that via some sort of freak-out where she accused me of being a creep/misogynist/attempted-rapist. Asking girls for numbers felt very "safe", modulo of course the chance of rejection.
I did very strongly get that impression from one of the American girls I dated (very briefly), partly because she told me a story in which she had engaged in exactly that kind of meltdown with another guy, apparently unaware of how crazy it made her sound - she was "nearly raped" by a guy who did and said literally nothing that could have created any such fear, by her own telling of the story!
I'm not trying to brag or anything like that, I just think it's a huge shame that men are now (reasonably!) afraid to do this because positive interactions with strangers are one of the things that gives life colour. It's not a fantasy or fiction story. And although it turned out that sitcom style pickups were indeed possible, in the end I didn't meet my wife that way.
I'm in the US and fairly introverted, but I can still think of one time I sort of did this, which was at a mind-numbingly boring company orientation event where she was prepared to goof off with me (I don't really consider this meeting her through work because it was a very large organization and the people at the event were all strangers from different departments that seldom if ever interacted). It led to one not-good date.
If you weren't super-extroverted, it seems hitting up strangers was a lot easier if you frequently found yourself in situations where everyone was bored and there was nothing to do but either stare ahead blankly or make conversation with strangers (this scenario happens basically never post-iPhone).
E.g. I recall an airport security line circa 2005 that took 90 minutes to get through and I spent most of the time making very good conversation with the young woman behind me. Would have asked her out, and I got the impression she'd have accepted, but we were flying to different cities and lived on opposite coasts.
Yes, airports proved to be good places to meet women perhaps because on a plane phones don't work :) But I think there are still lots of situations where people aren't on their phones, or would rather enjoy an amusing conversation with a stranger than flick through Instagram for the 3rd time that day. So it's not quite so bad. My dating years were mostly post-smartphone.
Well very good then. I think I was single and looking for a total of 3 months in the post-iPhone world before I met my wife, but I just notice that I find myself engaging much less often in these types of conversations with strangers (as 99% of such conversations in my life were not with an attractive single woman). I suppose people might be open to them, but as an introvert I find it much easier to break the ice with someone staring at the pattern of the carpeting than someone staring at social media.
There are lots of guys on Youtube who film themselves asking girls on college campuses for their phone numbers. The girls do often seem surprised, but lots of them give their numbers. Most of them seem flattered and happy to be asked.
No, the guys tell the girls afterwards that they're just making a video, and I assume just delete the numbers. I'm sure lots of the numbers are fake, but then again there are lots of guys that did this (I watched them in 2019; I don't know if they did it during COVID or if they're going to start doing it again) and tons of videos, adding up to at least hundreds or even thousands of numbers. I'll bet that at least hundreds of the girls were sincere. :)
That's interesting, I thought the old "wiser" advice was to not meet women in bars, and instead to try to meet them in grocery stores, etc. Like this clip from Superbad:
I don't know many people who asked someone out at a grocery store or gym, but I know a lot of people who don't drink, want to ask out someone in their friend group, and don't know how to do it or whether it would be socially appropriate.
The only way I've really seen that work is subtle hints communicated through other members in the friend group. It's a bit "high school", but asking out someone in friend group blindly has the potential to be even more awkward than someone at random. I've virtually never seen that. You usually send feelers through others to see if there's at least some level of reciprocation. Typing all this out just underscores the genius of dating apps btw.
That one is tough, because part of the expectation of "going out on the weekend to the pub" is "possibly meet someone", but the expectation of "going to the grocery store" is "ooh, they have two for the price of one on the new chocolate bars!" not "possibly meet someone", unless it's in the explicit context of Singles' Nights (did that ever take off as more than "article in news media about reporter went to one"?)
Not that I'm ever at risk of this happening but if I thought that when I just wanted two litres of milk and some crusty bread rolls, I'd also have the possibility of being asked out, oh God another place I have to dress up for?
Talking to women is now socially inappropriate. The messaging for the last 10 years from *women* to *women* , particularly from feminists is that "all guys are rapists, always be on your guard there are MEN around". Ergo, justified or not - women who haven't been made painfully aware that everyone is trying to sell you something have started to internalize the Inherent Danger of Men.
A friend on a different platform was saying something about having to worry about a new stalker every time they met someone - and my immediate reaction was "holy shit you need therapy", that person had significant traumas that they were working through - but the Life Experience was brought up to make a point about a perfectly normal conversation about "how much is it acceptable for a male person in the vicinity to flirt with people if eg, they're working on her house".
Instead of "you need therapy, the base rate of this thing is very low despite the astronomical consequences, and a few basic self-protection practices will basically stop this from happening in almost all but the most egregious possible cases" - the correct response is "Thank you A for educating me on HOW HORRIBLE this can be psychologically, B that man is HORRIBLE and maybe a RAPIST. You should report them to the POLICE".
When I think "getting a romantic partner the sitcom way" I think "date people at work" because so many sitcoms are set at work and need to ship their characters together.
"My concern is more about there being a culture of fear, where people who oppose whatever the wokest 10% of the population thing are scared into silence"
This is a complicated thing to try and solve, the fear isn't just made up of fear of social rejection, but also fear that speaking out might harm the good things that have come from whatever movement is in question. That's not an unfounded fear, there are a lot of countries around the world for example where gay rights are being undermined and removed. There's a big information deficit for all involved about what influence their raising their voice might have.
Also, it should be pointed out that a lot of the fear is due to propaganda designed to inspire fear in hopes of creating a backlash (which has largely worked), rather than rational fear that's proportional to actual risk.
Like, during the satanic panic, a lot of parents were legitimately scared for their children's safety, that they would be abused or murdered by satanists. But if your response to that was 'we have to search even more vigilantly for all the satanists in order to wipe them out so people can feel safe again', you probably weren't helping matters.
I wonder if someone, anyone, has actually tried mapping the actual number of incidents. I don't trust any estimation that is based on "i've seen n articles about people being cancelled". The exposure those articles get is driven by memes, not by reality.
Bonus points if you can do an historic comparison with say the red scare.
The difference being that _literally no one_ managed to summon a demon or whatever the fear was. _Some actual number of real people_ have had negative life reactions for expressing relatively innocuous opinions and beliefs. Is that number much smaller than some people think it is? Yes. But it's not zero, and the fear isn't entirely unfounded. I do _generally_ agree with you that one vector of attack is to reduce the fear. I think if fewer people were afraid and were willing to say the things they want to say, then it would be harder to enact negative repercussions. But If everyone did that _some people_, at least early on, would face real, significant backlash, so we also need to be actively fighting the impulse to punish people for expressing opinions.
> The difference being that _literally no one_ managed to summon a demon or whatever the fear was
As a kid who's mom never let me play D&D because of the media panic, I've never been particularly sympathetic to the Satanic Panic fearmongering of the 80's, but I wouldn't say there was *NO* basis whatsoever for it -- there was.
Serial killer David Berkowitz, aka, the "Son of Sam", who claimed to have been part of a Satanic cult and performed the murders as some weird ritual act:
So the media definitely manufactured it, but there really *was* at least one crazy guy who killed a bunch of young people in horrible ways and at least claimed do be doing it in the name of Satan.
Pretty sure D&D specifically had nothing to do with the murders? Given it only came out 3 years before the first one I'd be surprised if Berkowitz had even heard of it.
Look, my only point was to say that as tenuous and overblown as the Satanic Panic was, it wasn't responding to *literally absolutely nothing*. This isn't to justify it or say it was a good idea or reasonable or anything like that. Just that it didn't come out of *absolutely nowhere*, because
we do indeed have this one very well documented high profile case of gruesome and terrifying murders of young people murdered by at least one guy who claimed ritual Satanism as his motivation (whether we believe him or not).
I am once again asking people to stop constructing weird fictional narratives about a dead gay comedy forum.
SA was never some even-handed centrist discussion board. Like most of the 00s internet forums it was about 75% lefties broadly construed and the remainder was mostly libertarian (not well-disposed towards McCain). Something like 50 accounts lost their McCain ban bet and only a few of those were actual regulars. It was not some great epoch-shifting exodus.
And they most likely didn't go to 4chan. By the time 2008 rolled around, 4chan had been a separate website from SA for years (and had spun off of an entirely different subforum with not much overlap to the politics boards). They mostly ended up at various spinoff forums where they accreted all the other bitter people who got banned over the next few years over things like "faggot" becoming dispreferred nomenclature and just memed themselves into fash.
4chan went right-wing because there was a coordinated effort by Stormfront to colonize it and make it right-wing. There were explicit threads about this on Stormfront, and the userbase there was much bigger than the userbase of McCain supporters on SA ever was.
I'm not sure I agree with all of this. SomethingAwful posed a problem that has overtaken a very large portion of the internet: what happens to you when you surrender totally to irony? When you lose the ability to simply understand the world around you without mental quotation marks over everything you think and do? Some people devolved into the nihilism of the altright, all of the "ironic" f-slurs and n-words congealing into an ideology, even if that ideology was really for the lulz. Some got overbearingly woke but stayed ironic about everything but injustice. They tell the same shitty Weird Twitter jokes they always have but pepper in "ACAB! BLM!" now.
My entire point here is that "some people" was not that many people. I am sure you could probably find at least, like, one guy who had the arc described by the original commenter. But it wasn't some kind of cause-and-effect with 4chan where all the McCain toxxers picked up shop to 4chan, waited several years for /news/ to be created, and concertedly tipped what was by then an entirely separate website to the right. The numbers and timeline just don't add up.
When I talk about Something Awful being the starting point for a lot of this stuff, I'm largely just pulling back to the link between that and the Shit Reddit Says community. That's the place where I think it was actually weaponized, using these issues essentially as a moral license for ironic radicalism and bullying.
That's another thing different from either of these first two things! Shit Reddit Says was GBS. 4chan was ADTRW. The McCain toxx thread was LF. If this is gibberish to you, please consider not having strong opinions about Something Awful Dot Com
People have a really hard time grasping just how different the various sub forums were/are on SA. I spent 10+ years hardly ever venturing out of AI or SHSC. I'm not sure there are many useful generalizations you can make about the SA forums as a whole.
Yeah, plus the fucking place has been around 20+ years so all three of those are also different in time as well. (4chan spun off in like 2003, the election was 2008, and reddit scolding was more of a 10s thing)
I forgot how much concern there was about details of SA culture and history. I did hang out mostly in LF, so my view is skewed by that. I remember a lot of discussion about the exodus circa 2009-2010 and a lot of cross discussion about posters who used to post on SA that were posting on 4chan. How much of that happened is in my memory a lot, but it was 10+ years ago so who knows anymore.
>This captures a fear I have too. Yes, lots of people make fun of conservatives for freaking out over some proposal made half-jokingly by a tiny magazine with three subscribers, and acting like it’s the unified will of the entire Democratic establishment. But some non-zero fraction of the time, the ridiculous thing ends up taking over, and after it’s taken over it’s too omnipresent to protest. The window between “it has been seriously mooted” and “people are terrified of being seen not to whole-heartedly endorse it” is razor-thin, and it’s hard to blame people who aren’t confident of hitting that window, and sometimes that looks like arguing against it before the the mooting could be honestly described as “serious”.
At the risk of litigating a particular instance beyond the point of relevance, I think that quite a lot hinges on the specifics of what the proposal actually *is*, and judging it carefully and consistently. If the fear is that certain language will become common, showing its use throughout society is good evidence. If the fear is that it will be *compulsory*, it is poor evidence. Equivocating between the two is a huge epistemic problem - this isn't just politics, it's a concrete logical error - and leaves one in a position where one can feel threatened so long as any examples of their opposition exist. With only a little effort you can find examples of such all over the political spectrum, and I am extremely skeptical of ad-hoc proofs that the outgroup definitely does it more.
tl;dr: If you can't commit to a specific prediction, you're probably motte-and-bailey'ing yourself.
> That's the same issue, I was complaining about, though. These days, the distinction between "common" and "compulsory" is razor-thin if not nonexistent.
Says who? That's a failure of clarity and consistency, says I.
(Or alternatively: criticism is not the same as censorship.)
If a minority of people can criticize someone effectively enough that their works become inaccessible to people who would generally be receptive to them, then that criticism is indeed censorship. (Imagine, for a barely contrived example of this, a cabal of reputed movie reviewers agreeing be overly critical of a movie because they don't approve of the director's communist ideas. While technically they may be merely criticizing it, the effect as implemented is censorious.)
I reject the theory of censorship where the label is applied to anything that affects accessibility on the margin. Price tags aren't censorship. Advertising strategies aren't censorship. Search engine design isn't censorship. Distribution patterns aren't censorship. Negative reviews aren't censorship. Blocking isn't censorship. Counter-protesting isn't censorship.
An individual is not entitled to works that meet their tastes, nor is a work entitled to an audience. But there are barriers that should *not* be placed in their way.
Censorship is government action. Content restriction on the use of airwaves is censorship. Excessive public access fees are censorship. Legal barriers to publication are censorship. Age requirements are censorship. Fines and blocking and the use of the bully pulpit *can* be censorship when employed by officials, depending on more nuanced factors. Intellectual property is an edge case - actions taken by private individuals, explicitly backed by governmental enforcement.
Most societies agree that some common types of censorship are a good thing, and disagree on innumerable others. But it pays to be *extremely* skeptical when someone argues a new category of censorship is necessary to combat disfavored speech, or that a chosen category of speech is important enough to compel others to repeat it.
I find the distinction you're insisting on between government and non-government action pretty artificial. Surely if the Mafia comes in and burns your printing press, that counts as censorship?
> I find the distinction you're insisting on between government and non-government action pretty artificial.
The categories are indeed made for man.
> Surely if the Mafia comes in and burns your printing press, that counts as censorship?
No. It is a criminal act that can be addressed through the standard legal process, not requiring a revisiting of speech principles. And if the Mafia cannot be realistically defeated by the legal process, then your problem *still* isn't a speech issue.
Search engine design sticks out from your list in the first paragraph.
Somebody is literally playing censor there - acting with authority to prevent you reading something, in a way you can't just refuse to accept the way you could ignore a bad review.
Not to mention that the search engine market has very few prominent players. Whereas it's almost impossible to coordinate censorship of something even by the Western governments, 2-3 search engines are being used by more than 95% of all of their combined citizens, and they can easily collude or be coerced into censoring essentially anything.
> Somebody is literally playing censor there - acting with authority to prevent you reading something, in a way you can't just refuse to accept the way you could ignore a bad review.
No, unless the search engine is itself governmental and the restrictions aren't content-blind. You *can* in fact refuse to use a given search engine, or any search engine at all. You are not entitled to an unbiased algorithm, nor is Google obligated to serve results impartially - if you wish to *create* such an entitlement, compelling specific action from an existing private entity is not the way to do it.
If the linguistic prescriptivists start hunting people down for crimes against semantics, I'm definitely not making it through the first few rounds of executions. But it behooves us not to let principles attached to one definition of a word leak into others - censorship cannot both be a terrible violation of liberty that ought to be resisted *and* a casual everyday practice for smoothing social situations. See "failure of clarity and consistency" above.
I don't think "compulsory" is a meaningful term here. Is it "compulsory" to say "postal worker" and not "mailman"? To say "black person" and not "Negro"? My impression is that the government wouldn't arrest me in either case, but that in both cases, if I used the less preferred term in formal writing, my editor would tell me to use the more preferred term (and think slightly less of me), and if I used the less preferred term on an Internet post, I'd have people commenting telling me to use the more preferred one, and getting angry if I pushed back. I think this would be much truer for the second example than the first example. So are these terms "compulsory" or not? I think all you can do is admit that there are gradations of social pressure and stigma.
> I think all you can do is admit that there are gradations of social pressure and stigma.
Gradations, sure, and often distinguishable ones. This is part of the proactive argument in favor of precision rather than a defense for its lack - government action is not the same as doxxing is not the same as status games is not the same as motivated firing is not the same as being cast out by one's own support network. Conflating vastly different reactions is a serious mistake at the best of times, and there often isn't even a strict hierarchy of intensity.
(And on an object level, is why I'm deeply unsympathetic to an idea that this is something Democrats are uniquely or even disproportionately guilty of. If one hasn't noticed any government action from Republicans, one has missed quite a bit.)
Forget sympathy, I'm downright *hostile* to claims that government action is needed in the here and now to head off social pressures that manage a stream of anecdotes but somehow haven't resulted in those consistent measurable fears. IMO, the biggest failure of capital-L Libertarianism in the US is failure to be sufficiently skeptical of increasing government power to combat nebulous social threats.
"Capital-L Libertarianism" meaning individuals who primarily identify as libertarian as an organized political force. Compare conservative v. Conservative.
I think Scott’s point regarding the language is similar to the “Whole City is the Center” concern, where we have perfectly good words for things that don’t need to be replaced.
I am not defending “mailman” because some of them are not men... that’s a good word to change. Maybe a good example is “handicapped”... which I think became “disabled” and then “differently-abled.” (?) Has this accomplished anything? No one wants to be unable to walk or thinks that’s a good thing, but we should all agree that those who can’t walk deserve respect. Maybe the intent is to encourage the (in my opinion true) belief that a variety of seemingly bad conditions can lead to a beautiful diversity of talents and perspectives, like the archetype of the blind piano virtuoso?
Those who don’t want to extend such respect - bullies come to mind - are going to hear the new word and apply the same disrespect to it, so what does it accomplish? We’ve only achieved collateral damage to people who too slowly evolved to using the new word.
The changing of the words seems to be an unnecessary symptom of what was happening anyway: an increase in respect for previously marginalized groups. But maybe the two phenomena are inseparable, or the word change is in some way causal rather than symptomatic. I’m not sure.
There's a really great point on this that Freddie deBoer made back in late April on this that I hope he won't mind if I post here (seriously, Freddie, if it's an issue please let me know and I'll delete this post):
"Social justice politics are obsessive about the linguistic, symbolic, cultural, discursive, and academic to the detriment of the material. The reasons for this are pretty plain: the parts of contemporary society that the social justice world controls are media, academia, the arts, nonprofits - in other words, the domains of ideas, the immaterial. The man with only a hammer seeing a world full of nails, etc. But this means that basic aspects of material suffering ultimately receive scant attention. I already mentioned above that Meghan Markle received vastly more press coverage in that news cycle than the Black-white wealth gap that touches the lives of every Black American. From the standpoint of promoting mass racial justice this makes no sense. But the wealth gap is a difficult problem that the cultural industries have no capacity to solve, and they don’t spend a lot of time reporting on poor Black people. Because the British royal family is sensitive to public perception they fixated on that problem which they thought they could change. Sadly for poor Black people the wealth gap does not have a public relations team, nor is entry into wealthy royal families a realistic path for most. The triumph of the linguistic overall the practical can be found all over this world. For example, consider the recent rigid policing of the term 'person suffering from homelessness' over 'homeless person.' The thinking is that the former stresses that homelessness happens to some people at some point while the latter defines them by that condition. I’m sympathetic to this reasoning; it makes sense to me. I’m also sure that if you polled a thousand homeless people you would not find a single one who would list this among their top ten problems. But when you’re a bookish arts kid language is everything, and anyway, social justice politics does not have anything substantial to offer the homeless in material terms. So language policing it is."
Do you mean when a black person has to see a Confederate statue every day, that statue gets more attention from that black person than slavery in another country does?
> I think Scott’s point regarding the language is similar to the “Whole City is the Center” concern, where we have perfectly good words for things that don’t need to be replaced.
Thing is, language evolution only occurs when a bunch of people all think they newer way of talking about something is better than the previous way. So clearly, they didn't think it was "perfectly good" before. No one controls language. If you notice everyone around you is using language differently from you, they almost certainly have good reasons.
I just think your/scotts model for how lanugage evolution works is kind of ridiculous. Language is a fundementally distributed system. If you want to use "negro" instead of "African American", no one is stopping you from doing so. But this decision you have made is revealing. Sometimes, for some language choices, all it reveals is a cultural difference, perhaps as a result of age. Sometimes, it reveals a lack of concern for a specific group.
> Those who don’t want to extend such respect - bullies come to mind - are going to hear the new word and apply the same disrespect to it, so what does it accomplish?
You are mistaken. Bullies hear the new words and call them stupid. They fight the change in language. In doing so, they reveal themselves to be bullies and people can decide whether or not to subject them to social pressure.
To be perfectly clear, changing language isn't going to magically fix inequality/racism/oppression. But to think language change is arbitrary is kind of insane. If everyone around you is updating their language, they have good reasons.
"The decision you make is revealing" is exactly the kind of implicit threat that lets the powerful choose what language is and isn't allowed, and embed their own ideology and values in the very words we are allowed to write.
Oh, you're allowed to write what you will - it's just that others are allowed to write in response. What kind of system would you prefer, that would make you feel safe against such "implicit threats"?
"Thing is, language evolution only occurs when a bunch of people all think they newer way of talking about something is better than the previous way."
No, that's not at all true. There are lots of reasons why language evolution occurs. Do you seriously think that the Great Vowel Shift occurred because a bunch of people said "Gee, the English language would be a lot better if out vowels changed?"
"If you notice everyone around you is using language differently from you, they almost certainly have good reasons."
It's reasonable to conclude they have reasons. It's not reasonable to conclude that they have *good* reasons. And your argument can apply even better the other way around: if YOU think that your new way of speaking is "better", well, there's probably good reasons for why people are speaking the traditional way. You making a bizarre reverse Chesterton Fence argument.
"I just think your/scotts model for how lanugage evolution works is kind of ridiculous. Language is a fundementally distributed system."
So you believe that failing to distinguish proper nouns by capitalizing their initial letter makes the language better? You think the English language would be better if we spelled "language" as "lanugage" and "fundamentally" as "fundementally"?
"You are mistaken. Bullies hear the new words and call them stupid. They fight the change in language. In doing so, they reveal themselves to be bullies and people can decide whether or not to subject them to social pressure."
It logically follow from this that you believe that *only* bullies fail to adopt the new form, and so if someone fails to adopt the new form, it is completely legitimate to conclude that they are a bully. This is a terrible attitude, and is itself a form of bullying.
About 20 years ago, I wrote something like "the candidate's speech was schizophrenic," meaning, of course, that it displayed multiple personalities. A geneticist wrote to ask me not to use "schizophrenic" in that common but incorrect sense. At first I was going to scoff, but the more I thought about it, I realized:
A. Schizophrenics don't have multiple personalities.
B. Schizophrenics and their loved ones have enough problems as it is without pundits like me, who ought to know better, making their lives harder by helping reinforce in the public mind a misimpression about schizophrenia by using a lazy cliche.
So I haven't, to the best of my knowledge, used "schizophrenic" in the metaphorical sense in many years.
But I haven't noticed this being a terribly popular example of language reform.
I wonder why? In the past, many examples of language reform tended to come from the "euphemism treadmill," where a term has become associated with empirical tendencies toward bad things, so a new term is invented to make people forget the statistical correlations. But then they notice them anyway, so a yet another new term has to be invented.
In contrast, not using "schizophrenic" to mean "multiple personalities" would be language reform to make language more empirically realistic. Perhaps there isn't much of a constituency for that?
> I am not defending “mailman” because some of them are not men... that’s a good word to change.
I was almost agreeing with this, but... I don’t agree with the sentence “women are not part of mankind”. So... OK, I’m not sure exactly what point I’m trying to make, but I’m sort of pointing towards “word meanings are complicated, and if you just split compound words into pieces and interpret those pieces as phrases, you’re probably doing it wrong”.
I would defend “understand”, even if sometimes what it refers to happens while sitting, or it refers to things that are below the person that is understanding.
Language change is natural and inevitable. Resistance to change is also natural and inevitable. (I'd say it's more important even: if people changed the language whenever they felt like, language would change so fast people would have a hard time understanding their children or grandparents. If language didn't change at all, except inventing new terms for new concepts, it wouldn't pose any major problem.)
In any case, the objection wasn't to spontaneous language change, but to (de facto) compulsory, politicized language change. And it could also apply to all sorts of silly proposals other than language change.
I'd go so far as to say that language change is overall a bad thing, even when it's spontaneous, because it creates an unnecessary language barrier between ourselves and the massive corpus of great literary works that our ancestors have left us.
Shakespeare is mostly lost on us these days; even those of us who have spent enough time reading the footnotes to understand what all the words mean are missing a lot of the shades of meaning. Overall it would be better if we'd stuck with Latin.
Which Latin? I have a preference, but I think the Catholic Church disagrees.
More to the point, individuals change language to suit their needs - it's already a known problem in the more successful conlangs that the generation raised on it as a first language is going to deviate from the prescribed rules. There's room and rationale for a relatively static tongue for official use, but you'd fight an eternal uphill battle to keep it universal and quite a bit of valuable art is going to be generated in the vulgate... Shakespeare very much included.
I suspect there's also a loss in needing to learn the meanings of words and phrases from footnotes compared to knowing them already and then getting the impact from the play.
Scott won't be banned from Substack, because Substack's entire business model is about being willing to touch untouchables (a form of cartel defection).
It's more likely that Substack itself will be targetted.
"'Negro' is an offensive term, so why has it remained in the name of at least 26 Texas places?
Texas, it's time for a change.
Despite a law passed in the state in 1991 to remove the word "Negro" from the names of places such as creeks and valleys, at least 26 Texas locations still feature the word, according to Reese Oxner with Houston Public Media. The issue seems to rest in the fact that the power to change the names of such locations lies with the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, and the federal government blocked the changes.
“Negro Creek,” “Negro Hollow”, "Dead Negro Draw", "Negro Creek" and “Negrohead Bluff” are the names of just a few of the places you'll find on a tour through the Lone Star State — and state officials are adamant about getting them renamed.
Harris County commissioner Rodney Ellis sponsored the billing banning the word's use in 1991, and he told Oxner it's time to right "a lot of wrongs that we just ignored and oftentimes perpetrated for decades, for centuries." Ellis told Houston Public Media he wanted to rename the locations after African Americans who have made significant contributions to the state.
...Texas NAACP President Gary Bledsoe didn't know the names were never changed until being contacted by NPR for their article, as reported by Oxner. He, like Ellis, was under the impression that then-Texas Governor Ann Richards signed the bill into law and fixed the problem at hand.
“Negro is still offensive. It’s outrageous,” Bledsoe said. “Offensive names have no place in the public domain.”
Now fair enough, I can see why you might want to change "Dead Negro Draw" to something a little less morbid, but seemingly this usage would get Scott's comment Banned In Texas 😁
I've always perceived such changes in the language as examples of the virtue of precision. It's indeed can be weird at first to see some new terms like "menstruators" and we can understand and empathize with people who annoyed by them. But nevertheless this term can be more precise than "woman" in some context and therefore good.
It would be a mistake to consider a "menstruator" a substitute for a "woman".
"Woman" is a bundle term, a huge cluster with all different sorts of meanings and connotations. While "menstruator" refers to a person capable of concrete function. We usually include the meaning of a "menstruator" into one of the meanings of a "woman" but it's not accurate as there are both women who do not mestruate and non-women who do. Thus a new term, which can be used when we need to talk specifically about a group of people capable of menstruating.
By the same token, if we want to talk specifically about creatures that walk upright, excluding people who can't do it and including some extinct hominids - we can use a new term "upright walker" and it will be more precise and therefore good.
> I've always perceived such changes in the language as examples of the virtue of precision.
Sure, but if you need to know if someone passed through menopause before knowing which term you must use to refer to them, you might be leaning too much on that particular virtue. I agree that in *some* contexts it might be useful, but you probably don’t need to use “Homo sapiens” instead of “people” most of the time.
Also the particular absurdity in this case was that the complaints were specifically about "Mothers Day" then the evidence cited was someone specifically talking about pre and post natal healthcare. Its one thing to say "a tiny number of people are doing this thing, but it could get bigger" but a significantly higher burden of proof if you are saying "people are doing a thing in an entirely different context that is similar, but they could do it in a different context and that would be bad".
As was pointed out on the subreddit there's also an asymmetric element to this. A lot of right wing commentators were talking about the "birthing people's day" thing, or Biden banning meat, and it was barely discussed on the left, and if it was it was in the context of "why are the right going on about this crazy thing". So the perception of how common something is, and therefore how likely the thing is to become prevalent is distorted.
(For balance, the left also has a distorted view of what is common belief on the right, e.g. would ban abortion tomorrow and make Trump president for life).
The incentive structure of the fractured and click based media landscape means that people are going to optimise for stories that maximise the outrage on their side, and since people are in media silos they won't notice the disconnect that the other side isn't actually talking about banning meat or whatever. So the result is that its profitable to make up things that are maximally outrage generating and ignore reality.
Well sometimes specific predictions are not possible, but unspecific predictions end up being true anyway. Consider it as a prediction that can be taken as a highly specific meta-prediction, i.e. if A occurs then something bad will occur, {W,X,Y} are in the set of bad things that conservatives are afraid of, perhaps in increasing order of "badness". Conservatives, mouths flecked with spittle, claim W will happen if you allow A, but actually Z happens. It's a far worse outcome, and those conservatives will claim they were right all along, meanwhile progressives will point and laugh and say how wrong conservatives are because they predicted X and Z actually happened.
For an example, here in the UK there was a right wing point against gay marriage that came up when that was a contentious issue, something along the lines of allowing gay marriage will allow the slippery slope to bestiality.
What instead happened was that the same advocate organisations for gay marriage switched to transgender/transsexual advocacy, with the actual material outcome being advocating for procedures and treatments that, as a material result of their application, sterilise teenagers and young adults. This is, I expect, going to trigger a lot of people and is probably unwise to do so under a non anonymous account, but when a real "definitely not a
slippery slope guy, just treat these people fairly" ends up with "we need to advocate for the sterilisation of this group of people" ('so they can be happy and disagreeing makes you a hateful evil nazi bigot') then perhaps introspection is desperately needed, as the piles of skulls lining the path have clearly not been noticed.
Or to put it another way, when the conservatives freaking out and sounding like paranoid lunatics turn out to have vastly underestimated the "badness" of the outcome, and this happens repeatedly, then it becomes *really really hard* to not start taking those paranoid lunatics seriously and start thinking that perhaps if they were right all along, what else are, and have, they been right about? It also makes those laughing about the slippery slope fallacy look like blind fools and utterly discredits them.
This pattern of behaviour, in my opinion, is nothing but a one way ratchet that functions by *repeatedly* destroying the credibility of tolerance, moderation, and reason and replacing it with a perfectly evidence justified fear that everything is just a motte and baily slippery slope being deployed by people who might, actually, *want* piles of skulls as a deliberate outcome.
To consider your tl;dr for example, If someone falls from a plane without a parachute can you commit to a specific prediction about how they will die? haha they survive, you clearly must not know anything then? Or you say blunt force trauma, well that's not specific. What trauma? which organs will be damaged? which blood vessels? what bones will break and how? etc.
Saying they will die from the force of the impact is specific enough, as anyone with any common sense will clearly see, and so I increasingly think are a lot of culture war adjacent predictions - even if a direct casual link isn't clear, the patterns and direction of movement seem overwhelmingly clear, introspection and thought are out, hate and ignorance are in.
> Consider it as a prediction that can be taken as a highly specific meta-prediction, i.e. if A occurs then something bad will occur, {W,X,Y} are in the set of bad things that conservatives are afraid of, perhaps in increasing order of "badness". Conservatives, mouths flecked with spittle, claim W will happen if you allow A, but actually Z happens. It's a far worse outcome, and those conservatives will claim they were right all along, meanwhile progressives will point and laugh and say how wrong conservatives are because they predicted X and Z actually happened.
This is a complex, but ultimately straightforward problem of Bayesian logic. If multiple predictions are being made but only one of them comes true then we can adjust the predictor's accuracy accordingly. If it turns out that the predictor can be relied on to report all and exclusively the negative outcomes, they're useful but not remarkably so.
> Or to put it another way, when the conservatives freaking out and sounding like paranoid lunatics turn out to have vastly underestimated the "badness" of the outcome, and this happens repeatedly, then it becomes really really hard to not start taking those paranoid lunatics seriously and start thinking that perhaps if they were right all along, what else are, and have, they been right about?
Begging the question - I can think of many, *many* predictions that conservative commentators came up with more serious than the downsides that came to pass and thus feel no compulsion to update in their direction. If you can't enumerate X, Y, and Z ahead of time (and don't have an א or ℶ!) then this isn't compelling.
> This pattern of behaviour, in my opinion, is nothing but a one way ratchet that functions by repeatedly destroying the credibility of tolerance, moderation, and reason and replacing it with a perfectly evidence justified fear that everything is just a motte and baily slippery slope being deployed by people who might, actually, want piles of skulls as a deliberate outcome.
This is only true if you've never heard predictions worse than what came to pass. Have you?
> To consider your tl;dr for example, If someone falls from a plane without a parachute can you commit to a specific prediction about how they will die?
Different problem. It's enough from a probabilistic sense to have predicted that they would die, and if one was foolish enough to instead have tried to predict specific cause of death, so much the worse for that predictor.
I think you're not giving quite enough credit to the difference between socialism and wokeness in terms of its being a threat. Regardless of what people say, no one is ever canceled just for being white or just for being male (except maybe in the rare case where the head of a woman's organization is a man, and they finally decide he needs to be demoted to a VP role so that a woman can be in charge - and that's not a "cancelling"). Most people don't like the idea of benefiting just from their race or sex, and so don't worry too much about losing that benefit.
But if you're rich, or a manager, socialists *do* want to cancel you for that. You might not lose your job, but you *will* have your money and/or power taken away from you. Wokeness doesn't want to take away what very many people really don't want taken away from them. Socialism does.
In fact traditional socialists and identitarians are committed enemies and most socialists I know (and I know many, many socialists) see canceling as counter-revolutionary.
> In fact traditional socialists and identitarians are committed enemies
I see this perspective consistently from members of so-called "dirtbag left" and I guess it makes sense with the weasel word of "traditional", but it clearly doesn't fit with the majority of public facing socialists. You can see the identitarians all over the DSA. You can see anti-capitalists throughout the major identitarian movements.
The identitarian movement is what you get when you apply the marxist framing of oppression to race/identity.
As I understand it, what distinguishes the trad socialists from Social Justice is that they think it's a serious mistake to make anything more important than class.
Marxists tend to have a goal of race-blindness. This is very different from identitarian views which celebrate minorities' culture and emphasise awareness of "privilege".
Opinion: This is true in the same sense that it's true that, say, Christianists and Islamists are committed enemies. In that, they are indeed committed enemies, but to people outside the conflict, this is less noteworthy than the deeper similarity in thought processes between the two (and how those thought processes differ from those of other groups, from way far away in politics-space).
Hm. If a Christian or Muslim thought the concerns I had about fundamentalist and/or organized religion only applied to their enemy, I'd be very skeptical but I would hear them out. I am no theologian though.
(Also, I of course doubt I would ever embrace the entirety of Christianity or Islam in that case. But maybe some small sect makes unusually good points.)
freddie is card carrying communist who travels in very unusual circles that take people who say absurd things like "I don't believe in human deserts" seriously.
For what it's worth, Will Shetterly was majorly in opposition to Racefail, and I believe it was because he believed in analysis by class rather than identity.
It may not be a coincidence that two classic anti-social justice essays were by trad socialists.
I think there's also a difference in that a rich white male CEO might have personal issues with wokeness, its not a threat to the institution they are part of, so they can't deploy its resources in the same way. A more diverse boardroom is maybe bad for you personally, but neutral or good for the company, higher corporate taxes are bad for the company, and so you can legitimately use company resources against them. (e.g. by hiring lobbying firms)
I think what a lot of people don't get is that a more "diverse" boardroom is exactly what those who are already in power want.
Suppose you're a high-competence white man who sits on a board. There's a vacant seat. Who do you want to fill it? Another high-competence white man who might be a threat to you, or a modest-competence Diversity Hire who is acknowledged by everyone to only be there to fill a seat and look black? Obviously you'd go for the Diversity Hire.
Star Trek? If there is any fictional organisation I would associate with ruthless meritocracy it is Starfleet.
I'm also unsure how a white man would be a breater threat to you as a board member than a person of color. If you want to hire people of low compentency you don't have to wait for wokeness to roll around, you can just hire a low compentency white man! Moreover, if you want people that agree with you you are better of hiring people that are more like you, they would share your perspective more.
If you really want to play the selfish maximasation game you hire the nephew of your boss, or the nephew of your client, or the nephew of your allied colleage.
Anything written about old shows or works past about 2005 or so should be immediately considered suspect when it comes to sussing out the politics of the area.
The first episode of Picard shows Picard getting outright shown up by some young, woke, Female-identified recruit.
Suggesting that this is an intended message of Star Trek, the show that people know - is absurd. The deliberate revisionism in order to meet modern Hollywood sensibilities is obvious.
I think the idea is that a low competence white man will be fired or could not be hired in the first place. A low competence minority will be a difficult target to remove, as the act of firing them will be worse for PR than the benefit from having hired them in the first place.
No, each person is self-interested, which includes their own power but also the smooth running of the organization. If you're going to give someone power, you want something out of it. Hiring another white male provides no alternate benefits (PR, and can actually detract from it if the board is heavily white and male), while also not providing the board's function. You may want to hire a person, regardless of sex or race, for non-business reasons such as nepotism or corruption, but you wouldn't want to hire an incompetent board member without some other reason(s).
Starfleet may be ruthlessly meritocratic within the universe of the fiction. But the classic Star Trek had an extremely tokenistic cast - an All-American Midwestern white male in charge, and a crew of one black woman, one Asian man, one Russian, one Scots-Irish southerner, and one rational alien all helping him out. None of them could ever be in charge, so he is unchallenged!
That's weird, substack had issues half way through my writing the grandfather comment and I had to close the window. I didn't realise my draft version of the comment had been posted until I got the reply notification.
Anyway I had a feeling as I was writing it that Star Trek was the wrong analogy and I should go with a different show like Community. The Community view of diversity is that you have a racially and sexually diverse set of characters, with the caveat that the straight white guy is the main character and everyone else is there in a quirky supporting role to represent their particular demographic. This is a pretty common trope in modern American entertainment.
The point is that you _can't_ hire a low-competence white man to your board, but if you nominate a low-competence black woman (and I don't really mean _low_ competence, but low competence by board standards) then you're far more likely to get them through, because hey, we need "diversity" and it's not like there's a black female equivalent of Eric Schmidt knocking on our door.
As a random example, let's look at the board of Apple, of whom I know nothing as I write. Scrolling down to the Board of Directors section here https://www.apple.com/au/leadership/ it's interesting that it has no photos so we can play this game quite effectively. There's seven directors in addition to Tim Cook, and I already know what Al Gore looks like so we've got six others whose races we need to guess. I'm going to guess that Levinson, Sugar and Wagner are white due to impressive-sounding credentials and that Jung and Lozano are very visible minorities due to their credentials at places I've never heard of. Bell is a toss-up since he's a former CFO rather than CEO at Boeing.
Results: Bell is black, Lozano is hispanic (no major points for guessing this one I suppose due to the name), Jung is Asian (also no major points, but Carl Jung wasn't Asian), and the rest appear to be white, as I predicted. So there you have it, the races of board members of a major company were pretty easy to guess based on the relative impressiveness of their credentials. And of course, the chairman of the board is white.
"I think there's also a difference in that a rich white male CEO might have personal issues with wokeness"
You do know its not the 1970's right? And that most rich white male CEOs, outside of particular industries like oil extraction and firearms manufacturing, are more likely to be woke than conservative, right? Kevin Smith's Green Arrow made this point *20 years ago* but we still seem to be operating under this amesiatic brain fog.
Corporations aren't because marketing is dragging angry old men kicking and screaming. They are woke because the board-level decision makers are woke.
You do understand that the person wasn't claiming that a majority of rich white male CEOs would have personal issues with wokeness - they were just claiming that some individual might, but even so, wouldn't have tools to fight it the way they would be given tools to fight socialism.
A more diverse boardroom is great for management. They love all these ESG initiatives. Anything that detracts from accountability will be cat nip to management
This does miss the terrifying implication of the slogan "When You’re Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression" being used to justify things that could easily be described as oppression in a different framing. People don't want to benefit just from their race or sex but there being a pretty big disagreement on who exactly is benefiting from their race or sex and a willingness to use crushingly huge institutions to enforce various fixes is pretty chilling when you're a member of a group deemed to be benefiting from your sex or race.
Stacked on top of this is the genuine belief that people are blind to their own privileges and you quickly get to a place where your objections are just meaningless noise to the ears of the inquisition.
I think of "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression" as putting a penny in the fuse box*, since oppression also feels like oppression.
*Is there a need for a more current** way to talk about disabling safety measures? If so, what's a good metaphor?
I think this is wrong. Socialists want to transfer wealth from people who have lots of it to people who don't. The woke want to do the same thing. The only difference is socialists want the recipients to be the working class and the woke want the recipients to be people of a certain skin color. The natural tendency then, is for these two groups to team up for the taking now, then fight over the spoils later.
I don't think this is right. The woke aren't particularly interested in wealth, any more than other privilege. And they don't particularly want to eliminate privilege, so much as share it.
Seriously? Why do you think these people are so interested in group level disparities? Because they care about what other people have vs what they have, and group level disparities are a great excuse for redistributing stuff. Status and money, mostly, which, as you may have noticed, is a large component of wealth.
Which I think is a lot more fair when you recognize that people are saying 'that will never happen' to 10,000 things, and the 3 of those that then do happen, might have happened for a good reason.
There's a mortality bias at play in the analysis here, is what I'm saying.
To be clear, I would say Dreher's Law of Merited Impossibility (at least, as originally proposed by Dreher) isn't trying to predict where the Woke/LGBT juggernaut will proceed next (as many rightists do, and get it very wrong), only that its victories, whatever they are, will be weaponized to attack Christians and our institutions and progressively boot us out of polite society, despite any promises to the contrary.
I ctrl-F'ed for "Law of Merited Impossibility" after reading that section. Makes for a good Google search if you're looking for the examples Scott declined to give.
I agree I was meandering from the topic -- I'm generally trying to put the culture war into a broader perspective, in part as this might make it more solvable, but mainly because I really do think that wokeness is the tip of an iceberg. I'm far from buying the Lomez/ZeroHP/Kaschuta worldviews wholesale, but I'm seeing some of the same things they are seeing: Western culture, tech *and* academia have lost their virility and are on the decline (with a few holdouts, like blockchain, biotech, SpaceX, and maybe these little bits of right-wing creativity I've mentioned; but a few swallows do not a summer make). Taking this as given, it doesn't surprise me that classically liberal ideas are losing popularity and are getting replaced by zero-sum tribalism: The Enlightenment has always been a trade where you paid your spiritual security for adventure and progress; with the latter gone, the trade is looking more and more like a scam. It's just that I'm still hoping the upside can be brought back, perhaps at the cost of inviting some unsavory characters back into the project...
There's also a tiny thing of socialism already having killed tens (or maybe hundreds?) of millions in the 20th century, and wokeness, with all its disgusting totalitarian excesses, haven't yet. So maybe there's still a bright side to it - at least being banned on Twitter is not literal gulags, and however much the socialists might be salivating over those, American society can go as far as "gimme free stuff", but no further yet.
Just because I like doing this thought experiment with people who say that - how many people would you estimate capitalism has killed? And can you give a few sentences about your thought process in arriving at that number, and how it compares to the thought process you used to get the socialism number?
I would estimate none by itself, at least not intentionally (one could say that if I don't donate money to a charity and they don't give it to somebody poor who dies from a preventable disease then I killed that person - but I do not accept this conclusion, I am talking about actions which were intended or highly likely to cause death of people, and were performed because or with full knowledge and intent for such result). While people, of course, can get killed while capitalism exists, capitalism does not inherently require violence: certain people can benefit from it, but it is not a requirement, and it can perfectly exist without it. However, if we turn to socialist practices of 20th century - USSR, China, North Korea, and other smaller satellite states - we uniformly find a violent beginning, usually violently taking property from current owners, frequently murdering them in the process, and a lot of violence - in the form of mass imprisonment, forced labor, suppression of dissent, confiscation of property, frequent murderous purges, etc. The fact that it happened pretty much everywhere marxist socialist model was attempted consistenly, allows us to conclude it is an inherent quality of the model.
Now, you'd say we had forced labor - slavery - under the capitalism too - and it's true, we did. And we got rid of it, without affecting capitalism as such (while many capitalist systems didn't have it at all) - which proves it was not inherently necessary, and actually likely harmful, for the capitalist enterprise (e.g. in the US, the North was economically doing much better than the South, and slavery was one of the reasons why the South got stuck in a bad economic model). We also had totalitarian somewhat-capitalist societies - but those turned out to be very unstable. However, if you remove state violence component from a socialist country - it will collapse very soon, and it will collapse into a chaotic proto-capitalist society. Just like it happened in Russia in the 1990s.
That's like smoking vs. non-smoking. Smoking causes a variety of diseases. Those can happen to non-smoking people too. But in smoking case, we can trace it to the specific reason - the smoking. In non-smoking case, it'd be a variety of reasons, which most likely won't include "not smoking". Or, in another words, 83% of traffic accidents were caused by sober drivers. Is sobriety a major cause of traffic accidents?
For me that looks like ignoring the casualties caused by Intervention untertaken by US Governments on behalf of US companies in South and Middle America or Asia
Did socialist governments never interfere in foreign affairs? I think USSR alone should demolish this argument, but China interferes a lot too. As such, foreign interference does not seem to be inherently linked to capitalism - in fact, both capitalist and socialist regimes do it pretty much in the same manner. Of course, in capitalism systems it is done on behalf of the major companies. It's like when they asked Willie Sutton why he robs banks, he answered "because that's where the money is". Of course, under the capitalism, the money is with the large companies, so stuff is done on their behalf. Under socialism, everything is controlled by Politburo, so stuff is done on their behalf instead. But it's the same stuff, it's not specific to capitalism.
Capitalism is not necessary to explain the colonial interventions, and capitalism survives without these interventions (re)occurring. We have plenty of colonialism in history that predates capitalism, and modern capitalism occurs without colonialism
"Capitalism" did no such thing. A (corrupt) intertwining of government and business did. It was neither necessary nor sufficient that the government be capitalistic, as such interventions happened without, and captialistic systems have existed without producing such interventions.
Whereas Communist systems, *without fail* have generated murderous atrocities across history.
Communist atrocities were (usually) committed in the name of Communism. Same with Nazism. The atrocities committed by capitalist countries tend to be committed in the name of Freedom or Democracy, but are usually really committed due to geopolitical reasons (spheres of influence, political alliances, natural resources). Geopolitical reasons exist regardless of ideology (USSR had them, feudal monarchies had them, etc), so it does not seem appropriate to say "Capitalism did it" in the same way as "Communism did it" or "Nazism did it".
I think most self-professed socialists (excluding the extreme ChapoTrapHouse radicals) are talking more about Nordic Model, welfare-state-with-market-economy socialism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model), not Soviet style, plannned-economy-and-gulags socialism. Conflating the two doesn't really help anyone.
the Nordic countries have some of the freest economies in the world, just high levels of social spending. If the socialists would stick to that, I wouldn't worry about them. Unfortunately, they spent a decade applauding hugo chavez:
Northern countries are much less socialist than popularly believed. They played with socialist policies decades ago, and have been slowly walking them back ever since. However, while the right-moderate wing of the Dem. party could have been happy with state-owned healthcare and increased union membership (oh those sweet union campaign dollars!) - the left Marxist wing is calling for destruction of the capitalism all the time. In fact, it's not uncommon to hear that the only way a just non-racist society can be built is by destroying the capitalism, the only way climate could be fixes is by destroying capitalism, etc. etc. So I don't think there's confusion. I think the socialist wing of Dem. party wants actual marxist socialism. Most of them don't really want gulags if it can be done without it (spoiler: it can't), though some wouldn't mind it if they could guarantee only the deplorables would end up there (spoiler: they couldn't). So yes, "not all leftists" are hardcore socialists. Some are though.
I think there's a fundamental disagreement over the meaning of the word "capitalism" here.
As used by (a lot of) self-proclaimed Marxists, it means that most political and economic power is concentrated in the hands of a small number of people based on those people's possession of capital. You will note the complete absence of the word "market" in there.
If you go by that definition, then libertarianism is anti-capitalist and wants to destroy capitalism. Anarcho-capitalists are anti-capitalist if you go by that allegedly-Marxist definition of capitalism.
The way I've characterised it before is "if you mean by capitalism my ability to go into a shop and buy a sandwich of my choosing, then I'm for it; if you mean the ability of a small number of multi-billionaires to distort the entire political and economic system by spending billions of dollars, then I'm against it".
If you go by Marxist language, then you find that a bunch of words don't mean what they are generally used to mean (and, to be fair to the Marxists, Marx made a lot of this language up, so it's not ridiculous that they should be allowed to use it the way he did). For instance, a capitalist is someone with a lot of capital, not someone with an ideological belief. So Jeff Bezos is a capitalist because he owns a large fraction of the capital of Amazon. Queen Elizabeth II (who is probably richer) is not a capitalist because very little of her assets are in capital. "Capitalist", in the Marxist sense, means something very similar to "billionaire". Capitalism is the system by which Jeff Bezos has enormous political and economic power; you can have non-capitalist free markets and you can have capitalist non-free markets (Can you have capitalism without any sort of market at all? That's the sort of theoretical question that Marxist theoreticians spend years arguing about)
So, um, what does this mean? It means that concentrations of capital are the thing that is being objected to, not the existence of markets.
> The way I've characterised it before is "if you mean by capitalism my ability to go into a shop and buy a sandwich of my choosing, then I'm for it; if you mean the ability of a small number of multi-billionaires to distort the entire political and economic system by spending billions of dollars, then I'm against it".
A kindred spirit! I, too, am against mustache twilling villains!
>So, um, what does this mean? It means that concentrations of capital are the thing that is being objected to, not the existence of markets.
You can't have the one without the other. If markets are free, someone will accumulate more stuff than others. But if you're against concentrated political and economic power, the last thing you should want is to give more money and power to the state.
> most political and economic power is concentrated in the hands of a small number of people based on those people's possession of capital
That's called oligarchy. But it also a very simplistic view which no real capitalist (or even oligarchical, or totalitarian) society matches. Is the riches man the most powerful? Certainly not. Bill Gates has a ton of money, so does Elon Musk. But do thave more political power than the US Senator? Than the US President? Than the owner of the New York Times? I don't think so. Reducing everything only to capital is so hopelessly naive it can only be excused in a college freshman who just heard a lecture by a marxist professor.
> If you go by that definition, then libertarianism is anti-capitalist and wants to destroy capitalism
That's one of the reasons why this definition is silly. Of course, it's nowhere near the common and accepted definition, so I call it motte & bailey - where "capitalism must be destroyed!" turns in a pinch into "we just want to avoid oligarchy!"
> you can have non-capitalist free markets
Actually you can't. If you prohibit people from accumulating capital, then your market is not free. Unless you also have some unusual definition of "free".
> you can have capitalist non-free markets
That of course we already have.
> It means that concentrations of capital are the thing that is being objected to, not the existence of markets.
I believe you can find a marxist professor that thinks that. However, that's not what most of the socialists are objecting to, and certainly they don't object the concentration of power - because every socialist society has enormous concentration of power, socialist societies are the most power-unequal societies in existance, Politburo has pretty much 100% of the power and the rest of people have the remaining 0%. At least here we for each Bezos can have Buffett and Musk and Thiel and Koch and so on. But there's always only one Politburo.
Socialism is a defined ideology (several related defined ideologies, at least). We can point to policies explicitly defined by the ideology carried out by explicitly socialist states run as one party totalitarian states by explicitly socialist parties. For example, Lenin tried to change the Red Army so that officers would be elected by their troops. Soldiers are workers (as in the Workers and Peasants Red Army), workers in socialism elect their representatives, so this is a decision explicitly defined by the ideology. As anyone who has studied military history can probably tell you, this failed miserably, and so the whole idea was walked back as 'we're not ready for this yet'.
The original question that sparked this discussion was 'how many people would you estimate capitalism has killed?' This talks about capitalism as if it is an ideology similar to socialism, with explicit definition that can be used to base parties and countries off of and that can take the blame for deaths. There are political parties that include concepts like trade and free markets among their principles, but like the Scandinavian social democracies and even the US itself these principles have to compete with others that justify some level of market interference. If you're not referring to it as an ideology, then 'capitalism' is just the absence of socialism. (It also doesn't help that failed explicitly socialist states can be branded as 'state capitalism', which is even less of an internally defined concept; I don't know of anyone who brands themself as a 'state capitalist', it's only used as a way to disassociate failed socialism from theoretical socialism.)
If 'how many people would you estimate capitalism has killed?' isn't referring to an ideology but merely the absence of socialism, then it's impossible to differentiate from 'how many people would you estimate [not socialism] has killed?', and thus the questions are analogous to 'how many people has drunken driving killed?' vs 'how many people has sober (i.e. [not drunken]) driving killed?'
spoken like someone who has never seen a soviet hospital. It's capitalism that generates the wealth to build hospitals and the medical technology that makes them useful.
Capitalism and communism can both cause people to die. They aren't mutually exclusive. I am less endorsing the USSR and more suggest economic systems that have *never* been tried be investigated.
(I can't name examples, but it seems overconfident to suggest that any fundamental improvement upon capitalism is inconceivable.)
> Capitalism and communism can both cause people to die.
A meaningless statement. Everyone dies eventually. the question is which system ends more lives sooner, and the answer is unquestionably socialism, which in its hard failure mode starves millions to death and its soft failure mode fails to deliver meaningful economic growth, which is the one thing that we know tends to extend life.
> They aren't mutually exclusive. I am less endorsing the USSR and more suggest economic systems that have *never* been tried be investigated.
Investigate them with your own money and your own lives, not mine.
> can't name examples, but it seems overconfident to suggest that any fundamental improvement upon capitalism is inconceivable.)
If you think socialism guarantees you quality healthcare, you're up for some major disappointment, I can tell you as somebody who spent time in the socialist healthcare system. Let me tell you how it works:
Nominally, you don't have to pay a single kopeyka for the healthcare. However, in practice there are widespread temporary shortages, as always under socialism, so if your pharmacy is our of the medicine you need, you're out of luck. Unless you have money and know people. If you want the access not to the random doctor but one that actually good at what you need, you need to know people, and you need to be grateful to these people (which usually means money and things one buys with money). And of course, if you want level of service beyond "what I can get away with without being fired" in a hospital, you need money (knowing people helps too, but just money, properly applied, usually is enough). And of course, unless you know really powerful people, the quality still only would be the socialism quality - the same one which gave you cars that need service right after getting out of the manufacturing, clothes that never fit and toilet paper than can double as sandpaper.
'Adequate' is ill defined here. We will all someday die, and for any person and any given cost there will come a point where the kind of care adequate *to extending their life* a unit of time will cost more than that given cost.
This is not specific to capitalism.
There is room for steelmanning what you are trying to say, but it involves a hell of a lot of steel.
Isn't you being able to decide what happens with this money without responsibility to "use it for good" quite a major part of capitalism? You might argue you are not acting and therefore less responsible, but not the system that binds the use to your action or inaction, that's like saying "a planned economy not distributing food to a group of people isn't them killing the people, they just don't save them". And by focusing on intent, you are favoring systems that use less central planning, because they don't need anyone to acknowledge and act in knowledge of their bad consequences, while centrally planned ones more often do. Doesn't mean the method of distribution has or doesn't have that intent.
You can find a large number of deaths due to capitalism, or "people killed by" capitalism, if you will - nothing is without drawbacks.
Also, but that's nitpicking, because the groups you're talking about don't want to reinstate the Soviet Union or North Korea (which is my actual objection to that argument), and they don't want to follow Marx to a t, either: I wouldn't say "let's stay with this totalitarian state designed as an interim between Tzarist Russia and a classless, stateless, moneyless society" is a consistent application of "when capitalism reaches its exreme, the workers will rise and - after an interim period - create a classless, stateless, moneyless society".
Even if they just want to reinstate East Germany, that's bad enough.
Also, I'm not seeing any change in ideology which might prevent the current batch of communists from setting up totalitarian states. How is what they've got in mind different this time around?
Even the most moderate I've seen (Contrapoints and Vaush) just think it's easier to get to socialism from a democratic country than from a fascist country. That's why they strongly supported voting for Biden.
At least if you take Contrapoints and Vaush or generally the cluster vaguely described as "breadtube" as examples, "tankies" (authoritarian communists, specifically the ones who like Stalin) are utterly despised there (at least in my experience, I know youtube is a bubble generator). They are far more likely to be left-wing anarchists and similar.
And yes, even more: even if they just want to abolish capitalism entirely without changing political structure and somehow do that by getting a political majority, without any violence, it would still be bad - I am a social democrat, pretty much, I don't think you can't use capitalism for good, it just also has heavy drawbacks you have to consider, work around and work with.
(also, at least Vaush is a pragmatist: he believes Biden is less bad, so he supports voting for Biden, even if it wouldn't help or hurt the prospects of a future socialist shift)
My impression of the typical socialists is that they don't like tankies, but they like Cuba and they don't have any plans for their preferred socialism not turning into Stalinism.
Given the correlation between income per capita and life expectancy, capitalism is massively positive. Don't apologize for the socialist holocausts, its disgusting.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was explicitly founded on socialist ideological principles (or at least the RSFSR was, and it's easy to trace the USSR back to the RSFSR). It was a one party state, with that party explicitly founded on socialist ideological principles. The state was totalitarian, so anything that it did was ultimately the responsibility of the central government. The state took actions explicitly derived from the ideology they profess to follow (collectivizing farming and dekulakization). Under those circumstances, it's easy to attribute actions of the state to an ideology.
On the other hand, multi-party democracies don't have the power to compel adherence to an ideology, and I can't think of any that try at the constitutional level. Most successful parties that have to compete over time at the ballot box that aren't dominated by a single individual also can't be bogged down by ideology (the Fascists and Nazis managed to beat this one by tying themselves to a single charismatic leader, but they both explicitly scrapped democracy once they had power). The behaviors of multi-party democracies have to derive from the competing interests within the country (specifically the legislature), making it hard to attribute the actions of the government to any one individual set of beliefs.
That being said, at least some of the deaths in the Irish potato famine seem to be directly the fault of a clique of laissez-faire proponents in the British government explicitly based on the idea that further interfering with the situation in Ireland would make things worse, so we can say that market ideology isn't totally without casualties.
I don't see how the mistake of British government follows from free market principles. Free market does not preclude charities (in fact, most charity by volume is performed by capitalists) and the failure to help in the Irish case doesn't seem to be dictated by any free-market principles. It could be that some free-marketers thought that not helping was an optimal solution and were wrong - as some engineer might think that designing a bridge in certain way is solid and be wrong, and a lot of people could die because of the bridge collapsing. The critical point here is where the mistake was - and I don't think the mistake was in the free market ideas.
This argument is completely parallel to the defense of communism from the horrors wrought by the USSR and Maoist China. Some Communists erred, and millions of people starved. But anyone willing to support communism in spite of that is bound to believe their mistake was not in *communism*, but elsewhere.
Except for the part where it's completely false. Holodomor wasn't some economic calculation mistake - it was a policy specifically designed to starve people to death. Kulaks were destroyed not because somebody made a typo or calculated wrongly - they were specifically destroyed by the policy meant to destroy them. Gulag wasn't some welfare project gone wrong - it was specifically designed as a system of imprisonment, forced labor and eventually death for undesirables. Belomorkanal and such were very specifically and intentionally forced labor projects, and there were no error in that. Cambodia killing fields were specifically for killing people, nobody mistakenly thought they are making it better for them by crushing their heads with spades and hoes - they wanted those people dead. Cultural Revolution wasn't some policy gone wrong - it was designed to destroy culture and suppress people. And so on, and so forth.
So no, communists didn't "err". They did exactly what they set out to do. The results were far from what they predicted - because they either lied or were unable to correctly predict them - but their policies were murderous and violent from the start, and they executed them with full intent to commit murder and violence.
Right... the error was thinking that being horrifically murderous was a good choice. Was that belief caused by their communism and a necessary outgrowth of that? Or was it part of the general murderousness that occasionally infects despots?
And this IS completely parallel to your defense of capitalism; the Irish Potato famine was deliberately made into a genocide by the English government. They knew they were slaughtering the Irish by their decisions, and did it deliberately. They prevented free aid from being delivered, reduced foreign aid, and mandated food exports from a starving province (just as the USSR would later do in the Holodomor.)
If you're willing to contend that the horror the English perpetrated was due to something besides their belief in capitalism, you should probably entertain the argument that Stalin was horrific for reasons other than his belief in communism. (I'm not sure I buy that argument; but it's definitely worth considering.)
Wait, are you saying socialism doesn't allow people to die, so they live forever? If that were the deal, I would look at it at entirely different light. But I'm afraid Lenin is the only one who lives forever, and even that is only in Soviet propaganda slogans.
Or, alternatively, you mean that socialist prefer to kill people for being anti-party elements before they die of their own fault? Then of course it's more true but I'm not sure how it's an advantage exactly.
For those who think capitalism doesn't kill, I think it's useful to remember that corporations are the original strong AI - they are artificial entities designed for maximizing some objective function that may or may not line up with human objective functions. They are much smarter than anything made out of silicon so far, because they're made out of humans, who each do their part according to the rules given by the corporation.
Anyone who thinks there is a risk of AI-caused disaster should be thinking about whether or not there has been corporate-caused disaster. There may be reasons why one would be worse than the other, but they should at least have relevant analogies.
Deaths caused by these corporations may or may not be attributable to "capitalism", or to the humans that make up the corporations. But they're worth thinking about.
What about this does not apply to the actions of any organized group of people? Organizations have power proportional to their size, and the largest organizations are governments (except perhaps religions, which is a whole different can of worms). Governments also have a monopoly on force.
"I’d treated it as kind of mysterious that the George Floyd protests erupted when they did, as intensely as they did; anti-racism talk was trending down, police had been killing black people in approximately equally bad ways since forever, it seemed weird that this was the spark that ignited a conflagration. I think I figured maybe it was just that everyone was on edge because of the pandemic. But several commenters pointed out that no, the George Floyd video was a new low in terms of obvious, enraging, terrifying police brutality."
I never wrote this down anywhere, but I remember thinking that I expected something major to happen. I would not have guessed at the scale of last summer's protests and riots, but I did have an intuitive sense that things had reached a breaking point. Each previous incident had garnered more and more attention and outrage but not changed much, racism was (as Scott noted) in the air, and the pandemic had people itching to get outside and do stuff. But I think primarily it was just "the straw that broke the camel's back."
The general principle seems true. I don't see why the trend over time matters though. If, say, crime is lower today than it was five years ago, that doesn't make it unreasonable to wish there were less crime.
It doesn't make it unreasonable to wish there was less crime, but it does bear significantly on the question of how radically you should be prepared to restructure society to reduce crime.
If things are actually steadily getting better with time, then it may be a bad idea to change things at all without great care, because you might break the process which is fixing it.
I don’t think you guys are disagreeing. A marginalized groups concerns being more culturally significant is a result of its increasing power, and the possibility of change can be a positive feedback loop that creates more action to protest/solve problems, even if the problems are not necessary worse than they were in the past.
Hm, yeah. I have never thought of BLM etc. as having the potential to radically restructure society. (That is regardless of what anyone wants to happen.)
Progressives in various local governments have tried to 'defund' the police, i.e. reduce their funding & responsibilities. This may not be very radical in itself, but given its potential effects on crime it is itself a tradeoff that may not be worth it if the issue it's meant to address is not as bad as its supporters think.
What I remember clearly about last summer was that George Floyd was at least the third in a series of heavily-promoted incidents which seemed to be angling for this kind of reaction.
The first was the "jogger" who got shot by neighbourhood watch.
The second, because it was a very slow news week, was an argument about a dog in Central Park, and I remember thinking how odd it was that this non-incident had somehow been promoted to a major international news story.
The third was George Floyd, and that one was the right combination of everything to actually get the riots started. But I would say there was definitely a pretty concerted effort to promote the sort of news stories that would lead to such a reaction, in the weeks and months leading up to that incident.
When you say "heavily-promoted" and "concerted effort", do you think that there was a group of people who had planned together to make something break through, and these people work for a variety of media organizations and internally pushed these stories?
Or do you just mean that this was an emergent property of the set of subconscious and conscious biases of many people embedded in complex systems with particular incentives?
I think it looks a lot like the former, but I'm not excluding the possibility that it could be the latter.
In reality it's some kind of combination of both, like a fire that is already starting to spread in a forest when a fleet of 747s show up to dump liquid oxygen on it. Where did the 747s come from? Did someone coordinate them for some specific reason? We'll never know.
I always thought it was weird how BLM protests mostly disappeared after Trump's election even though, if you checked, there were still black people being killed by cops. But it never occurred to me that anyone would seriously *move on*, so maybe that's why I wasn't surprised by the George Floyd protests.
Neither you nor Scott mention that there was a narrative well before the riots that the pandemic was hitting the black community extra hard. I don't know who was taking it seriously, but WaPo and NYT were definitely running with it. I imagine that had a strong effect.
> I don't feel like non-political boards like /sp/ have changed much in tone in the last +10 years.
Hard disagree, /pol/ has absolutely leaked to the other boards at this point. /tg/'s MtG threads went from reasonable-ish discussions on a trans character to multiple posters going "BLACK MAN ON CARD REEE" during spoiler seasons. The /sp/ game threads I've seen had racist shit talk about blacks and "beaners".
I got into an Internet argument with someone over J.R. Rowling and her transgender views. I knew exactly what I was getting myself into, but I was curious what would happen. I actually bothered to read what Rowling wrote, which I interpreted as being:
"I believe in transgender rights, but I don't believe we should erase the idea of gender, because a lot of hard-fought gains for women have been made over many decades and erasing the idea of gender will destroy that. Also, I believe that the designation of being a "women" in the UK should be stronger than just a man stating they believe they are a woman. There needs to be a stronger commitment to gender reassignment before they should be allowed to be considered a woman, and consequently use a woman's bathroom."
Boy, they were having none of that. As far as the trans-supporters were concerned, she was anti-trans, even though Rowling specifically mentioned support for trans rights. And they said I was anti-trans because I dared to explain what Rowling was saying, even though I said I believed in trans rights and I didn't agree with everything Rowling wrote, I was just trying to explain what I believe Rowling meant.
Trans-activists seem to believe that if you don't check every single box in terms of supporting all the demands of trans people, then you are anti-trans. They are ironically completely binary on a topic that itself proclaims fluidity.
I privately got several messages from people that said they agreed with me and that they are getting sick of trans issues being pushed down into younger and younger education. I think a lot of moderates are getting sick of ultra-wokeness being shoved down everyone's necks, to the point where something may actually be done. In SF, the fight with the SFUSD Board of Education is coming to a head. There is growing support for the recall of several members after a disastrous push to rename dozens of schools named after "racists" around SF at the cost of $1M. It turns out they never bothered to consult with historians, they just googled names and ended up while they refused to do anything about bring kids back into the classroom. And they put their efforts into this at the expense of trying to get kids back into the classroom in a safe way. In fact, so many people have been outraged by this and other acts of wokeness that many people I know might actually muster up enough indignation to sign an Internet petition that might lead to something sometime in the future!
I'm not particularly leftist or an activist, and all I know about trans identity is what a few trans friends have told me, but I find Rowling's beliefs as paraphrased by you to be pretty bigoted. "Just a man stating they believe they are a woman" is a cheap parody of trans identity, and seems insulting to those who are genuinely living with those issues.
I think Rowling thinking that rapists would go through the trouble of declaring themselves as transgender just to be in the same bathroom as women is absurd. I think similar arguments were made in North Carolina bathroom furor several years ago.
However, I disagree that it's a bigoted statement. She's obviously fearful of this situation, and she says it's because she was a victim of sexual assaults, and that bathrooms are inherently the most vulnerable place a woman can be in. I don't think she is saying that all trans women are just men trying to get access to bathrooms so they can rape women. And I don't believe that she is saying that trans women shouldn't be allowed to use women's bathrooms. I think she is saying before a man is allowed to women's bathrooms, they should show a certain level of commitment to gender reassignment. She says that in the UK, all you need to do is say you're transgender, and you're issued a certificate which I think she says isn't enough.
I believe Rowling is also concerned with women's prisons. And it is more plausible that a male convict might say they were a woman in order to get transferred. Even if they have no ill-intent, they're a lot less likely to be violently attacked in a women's prison!
She never said rapists would go through that rigmarole, she said that women who have experienced rape or sexual assault would feel unsafe knowing biological men would be allowed in purely on the basis of self-identification, and that their rights were being trampled and ignored. She may have been vilified for it, but she won where it matters, and the British government dropped the proposed legislation that would have allowed self-identification of gender/sex.
She didn't say that per se, but what other parts about having men in women's bathrooms would make her feel unsafe? I used the term "rapist" flippantly, I really meant "a man who wants to harrass or attack women", either through sexual assault, harassment, threats, making them feel uncomfortable, etc. Obviously she thinks this is a risk, otherwise what else about the situation would make her feel unsafe?
If she is generally against trans females using women's bathrooms, which I don't think she is, then that would be bigoted.
It's not bigoted to say "Trans women are women. Some cis men pretend to be trans women in order to access women-only spaces for the sake of their sexual gratification and that should be a crime. We need to have an effective mechanism to distinguish between the two".
If Rowling had said something that could be rounded off to that, then I'd support her - there would then be a rather technical argument about whether up-front or after-the-fact mechanisms are more effective. But the things she has said tend to sound as if they might round off to that, but when you examine them closely, they don't actually concede that any trans women should be allowed into women-only spaces.
And my experience is that it typical of gender critical rhetoric. You'll get things like "male-bodied people should not be allowed into women-only spaces". That sounds pretty reasonable, but it really does depend on what "male-bodied people" means. If you believe (as gender-critical people do) that "male" and "female" refer strictly to sex and that it is impossible to change sex, then "male-bodied people" includes all trans women. Which is suddenly much less reasonable.
I haven't heard her say that trans women shouldn't be allowed in women-only spaces. I was trying to research this before engaging in the original Internet post. If you know of any passages where she is clearer about explicitly not supporting trans women, then I would appreciate it so that I can read it up.
I’m not sure I agree with your first paragraph here. I don’t know enough about rapists, but I’ve been a high school guy, meaning it was easy to hear what the creepy high school guys were saying. I knew someone (a guy) who joined cheerleading so he could look up girl’s skirts. When he initially told people he joined, guys often treated him with disdain, until he explained his reasoning, at which point he was jokingly considered a hero.
Now thankfully, I don’t think that many guys are scumbags. But, there certainly are creepy guys out there, and if no bar is set, imo some people certainly will do this. I think there are real questions about the tradoff of “Preventing creeps from creeping” vs “inconveniencing/blocking trans people.” I’m not a member of the trans community, so I don’t know what bars would inconvenience them least, but it seems like something could be found, even if it’s a “fulfill one of the following conditions” before we treat people a different sex from their birth one.
It's one thing to join cheerleading to do this. It's another to request a change of your ID card that would ban you from all men's bathrooms and men's locker rooms for the rest of your life.
I completely agree. I think if you had to permanently change your ID, in some once in a lifetime way, that’d do it. But this is the first time I’ve heard that idea clearly articulated, that it would be once and once only.
I don't see why we should say something isn't bigoted just because the person is saying it out of earnest fear. I think *most* bigotry comes out of earnest fear.
She doesn't seem to be saying anything about "a certain level of commitment" - she seems to be saying that no transition *at all* should allow people once classified as men into women's bathrooms.
I'm saying Rowling isn't being bigoted in this situation. Obviously fear and hatred form bigotry. She also said that it was far too easy for people to get the UK Gender Reassignment certificate, which could then be used against women in bathrooms (as I've stated earlier, I think this argument is nonsense). As far as I've researched, she has NEVER said that trans women shouldn't get access to women's bathrooms. She said it was too easy for men to get access to women's bathrooms for the purposes of attacking, raping, harrassing, etc.
Later on she says something to the effect of "men can get these certificates without even seeing a psychologist". My interpretation is that she wants to see more of a commitment to gender reassignment than just "I'm a woman in a man's body."
"I think Rowling thinking that rapists would go through the trouble of declaring themselves as transgender just to be in the same bathroom as women is absurd."
Now, if the defence is "Ah but these aren't *real* trans women", then what happens to the claim that "you're trans if you say you're trans, you don't need surgery or hormones or medical gate-keeping or dysphoria or anything other than how you feel?", which is certainly a view I often see pushed.
Either these really are trans women who took advantage of being placed in women's prisons to be rapists, or they are men who pretended to be women in order to get access to women's prisons and be rapists. Not looking good either way.
It could also be a statistically unremarkable fact. Women (and men) get raped far more frequently in prisons than elsewhere. If you put any population in that sort of environment, you would expect to see some of them perpetrating rape. In other words, a few anecdotal examples do little to answer the real question of “are women raped at higher rates by trans women than by cis women (proportional to their respective population sizes)”?
According to the article, trans women make up 1% of the UK prison population but accounted for 5% over the sexual assaults. Not sure how reliable the Daily Mail is for statistics though. It seems like in the US, for the most part trans criminals are jailed with their biological sex, not the sex that they identify with.
this is what I get for not doing my due diligence and reading the entire article. yes, those stats certainly are bad.
Anecdotally, I believe it’s birth gender (I knew a trans man who was sent to a female jail). Does anyone know whether trans men in US women’s jails rape rates differ significantly from the norm?
Rowling was defending Maya Forstater (a classmate of my wife) who was fired from her NGO job for saying that unlike gender, sex is a biological reality.
The part about self-declared sex identity was a debate about proposed legislation in the UK that would have allowed self-declared identity without any verification or restriction. This was eventually withdrawn by the Conservative government, but before you accuse them of being transphobic troglodytes, keep in mind it's a Conservative government (David Cameron's) that legalized gay marriage in the UK (except for Northern Ireland, which is, ahem, special).
What hilariously lacks self-awareness is people like Daniel Radcliffe mansplaining to Rowling that they know better than a woman what a woman is, even if it is rather ungrateful coming from someone whose entire career is owed to Rowling.
> What hilariously lacks self-awareness is people like Daniel Radcliffe mansplaining to Rowling that they know better than a woman what a woman is, even if it is rather ungrateful coming from someone whose entire career is owed to Rowling.
This—to me—seems like a lot of words that sound bad without any clear explanation as to why Daniel Radcliffe was lacking in self-awareness.
Why does it matter that his career is owed to her?
Maya Forstater was fired (technically her contract was not renewed, but that's still firing) for refusing to refer to a trans colleague by her name or indeed to call her "her".
She has claimed that firing her is discriminating against her philosophical belief that it is impossible to change sex.
It is not her beliefs, nor her statement of those beliefs, but the actions that followed from them that resulted in her being fired.
["Philosophical belief", in this sense, is a legal term of art; the discrimination law she is seeking to apply is the one on religion, but that includes "philosophical belief as well as "religious belief" so courts don't have to make a determination on whether a belief that doesn't involve a god is religious or not]
Also "self-declared identity without any verification or restriction" is not a correct characterisation - a person would have to state, under penalty of perjury, that they intended to live permanently in the acquired gender. That's a pretty considerable restriction - it would be a crime to claim that falsely.
A terrible violation of her fundamental human right to treat her colleagues like shit. How dare they decline to rehire her just because she went out of her way to repeatedly insult another employee?
Except that none of this is true. She didn't have any trans colleagues, and never harrassed any co-worker. She was fired (or non-renewed) for expressing gender-critical views online (not in the workplace and not aimed at any co-worker or client).
> for saying that unlike gender, sex is a biological reality.
Leaving aside that that's not why she was fired (see Richard Gadsden on that), Scott wrote a long post a while back ("The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories," 11/21/14) showing how what that sentence calls "reality" is actually an artificial construct. Yes, the X and Y chromosomes are real, and so are genitals, but the decision to identify one or another of these (they don't always match up, which is part of the difficulty) as the definition of biological reality is a purely arbitrary and artificial decision by human classifiers.
What's arbitrary and artificial is not the things themselves - I said that! - but using them as the sole defining features of the definition of sex. The fact that you're having difficulty grasping this demonstrates the problem.
3) I didn't use "bigots" in this comment. But the way the concept is being waved around by Forstater and her defenders including Rowling - claiming to just be pointing out biological reality and being punished by some mob - tries to paint them as bigots, bigots against "biological reality," and that -is- bigoted on the part of Forstater and her defenders.
"(they don't always match up, which is part of the difficulty)"
Intersex is a real cluster of conditions, I accept that it exists, if an intersex person decides they are male or female, that is their business.
Nothing at all the same as someone with normal, functional, male biology deciding that now they are a woman because of magic brain conditioning that happened while they were in the womb, with no evidence (like MRIs) that their brain is indeed the magic hormone changed brain. You want me to accept your identified gender? Show me your MRI https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180524112351.htm or else.
As someone who came under the older school of feminism, I now find it *deeply* ironic that Science Proves! there are such things as "male" and "female" brains and this indicates you are trans:
"In addition, GD adolescent girls showed a male-typical brain activation pattern during a visual/spatial memory exercise."
The old orthodoxy on this was "there are no specially male or female brain areas, and women who are good at, or show interest in, 'male' traits are women who are good at these things which are not specifically male or female traits". Men can like sewing and cooking, women can like DIY and driving rally cars.
But now we really are back to "Barbie likes pink and math is hard!" for girls, and if you're a girl who is good at spatial exercises, you have a "man-brain". O tempora, O mores!
I take issue with the use of the word "bigoted" here.
Taking a sex-centered rather than "gender"-centered view of the world is certainly contrary to the way that trans-sexual individuals would prefer to be seen, but it's not "bigoted", it's simply a different ontology.
We got the whole lecture on "gender and sex are two different things, of course trans people are not arguing over biological sex" from the activists. But now its "gender and sex are interchangeable terms and someone who hasn't had surgery and isn't on hormones and has only grown out their hair and declared their name is now Susan is a woman, and any deviation from complete acceptance of that is bigotry".
Well, then, call me a bigot. If a woman who has fled a violent relationship where a man beat her up now is nervous and anxious and distressed because a person who sounds and looks like a man is in the place where she is supposed to get shelter is in the wrong, and the trans woman gets all the sympathy, and I'm a bigot for saying "maybe work on setting up shelters for trans people in this situation?", then I'll happily be a bigot, no matter how many tears are shed by allies.
Do you think it is insulting to women who have been physically abused by masculine-bodied individuals and are now in women's shelters, to have a masculine-bodied person demanding access to that shelter on the ground that they too are a woman, and if the cis women there feel distress or anger over that, too bad, they're the bigots?
Because that is what Rowling was arguing - in spaces for vulnerable and traumatised women, maybe having "trans woman" who still looks and has all the biology of a man in that space is not the best idea for all concerned. But she's the bigot for this.
This is interesting. This makes it sound like Rowling is not the TERF archdeacon she has been construed as, but rather what is usually known as a transmedicalist; someone who believes that although a trans woman should be allowed to *transition* if she wants to, this is to be understood as a process of "becoming" a woman; whereas the orthodox position is that a trans woman has been a woman all along, and the hormonal treatments will merely make her body "catch up".
Although there are lots of other issues bound up in this, transmedicalism is upsetting to trans people with dysphoria for I think perfectly non-ideological reasons. Transitioning is difficult and takes a long time; it could be years between a person deciding they want to transition, and successfully doing so.
A dysphoric trans person finds being referred to by their birth sex upsetting, in the same "non-physical but very much non-controllable" way that a person with arachnophobia finds it upsetting to be forced to look at a bunch of spiders. If you say "You won't be a woman until you've had the proper surgery", even with perfectly noble intentions, they will hear "I am going to continue to throw images of spiders at you for two-to-three years, but promise, afterwards I'll stop".
…All of which said, if it is true that Rowling merely espoused transmedicalist views then it is completely out of line that she has pretty much been conflated with the archetypal TERF in Internet culture. It seems a dangerous category error of akind with "Bernie is a communist" or "Trump is literally a Nazi", even if one continues to disagree with the person's *actual* views. I shall definitely be looking further into this.
I didn't read anything from Rowling that suggested that only post-surgery trans women should be considered women. The gist I got from what she wrote is that there should be some level of commitment, ex. hormones, seeing a psychologist, etc.
Oh, sorry for maybe lumping in hormones and surgery. The point is that the question is whether a transitioning person "becomes" the other gender, or if they were always the other gender and are simply taking steps to better be recognised as such.
Of course, there is also the argument that legal and social transition needn't be synonymous; perhaps we might have a system where the social norm is that a trans people "are" their stated gender as soon as they come out; the procedures to get this fact on the books take longer; and the latter can be sped up if you have reliable testimony that you've been earnestly practicing the former for a while. ("Common law gender" by analogy to "common law marriage"?)
Of course, one could still find issues with this. Some (not many, but some) trans people are happy enough with a wardrobe change and don't *want* physical alterations, either because they don't have physical dysphoria, or because the idea of medical alterations to their body creeps them out *more* than the dysphoria does. Hence, since it won't lead to any particular medical procedures, their going off to see a psychologist to sign off on a piece of paper that says "yep, trans" will boil down to just another bureaucratic formality; and then what's the point?
My statement is probably only true if we conflate "trans activist" with angry trans people on the internet, and perhaps we shouldn't even consider that activism.
My real point was that the trans community has differences of opinion on a wide range of issues, and that these disputes can often get ugly and result in trans people accusing each other of being anti-trans.
Issues on which the trans community is not united include whether dysphoria is an essential part of being trans (the Transmedicalism dispute), whether trans women are actually women ("gender critical" trans people exist), whether there are more than two genders, whether you should have to announce your pronouns, whether you're allowed to call yourself transexual, whether trans women should play women's sports, and of course whether a trans person is allowed to be a Republican (we can tolerate anything except the outgroup!). I could probably argue that any position on any of these issues is anti-trans, and I'm just a cisgender amateur.
Slight terminology correction that further demonstrates how complicated and splintered this all is: transmedicalism is not *quite* the same thing as the belief that dysphoria is an essential part of being trans; the latter position is usually referred to as TRUSCUM by its opponents; I am not sure its proponents give it any specific name.
Transmedicalism is the framework where a trans person needs physical, medically-assisted transition, with hormones and surgery and whatnot, to "count"; where gender remains determined by physical characteristic, but artificially filling those characteristics can actually "count" to become "for all intents and purposes a slightly weird biological, infertile woman instead of a transvestite man" or vice-versa.
TRUSCUMmery is the belief that you're only trans if you are experiecing bodily dysphoria. Although the two are often twinned, it does not *necessarily* follow that people who do have bodily dysphoria, but still don't want surgery for unrelated reasons, shouldn't be counted as trans. Conversely, while it is rare, you can certainly imagine a transmedicalism wherein "anyone who transitions medically counts as a trans person of their chosen gender, regardless of their feelings prior to transitioning", to which dysphoria is theoretically irrelevant, even if in practice it's mostly dysphoric people who'll want reassignment surgery.
Thanks for the clarification, I did quickly look up transmedicalism and was aware of the use of the term "TRUSCUM", and saw the terms as basically interchangeable, but it seems there are subtle differences that I missed. I think the kind of people that others refer to as "TRUSCUM" would describe themselves as transmedicalists, with dysphoria being the symptom of the medical condition that they believe trans people suffer from?
Yes. Come to that, it's possible that TRUSCUMs call themselves "transmedicalists". But that'd leave us without a name for the position of "anybody can choose to transition regardless of whether they have dysphoria, but you only start being a woman once you've started hormones, much like how you're not bald until you've cut off your hair; it's not enough to have *decided* that in the abstract you'd like to cut it". I think many TRUSCUMs are of the opinion that people suffering from dysphoria should be called by their preferred names and pronouns even before they start their medical transition.
This is way harder than the 'what if men claim to be women to invade spaces because they are perverts' rapists etc' arguement.
What is a transgender person/identity?
Surprise, it's more complicated than you can fathom but the key point I'll make here is that there are clearly different types of transgender people with differing etiologies.
A non insignificant number of MTF are driven at the core by a sexual impulse. This is to say nothing about the profound emotional and philosophical attachments accrued under this type of sexual development. This group is most likely the fastest increasing group coming forward for things like HRT. This deeply misunderstood paraphilia has many flavours but I'll describe it roughly as a sexual response to the abstraction of 'femininity' however that notion manifests and is represented in their head and in society.
Knowing this should show how difficult this issue is going to remain going forward as people understand more.
Natalie Wynn seems to have thoroughly researched JK Rowling’s stance in order to make a video discussing her form of bigotry. Her take is that Rowling is a sort of crypto-bigot who promotes the views of more openly virulent transphobes while pretending to be sympathetic. Apparently Rowling also wrote a long novel about a serial killer who is trans or cross-dresses and is coded as trans. (https://youtu.be/7gDKbT_l2us)
The novel in question has *one line* in reference to a serial killer once having put on a wig to disguise himself. He is not trans or a cross-dresser or whatever; he's a person who once put on a disguise.
What would you consider a non-biased source? I am not sure there is such a thing in the world anymore as someone who understands trans terminology sufficiently well to go into subtleties like "is J.K. Rowling a TERF, or a transmedicalist, or a TRUSCUM?", and yet does not have a strong opinion one way or the other.
"Apparently Rowling also wrote a long novel about a serial killer who is trans or cross-dresses and is coded as trans."
Yes and no. Rowling writes adult novels, detective fiction, under the name "Robert Galbraith". Her recent novel in the series had a villain who does cross-dress for disguise purposes, but it's not about them (not in the way Thomas Harris' "Silence of the Lambs" was about Buffalo Bill, and if Rowling is to be cancelled for that, then so should Harris).
Publisher's blurb for the book:
"Troubled Blood
Private Detective Cormoran Strike is visiting his family in Cornwall when he is approached by a woman asking for help finding her mother, Margot Bamborough – who went missing in mysterious circumstances in 1974.
Strike has never tackled a cold case before, let alone one forty years old. But despite the slim chance of success, he is intrigued and takes it on; adding to the long list of cases that he and his partner in the agency, Robin Ellacott, are currently working on. And Robin herself is also juggling a messy divorce and unwanted male attention, as well as battling her own feelings about Strike.
As Strike and Robin investigate Margot’s disappearance, they come up against a fiendishly complex case with leads that include tarot cards, a psychopathic serial killer and witnesses who cannot all be trusted. And they learn that even cases decades old can prove to be deadly . . ."
I don't read the Strike novels, but I was unimpressed by the reaction of those who up until the whole row had been fans, and were now saying "if you still want to read this book, here's how to pirate it so you won't be giving money to a transphobe".
It's ridiculously easy to rile up these youngsters to uncritically follow along, just so long as you use a few magic words - like "transphobe". They won't investigate for themselves, they'll automatically accept the accusation as true - rather like the #MeToo craze at its height. If an accusation is made, then it must be true, because there are no mistakes or false accusations. And if you are pro-trans rights and a good ally, you don't question or doubt the narrative, because that leaves you open to accusations yourself.
I spent a lot of time on SA for ten+ years up until a year or so ago and it had great forums about "serious" subjects. I never ventured into the "comedy" parts of the forums but I regularly participated in all sorts of threads on computer programming, cars, investing, etc. It, as of a year ago, was a shadow of it's former self, but it was so large and influential that a shadow of it's former self was still pretty large. IIRC, at any given moment it was not uncommon to see several thousand users active.
> Yes, lots of people make fun of conservatives for freaking out over some proposal made half-jokingly by a tiny magazine with three subscribers, and acting like it’s the unified will of the entire Democratic establishment. But some non-zero fraction of the time, the ridiculous thing ends up taking over, and after it’s taken over it’s too omnipresent to protest.
I just want to point out that I can specifically recall taking this sort of position years ago when some liberal person made a point about far-right conservatism and now it seems like the far right has vastly more sway than I ever thought possible.
To that anonymous liberal person I was arguing with so many years ago: you were right and I was wrong!
Just this week Liz Cheney, not exactly a leftist icon, was exiled from the Republican party for saying Trump lost the election. Maybe what we are seeing is a general phenomenon of more extreme groups getting more traction as people split into ideologically sorted media bubbles.
That's going to be tautologically the case, given the limited amount of words spent describing something. A more useful question would be what it is leaving out and why it is important
Two key differences. One, that she was saying a whole lot more than a simple "Trump lost the election." Two, she was going out of her way to publicly denounce other Republicans and the stance of Republican leadership.
You can argue, and I would support this, that she was trying to appeal directly to a subset of Republicans who are worried about the direction of the party. That doesn't mean the Republican leadership cannot make a decision that a supposed leader in the party shouldn't be throwing the Democrats fodder for attacking Republicans. The Republican base can accept or reject that approach, but it's absolutely the right of a political party to make that kind of decision. It happens all the time, just usually less publicly. I think the big difference is the media interested in making the Republican split look bad and hyping both Cheney and the fallout.
Given that Liz Cheney is being replaced with Elise Stefanik, who by voting record is much more moderate, it seems very odd to use this as an example of the GOP being taken over by "far-right conservatism" or "extreme groups getting more traction."
Ehh, it's not worth it and it's not really relevant to my point. What the person and I were talking about was apparent to us. The point is merely that I'm not sure it's really a thing that happens exclusively to Democrats.
For the most part, yeah, it is. Or, at least, it's only a thing that people on the right are correct about. Cthulhu only swims left. other than gun control. there's no political position on which the republican party today is to the right of where it was 20 years ago, while the democratic party has galloped to the left, and dragged the republicans along in that direction.
The difficult thing here is that the Republican party has *no* political position today. That makes it very hard for them to be right *or* left of *anything*. They just stand united against Democratic proposals.
The only significant Republican legislative proposal of any sort at the federal level in the past decade is the Trump tax bill.
The Republican base may have some, but they don't get to write anything.
The leadership of the Republican party has very explicitly chosen *not* to write anything (the 2020 platform was literally "the 2016 platform is probably ok, but most importantly we support Trump").
Trump has a clear set of policies of cutting the amount of people and goods that cross the border. But not much else.
It's not like a decade ago, when there were actually written party platforms, legislative proposals, and so on. The Democrats now still have that sort of thing, but the Republicans don't.
"While this makes a bit of sense, I’m sort of skeptical. Steve Sailer, Richard Spencer, and John Derbyshire are still on Twitter. Spencer has over 70K followers."
This analysis is missing something I can't quite articulate - Molineux and Milo were just enthralling in a way that Spencer et al are not. My brain is informing me that the problem is that Spencer et al are too far off the grid and Shapiro is too centrist, while Molyneux et al were in the edginess sweet spot, but I'm not sure that's right.
All I can really offer is my personal experience that if I had gotten sucked down the rabbit hole it would have been because of Molyneux and Milo. Spencer is interesting to gawk at, but he's not attractive like them. And Shapiro isn't a rabbit hole at all.
I realised I've never actually seen Molyneux talk. I managed to find him on youtube (though interestingly enough youtube had "stefan molyneux" added to the autocomplete blacklist so you have to type every letter of his name).
Here he is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L0dPKpfHRA He's not charismatic as such, he's neutral. His vibe and body language remind me of any basically-competent professor I've ever seen at a lecture or symposium.
Ben Shapiro, by contrast, has anti-charisma https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3pjh4Xyl0s . He looks like a thirteen-year-old who wears a suit to class and tries to suck up to teacher. You feel embarrassed for him just watching him. You feel compelled to disagree with him even when you agree with him.
The worst part is that I think he knows this and plays into it. He knows that his career will go well if he can play the role of "the kind of right-winger that the left wants you to see".
This analysis of Molyneux strikes me as correct, but the Shapiro angle is interestingly skew. I think the video you linked is missing the fact that him reading the lyrics of WAP is supposed to be the incredibly cringe - as a counterpoint, consider the entrance reaction he gets here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIAyudtNicY You don't get a roar like from an audience if you're anti-charismatic.
> I have a hard time feeling sorry for people who used the n-word in a tweet five years ago. I think it’s kind of silly to waste your energy trying to destroy their lives, but also kind of silly to waste your energy supporting them super-hard.
You do realize that approximately 100% of this concern has been for teenagers using the word in the friendly hip hop way and getting fired/rejected from colleges years later for this horrible crime, right? No IDW types are rising to the defense of repentant racists AFAIK, and there isn't a movement to save them. Protecting *the intent* behind language as something that matters seems like an important line to hold in the fight against wokeness, at least to me.
As for George Floyd, it *was* a particularly bad video, and the fact that only videos of black people getting killed rise to public attention means since Trayvon a whole generation of black and white people on the left thinks that unjustified police violence is pretty much just something that happens to black people and happens all the time. The concept of the media being biased *towards* coverage of white-on-black violence in our systemically racist country is so unthinkable to these people that the current climate is *proof* of an epidemic. You can show up with the Washington Post data base, FBI crime stats, similarly horrifying videos of Tony Timpa and Daniel Shaver but they are still pretty unknown and you can't say anything without raising scary Trump supporter alarms for 90% of liberals.
Indeed, people who actually use the word as a slur don’t get sympathy. Usually when such cases make the news and cause controversy it’s because they were singing along to a hiphop song, or reading from Mark Twain during a classroom assignment, or quoting someone else disapprovingly ("I think it was wrong for Alice to call Bob a ..."). Oh, and then there was the guy who got in trouble for using the word "niggardly" correctly.
Also, people have been cancelled for a lot less than that. "Give me six lines written by the most honest man and I will find something in there to hang him" and if you have any kind of on-line presence there’s a lot more than six lines that can be used against you.
Holy SHIT! The first question in that Anna Khachiyan interview is the greatest thing ever. By the time I finished reading it I was in love. There is not enough money in the world to send Niccolo I'm-typing-on-a-phone-so-I-can't-look-up-whatever-his(her?)-last-name-is for a subscription. Thanks Darij.
The introduction was great too, but it's Red Scare fan service. If you aren't already involved you're not going to get the jokes. The rest of the interview brightened my day even though I had my identity stolen and spent twelve hours when I should have been working tracking down what the hell happened and placing all kinds of traps around my finances that I'm positive won't come back and bite me on my ass
> I have a hard time feeling sorry for people who used the n-word in a tweet five years ago.
It occurs to me to wonder how soon it will be first rude and then unforgivable to say (literally) "the n-word". After all, we know what word you mean here, and all your sly euphemism doesn't excuse it. And if that time comes, current events show us that the fact that you said it back in 2021 will not buy you any understanding.
I can’t tell for sure from that story whether the word used was the actual n-word or one of the still-acceptable euphemisms, but it sounds to me like the former; I think the bowdlerization happened in the complaint and the news item rather than in the original course material. If so, that’s not what I’m talking about.
"The slur shocked students created a momentous distraction and caused unnecessary distress and anxiety for those taking the exam. Considering the subject matter, and the call of the question, the use of the "n____" and "b____" was certainly unwarranted as it did not serve any educational purpose. The question was culturally insensitive and tone-deaf. It lacked basic civility and respect for the student body, especially considering our social justice efforts this year."
This part takes the cake for me. These students are hoping to become lawyers. Some of them may have to deal with cases like this when they get a job. What are they going to do when taking evidence from their client - "And what did your co-worker say that was offensive?" "Well, you know - Naughty Names". Yeah, try telling the judge that "our complaint is Naughty Names". That could be anything from "You're fatter than Miss Piggy" to [Unexpurgated Terms]
Keel over in a fit of the vapours and need hartshorn to bring them round if the client uses the actual words and not even the expurgated dashes? That's not going to help you keep your job if every single time you need to rush out of the office to sob in the lavatory about "They - they - they USED DASHES! TO MY VERY FACE!"
I had no idea we were going back to the 18th century where the avid reader was pleasurably shocked and titillated by the naughty words implied in the text - "The Duke of P______, being in a tearing rage, threw his topboots at the valet and said 'D___n'd villain, get out of my sight, you ____, _______, booby!' "
And I'm pretty sure the shocked and appalled students that took a fit of weakness at reading such terms as "b___" on the exam paper have used such words and worse, unexpurgated, in ordinary speech without needing to be brought round by paramedics afterwards.
I hope nobody, in an unguarded hour, ever lets these poor fragile blossoms have access to a copy of Dickens' "Nicholas Nickleby", for they will stumble upon the character of Mr. Mantalini therein, he who uses the "D-" word with wild and unexpurgated (if softened by writing it in a particular vernacular) abandon!
"'Will she call me "Sir"?' cried Mantalini. 'Me who dote upon her with the demdest ardour! She, who coils her fascinations round me like a pure angelic rattlesnake! It will be all up with my feelings; she will throw me into a demd state.'"
Oh, oh no! The unexpurgated and not even using dashes "D-" word! We've gone back to the days of the "Lady Chatterly's Lover" obscenity trial, where "do you want your wives, or servants, or law students, reading the likes of this?" is now the watchword:
"Prosecuting, Mervyn Griffith-Jones began by urging the jury to decide if the book was obscene under section 2 of the Act and if so whether its literary merit provided for a 'public good' under section 4, and that they must judge the book as a whole. Inviting them to consider as a test of whether it would deprave or corrupt he asked "Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters—because girls can read as well as boys—reading this book? Is it a book you would have lying around your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?"
One strange thing about the discourse around terms like "birthing persons" which may not have been obvious to you or others on the periphery is that anti-trans people routinely portray such attempts to be inclusive as attempts to be inclusive of trans women (usually with associated rhetoric about "erasing women"), when in fact they are attempts to be inclusive of transmasculine people (Ozy of Thing of Things being one such person you and older commenters may be familiar with). I'm unsure why this disconnect with the actual stated (and to me obvious if you actually think about it for 30 seconds) intent is so common and consistent across a wide variety of anti-trans groups, but it is.
By and large such inclusivity attempts are a supplement rather than a replacement (essentially, if you have a transmasculine pregnant person in front of you, maybe don't use heavily female-gendered terms for them which might make them uncomfortable), but some people do go farther in terms of trying to universalize it, and I wish they wouldn't because right now it mostly just makes people mad at us trans/non-binary people for little benefit. I like gender-neutral language, I want people to use more of it, but I also want to not start unhelpful fights and language evolution is a complicated process that doesn't respond very well to artificial pushes in a particular direction.
That's an interesting point, and makes some sense.
My preference is pretty strongly on the side of earlier generations of feminists -- to call someone who gave birth a mother regardless of how feminine or masculine they are, and try to be less soppy about motherhood. I'm a mother who's working (and had to continue going into work in person through much of the pandemic) while my husband is at home raising our toddler daughter, and I have a personal interest in society being less judgmental about gender norms. But the particular choices in this case seem pretty bad. Even birth giving parent would be better, emphasizing the relationship to the child (as mother and father do), instead of emphasizing the atomized individual (as person tends to).
Still, the amount of energy expended on this illustrates a much bigger problem with American feminism, and the reason behind the one way in which American women truly are underprivileged compared to women in almost every other country in the world -- the total absence of legally mandated paid parental leave. The problem is this -- American feminism simply has no time for or interest in women who *want* to be mothers.
They'll have your back 100% if you want to end a pregnancy, but if you want to carry the baby to term and raise it, the response is indifference or weak sympathy at best, or disgust at worst (see: the absurd Marcotte/Bruenig flareup on Twitter). If some Congressperson has used the term "birthing person" this last week, that's one more than has said "paid parental leave" in the same time period. As an immigrant from a country with an actual patriarchal society, I find the whole thing beyond absurd.
I strongly disagree that American feminism has no interest in women who want to become mothers. Most abortion funds operate follow the philosophy of reproductive justice that says that abortion and having children/being able to safely raise them should be choices women make because they want to make them, not because they are forced to by lack of resources or support . (More on that here: https://abortionfunds.org/about/) I haven't heard of a single feminist that is against maternal leave. It's just that the constant attacks on abortion access/rights in the U.S. makes abortion a priority. If abortion is not defended, it will be eroded and banned in many places!
That is literally the exact attitude I am describing. Feminists don't oppose parental leave but they are indifferent to it, because all their energy is spent on the choice to *not* have children.
Since you didn't mention the abortion landscape in the U.S. in your initial comment this seemed like an oversight. You didn't give a reason why feminist activism prioritizes abortion, just that it does, which I read as feminists not caring about access to childcare rather than prioritizing abortion because of its precarious status. Also, even though American women have many more rights than women in other parts of the world, they still very much live in a patriarchal society. The lack of abortion access and lack of child care options are clear expressions of it. When it comes to making sure that women can access the same stuff as men (access to jobs, education, property) the USA is pretty good, at least on paper. When it comes to making sure that women can access services that relate primarily/exclusively to them (abortion, maternal leave, childcare, sexual assault services, domestic violence services, research into female specific medical conditions, etc.) the U.S. seems sorely lacking compared to other countries it's usually lumped with.
"anti-trans people routinely portray such attempts to be inclusive as attempts to be inclusive of trans women (usually with associated rhetoric about "erasing women"), when in fact they are attempts to be inclusive of transmasculine people"
Possibly confusion? People not familiar with the nuances often get mixed up about which is the correct term for female-to-male or male-to-female.
There is also a tiny online minority of very weird self-proclaimed trans women who are creepily obsessed with menstruation, pregnancy, and so forth.
"transmasculine people (Ozy of Thing of Things being one such person you and older commenters may be familiar with)."
I have enough respect, even though often in disagreement with their opinions, for Ozy to do them the courtesy of referring to them as they wish. They have also described their genuine distress at being identified as female or feminine in ways unacceptable to them. So, also taking into consideration the right to privacy and not being made a political football of their small child, I'm not going to discuss the particular circumstances of their pregnancy.
I would also note that the claim Bush "was now using “birthing person” instead of 'mother'" made in this post is objectively false. Rep Bush's full comments were: "I am committed to doing the absolute most to protect black mothers, to protect black babies, to protect black birthing people, and to save lives.” There is something to be said about the absurdity of the outrage when the example supposedly demonstrating that "mother" is being replaced cited a person using *both terms*.
> The window between “it has been seriously mooted” and “people are terrified of being seen not to whole-heartedly endorse it” is razor-thin
One area I worry about regarding this is mask requirements. I think we're in a narrow window where we can say, now that everyone can get vaccinated, mask requirements are dumb and need to end. There's a medically reasonable response of "wait a few weeks for everyone who wants a vaccine to be done with theirs and rates to go down some", but I worry we have a narrow window and if we don't push back hard right now we'll be stuck with mask mandates and other covid laws forever, just like we are with the TSA.
I wonder if the liberal mainstream might give fourth-wave feminism a milder version of the "New Atheism treatment" over the trans issue. Clearly many/most feminists are ardent trans rights supporters - just as many/most New Atheists became social justice evangelists - but there's enough of a gender critical contingent that I feel as though the ideology itself - particularly the 70s-era feminist philosophy that more or less formed the basis upon which essentially all subsequent feminist thought and activism is predicated - might be in danger of coming under suspicion.
John S bringing up Rodney King to show that rioting is uncorrelated with extremity of the catalyzing incident of police misconduct totally ignores the relative scarcity of video in the 1990's. Rodney King's beating is not an extreme example of police misconduct in today's world of ubiquitous smartphone footage, but when footage was so rare this was the most extreme example of state indifference to clear misconduct audiences would be exposed to.* If anything the Rodney King example suggests that the rise of BLM is a product of the ubiquity of cell phone video, and the ease of viral streaming.
And look, I hate to say it, but framing violent riots by the urban underclass as "internet fashion, go figure"" is peak confusing twitter for real life. No one is less likely to read an essay from some lefty professor on how riots are the voice of the voiceless than someone who actually lives in the shitty part of Kenosha.
Police violence against civil rights protestors in the 1960's was similarly a shocking expose of police violence, but less an expose of police hypocrisy, as violently enforcing Jim Crow is what they were supposed to do.
> you're going to have far more serious, widespread, and long-lasting rioting if the essay-reading class of society is pro-riot, which is exactly what happened this summer.
Is there any evidence of this? While the essay-reading class of society may be more pro-riot now than they were in the '60s, we had much more serious, widespread, and long-lasting rioting in the '60s.
> This captures a fear I have too. Yes, lots of people make fun of conservatives for freaking out over some proposal made half-jokingly by a tiny magazine with three subscribers, and acting like it’s the unified will of the entire Democratic establishment. But some non-zero fraction of the time, the ridiculous thing ends up taking over, and after it’s taken over it’s too omnipresent to protest. The window between “it has been seriously mooted” and “people are terrified of being seen not to whole-heartedly endorse it” is razor-thin, and it’s hard to blame people who aren’t confident of hitting that window, and sometimes that looks like arguing against it before the the mooting could be honestly described as “serious”.
But naturally this could never, *ever* apply to racists going from Just Trying To Talk About Genetics to anywhere else, goodness me no.
I think it makes much more sense to worry about the side which is constantly winning and where the few nuts to everyone in the world pipeline keeps happening, than to worry that it might theoretically happen on the side that is constantly losing unless people crush it even harder than it is already being crushed.
Which side is it that you think is constantly winning? Because if you think it's the left, I think that's a weird read of the last forty years, or at least puts way too much emphasis on rhetorical progress for minorities.
Yes but the left is winning and overreaching within the social and professional enviornments of young educated grey tribe internet commenters and we know that's the actual most important thing.
A lot of perception that the left is losing seems to be leftist policies failing or being perceived as failing and then being retconned into somehow being right-wing policies. See race-blindness, which used to be leftist, but which became perceived as a right-wing policy on the left.
The left is constantly winning in the urban educated online bubble you inhabit, and I'm with you that the norms in this bubble are bad and people should try to make their near environment more epistemically virtuous, but that's very different from electoral politics and state power. Republicans will likely control the house and they just kicked out Liz Cheney for bringing attention the the fact that Biden's win was legitimate. The relevant "nutcase to everyone in the world" situation for electoral politics is a Republican House refusing to certify a close D win in 2024, kicking the vote to congress and winning the majority of state delegations.
In my opinion it may be useful for you to meditate on this thought for some time.
When the Left scaremongers you write how it's bad to cry wolf. And while there is lots of truth in it and for me personally this essay was helpful to check my own political biases there is some truth to be alarmed as well. For instance, in the New Sultan book review you mentioned that "there is no fire alarm for dictatorship". Which seems false to me. Especially compared to AI fire alarm. There are lots of fire alarms for dictatorship. But if you are more worried about false positives - that you won't hear them. In failure but not of prediction you credit people who were concerned beforehand, while everyone else didn't want to create panic. Why doesn't it apply here as well? May it be due to the fact that left narrative fears are less relevant to you in particular? Or being worried about such issues is lower status in the Grey tribe?
On the other hand, when the right scaremongers you are concerned. And again I agree that total dismissal of these issues would be wrong. But is it really proportionate response? Is the right narrative is so much more true than the left? Are risks that much higher?
Is Trump or the Capitol thing a fire alarm for a dictatorship, or is it the increasing lack of ideological diversity in many places of power?
From my perspective, a lot of leftists fears completely ignore the lack of means, which makes their fears non-credible. It's similar to being worried that the US will become a Sharia state.
It is a fact that there are a bunch of extremist Muslims that want a Sharia state, but there is no credible way in which they are able to implement Sharia on a state or federal level.
Do you mean academia and journalism? I wonder how correct is it to call them places of power, but nevertheless, this seems to be a fair question.
I'm not an expert in political science so I would appreciate any input. But it seems to me that it's always works in this order: first the aspiring dictator comes to power via elections or coup and then uses it to take control over the press and other social institutes. Has It ever happened the other way around?
If the press is united in being critical towards the leader of the country it doesn't seem to be a fire alarm for a dictatorship - if the press is celebrating his every move - that's worrisome. When the government is trying to influence parts of the civil society which are supposed to be independent - that's an alarm. When the civil society affects who's going to be elected - that's just how democracy works isn't it?
I think your Sharia state metaphor can be useful here. It's indeed strange to worry about it by default in a secular country. But when the most pro-muslim candidate gets elected into the office this becomes a little more credible. When he tries to overturn the next election, spreading disinformation, and his supporters storm the capitol - that's two more points of evidence.
What your metaphor fails to catch, though, is that priors are different. American political system is historically much closer to Trumpism than to Sharia state or to Socialism, for that matter. Imagine if instead of Trump, Bernie Sanders got elected in 2016, then when he lost 2020 election to some moderate Republican candidate (Mit Romney?) he started doing what Trump did and eventually pro Bernie crowd storms capitol. Would you've said that it was still totally unreasonable to worry about socialist dictatorship for the lack of means it could be installed in the USA?
But the example described was one in which an inclusive word ("birthing person") was being used in place of a traditional word ("mother") in a context of generalities, with a worry that we would stop using the traditional word even for individuals that identify with it. Are there any instances where that has happened to any other word in the past? (I suppose there might be some magazines and newspapers that only use "Ms." and never use "Miss" or "Mrs.", but I can't think of any attempts to get rid of racial or gendered language when the individual in question wants to use racial or gendered language - just attempts to get rid of it in cases where we are talking about multiple people, some of whom might not identify with it.)
I appreciate your acknowledgement that you're just not the interested in the pathologies on the Right in the same way that you are on the Left. It's like Claire Lehmann's acknowledgement to Tyler Cowen that cancel culture and political correctness is more of a problem on the Right, but she just wasn't interested in that. That kind of intellectual honesty is really rare.
But that's also the basic answer to your question. It's going to be hard to figure out why young people are disinterested in the Right when you're not interested in interrogating the Right.
Just read a book by Lee Kuan Yew. Coming from “multiculturalism will destroy America” to this comment section is quite jarring. When the East looks over the ashes of the West, they will wonder what compelled such a successful culture to allow itself to be destroyed from within by such degeneracy...let’s hope Scott is right that this is all just a passing phase!
The West was too successful for so long that "thrive" mindset took over from "survive", a trajectory that still goes on relatively unchallenged. The East is far from being in position to gloat about "the ashes" yet. They may have done well in catching up, but taking over the intellectual and cultural hegemony is another matter, and there aren't that many signs that it's about to happen any time soon.
In fact, peak fears of this were concerned with Japan way back in the 80s, which promptly entered into decades-long stagnation shortly after. China is now poised to be the next "threat", but nobody seems to be particularily enthused about importing their "socialism with chinese characteristics", even other dictatorships. It also remains to be seen how well will they be able to sustain their economy with the quickly aging population.
"When I was dating more, I had some success using OKCupid, where most people would write long essays about who they were and what kind of relationship they wanted. Tinder was always more of a mystery; usually just a photo plus a one-sentence cryptic description like '25, Aquarius, hit me up! <3' I sometimes considered lowering my standards enough to “swipe right” on one of these people, but was never actually able to sacrifice that amount of dignity. Then OKCupid became a much worse Tinder clone and my useful options collapsed to zero (don’t worry, I’ve since found someone great through my community). While in theory dating apps are a great solution to this problem, in practice they’re surprisingly terrible."
This roughly matches my experiences using both OKCupid and Tinder in the past, including not finding OKCupid useful after it became a Tinder clone. I'm thinking of getting back onto the dating market now that I'm vaccinated, but it will need to be mostly online since I know very few women in real life. Does anyone have suggestions for dating apps/sites that aren't surprisingly terrible?
When do you date OKCupid's demise to? When I used it in late 2018, well after its glory days, it still seemed vastly preferable to anything else, if only by a factor of 5 instead of 100. I had enough success then that I haven't had a chance to explore the dating app environment since. Is it now really as bad as Tinder? (Even if they stripped out everything else, the ability to write profiles of unlimited length would put it head and shoulders above every other option, because it lets you filter for people who bother to read and communicate any info at all about you.)
My last experience with it was 2017-2018, so it might still be the best of lots of not-great options. It felt like it got significantly worse when it moved to copying Tinder's swipe model instead of matching you based on your answers to questions, but I still thought Tinder was even worse than that. I haven't had much experience with dating apps/sites besides those two, so I was hoping to hear about others that people prefer, if there are any; if not, I'll probably try OKCupid first.
"I had never heard this story before and it sounds just ridiculous enough to potentially be true"
Not quite true I think. It is correct that a lot of disgruntled goons (as somethingawful posters called themselves) ended up on 4chan. Disgruntled as in permanently banned, naturally, and somethingawul moderators were known for being a tad impulsive sometimes, let's put it this way.
But on the other hand making political predictions and staking your account on that prediction was a long-running tradition, this game commenced come each presidential election cycle, and I think for other elections as well, and knowing goons, probably for other stuff too - like oscars etc.
The thing is - people getting in the game knew the risks. If you predict wrong, your account gets banned, I am sure people here can appreciate this setup.
And to clarify, SA accounts were paywalled, registrering an account was like $20, and if you got banned, you could immediately re-register your username with another twenty (unless you were permabanned, which was a different form of ban, or probated for, like, 10000 days, or permaprobated)
So I doubt a significant percentage of 4channers were born out of betting against Obama. A lot of folks did get banned for posting in a right-wingy way, that's correct - SA moderation was known for its left-wing slant - but a lot of folk got banned for posting paedofilia, another big no-no, as well, so you know. Mileage may vary and all that.
My brief follow-up would be that it seems a lot like evil people start tiny movements without much membership. They aren't real groups. Disaffection and stigma pushes lost millennial boys into their orbit, most eventually get fed up/horrified and leave, but the groups are sticky and end up legitimized and enlarged by the process. Don't know if I communicated that well in my first post.
I believe the google search results for trans might be biased as opposed to feminism or racism since it would also include porn searches which would dwarf any other kind of searches. That's why lgbt, transphobia and terf are better terms to search, and as you said that shows better trending.
The question of socialism can be easily explained by not considering the ruling class to be unified. I know, ironic.
In a broadly Turchinian view, we need to distinguish an established elite from aspiring elites (and within those, regular elite aspirants from counter-elites, but counter-elites operate outside mainstream institutions, so they need not be included in this particular equation; it suffices to say they leave to create their own alternative institutions, like Substack). At present, aspiring elites can be considered roughly equivalent to urban intelligentsia. (Professional-Managerial Class in modern parlance.) Degree inflation and all, people are forced to get a diploma for regular jobs, so not everyone college-educated is in this group, but many are, and it's still very large. Way too large for the limited number of positions available to it, and they're in a constant, brutal fight for status. (They're also in a constant class war, trying to create as much demand for cushy specialist jobs as possible. I'd give HR and diversity consultants as obvious examples, but they're only a small fraction of the whole process, and as a whole it isn't culturally coded woke, job market for economists works the same way. But again, that's another story.)
And brutal means brutal. Once someone discovered moral outrages can fire people and create job/promotion opportunitiess, it was only a matter of time before they became commonplace. This required a unified, shared ideology, and the one most conductive to the task won out. Or rather, keeps winning out. Once older elite aspirants establish themselves, they're becoming a target of the next wave of challengers, and the ideological tools must change to reflect that. You don't take feminists down with misogyny, you take them down with transphobia.
So, why not socialism? First, because the aspiring elites are aspiring to be elites. Diversity quotas in elite positions are in their interest, actual egalitarianism is not. And they're taking over current institutions, which are, and have been for 200+ years, liberal, so the aspirants will themselves be liberal. (Those who dream of soviet union with themselves at the top of politburo would still need to defect to counter-elites to get there.) Second, because the elite aspirants are not actually in charge, the elites, i.e. wealthy stockholders, are. They'd very much like to be in charge instead of stockholers, and they'll make some noises to that effect, socialism-flavored or not (mostly merely etatism-flavored, some will call that socialism due to a flawed conceptual apparatus, but it's really not), but they can only go so far until the stockholers intervene, and in the meantime they're still employed to serve whatever immediate interests the stockholders currently have.
Also, as a somewhat more general comment to the recent string of culture war articles: I don't really disagree with the whole cultural part of the analysis, but I feel detaching it from wider context took away any predictive power it might have had. In particular, we socialists are simply fighting a different battle from elite aspirants, one for the souls and attention of common people. (So far, we're losing badly, though I would lie if I denied the memetic progress we made in the last few years. But even that progress is frankly irrelevant, society as a whole has recently started moving leftward, it will continue to do so with our help or not, for purely material reasons, and socialist ideas will be rediscovered, memetically proficient and fashionable or not. That post-2008 surge in interest in socialism? Is it really explained by Obama being called names, or perhaps by the biggest economic downturn in decades? I'd venture the latter.)
> Some commenters got into a subthread about a claim that transgender advocates wanted to rename “Mother’s Day” to “Birthing Person’s Day”, with the predictable response that nobody really wanted to do that and it was a fake conservative talking point / hyperbole / satire / attempt to scare people. Someone else pointed out that a Congresswoman was now using “birthing person” instead of “mother” and this seemed non-fake and non-nutpicking, and someone else pointed out that using “birthing person” was different from demanding other people use it, or changing the name of an entire holiday.
This won't happen. Not because it'd be wierd, but because this fails to make sense even from a woke perpsective. Trans advocates don't advocate renameing womens bathrooms to people-with-vaginas bathroom. They advocate for allowing transwomen to use womens bathrooms. When it comes to Mothers day, you would expect them to act analogously . They recognise that "birthing people" is a different set of people as "mothers" (and you do too if you believe adoptive mothers are a thing), but they'd much rather have mothers day celebrate all parents that happen to be female than people that happen to give birth.
The idea that they would come up with "birthing people day" is exactly how conservatives think progressivism works, not how it actually works.
I think the concern here is "constant dripping wears away the stone". Yes, things like this are extreme and silly and probably (but God alone knows, I am now at the stage of "never rule *anything* out as too stupid to happen") won't go ahead.
"Please note: As part of our journey towards providing gender inclusive care for everybody we are working on updating the language on all of our resources, including our website and patient information leaflets. We will endeavour to do this as quickly as possible, and thank you for your understanding as we implement these changes.
Gender Inclusion Midwives
At BSUH we acknowledge the additional challenges that gender identity can have on pregnancy, birth and infant feeding and recognise the importance of providing inclusive, respectful care to pregnant people and their families.
We are on a journey towards gender inclusive care for everybody during pregnancy, birth and afterwards. This journey is led by members of the trans and non-binary community. We are at the beginning of this process, which will continue over the next few years.
Midwives believe pregnancy and birth are normal, healthy parts of life. The midwife’s role is to support a pregnant person’s journey through each stage of pregnancy, birth, and the early days with their new baby. Midwives believe that you know what is best for you and your baby, and will work together with you to ensure your experience of pregnancy and birth is safe and positive.
The Gender Inclusion Midwives are keen to talk to you about how we can welcome you into care that is individualised to meet the specific needs of you and your family. Contact us to discuss how we can help you feel safe and supported during your pregnancy, birth and postnatal period. You do not need to be currently pregnant to make contact. Enquiries are welcome from all, whether you are a prospective or currently pregnant trans or non-binary person, a partner or healthcare professional."
A statement from the Trust says that they are not replacing traditional language with these terms, simply adding to the terms used, but again I wonder - how long until replacement?
"Maternity services at Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals have broadened the language they use to support midwives providing care for trans and non-binary people who are giving birth.
The trust recognises the vast majority of midwifery service users are women and already has language in place women are comfortable with. This is not changing. For example, we will continue to call them pregnant women and talk about breastfeeding.
BSUH always aims to meet the needs of our local populations and provide the best possible, individually tailored care for every person. By adding to the language we use we will support more inclusive care and ensure that people who identify in a different way feel the service includes and represents them.
The additional wording is part of an ongoing, award-winning piece of work led by our midwives who have been engaging with trans and non-binary service users to gain an understanding of their unique needs.
This work does not impact on other maternity services and staff are not being asked to stop using any language relating to women.
The clinical guideline and model of care for trans and non-binary people is the first of its kind and will be made widely available to other maternity departments across the country.
BSUH Chief Nurse, Carolyn Morrice said:
“Adding to the language we use is something people who use our services have been asking for, for some time. Our aim will always be to treat everyone who uses our services as an individual, providing care that is personal to them, that meets their needs and uses language they are comfortable with.”
Amanda Clifton, head of midwifery, said:
“I am looking forward to a time when this standard of inclusive care is in fact business as usual for the whole of the NHS. That being said, improvement has to start somewhere, and I am particularly proud of all the hard work our service has put into this award winning work.”
(Examples of our use of gender inclusive language include: “pregnant women and people”, “breastfeeding and chestfeeding“, “mothers and birthing parents”.)"
I could definitely see *someone* objecting to "mothers and birthing parents" as being exclusive or discriminatory language, or making a distinction between 'mothers' and 'birthing parents' which implies that the default is 'mother' and 'birthing parent' is something unusual and abnormal, and in return then the language being trimmed to 'birthing parents' so as not to offend anyone.
"Not all birthing parents identify as women or mothers ...trans men & non-binary people can give birth too"
Do you really think it is absolutely impossible and unimaginable that in time, the term "birthing parent" will not be the one pushed as the default, because continuing to use "mother" or "pregnant woman" is discriminatory and exclusive and distressing to trans and non-binary pregnant persons?
I think that, when referring to a specific person, then "mother" will continue to be used for a woman giving birth. When referring to people in general, it does seem plausible that "birthing parent" might get used in the specific context of obstetrics.
But that isn't likely to affect "Mothers' Day" at all - because "mother" outside of the context of obstetrics doesn't refer to the person who physically gave birth, but to a female person who took on the primary parental responsibilities. Trans women who had kids (by their sperm fertilising someone else's eggs) are mothers. Female adoptive parents are mothers. The one of a lesbian couple who didn't give birth is a mother.
"You are my real father, he's just the sperm donor" is a line used so often that it's a cliché. The equivalent "you are my real mother, she just gave birth to me" is less clichéd, but the sentiment is instantly understandable.
It's not that motherhood is being opposed, it's that giving birth is being decentred from motherhood. If the central concept of mother is "person who raised the child" rather than "person who gave birth to the child" - and I think that has been the central concept in our culture for decades - then changing the language for people giving birth is not going to affect the central usages of "mother".
"Trans women who had kids (by their sperm fertilising someone else's eggs) are mothers."
Nope, they're the biological father. If they're never in the offspring's life, they are still the father. If they're trans lesbian and impregnating their female partner, legally you have two mothers and the child may call them both "Mommy" once it is capable of speech, but one of them is the mother and one of them is the father.
There are a bunch of cases where "mother" doesn't work very well.
One is when the person giving birth is a trans man, who prefers "father".
Another, though, is a lesbian couple. They are both mothers. They will object very strongly to being told that the one giving birth is the mother and the other is not (and also, what should they be called: "father" is obviously wrong here).
So, when you want to distinguish between the parent that is giving birth and the one that isn't, then "mother" and "father" are not a good choice of words.
Yes, at least 95% of the time (and probably more like 98% or 99%), there are two parents, the one that is giving birth is the mother and the other one is the father. But the rest of the time is not zero, and working out what the right language is for cases where the parents are not a cishet couple is a worthwhile exercise.
... and of course that's what any such guidance is going to centre on; everyone already knows the right language for cishet couples, it's "how do I say to a lesbian couple 'the one that's actually giving birth should go this way and the one that isn't should go that way' without pissing them off?".
"One is when the person giving birth is a trans man, who prefers "father"."
When the kid is born, and Dads One and Two, or Dad and Mom, or whatever arrangement is in place, decide who wears the trousers (so to speak), sure, fine.
You got knocked up, you still had the equipment to get knocked up, and you bore and delivered the kid because your partner was unable/unwilling to do so, you're a (biological) mother not a father. Humans are not seahorses, and until uterine transplants for cis men/trans women happen, there are no such thing as pregnant men or "I gave birth to you so I'm your father".
Social and legal recognition that you're a man? Sure, go ahead. But the person who donated the sperm is the biological father, the person who got pregnant is the biological mother, and while terms like "birthing parent" may blur this distinction to preserve the comfort of all parties involved, we still can't simply toss our heads and laugh scornfully at biology.
Haven't we come far from the days of "Heather Has Two Mommies" to "Heather Has Two Mommies, and One of Them is Her Father"!
To hell with it, while I'm at it - why bother with "birthing parent", why not simply expand the definition of the term "mother"?
Cut it loose from gendered expectations. After all, if gender is socially constructed, then gendered terms are also socially constructed, and it should be a lot easier to go "mother now includes 'person of whatever gender, or non-gender, status who got pregnant and delivered the child' as well as the existing meanings" than tying ourselves into knots over "birthing parent" and "chestfeeding".
Cis, trans, gay, straight, non-binary, agender, all genders, pan, bi or omnisexual, or a partridge in a pear tree: "mother" is "person who popped out baby (amongst other already assigned meanings)", "father" is "person taking opposite role to that of mother". If trans women are real women, then birthing parents are real mothers too! Male mothers, female fathers, come one, come all, just expand the definition as is being currently done on trans versus cis versus the other options!
Because that's bioessentialist and the whole point about trans is that it's opposed to bioessentialism?
"person who popped out baby" is, like all biological categories, one that is only relevant and important in a narrow biological context (in this case, in the context of the popping out of the babies).
The primary and important category is the socially constructed category of gender, ie of "woman" or "mother". The biological categories are secondary, are ones that we do not assume align (ie we don't assume that "person with XX chromosomes" and "person with vulva" and "person popping out baby" are a Venn diagram that's just a circle), and are used only narrowly.
If a trans man is arguing that he is not a mother, on the grounds that "mother means female parent", then he's the one who is the biological essentialist, not me.
The only reason to have tortured phrases like "birthing parent" is because of the confusion that these edge cases cause: "Who is the father?" "That would be me" "Ah yes, Mr. Jones, please wait here until you're allowed into the delivery room" "No, that's the *other* Mr. Jones, I'm the Mr. Jones who needs to be in the delivery room because I'm the Mr. Jones who is having the baby!"
Just keep "mother" to mean "the human being giving birth to the baby" and there need be no confusion, no changing "maternity wards" to "perinatal services", and no neologisms that cause more confusion than they solve. If ordinary people are supposed to take it on the chin and accept all the neopronouns and trans [whatever] is real [whatever], then trans and non-binary people can put up with this in exchange.
This simple action would do more to loosen associations of gender with roles than any amount of "birthing parent" silliness.
Because the 'men' who want to be mothers still have to deal with "okay, come off testosterone, okay start menstruating again, okay get pregnant by whatever method, okay go through nine months of the physical body changes, okay deliver the baby".
Biology can't be escaped there, not at our current level of technology. Artificial wombs and the like may be in the future, so eventually we can escape that aspect, but right now? No.
And the people who want a baby but don't go the surrogacy route, it may be that they can't afford it, it may be that they want their own biological child, but if they do get pregnant, they will be undergoing the process like women have always done the process and not like men have.
The first paragraph is something that is entirely correct. But I don't see how it's relevant. A man can do that, this doesn't make him not a man, and it doesn't mean that he's not a father - it's just a different version of fatherhood.
That's what I mean by "laughing scornfully at biology" - of course you have to deal with biology if you want to do a biological process, but gender isn't a biological process.
Richard is completely right. All the examples of "birthing parent" being used are in the context of brith specifically. Mothers day isnt about birth, it's about taking care of you.
And here we have it! We've gone from "nobody is trying to get the term 'birthing parent' accepted" to "Mother's Day isn't about birth, it's about taking care of you".
Ah, and when did this handy re-defining of the term "mother" to mean "caretaker" happen? "Taking care of you" can apply to any family member, a guardian, the paid childminder, the teachers supervising the after-school programmes. Are they all to be celebrated on "Mother's Day"?
In the very argument against definition creep, you've example definition creep.
This is why I'm arguing if the tiny minority of mentally troubled people who think they don't have a gender or that they're the opposite sex to what they biologically are are to be accommodated so that their disorders aren't triggered, I don't see why the other 99% of the population should be the ones to change terms everyone has used and understood.
Expand the definition. If a man can be pregnant, then a man can be a mother. It's only a socially constructed term after all, and we can expand it to include "women who think they're really men".
Otherwise, the trans and non-binary people are the ones who are arguing for biological essentialism on the grounds that "I can't be a mother, that means X and I am Y (or Z)!"
> Ah, and when did this handy re-defining of the term "mother" to mean "caretaker" happen?
at the dawn of the concept of "adoptive mother", which stretches back to antiquity.
> "Taking care of you" can apply to any family member, a guardian, the paid childminder, the teachers supervising the after-school programmes. Are they all to be celebrated on "Mother's Day"?
Don't be padantic. Paranting is a special kind of taking care of a kid. One that is legally and culturally entranched in our society. And also one that is not always biological (see, once again, adoptive parants).
> This is why I'm arguing if the tiny minority of mentally troubled people who think they don't have a gender or that they're the opposite sex to what they biologically are are to be accommodated so that their disorders aren't triggered, I don't see why the other 99% of the population should be the ones to change terms everyone has used and understood.
I'm the one that is arguing to maintain the definition we have always had "female parent". The only thing that has changed is the what we mean by "female"
Also, essentially nobody is confused about what their sex is. people just identify with a gender not associated with their birth sex. People don't just forget they have tits one day.
At best you could say that trans man are "biological mothers", but that's different **and has always been different** than "mothers"
You're using "adoptive mothers" the way trans activists use "intersex people" - as human shields. Adoptive mothers from antiquity to today are women, not men or men pretending to be women or men who think, thanks to a brain disorder, that they are a woman.
> Ah, and when did this handy re-defining of the term "mother" to mean "caretaker" happen? "Taking care of you" can apply to any family member, a guardian, the paid childminder, the teachers supervising the after-school programmes. Are they all to be celebrated on "Mother's Day"?
This is why I'm confused by this whole conversation - the norms I grew up with are "any parent who is female is called a mother", where "parent" is usually defined so everyone has at most two parents but is otherwise extremely loose. A parent could be a birth parent, an adoptive parent, a step-parent, a guardian who is close enough that you prefer to call them a parent, or a multitude of other situations, and any parent who happens to be female is called a mother. I know many people who have adopted children, and any of these adopted parents who happened to be female were celebrated on Mother's Day. Heck, even in my extremely conservative religious group, the Mother's Day celebrations that never would have mentioned lesbian couples still tried to make Mother's Day a celebration of womanhood in general and not just motherhood, since we didn't want to make women-who-wanted-to-have-children-but-couldn't feel hurt/left out.
That background meant that when I grew up and learned about things like lesbian couples and trans women, Mother's Day naturally expanded to celebrate things like lesbian parents and trans women who are parents, regardless of who has actually given birth and who hasn't. I haven't heard of any progressive push related to Mother's Day, and one could very well exist that I'm not aware of, but any woman who is a parent of any kind has always been someone I would call a mother, not just women who have given birth.
> I think the concern here is "constant dripping wears away the stone". Yes, things like this are extreme and silly and probably (but God alone knows, I am now at the stage of "never rule *anything* out as too stupid to happen") won't go ahead.
I agree there is nothing too wierd to happen. This precisely why I specified that the reason this won't happen is not its wierdness. I instead point out its incompatibility with progressive ideals themselves
> a bunch of medical organisation using the term burth parents
sure, im not suprised by this. I would be suprised if people started using the term birth parent in a non-medical way (birth parents day, your birth parent will pick you up at school)
I agree with Monkapp that in the specific case of Mother’s Day, it is extremely unlikely that “mother” will ever be replaced by “birthing parent” because for those who prioritize gender identity over sex, “mother” means “feminine person playing a parental role.” If we celebrate “Mother’s Day,” we get to affirm the femininity of trans women parents, while “Birthing Parent Day” would place an uncomfortable emphasis on precisely the biological realities that the people invovled do not want to think about.
However, gender-neutral language like “birthing person” and “chestfeeding” is, as Deiseach points out, increasingly common and required in contexts (like obstetrics) where biological differences must be acknowledged, and failure to use this language is increasingly punished. For example, consider the case study below—not something I went looking for, but stumbled on in the materials for a pedagogy workshop at my current university, where I was hoping to learn more about how to include first-generation and low-income college students. This case study, based on a real incident but fictionalized to preserve anonymity, was used to start discussion about inclusive teaching. The scene is set in a biology class during a unit on human reproductive disorders:
-
“For class today, let’s start off discussing menstruation issues in women,” said the professor. As she continued with the lecture, Chipepo found herself struggling with some of the terminology Dr. Clark was using. “Menstruation doesn’t only occur in women,” thought Chipepo. “It can occur in people of all genders.” Chipepo was trying to focus on the content of what Dr. Clark was saying, but she found herself repeatedly being distracted by Dr. Clark’s language and was wondering if she needed to say something. “After all,” Chipepo thought, “she probably went to school during a time when trans issues were not discussed. While she could be using this language intentionally, there’s also a good chance she’s just mistakenly using trans-exclusionary language.” Chipepo took a deep breath and raised her hand. “Yes, Chipepo?” queried Dr. Clark.. “Uh..yeah, I was wondering if it would make more sense to discuss menstruation as something that occurs in ‘people’ and not just women.” Chipepo paused, waiting for Dr. Clark to say something. When Dr. Clark didn’t, Chipepo felt like it may be better to elaborate. “Well, um, for menstruation to occur, one essentially needs a uterus, which isn’t just exclusive to women. Transmen and non-binary people can also have one, and, therefore, can menstruate.”
The professor sighed and thought for a moment. “That’s very true, Chipepo, but they were women at one point. Biologically speaking, females are the ones that menstruate. I think getting into all this language stuff is beside the point of the lecture.” Chipepo opened her mouth for a second, but decided against saying anything further. As Dr. Clark turned back to the presentation, Chipepo heard a voice behind her. “Dr. Clark? Well, they were assigned female at birth but they are not women.” Chipepo turned around to see Matt speaking. “Additionally, there are cis-women that don’t menstruate, and intersex people who, regardless of gender, may or may not menstruate. What Chipepo said -- using ‘people’ just makes more sense.”
Professor Clark paused again. “I appreciate what you both are saying, but I think we’re getting beyond the point of the lecture. For simplicity’s sake, I think it’s easiest to go with the traditional understanding of this, but the class will know we don’t mean just women.”
-
In other words, in my university, and I’m sure in many others, it is considered inappropriate and exclusionary to use the words “woman” or “female” to refer to the subset of the human population that normally deals with menstruation (and reproductive disorders related to menstruation, including the absence of menstruation in a person who would under normal conditions experience it—and I can’t think of a simple way to express that idea without recourse to “woman” or “female”). It is not an acceptable compromise to acknowledge outliers and special cases, but still choose to use easily understandable terms for the sake of simplicity and clarity. It is not acceptable to say, “This is a biology class, so let’s stay focused on biology and leave metaphysics and/or language games for other contexts.” The professor must rewrite her lecture and obfuscate her subject to center the concerns of trans people and marginalize the identity of cis women.
This incident was reported to university administration by an unhappy student. The administrators agreed that the professor had acted badly and provided an instructive example of what not to do. It is not at all farfetched to imagine that the students’ report may have led, or that similar reports might lead, to disciplinary action against the professor (especially if, like a majority of college professors today, she is non-tenure-track and can simply have her contract terminated or not renewed without any formal process). It is not farfetched to imagine the same kind of thing happening to lots of people who need to talk about reproductive biology, including primary and secondary teachers, healthcare workers, and researchers. The fact that “Birthing Parents’ Day” is unlikely to catch on, for reasons having nothing to do with how weird it sounds and everything to do with internal pressures to affirm the masculinity or femininity of trans people, does not mean that people will not be pressured into other bizarre, coercive, and obfuscatory linguistic changes.
> I … have to admit that I didn’t watch the video. I heard the summary, I don’t have much of a stomach for horrible things, I figured I didn’t have to watch this poor man die.
...it had the wrong ratio of enticing-to-horrifying.
I didn't watch it for a different reason; I didn't want to develop sympathy ("this poor man") for the person involved. It's very difficult to watch someone die _without_ developing sympathy, but he doesn't deserve any.
We're looking at a convicted armed robber who took a lethal dose of hard drugs and got in a car to drive around. He could have easily killed an innocent person. His death was entirely his own fault and entirely deserved, and the world is a much better place without him in it.
Holy fuck that is perhaps the least human, least empathetic thing I have ever personally come across on the internet. There is a reason that none of the crimes you listed carry the death penalty, and there is EVEN MORE of a reason that we do not give cops the power of summary execution. You need to take a chill pill and perhaps think about the way you view your fellow humans.
You do not need to think he was a good person, or even think that the cops behaved in the wrong way, to think that the death of another human is a tragedy.
3. The immediate cause of his death was Chauvin's actions. To say it's "entirely his own fault" is absurd. And if we're tracing the chain of causality backwards, does the cop who shot Floyd have any responsibility in him being driven to take drugs, or being reluctant to get into a police car?
4. Impaired drivers do not deserve the death penalty.
5. George Floyd was a contributing member of society with a family. The world is not better off without him (other than perhaps the movement that his death helped push).
You either are repeating rumors without bothering to verify them, or are deliberately lying. I think this merits at least a 24hr ban.
> Women are not particularly oppressed when compared to groups that are more oppressed than them
Is this a joke sentence? Maybe I just missed the tone.
I've no real love for feminism, but ciswomen have had their ordinary places nuked. Even /r/2Xchromosomes, whose title is literally about 2X, can't work for ciswomen. My wife has to find tiny little places on Facebook to talk about women's issues. And I don't mean "how do we stop Handmaid's Tale," I mean just plain-jane women talking about everyday ordinary stuff. And the places get destroyed every few months and new ones need to be found, like some kind of terror cells.
I have less data on this, but I've heard from friends that lesbian spaces have also been annihilated. Lesbians are outnumbered by transwomen who want to date ciswomen, and they aren't allowed to just filter them out.
Well, men have, for the most part, lost their ability to keep women out of their physical spaces as well. Would that also qualify as oppression, according to you?
I honestly wasn't trying to get into the definition of oppression or decide who was winning the Oppression Olympics. But I found the phrase "women are less oppressed than people who are oppressed" to either be a joke that missed me (quite likely, I can be rather dense ~~sometimes~~) or trying to smuggle in a conversational victory.
You know, I think I was being uncharitable there and took this conversation in an unproductive direction. Sorry about that, I guess I was just being butthurt because what you described is something many of us have had to deal with for a while now.
If I may offer a bit of advice, cis women should start their own communities - away from the mainstream platforms. Many of the edgier internet communities have already gone through this a while back and it does appear to be fairly effective.
All fair. And if you told me who is half my age "hey, all those women-only communities are going to get destroyed just like your men-only ones did," he would have taken some small bit of comfort in it. And also been amazed that the women just surrendered to arguments from fedora-wearing men.
> I have less data on this, but I've heard from friends that lesbian spaces have also been annihilated. Lesbians are outnumbered by transwomen who want to date ciswomen, and they aren't allowed to just filter them out.
This sounds a lot like my cousins in India who claim that Muslims outnumber Hindus and the government just isn't counting them right.
One of my culture-war hypothesis is that the tech companies are banning all of the non-crazy far-right people and the influential right-wing people, while still keeping around the crazies. This provides a double advantage. First, they can deflect criticism of opinion-based censorship by pointing at the remaining fringe speakers. Secondly, the only right-wing speakers which can be found are so crazy as to be generally repellant to even the moderate right.
This is why people like Alex Jones and Denis Prager needed to be taken off the platform. They were either popular (and thus influential), or moderate enough that they could result in convincing people.
I am fairly sure that this was a strategy used for at least some time. Then they started banning everybody exscept a few well known boogie-men such as Richard Spencer.
The first "white nationalist", to be banned from twitter without having broken any rules were Jared Taylor, who is a mild-mannered american gentleman, an early baby-boomer in age, who grew up in Japan with his missionary parents, learned to speak English from moveies which means he has a very pleasant and accultured sounding accent, went on to Yale and earned a BA in philosophy and spent a couple of years at one of the elite universities of france where he got a Masters degree of some kind.
He call's himself a white advocate and as far as I know nobody has found any text or video where he has said anything nasty about other races or ethnic groups although he does not shy away from established facts such as disparities in intelligence between races and ethnic groups and favors a partly genetic explanation of these things, well in line with mainstream science in intelligence research.
Of course, he has asssociated with people who has said negative and sometimes pretty nasty things about other races and by today's standard he is a white supremacist even though he openly acknowledges that east asians and jews are more intelligent than whites as well as that cerrtain black ethnic groups are far better at certain physical sports than whites. He is an antimsemite as ell, by today's standard, although he is not negative towards jews and feels they belong with whites but of course is aware of the great power Jews' hold in the US and to a large extent in Europe as well, relative to their part of the overall population, such as dominating Hollywood, Media, Wall street, certain parts of acedemia and overall being extremly overrepresented within organisations that have been active in pro-socialist or communist causes as well as organiations working for socially radical causes in the west. These are just facts, well established and one can think they are either good or bad.
CNN did a single one hour interview with him after the alt-right became a thing and he was absolutely charming to the black 40s lady who interviewed him and fairly laid out the case that every other ethnic group or race has organized representative groups who exclusively promote respective ethnic group's or race's interests and he thinks white's should have the same and also be allowed to have their own countries were they are the absolute majority and are allowed to control their own destiny, something that is completely uncontroversial when promoted for the Kurds, Tibetans and the Jews and many other minority groups.
The CNN could not pin anything negative on him and he did a brilliant interview and I believe the powers that be realized that he was impossible to make a boogieman out of.
And he was the first to be banned from Twitter without never having broken any of Twitter's rules and with no cause given.
I’m too old too understand a lot of this. I think in some sense I’m just not supposed to get it. My generation established its own identity by behaving in ways that our elders wouldn’t get - See “Don’t criticize what you can’t understand” - I would really like to understand how some of my old hippie friends are wearing red hats though. I guess I’ll reread “Kill All Normies”. Have a 50th high school reunion coming up in July. That’s not a lot of time to get a handle on this. Really, I don’t care about agreeing with it. It would be a comfort to simply understand what is going on in people’s heads.
<i>>> After 2016 (when my gf of 4 years and I broke up), I exclusively went on dates using dating apps. I have never asked out a coworker, a girl at a bar, or a girl at the gym, and I don't know a single couple in my peer group who met that way either. For some reason, portrayal of dating in the media has yet to catch up.</i>
Go read romance novels (porn for chicks). Zero of them feature a meet-cute on an app. Maybe not quite literally zero, but .0002% rounds down to zero. Top guys figure out how to date offline.
I am not one of the top guys, and I have no idea how to date offline. Are there good resources somewhere to learn about that? Importantly, I know very few women offline, and I was also raised in a highly religious culture with its own dating norms, so I have no idea how things work outside of that.
I think there's a narrative here where certain people are congratulating themselves on succeeding at derailing a new extremist right-wing movement.
However, the new extremist right-wing movements, insofar as they have been "defeated", are a figment of the imagination, either in beliefs, popularity, or appeal. MRAs, for example, aren't right-wing; they're left-wing. And they have (appropriately!) increasingly faded into the background as their causes have become mainstream; think about how domestic abuse violence against men is treated today, as compared to how it was treated twenty years ago.
Deplatforming has not eroded the right-wing movement; it has created a new, much more powerful, right-wing movement. My company now includes some ordinary, fairly bright right-wing people who have beliefs that, a decade ago, would have been constrained to a few very crazy, very online people. They have lost all trust in the institutions that once could be relied upon to hold these kinds of beliefs in check; they have lost all trust that there is any objectivity in terms of what information reaches them, and thus have no constraint on what kind of beliefs about the world make sense.
This has not been a successful strategy for the illiberal left; this last election is not proof that their strategy works, it is proof of how badly it is going. They are creating a monster, which they empower more and more with each iteration of the process. And frankly, a lot of the liberal left are moving to the right; the idea that opposing this insane process is right and good has not-so-quietly entered the mainstream.
> First, how does the wokeness vs. socialism calculus in self-interested people really come out? White male executives might reasonably worry that if their companies became super-woke, they could get cancelled, or miss out on promotions that go to minorities instead. On the other hand, it’s very easy for the same white male executive to say “Oh, yeah, there should be Medicare for all and higher taxes on the rich”, knowing that all this will get abstracted over the whole country, and his own pronouncement will earn him signaling points but not really affect the chance of those things happening too much.
It's not the executives making these decisions, it's the people above them, billionaires like Jeff Bezos or Jack Dorsey. People like that have no reason to care about "missing out on promotions", but they do care about a government that would clip the wings of tech billionaires, as it would reduce their own power, wealth, and status.
"On the other hand, it’s very easy for the same white male executive to say “Oh, yeah, there should be Medicare for all and higher taxes on the rich”, knowing that all this will get abstracted over the whole country, and his own pronouncement will earn him signaling points but not really affect the chance of those things happening too much."
I'm surprised to the point of "what am I missing" that more CEO types don't already do this. Particularly the M4A thing - it'd have a very modest impact on their own personal wealth and likely improve their companies' bottom line, what's the danger of even signaling toward it?
"So maybe it was just a really moving video."
It was genuinely one of the roughest things I have ever seen, and I am very online. Other effects absolutely factor in, but I wouldn't underplay the power of a really intense video.
"But it seems more like Twitter enforces the rules somewhat harder on the right than the left for PR reasons, without having a concerted campaign to ban the right in any kind of useful/consistent way."
While this makes a bit of sense, I’m sort of skeptical. Steve Sailer, Richard Spencer, and John Derbyshire are still on Twitter. Spencer has over 70K followers. I can’t deny that many far-right people have been banned. But it seems more like Twitter enforces the rules somewhat harder on the right than the left for PR reasons, without having a concerted campaign to ban the right in any kind of useful/consistent way.
Also, even if they did ban everyone to the right of Ben Shapiro, why wasn’t there a mass movement in favor of Ben Shapiro and others like him? I feel like far-right people can still find lots of far-right celebrities to follow, and Jones and Molyneux weren’t even central examples of far-rightists. Surely there are still enough unbanned rightists to satisfy almost anybody; this makes it hard for me to believe this had too big an effect.
This is not the same, Ben Shapiro is deliberately a funny, family-friendly right-wing pundit (or at least, as funny a pundit can be. Y'all may claim he's "cringe" or whatever - but Jon Stewart was a thing and basically epitomized the Smug Champagne Socialist archetype - I never hear the same complaints there , wonder why?.
The family friendly pundit is not the person who provides energy for a movement, particularly under young people. Take a look at the success of 'the Squad' - they're totally mindkilled, routinely display raw ignorance of the topics they discuss, and are generally not very respectable. However - they are *popular*, and they are popular because they have staked out an identitarian position in respect to their relationship with the established order. They are combative firebrands and not too concerned with how legitimate their ideological or technical positions are.
As a movement , whether or not you like those people - you *need* those people because they drive energy to the project as well as "create space" within the Overton window.
"Also, even if they did ban everyone to the right of Ben Shapiro, why wasn’t there a mass movement in favor of Ben Shapiro and others like him?"
Not sure if anyone said this, but maybe because Shapiro and the like forgo the strongest alternative explanation to systemic racism for racial disparities, HBD? And in terms of foreign policy and economics Shapiro is on the opposite side to the alt-right. A mass movement based on failed Bush-neocon policy?
Yeah this is a good point, "Right" is not a single direction in political space, it's just a vague description for "everything that isn't left".
The Shapiro/NRO definition of "right", which comes down to "Lower taxes for the rich", "less abortions probably" and "Israel first, America second maybe" is no longer a direction that mass movements are attracted to.
In Sweden, an NHS language guideline recommends avoiding the word for "woman". Official information says things like "Pregnancy pay can be paid to a pregnant person if [...] ze is unable to work while ze is pregnant" and "This is the case whether the one giving birth is a woman or a man". On the one hand, I would think that expressions such as "people with uteruses" would be too cumbersome to become widespread, but, on the other hand, unwieldy expressions for cripples and morons have managed to become commonplace, so it is not unthinkable.
Does the language guideline recommend that no one ever use the word for "woman"? Or just that in contexts where one is describing a general population giving birth, one avoid the word for woman, and use it only when a particular individual, who identifies as female, is being talked about? Because that's the guideline that most trans people in the United States want.
(Also, I think that translating the gender-neutral third-person pronoun from Swedish as "ze" is a bit misleading - my understanding is that this pronoun is seen by Swedes as just as normal as singular "they" in English.)
The guideline is for public health information given on their website. They present the sentence "Some women who have had eating disorders relapse during pregnancy" as an example of what to avoid. They also say that when the word nevertheless has to be used in order not to make the text too incomprehensible, it needs to be hyperlinked to a page that explains that "When we write the word woman, the word is used to describe someone who has what is usually described as a female body".
The Swedish pronoun in question is a controversial neologism (in dictionaries since 2014 or so) associated with certain social movements. So I consider it closer to "ze" than to singular "they". It is less fringe than the former but nowhere near the neutrality of the latter.
If only there were a short version of "person with uterus" we could use. Like "womb-man" or something...
In all seriousness though, what if we started putting disclaimers on documents which say things like "In this document the words 'man' and 'woman' refer to biological sex, not socially-constructed gender"?
>Women are not particularly oppressed when compared to groups that are more oppressed than them. This makes it kind of hard to sustain a feminist movement; you’re selecting for people who have accepted the social justice paradigm where issues should be about how oppressed relevant groups are, but you also want to focus your energies on a less-than-maximally-oppressed group. This makes it easy for other people to chide and hijack you, and it sounds like feminism keeps getting chided and hijacked.
I would say globally speaking, the "maximally oppressed" groups would be people of the lowest caste in North Korea, citizens of Zimbabwe, factory farm animals, etc. Any way for us to accelerate a transition towards focusing on their problems?
Those are fargroups. No one on either side of the Culture War is going to be particularly concerned about fargroups, because supporting your ingroup and opposing your outgroup are going to have a much more direct impact on the things you can visibly perceive on a regular basis. Humans are not the universal utilitarians that you apparently expect them to be.
I have a couple hypotheses of the causes of the rise and fall of online culture wars.
1. Boredom. Going down a new rabbit hole is fun, but eventually you get bored of it and look for something else. (Maybe this also acts in the form of the aggregate boredom of the public reducing the virality of old topics).
2. Reaction. A movement's overreach incubates its own opposition and causes it to lose momentum. Salient examples of overreach that get widespread media coverage update the priors of naive individuals to make them harder to recruit. This sorta seemed to happen in all three of the culture war phases. This also definitely happened with communism back in the 20th century. But somehow the dallas cop murders etc didn't slow down BLM. Clearly some movements are more susceptible than others to this sort of weakmanning. Maybe it's that the media are eager to distance the movement from the overreach when the media like the movement, and eager to pin the overreach on the movement when they dislike the movement. So the one kid who panicked and hit the gas at charlottesville when someone pointed a gun at him is the fault of every white person who wants to continue to have a homeland not ruled by foreigners, but the dallas cop murders and dozens of 2020 cop murders are just a freak occurrence with absolutely nothing to do with BLM going around chanting "Pigs in a blanket, fry em like bacon".
I think you've got it nailed down pretty good. The media in the west is the most sophisticated propaganda operation that has ever existed. and it affects the perception most people have of our society and what values they tend to have more than anything with the possible perception of very unpleasant personal experiences that is in direct conflict with the established media narrative.
Regarding the idea of hitting on women being viewed as creepy, I will second the idea that this didn't fade away but rather has become entrenched as the new norm, at least in educated circles . Allow me to quote from the 2018 Atlantic article, "Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?" (Simon is a 32-year-old grad student who has recently re-entered the dating pool):
“My first instinct was go to bars,” Simon said. But each time he went to one, he struck out. He couldn’t escape the sense that hitting on someone in person had, in a short period of time, gone from normal behavior to borderline creepy.
...“I play volleyball,” he added. “I had somebody on the volleyball team two years ago who I thought was cute, and we’d been playing together for a while.” Simon wanted to ask her out, but ultimately concluded that this would be “incredibly awkward,” even “boorish.”
At first, I wondered whether Simon was being overly genteel, or a little paranoid. But the more people I talked with, the more I came to believe that he was simply describing an emerging cultural reality.
This shift seems to be accelerating amid the national reckoning with sexual assault and harassment, and a concomitant shifting of boundaries. According to a November 2017 Economist/YouGov poll, 17 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 now believe that a man inviting a woman out for a drink “always” or “usually” constitutes sexual harassment.
...quite a few [women] suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out. “Creeper! Get away from me,” one woman imagined thinking.
Environment matters. You're in an enclosed space in an elevator there's no way to easily escape. Hitting on someone here is not a smart move. Women are on guard in these places.
*Hysterical* women are on guard in such places. You can escape on literally every floor, not to mention, escape from *what*?! Having to say "no, thanks" and then stand around in awkward silence for perhaps as much as 30 seconds? Nobody's going to hear "no, thanks" and proceed directly to violent rape in the time it takes for the elevator to reach the seventh floor? This is a culture of wholly disproportionate fear, not of sensible precautions.
I think the level of fear is excessive, but I'm not going to insult people for being frightened. Considering the odds, men who are afraid of having their lives wrecked by false rape accusations are overdoing it, too. Even men who are afraid of losing all their money and their children in a bad divorce might be overdoing it, but I'm less sure of that. Anyone know what the odds are?
Back to elevators. "Escape on every floor" assumes access to the buttons.
What did Watson say? As I recall, she just said that she didn't like it, not that she was terrified.
An elevator is a small room with a door that will randomly open to a random set of eyewitnesses every minute or so even if nobody inside the elevator presses any buttons. There's a button inside the elevator that can temporarily isolate it, but that same button also sends an alert to building maintenance and/or security that there's something gone wrong with elevator X that they ought to look into. As an environment for actual rape, this is decidedly suboptimal.
As you say, some people are going to be afraid regardless. But the rest of us can't spend our lives tiptoeing around the grossly irrational risk assessments of a few. If an "elevator pitch" is a legitimate thing when you're asking someone for millions of dollars (and prepared to take no for an answer), then it ought to be equally legitimate when you're asking for a one-night stand and prepared to take no for an answer.
And if the real issue is being annoyed but not terrified because you know it's just a proposition with no threat of violence, then A: you should say so rather than claim to have been terrified and B: your supporters and allies should say so rather than claim that you were terrified and/or rationally afraid of violence.
Rape isn't feasible, lesser assault is. And there will be a lot of people saying "Pics or it didn't happen".
Let's imagine a scenario. You're alone in an elevator at 3AM and someone comes in and starts trying to sell you bitcoin. I suggest this would somewhat degrade your quality of life, even if you're able to brush it off.
Maybe more so if you've spent your life in a culture where trying to sell things to random strangers is normalized so much that people tell you that you shouldn't mind.
I've been told that men (a lot of men? most men? I don't know) reflexively evaluate whether the man they're talking with is more or less physically capable than they are. Would it matter if the bitcoin seller is likely to be more dangerous than you are?
Why would it degrade your quality of life *more* if you're wholly used to it? Getting spam email trying to sell me things is wholly normalized for me, but what that means in practice is that I barely notice it.
Having people ask me to enter into transactions I'm not interested in, whether romantic or economic, degrades my quality of life in the sense that unwanted proposals of any sort are an annoyance and my life would be trivially improved by an infallible agent who screens all such proposals before they reach my notice.
But that's not a realistic option; society doesn't work unless proposals romantic and economic are made without certainty that they will be welcome. The more money you have, the more unwanted economic propositions you will receive. The more hotness you have, the more unwanted romantic propositions you will receive. Hence the analogy to the "elevator pitch". Either "man up" and deal, or retire from society. Traditionally, women *could* retreat behind (fallible) male agents who would screen their proposals; it's a good thing that is now an option rather than a requirement, but the price for taking the free agent option is that you field the unwanted proposals yourself.
As for feeling *physically* threatened by someone e.g. trying to selling me bitcoin, no, that's not really a thing and it's not a question of how physically imposing the man is. There's not much difficulty in distinguishing between literal robbers and the lesser annoyances. And it's not reasonable to expect people to never ask me to buy things from them or invest in things with them because I might hypothetically be afraid of them assaulting me if I don't.
As for "pics or it didn't happen", I'm pretty sure the elevator is the place in a typical hotel or office that is *most* likely to have security cameras. If an elevator proposition escalates to the point of your being actually groped, call security, and if they try to brush you off then tell them to call the police or you will. There's pics, so it officially happened.
Yea, "hysterical women." Because anything short of violent rape is totally chill. Groping, lewd comments, leering, and yes, rape. Not every environment with an elevator is full of bustling, watchful people. I recommend actually thinking about why a woman might be made uncomfortable by being alone with a strange man in an isolated environment rather than acting so hysterical your self.
Mr. Schilling has ably expressed my own sentiments on most of this, better than I could have, so I'm going to content myself here with pointing out that this "no u!" attempt to accuse someone pointing out actual alarmism of being the real alarmist is a particularly weak rhetorical effort, albeit tragically common among a subset of feminists. This is not a schoolyard in the third grade, and frankly I'm unsure if even a third-grader would fall for this sort of ridiculous gambit.
In the early days of internet culture (the mid-to-late 90s), there were constant debates between Christians and atheists for three reasons: First, atheism was just starting to become a mainstream and socially acceptable position. A lot of devout Christians were quick to argument simply because they'd never actually talked to an avowed atheist before and were genuinely surprised that anyone didn't believe in God, while a lot of atheists were quick to argument because they'd spent their entire lives getting flak for their views and finally had a place where they could fight back. Second, the internet was just starting to open up to the general public; previously, it had largely been the province of tech geeks who were disproportionately atheistic compared to the rest of the population, and the sudden influx of normie Christians was a recipe for conflict. Third, and perhaps most importantly, people just didn't have anything better to talk about. After all, times were good! We were living in a time of unprecedented peace and economic prosperity. In a sense, those early internet debates on theism were a luxury afforded by the lack of real material concerns during the Pax Americana. The conflict was *casual*.
That changed in the 2000s. The core conflict of the 2001-2008 era wasn't Christianity vs. New Atheism. It was Bush's coalition of pro-Jesus, pro-America, pro-war jingoists vs. everyone else (particularly liberals and libertarians, many of whom were atheists or at least secularists themselves). After 9/11 and the Iraq War, there was a real sense that the conflict wasn't between Islamic fundamentalism and secular liberalism, but between Islamic fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism. Yes, the anti-war crowd also talked about how Cheney was dragging us into war for oil, or how Bush just wanted to avenge the hit that Saddam placed on his dad, but there was a very real sense that Christianity itself was one of the driving factors behind American foreign interventionism. The debates over God's existence became less abstract and more heated as they became a proxy for Bushism vs. an unlikely alliance of liberals, libertarians, leftists, pacifists, and tech bros. The conflict was *partisan*, and internet atheism was only one part of it.
But after Obama's election, partisan politics in the U.S. took a different turn. Obama continued the military interventionism of his predecessor, which promptly killed the narrative that we were fighting in the name of Christian crusader-imperialism (of all the things he's been accused of being, I don't think anyone ever accused Obama of being too fanatically Christian). And aside from Obamacare, things didn't change all that much domestically either. Plus, the 2008 financial crisis (which, in my opinion, actually had even more of an impact on Americans and U.S. politics than 9/11) caused the first notable decline in standards of living since the 70s. People became less inclined to focus on abstract theological issues or even the very real problems of Afghanis and Iraqis half a world away, shifting their focus to home.
Combine worsening socioeconomic conditions (which affected everyone, but were perceived as disproportionately affecting racial minorities and women), the leftover remnants of the Bush-era Culture War (especially the debates over women's rights, abortion, and gay marriage), a newfound emphasis on race as a result of having the country's first Black President, and the advent of new forms of social media that encouraged controversy and polarization and echo chambers, and you have the perfect storm of factors to result in something like the left-identitarian movement of the late 2000s and early 2010s. While feminism may have been the "big sister" in the left-identitarian alliance, this was also around the same time that critical race theory and LGBT identity movements became popularized, along with the notion of "intersectionality" (i.e. the idea that the struggles of racial minorities, women, queer people, disabled people, etc. were all actually the same struggle). The conflict was now *cultural* first and foremost.
So what happened in 2015-2016? I don't think it's as simple as racial issues replacing feminism as the topic of the day, but rather a total repudiation of the idea that making the ruling class more diverse (in terms of race or gender) was a goal worth fighting for. The earlier model of liberal identitarianism, which largely sought to secure equal success for minority groups within the existing system, was replaced by a radical form of revolutionary far-left identitarianism that sought to topple the existing system altogether. This also happened to result in feminism taking a step down and anti-racism moving to the forefront - largely because upper-middle-class White feminism was a particularly egregious example of supposed liberal hypocrisy, and because race was more easily tied into both socioeconomic concerns and the "anti-colonialist" sentiments that tied anti-capitalism, anti-liberalism, and minority activism together - but that was simply a side effect of the real change in emphasis. The modern left has no love for pro-establishment women like Hillary Clinton or for pro-establishment gays like Pete Buttigieg, but they don't have much love for pro-establishment racial minorities like Cory Booker or Kamala Harris either. Even Obama is increasingly viewed as a weak and ineffectual figure at best, and a warmongering corporate shill at worst.
It's not that revolutionary socialism tried to replace left-identitarianism and failed, it's that aspects of revolutionary socialism were incorporated into left-identitarian ideology; many left-identitarians are now socialists, communists, or anarchists themselves, and almost all of them are at least nominally opposed to capitalism, which wasn't the case back in 2012. Sure, there are still some non-identitarian socialists like Chapo Trap House and the "dirtbag left," and some non-socialist identitarians like Noah Berlatsky and Charlotte Clymer, but they've become outliers, with both groups increasingly facing mockery and disdain from their fellow leftists. The conflict is now *structural.*
I think this account misses two things. First: it's all a function of the sentiment shifting leftward across the board. Which, sure, created many nominally-socialist identitarians, but all the same, many more non-identitarian socialists than there were before. Second: identitarians came first. By mid-2010s, they've essentially taken over all socialist spaces and organizations they could, and it wasn't until then that an explicit opposition to them started to arise. (Anything but an intuitive full support for minority interests, including identitarian mores, would have been unthinkable for a leftist a mere few years ago, some of it naive, some genuinely enthusiastic. The current increasingly organized opposition is really recent.)
By which I mean, It indeed is that socialism tries to replace left-identitarianism, and the only sense in which it failed is "so far". I believe Scott's take of "there's been certain memetic successes, but the opposition is institutionally entrenched" is in fact exactly right.
Socialists definitely came first, it was around long before the left-identitarians were. Socialism has been around for over 200 years, while left-identitarianism has been around for maybe 50 if we're being especially generous with the definition, and for less than 20 in its current form. There were semi-mainstream socialist and communist movements in the US back in the 1910s, but there was nothing remotely similar to the modern intersectionality movement back then.
I also don't agree that "anything but an intuitive full support for minority interests" would've been "unthinkable for leftists" until very recently. If you look at actual communist states like the USSR and China, they were incredibly nationalistic, misogynistic, and homophobic - hardly great places to be if you were an ethnic minority, a feminist, or LGBT. And that wasn't exclusive to the Eastern world either. For most of the 20th century, socialist and communist movements in the West tended to be almost entirely male-dominated, had a relationship with feminism that was mixed at best and often strained, and frequently ostracized and expelled homosexuals. McCarthy might've thought the queers and commies were on the same side, but there wasn't much truth to that notion outside of his paranoid delusions.
Different timeframes, note I was careful enough to type "a few years ago" without "until". Socialism used to be huge (and have commoner appeal, which necessitated traditionalist commoner values), but then it won so much it undermined its own existence. The developed west met workers' social needs without dismantling capitalism, the less-developed east had socialists take over and become exactly what they hated, then outside some exceptions in third-world countries by the 1990s all mainstream formerly-socialist organizations were on board with free-market liberalism and all remaining revolutionary organizations diminished to irrelevancy. Socialism as a living, inspiring idea was only preserved in academia, boheme and counterculture, this is the form in which my generation encountered it. Sure, boheme's and counterculture's irreverence is in stark contrast to the stifling conformity of identitarians, but the point is minority rights weren't associated with stifling petty-bourgeois comformity until recently either. They were associated with freedom and tolerance, and we were fully onboard.
PS: Of course there was something similar to the contemporary progressives in the US in the 1910s, the then-contemporary progressives, fixing social ills by prohibition. Thankfully, they reasonably quickly made way for actual social progress, here's hoping the history will repeat.
I will now give the left wing perspective on who is winning the culture war.
In leftist circles, it is accepted as true gospel that any amount wokeness and canceling people on twitter is purely symbolic.
Poor people still don't have equal access to health care or education, the wealth gap is still increasing, unions still keep not existing.
A mob of fascists invade the capitol, and three weeks later the so-called "left wing" of American politics is making nice.
All these incredibly canceled right wing figured get to be cry about it from the shelves of bookstores, or during prime time on the largest news network on the planet; and I bet ya'll can't even name one socialist as big as ben shapiro.
There has been no action on climate change. There has been no legislation on police brutality. Conservative have 6 of the 9 seats on the supreme court.
Conservatives almost won the house of reps, despite losing the popular vote for the legislature by 15%.
End Summary.
To people on the left, it looks like they are just barely hanging on by their fingernails, and anyone talking about "culture wars" and "canceling" is deploying rhetoric to hide the fact that they are on a 50 year winning streak.
I understand why the left feels like this. There has been very little movement on top rate taxation. But I think that is to miss why it's called the *culture* wars. On issues of politics, such as taxation and regulation - the left do not seem to be triumphant (nor routed, just that the battle rages)
But on issues of culture: What does TV and Film show to be valuable, who is praiseworthy, etc. I think it is hard to deny a leftward shift.
It sounds like you're saying the leftish perspective is "we don't care about the culture war, where are our practical victories" - and fair enough. But given that the left controls all of the major TV channels and newspapers, it seems that de-escalating the culture war, and focussing on policy is something that's entirely within the power of leftist actors.
The left controls culture. But they don't control politics, and given that they control culture, they figure they *should* control politics. But from the outside, they look petty and resentful for not being happy with their current wins.
The right controls politics. But they don't control culture, and given that they control politics, they figure they *should* control culture. But from the outside, they look whiny and resentful for not being happy with their current wins.
While I understand why you believe that, I have to tell you that it doesn't take a too long glance at European countries with fully proportional representation to see that no, they would not.
It's not that the left controls culture and the right controls politics. (In fact, the actual left and the actual right control nothing.) It's that the people who control both culture and politics are right-wing on political issues (particularly when it comes to fiscal policy) and left-wing on cultural issues. That's why you have billionaire CEOs who support right-wing economic measures like lower corporate tax rates while enforcing "woke" hiring and conduct standards within their companies. Or why the Koch brothers, who were infamous for pushing a right-wing economic agenda of deregulation and privatization, were also among the strongest advocates for increased immigration, marijuana legalization, and police reform.
You're correct that the Western world and especially the US keeps moving leftward on social and cultural issues, while simultaneously moving rightward on fiscal and economic matters. But it's not because of two competing groups who keep winning in one arena and losing in the other; it's because of one group that keeps winning in both, much to the chagrin of both "pure" anti-capitalist leftists and "pure" culturally conservative rightists.
The most prominent cultural shift in recent decades was from affirmation of common people to affirmation of meritocracy, and it cannot be considered leftward by any stretch of imagination.
Unless, of course, we redefine the "left/right" division itself as two competing strains of gentry. Then, sure, they exist and control different sets of institutions. And they sure look petty and resentful for not being happy with not controlling it all. But then it also becomes patently obvious why this control never translates to any practical change for their respective nominal (and nominal only) allies among the proles.
> To people on the left, it looks like they are just barely hanging on by their fingernails, and anyone talking about "culture wars" and "canceling" is deploying rhetoric to hide the fact that they are on a 50 year winning streak.
Then why are they wasting so much time and resources on issues that benefit ever smaller minorities of the population? If the left really wanted to effect widespread change, they would focus most efforts on the most inclusive category, which is CLASS, but instead they champion identity politics which disperse efforts along ever slimmer subpopulations.
As posters say below, they are focusing efforts on culture, but that's territory they *already control* and so wins are easy. Identity politics is diverting attention from unifying and focusing efforts on taking territory they don't already occupy. The left is frankly doing this to themselves.
The left wants a list of things, A: economic inequality, B: Environmental shit , and C: Culture stuff.
They are winning 70/30 in C, but are getting blown the fuck out in A and B.
If you look at the left's entire platform, instead of just culture war shit, you'll see that they only get things that don't cost money, and don't actually change anything structural.
Conservatives get everything they want except for cosmetics, leftists get to choose the wallpaper but nothing else.
I mean, think about the 2000 elections! That shit was crazy. Donald Trump won the election with 46% of the vote! Holy shit!
And in exchange, leftists get to set a couple nono-words.
> If you look at the left's entire platform, instead of just culture war shit, you'll see that they only get things that don't cost money, and don't actually change anything structural.
Because to change anything structural, you need coalitions to move against power. Guess what prevents the formation of such coalitions? Culture war shit like identity politics where the left ends up eating itself from the inside, which is what I was trying to explain in my last post.
Those in power want people divided, that's why the culture war gets amplified and co-opted by power. The left is happily playing that game, and is getting played in turn.
Stop amplifying stupid divisive politics and intersectionality above class if you want to move the levers of power.
If the left give up on intersectionality, what's left? The non-intersectional left movement failed for 50 years. If we give up on the issues of black america, or female america, what is the movement, even?
end scene.
Personally, I think that we could probably circle back around after winning some concessions vis. wealth, but who's to say they aren't correct? The wealth gap has existed for a while, it's just really bad now. If I give up on advocating for civil rights, that splits the coalition in the masses, and I somehow doubt
that the centrist neolib-politicians and the 'race realists' on the right would suddenly be onboard for green energy and wealth redistribution if I promised none of the wealth would go to black people.
> If the left give up on intersectionality, what's left? The non-intersectional left movement failed for 50 years
I have to say I'm a little puzzled by this take. How did it fail exactly? 70 years ago, socialists of any kind were pretty much crucified (McCarthyism), and now it's a reasonably popular movement with a democratic socialist who ran for President twice to great acclaim. That's a pretty dramatic turnaround, so I don't see a failure there.
Furthermore, Medicare was implemented just over 50 years ago, which was the foot in the door for a major leftist policy, universal health care.
I agree that there have also been some setbacks due to various perversions of neoliberal market ideals, but as above, democratic socialism is fairly popular now. Instead of striking while the iron is hot, people now strongly resist allying with others over comparatively trivial disagreements (that is, trivial compared to the benefits of universal health care, stronger labour rights, etc).
> If I give up on advocating for civil rights, that splits the coalition in the masses, and I somehow doubt that the centrist neolib-politicians and the 'race realists' on the right would suddenly be onboard for green energy and wealth redistribution if I promised none of the wealth would go to black people.
Well they wouldn't have a choice, black people would be well represented by unions that would stand to benefit significantly from a revival of labour power. There have even been studies that show that policies that improve class *disproportionately* benefit minorities as compared to policies that specifically target minorities. It's a no-brainer.
Furthermore, it's not even a question of giving up civil rights advocacy, it's a matter of giving issues weight proportional to their impact. Right now it's practically an inversely proportional relationship, rather than the directly proportional relationship that it should be. The petty squabbling then ensures that they alienate all the other people who normally might support them in solidarity.
Just think about a counterfactual world in which we were hit by SARS-COV-2 but identity politics did not have the purchase over the last 5 years, where national attention and political capital is spent on comparatively narrow issues. Don't you think there would have been more of a collective push for an overhaul of health care and worker rights like paid sick leave? A more unified left could have hammered these issues for over a year in the press with glaringly obvious examples everywhere, and it would have effected significant change, in my opinion.
The opportunity is pretty much lost now. Democrats will likely lose in 2022, and nothing will change for probably another 10 years.
"There have even been studies that show that policies that improve class *disproportionately* benefit minorities as compared to policies that specifically target minorities."
The weakness of class-based public policy is that it helps too many blacks AND too many whites. Any policy that boosts the wages of lazy ghetto enwords also boosts the wages of toothless inbred crackers. Middle-class voters *might* be persuaded to part with an additional $100 from their paychecks to assist poor members of the ingroup, but they know that a lot of that money goes to help poor members of the outgroup. If you want socialism, you have to accept that groups you loathe will get on the dole.
The effect of focusing on Woke politics is that popular (?) leftist economic objectives get neglected. But while that's the effect, I don't think it's the intent. I don't think there's a conversation at the top level of the Democratic party and corporate boardrooms that says "Gentlemen, we must protect Neoliberalism from Socialism. Quick, post a trans flag and a Black Power fist on Twitter so that the polloi don't vote for Bernie!" I suspect the opposite is true: Wokeness is seen as a tool to achieve leftist economic policy. It doesn't work - it does the opposite of what it is intended to do - but all that means is that a group has adopted a bad strategy.
The goal of Wokeness is to convince white people to get over their aversion to helping outgroup blacks. Wokeness involves, at its heart, a moral claim: Blacks deserve to be treated better. Their crime rates and poverty are not their fault; they are the consequence of systemic racism, which you, Whitey, uphold. Once whites understand that blacks *deserve* a $15 minimum wage and single-payer healthcare, the whites' aversion to helping blacks will be overcome.
Wokeness is not intended to compete with class-based economic policy. But it works out that way, because while some whites can be made to see that justice requires the use of Socialist economics to help blacks, Wokeness also sparks a backlash against the broad left.
Similar to Edward Scizorhands' response below, I feel like you're getting most of the details correct here, but also missing the big picture.
You claim that leftists want three things: economic equality, environmental protections, and cultural progressivism. Since the majority of environmental protections involve taxing/regulating businesses or allocating government money to green energy/infrastructure programs, we can lump that together with economic equality under the broad category of "fiscal issues" for the sake of simplicity.
Your main point seems to be that leftists in the U.S. keep getting most (but not all) of what they want on cultural issues, but almost none of what they want on fiscal issues, despite the fact that fiscal issues have a far greater material impact on most people's lives and are thus more important in the grand scheme of things. Overall, this leaves you with the impression that the left is losing on the fronts that really matter (i.e. the fight for actual structural reforms that cost money), and only winning trivial and shallow Culture War victories.
So why do right-wingers constantly feel like they're losing too? Because to them, those Culture War battles that you consider "cosmetic" are the ones that matter most! In fact, I'd wager that most of them don't give a fuck about corporate tax rates. Hell, most of them actively despise large corporations for enforcing "woke" standards in workplaces and on social media, for "virtue signaling" support of LGBT rights and BLM, for replacing blue-collar American workers with illegal immigrants who'll work for less pay, for causing mass unemployment by outsourcing jobs to India and importing goods from China. (It doesn't matter if any of that is true or not, that's what these people believe.) Do you really think Trump lowering the corporate tax rate to 21% even remotely felt like a victory for them? Hell, do you think it *was* a victory for them, in the sense that it meaningfully improved their lives or even seemed like it would do so? Of course not. At best, it was an irrelevancy they didn't care about one way or another. At worst, it felt like an actual loss to them, and an insult to boot: "Republicans couldn't get us any Culture War victories even though that's the whole reason we voted for them, but they can get tax cuts for their liberal cosmopolitan elite buddies on Wall Street?" It's no wonder the threats to McConnell and Pence's lives came from the right and not the left.
Below, you said "I somehow doubt that [right-wingers] would suddenly be onboard for green energy and wealth redistribution if I promised none of the wealth would go to black people," but that's honestly pretty close to what a lot of rural White blue-collar conservatives genuinely do want. (Well, almost. Other than the "race realists" you describe, who comprise a vanishingly small percentage of the American right, I don't think they have a problem with Black people per se, but with poor urban Black and Latino culture; it's more cultural than racial.) A world where the government prioritizes the economic interests of "real Americans" over the Wall St. and Silicon Valley megacorps OR immigrants and inner city minorities? I'd say that's exactly their goal.
The apparent contradictions of American politics make a lot more sense when you realize that a sizable chunk of Republican voters are either indifferent or actively opposed to the party's corporate backers and fiscal policies, ONLY vote red for the sake of social and cultural issues, and often utterly despise the politicians who are ostensibly on their side.
"A world where the government prioritizes the economic interests of 'real Americans' over the Wall St. and Silicon Valley megacorps OR immigrants and inner city minorities? I'd say that's exactly their goal."
Europe is running an experiment where social welfare programs that were enacted when the country was 99% Native Ethnic Group continue to run with increasingly diverse populations. I would like to see a graph of "Support for Social Welfare Programs" as a function of "Racial Diversity" for Sweden, France, the UK, Germany, etc. I believe it is taken as a given that the more diverse your country, the less support there is for social welfare programs by the dominant racial group.
Sorry, I was kinda vague. Leftist Perspective Clarification!
The left wants a list of 100 things. They get to have 25 culture war things and fight about another 15. this isn't a victory, and it's almost a crushing defeat.
The right wants a list of 100 things, and gets to have 50 free and clear, and argue about another 25. This is a clear victory, and it's just short of being a total blow out.
"In leftist circles, it is accepted as true gospel that any amount wokeness and canceling people on twitter is purely symbolic."
Wokeness and canceling are not coming from the right. Yet the wokeness and canceling keep coming. Assuming that W&C is not coming from "leftist circles" (because why would they waste resources on symbolic gestures?), who remains as the culprit? Who is pushing W&C if it's not rightists and it's not leftists?
The two possibilities that I can think of are (i) there's a third group, which has eluded being named, that keeps racking up culture war victories that neitht the leftists or rightists want, or (ii) a small subgroup of leftists is unhappy that it isn't getting its esoteric policy preferences, while the broader left marches onward to victory.
No, wokeness and canceling is coming from the left; if only because a majority of people hold left wing values. The right tries to cancel people all the time, but they can't muster up the righteous fury like the left can.
But, you might notice: For all the hue and cry and rending of garments about canceling, Jordan Peterson gets as much airtime as he wants on any news network he wants, and his books get to be front and center in every book store and library in the country.
You'd think if these people were being canceled left right and center, they wouldn't show up as bylines in major newspapers all the time.
It's weakmanning to use Jordan Peterson to demonstrate that rightists' complaints about "Cancel Culture" are overblown. Peterson has basically invincible job security (tenured professor) who intentionally joined the Culture War by becoming the Jungian prophet of disaffected young males. He wrote a conservative-ish book, and not buying his book and harshly criticizing his theses is not "Cancel Culture." Similarly, Ben Shapiro cannot be canceled, Rand Paul cannot be cancelled. Rightists who use those folks as examples of Cancel Culture are making bad arguments.
The Cancel Culture that rightists are correctly worried about is, as I explained in the original thread, the kind experienced by Justine Sacco and Memories Pizza. Roughly speaking, its elements are: (i) disproportionate punishment; (ii) of a non-public figure; (iii) who stumbled or was pushed into public view; (iv) for an essentially harmless violation of a rule (especially a taboo), especially one that emerged very recently; (v) that may not have been a violation at all once the full story comes out (see Nick Sandmann).
"(i) there's a third group, which has eluded being named, that keeps racking up culture war victories that neitht the leftists or rightists want, or (ii) a small subgroup of leftists is unhappy that it isn't getting its esoteric policy preferences, while the broader left marches onward to victory"
Your first theory is correct. The third group is cosmopolitan neoliberals, who are somewhat right-leaning on economics (at least compared to actual leftists) and left-leaning on culture, and keep winning on both fronts.
Your second theory is also mostly correct, but what you call "a small subgroup of leftists" is actually a fairly significant group in its own right: the leftists who consider actual economic leftism to be just as important, or perhaps even more important, than cultural progressivism. What you call "esoteric policy preferences" are actually the very core values and goals of traditional leftist ideology, which was focused on economic equality and class conflict long before it became associated with modern 'Social Justice Warrior' causes. And what you call the "broader left" is actually just the loose alliance of neoliberals, cultural progressives, and genuine economic leftists that comprises the current Democratic Party.
Consider also that maybe dating has gotten more civilized as time has gone on. Like maybe it's not just that people are older -- also dating, as an institution, which was not that old before, really, has matured.
I'm curious what you mean by this; what are some common dating behaviors now that you would describe as more mature than common dating behaviors before?
I feel like the Greta Thunberg/misanthropic/zero-sum/"let's go back to the stone age" type movements were on the rise between 2018-2020 or so. But that kind of ended with the pandemic. In 2019 I probably would've guessed Thunbergism would become the next culture war.
"My more intense feminist friends aren’t any less feminist, but they’re no longer interested in spending their time flogging the same points they did a decade ago. Been there, done that. And, frankly, we’re just not getting unwanted male attention at 35+ the way we did at 22. And of course if we’re still single and looking the men we encounter are older and wiser, too."
This part of the post is legitimately horrifying to me. If a woman still believes in idiotic shit with the same intensity and conviction at 35 as she did at 20, that's *terrible*. I would have hoped that at 35 any sane person would have figured out that unwanted attention is just a price you pay for liberty and complaining about it is bitchy and imbecilic. Clinging to the worst ideas of your youth instead means that you *didn't learn anything*. Likewise, the men she encounters seem in no way to have become wiser as they aged, since wisdom (or even just increased common sense) would imply no longer caring what some judgmental, nagging harridan thought about their hitting on a girl they liked. If you still think that the opinion of the worst women in society matters by age 30, you're a coward, and all you learned is to be a whipped dog.
Rather, what's being described here is our generation *hardening in its folly*, which God willing is not true outside the minuscule cohort of writers of thinkpieces about why they're still single in their 30s, but is a ghastly prospect. I hope they are wrong, and that people at large have obtained far brighter, happier fates than this.
Her statement basically boiled down to "we still hold the same core beliefs, we just mellowed out about them as we got older," which is... actually pretty fine and normal, and what happens to the vast majority of people who were very strongly and openly opinionated in their youth. The fact that you've managed to put such a grossly cynical and negative spin on it says more about you than it does about her.
Basically everyone mellows out going from their 20's to their 30's. But they will say "I still believe X" to maintain a sort of continuity of identity.
Also disgusting, but admittedly plausible. Rereading, I feel like "[m]y more intense feminist friends aren’t any less feminist" is specifically intended to head off this possibility, though. The writer wants to underscore that these friends have *not* mellowed out.
Yesterday I was harassed rather more than normal. I was riding my bike (slowly on the sidewalk). A man came up and asked for a ride. I said no. Repeat a couple of times. He asked where I was going. I said Whole Foods. He asked to eat with me. I'm giving him polite no's. He opens his arms and asks for a hug. Or maybe said "Give me a hug". I don't see a huge difference between asking and demanding in this case.
I yell at him, saying "Go away". He says a little something and goes away and stays away.
There were a lot of people around. He was bigger than I am, but I'm not sure whether I was physically frightened. My throat is still a little sore, and maybe I should work on how to get loud without forcing it.
I was somewhat upset for the rest of the day. I've had a night's sleep, and I'm alright now, except that I'm not feeling especially patient with you, but I might have had that reaction anyway.
Right, which is a consequence of being allowed the freedom of movement: you have to deal with the outside world. The alternative in practical terms is you either being chaperoned wherever you go or just plain not being allowed to go where you want. That guy can't be stopped by badgering him, and he *certainly* can't be stopped by badgering Scott Aaronson, poor devil. He is an *ineluctable consequence of your freedom*. You either have to suck it up and deal with it like a man, or ask someone to escort you to Whole Foods. The other solutions don't exist, they're fake.
Also, I venture to point out that he did in fact go away. Whatever risk level you assigned to this guy which caused you to fear for your safety was incorrect.
Okay, now map the same thing to being confronted with an aggressive panhandler hitting you up for money, who is much bigger and stronger than you are. Most of us find that pretty damned unpleasant. Indeed, having a lot of aggressive panhandlers in an area, even where there's hardly ever any violence, is a good way to get a lot of people to just avoid that place.
I was actually thinking of the example of beggars myself, who often accost me for money, and who, likewise, cannot be forbidden without an enormous grotesquery of tyranny. This is another case of the same thing: you simply have to suck it up or stay indoors. (Personally, not being raised by parents who were crazed with fear, I also don't regularly feel threatened by beggars, even if they're pushy. And if I did, it would be a me problem, because I've never been assaulted by a beggar. The worst thing they've ever done is move me to pity.)
Well, OTOH, I recently watched a street reporter interviewing people (mostly men, though one of them was gay) about whether they still directly asked people out on the street, and they got quite a lot of people answering that they indeed still do... (though nobody seems to whistle women any more, while they also interviewed one older person reminiscing that that he did it a lot in his youth), though I suspect that the "reporting" was heavily biased in the direction of "interesting stories" ?
You're dealing with something that adheres to a model of critical mass; at some point the reaction can't be stopped and you're just going to irradiate everything. Randomly throwing "birthing people" onto the fire didn't burn down the entire forest, but it put out a lick of flame and you felt it.
I sort of agree with Richard: Alex Jones is gasoline compared to Ben Shapiro's wet newspaper; no matter how much people want Ben Shapiro to ignite and immolate them, it's not going to happen. Any social pyromaniac is going to go left currently anyway, BLM is much more flammable than whatever the Mises Institute is pushing. You're dealing with a fire, not a hydra.
Philosophy bear here. I have been meditating on Scott's critiques of what I said. There's definitely a lot of interest here, which is why I really like Scott's stuff, he's got a sharp critical faculty that stops me from getting lazy.
I flatly disagree with him on canceling people- I really do think that treating people as disposable in that way is upstream of many of the more specific problems he points to- e.g. chilling effects, and that we have to make a point to oppose the destruction of people based on what has been called "offense archaeology", even if we don't like them much. I'm increasingly starting to think that even people who have done quite terrible things shouldn't be bullied about it years after the fact. I make an exception for people who hold formal positions of power which they are still abusing in the same way.
I thought his critique of my Marxist explanation of why socialism didn't take off was interesting and insightful, but ultimately I do think entrenched interests have to be at least part of the explanation.
His first counterargument I took to be of the form "if this is true, then why didn't white men band together against liberal anti-racism and liberal feminism in the same way- weren't their interests- or at least their perceived interests- threatened there?", I would argue a number of factors distinguish the cases:
Firstly, one feature of "the powers that be" in our society is that they are all -every single one of them- wealthy. There are some women among them, and some non-white people, but zero poor people. That means the ruling clique is perfectly unified on the necessity of stopping socialism in terms of their interests, in a way they aren't unified against liberal anti-racism and liberal feminism. This could explain part of the difference in response to anti-racism/feminism on the one hand, and socialism on the other.
Secondly, there's a selection effect that means that the kind of people who become very powerful in our society with regards to media ownership and access to communications must all value money very deeply. It stands to reason that they will therefore be more likely to go on the defence against threats to their money than threats to other kinds of status because selection for the position of "large media shareholder" is based much more on concern for wealth (threatened by socialism) than, say, concern for social status (threatened by anti-racism and feminism).
Thirdly, with regards to white and male members of the middle managers the literary class etc- how were they gotten on board with liberal feminism & liberal anti-racism but not socialism? It is possible to get these types to support liberal feminism and anti-racism on the basis that "they are one of the good ones", and chivalrously supporting the weak will make them look good etc. Even men who later get, say, metood, probably in many cases believed that they had nothing to fear from feminism because they didn't recognise their own past sins. Everyone thinks they're one of the good ones, till their vices are unveiled. There's no story you can tell yourself though about how your "being one of the good ones" will protect you from higher marginal tax rates.
Now Scott raised a second point against my Marxist theory of why socialism didn't take off, which was that he hasn't seen that much anti-Marxist material in the media. I would reply that, for the most part, it's been about denying coverage than negative coverage, but if you want to see a run of negative coverage around the broad American socialist movement, look around the time of the 2016/2020 primaries. There the strategy was not so much to refute socialism, as to constantly change the topic, i.e., to the real or imagined bad behaviour of certain socialists on Twitter etc. The strategy seems to be not to give socialism the same kind of media oxygen (liberal) feminism and (liberal) anti-racism have gotten.
Anyway, I'm working on a blog post on exactly this topic. I would love to hear what others think.
I mostly agree with you, Philosophy Bear. The "one of the good ones" point is something I've thought a lot about, I can even remember doing it myself as late as ~2014. Self-deprecating humor comes naturally to high-status people, especially high-status men. There's a noblesse-oblige to taking your lumps in trivial rhetorical or symbolic ways, it signals to others that you are secure in your power & comfort.
Scott's counterexample, of the manager deciding whether to support wokeness or socialism, misstated the incentives involved. A white male executive cannot stop wokeness by opposing it; he can only make himself its next target. If all the white male executives acted in concert it might matter, but a reign of terror is a type of collective action problem in which everyone weighs the risk of catastrophic personal destruction against the possibility of marginal public benefit. The particulars of the ideology aren't nearly as important when things have already reached this stage.
As I see it the self-interested wokeness vs. socialism calculus came into play much earlier, before the monster broke out of the lab, before the feedback loop of fear & silence took on a life of its own. Imagine you're a young rich person, circa 2010, and you want to make the world a better place but you also don't want to give up any of your power or comfort; there are real, substantive issues around race, gender & sexuality; why not focus on those? It's not a question of choosing a particular ideology to remake the world -- that's not up to any individual or small group, no matter how rich they are -- it's a question of participating in interesting, status-enhancing conversations about justice & oppression without feeling like a giant hypocrite.
On an individual level this bias is surmountable, so there are plenty of counterexamples of young rich people embracing socialism or even full-blown communism. But in aggregate, over time, most of them are going to opt for the philosophy that affords greater psychological luxury, and then reaffirm those choices among their peer networks, in classrooms, and finally in mass media.
There's also a background of neoliberal trans-national cosmopolitanism that I remember becoming pronounced in the 1990s, and even moreso since. This is a good thing; it's the culmination of generations of liberal progress. It also aligns well with capitalism, which wants peaceful workers & consumers, not warring factions. But it means even before wokeness took over, 21st C elites were extremely egalitarian in terms of race, nationality, gender, etc. even as wealth & income inequality were exploding. Of course they would rather talk about race & gender than class. I mean, I can never really prove any of this, but I'm looking at all these facts like I'm looking at the mirrored coastlines of South America & Africa and thinking to myself, "this can't be just coincidence."
"Anyone’s life getting destroyed is sad, but there are many people whose lives got destroyed for other reasons beyond their control, and I don’t want to privilege the people whose lives got destroyed because they said the n-word as targets for sympathy. My concern is more about there being a culture of fear, where people who oppose whatever the wokest 10% of the population think are scared into silence"
I'm not entirely sure why, but this response rings hollow, or off, or something. You care about a macro concern but not the micro issue (not that that is always wrong or anything). I don't want to generate a lot of sympathy for KKK marchers either, but in the interest of free speech (legal version), I find it important that our legal system go to bat for them when the government oversteps. Likewise, in the interest of free speech (philosophical version) aka non-culture-of-fear, I find it important that our extralegal system have a level of tolerance for disliked expression. As the level of punishable transgression decreases and/or level of acceptable punishment increases, like a risk assessment matrix, you get closer to conditions promoting a culture of fear. Some of that movement may represent the implementation of changing societal standards, but some of that just represents the will of a minority that happens to be in charge at the time and puts us on a path dependency. Add to it prevalence-induced concept change (yes, basically just a slippery slope), and you've got a recipe for a culture sliding in a way you don't like. At the macro level, this is your (legitimate!) worry. At the micro level, you (and I) are just another example of someone saying "where my country gone" after we didn't care about someone else's micro world.
"Women are not particularly oppressed when compared to groups that are more oppressed than them."
Women can't walk alone at night. The B slur is the only universally acceptable one left. Marital rape was legal until the late 90's. *We tell girls that their sex means they are required to have certain dreams and not others.* I don't see how women's oppression is not the most ingrained, violent, and normalized one.
"Oppression" to my mind refers to a system of resource extraction from one group by another. Everything else is marginalization (just as depressing, but not oppression.) We don't have many oppressed groups in the U.S. today! Women's bodies, workers' labor, native people's land and resources. Only the latter two of these have a history of international revolutionary campaigns or laws formalizing recognition and remittance (however helpful those have actually been)
Scott's answer to the former question is here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ and a response to your final point is here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/.
Unfortunately, I don't recall Scott ever writing an essay on who he does or does not regard to be a TERF.
Hadn’t read that one. BTW that hair dryer solution is bloody brilliant. I’m still stifling a giggle on JWB justifiable homocide gag too.
> the consequences were far worse and more destructive.
This doesn't sound right - there were a few blocks in Minneapolis, and maybe Seattle and Portland, that had some damage. But not like the many square miles of Los Angeles in 1992.
And of course, none of this compares to the riots of the 1960s.
We are not yet even one year out from the date of Floyd's death. I think it's premature to say what the societal consequences of this are. (I lived in Los Angeles in 2012, and there was a lot of discussion then about how different the aftermath of Rodney King seemed in 2012 than in 1993.)
Since it's been less violent and less disruptive and less dangerous to criticize than the response to Rodney King within the first year, my assumption would be that it would turn out better than the response to Rodney King?
>All in all I'd prefer the LA riots to what we got. It's not even close.
How many people died in all the #BLM riots combined, again? Because all in all I'd prefer six dead to sixty-three dead. I was there for the Rodney King riots, and you're right, it's not even close.
The Rodney King riots occurred at a time when "anti-racism" was aligned in a more constructive direction than it is today. That's not a function of the riots; that's something that happened independently when nobody was rioting. If you have something like the Rodney King riots today, the result is not "OMG too many people died, we were wrong, we have to strive for a colorblind society", it's a more intense and more violent push towards black identity politics. Modern antiracism is much worse than 1990s antiracism(*), but the Rodney King riots were much worse than all #BLM riots combined. Both of these things can be true.
* Because 1990s antiracism was an actually good thing,
What word is the Google Ngrams chart for? "transgender"?
*Google Trends
The word "transgender". I've edited that to be clearer.
I finally stopped being lazy and went ahead and replicated your methodology, and can confirm it checks out. I'm going to give you a minor finger-wagging though, for including 5 months of partial data in a 10-month rolling average - it's a round half so certainly no accusation of skullduggery, but in this case it also happens to return the local maxima. Cutting all the partials removes half the latest spike, while including all of them suggests a decrease since February.
I think there's a methodological problem in that insofar as "transgender" only fairly recently started replacing "transsexual" in any broad-based way. I would think a combined graph of the two terms (and perhaps "transexual" spelled with one N) would give a more accurate picture.
A quick glance:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=transgender,transexual,transsexual
"Transsexual" had an interesting trend in the late '00s, but the dominance of "transgender" over the past decade looks to be precisely the signal Scott's talking about. It's simply too popular to have been a substitution effect.
Huh, that's very interesting. And yes, I take your point.
Nick Denton is not even particularly close to being a billionaire, though he is a wealthy man.
"While this makes a bit of sense, I’m sort of skeptical. Steve Sailer, Richard Spencer, and John Derbyshire are still on Twitter. Spencer has over 70K followers. I can’t deny that many far-right people have been banned. But it seems more like Twitter enforces the rules somewhat harder on the right than the left for PR reasons, without having a concerted campaign to ban the right in any kind of useful/consistent way."
Twitter has been less censorious than other places. Facebook doesn't allow Spencer, for example.
The banning doesn't have to be done in a "useful/consistent way" to be effective. Here's Vox gloating about how no-platforming "worked" in the case of Milo and Alex Jones.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/5/18125507/milo-yiannopoulos-debt-no-platform
It's clear censorship has destroyed the voices of the most prominent people of the far right, so why wouldn't it work to stop a movement?
"Also, even if they did ban everyone to the right of Ben Shapiro, why wasn’t there a mass movement in favor of Ben Shapiro and others like him?"
Because the extremists are where you get the energy from. If Ben Shapiro is the most extreme person in your universe, and all he's arguing for is going back 10 years, that's not going to be "edgy," which is what gets the cycle started. The right end of the political spectrum has been unnaturally truncated, instead of being allowed to grow organically, which is necessary for these internet cultures to rise.
Also, Ben Shapiro is a loser. I don't just mean that as an insult, it's a whole part of his shtick; look him up on youtube incredulously reciting the lyrics to "Wet Ass Pussy" and talking about how wet his wife's vagina isn't.
Shapiro is promoted by the powers that be, because he's a vision of exactly what they would _like_ the Right to be; a group of five-foot-tall castrati talking about how taxes on the rich should be lower and pop music shouldn't use so darn many swears.
"Because the extremists are where you get the energy from."
I think you're going to need to argue that at length. In terms of triggering respectability cascades it seems to matter much more whether the next slightly more respectable+influential person has access to your writing than whether a normie does. The vox article suggests that it undercut their commercial viability, but I'm sure if you or I put in the slightest effort we could find whatever they've been writing in the meantime.
As an electorally oriented dem who really wishes we could cut off talk about trans rights/defund the police/open border's" and keep the media focused on our core message of "we are going to take money from the rich and give it to everyone else" I'm kind of curious to read why my preferred approach would backfire.
However, I mean this in good faith as someone who thinks your substack is worth readingf. But in the same way the left needs to wrestle with "why do we alienate older minorities" the right absolutely has to come to terms with "how come we've alienated everyone under 30". And just as the preferred leftists answer of "corporate media is why Hispanic truck drivers oppose trans rights" just doesn't quite cut it, I have a hard time believing "our message is perfectly optimized for people under 30 if only the evil SJW's at Facebook would stop censoring us" from the right. The conservative movements reliance on older voters and large scale funders just has to be part of why its media has failed to generate an appeal to younger people and you can't completely pass this off on censorship.
Yes, that's the way YouTube radicalization works, as everyone who's written about this know. It's basically people just watching video, getting recommended something else, etc. The internet is often about people getting sucked into things. Censorship therefore works, even if someone already committed can find whatever they want online.
As I thought the preceding sentence indicated that was not a contention about how virality works, but a contention about how fringes influence the elite. My mental model is that the power of fringes is in their ability to generate new styles and positions which influence marginally more respectable elites until at some point the normie piano teacher/youth pastor I had in 2nd grade starts talking about anti-imperialism and intersectionality.
Banning virality hurts the ability of Milo et al to financially support themselves, but doesn't interrupt the cascade of support for identitarian ideas from far right internet figures -> Tucker Carlson writers -> rest of Fox News & normie conservative media. I'm not saying the cascade has already successfully happened, I'm saying it is ongoing and contested. This suggests that censorship hasn't totally disrupted the ability of fringe groups to influence aligned elites. The problem for the right fringe is that there just aren't enough mainstream right-of-center figures popular with the under 30 set for the fringe ideas to cascade down to.
I think the left actually has been pretty successful channeling the energy of their extreme wing to move the country towards them. Yes, it hurts them in elections, but when they do win they get a much more liberal policy direction.
So if Democrats were moderate, I think they'd win say 50% of elections and govern like moderates. They've been taken over by their left wing and now maybe win 40% of elections and go much more radical, while always moving the Overton window (Republicans fighting trans women in sports has them giving up on gay marriage, Republicans fighting critical race theory includes them giving up on affirmative action, etc). I think partisanship is really strong and each side will portray the other as extremists no matter what, so for an ideologue the rational thing is just to enact policies you prefer.
On almost everything, the Biden administration is far to the left of Obama, look at size and scope of their stimulus bills if you're only interested in economic issues.
I don't think that the conservative message is actually optimized to win young people, of course it's not. But, even though it's not my politics, I think idenitatrianism could have won the youth if allowed to grow, and you can look at Europe for an example where the far right often does best with young people.
I'm a big fan of the Biden stimulus and I hope the child allowance is made permanent. But Biden didn't have big enough coat-tails to win statehouses, get anti-gerrymandering legislation or PR statehood. If politics proceeds as normal, R's will control congress from 2022 to the next realignment or crisis, and a stimulus bill will be the only major progressive legislation passed this decade. To consistently get 52-53% of the popular vote and not be able to do anything outside of emergency measures is just deeply frustrating. I kind of hope the supreme court overturns Roe because I think that's our only shot at congressional majorities.
The left has been (too) successful at channeling its fringe's energy into controlling speech norms in professional environments, but in terms of policy, we're going to get a temporary stimulus then nothing for a decade, while conservatives will have a 6-3 (or 5-3) Supreme court for the foreseeable future. Trump is a defeat for Trumpism in that he failed to satisfy the cultural/demographic concerns that animate the GOP base, but the party superstructure exists to cut taxes and prevent economic redistribution and the 2016 realignment + 2020 statehouse victories will let conservatives stand athwart congress yelling stop for a long time.
I don't think it's the platform that's 'wokified' it is the messaging. Biden's stimulus gave $350 billion to local governments. Local government budgets are 90% schools and *police*. This was a major sticking point and something Pelosi wanted included in the second Trump stimulus but R's fought it. So when it comes to actual policy Biden's presidency resulted in expanded police funding (or at least cities hit by Covid not having to cut back) opposed by Republicans, but would anyone hearing endlessly about "defund the police" and BLM think that's the case?
The democratic party needs to tone back on the woke messaging and win in rural areas because we have a constitution designed to govern a collection of agrarian republics and the senate isn't going anywhere. That said, places like Wisconsin where Democrats in 2018 got 53% of the vote for state assembly and only 36% of the seats are engaged in outrageous levels of gerrymandering that can't be attributed to geographic efficiency. State governor elections are purely popular vote affairs, and we get some moderate D's in red states and moderate R's in blue states. It's the malaportioned statehouses and legislature that are most polarized.
I have some sympathy for cultural conservatives, but at some point they just have to realize that their entire media ecosystem seems to exist to convince them that state power is an effective way of redressing cultural losses, and then delivering corporate tax cuts when they win. But, I'm sure the next round of kicking out the RINO's, and electing fighting politicians that are maximally offensive to young/educated people will reverse decades of cultural drift to the left.
Hidden in that "$350 billion to local governments" is the fact that "local governments" that are getting the aid money are mostly large, extremely progressive cities that spend lots of money on progressive policy.
What do you find "fully-wokified" about the party platform?
The right didn't alienate everyone under thirty. It wasn't facebook that did it either. The answer is quite simple: University education is mandatory, and complying with Leftist praxis is mandatory at most universities implicitly if not explicitly. This is a project that has taken the Left decades to complete, and calling it whining over facebook *both* discredits the Right as being sore losers about a real structural disadvantage the left created for themselves, and discredits the political ability of the Left for being able to manipulate liberal institutions so well.
Man I sure hope so, that would be great for those of us on the left if the right doesn't cement minority rule through constitutional technicality in the next decade. I'm only kind of joking.
To be more serious I do think way back in the 60's the right started on a path of defecting from mainstream academic/journalistic/cultural institutions and constructing parallel institutions. Right wingers frame this as a victimization by lefties, but I it was also facilitated by the fact that electoral politics/donor money meant that they never really needed to cultivate a version of their ideology that could persuade intellectuals and creatives. The rise of Limbaugh and Fox in the 90's cemented the dominance of anti-intellectualism in the GOP, and then Trump/Hillary in 2016 accelerated education polarization even further.
For weird reasons I got into a google group with a bunch of formerly centrist 60+ STEM professors/lawyer (and one truck driver who is somebody's cousin). Some of these old dudes voted for Romney and they're mostly weirded out by BLM/Trans stuff. But Trump's election sent them down the "piss tape is real rabbit hole". These are tenured profs at top 20 research universities who are spending most of their time doing legit research and the rest of their time speculating on what the server at Trump tower was sending to Russia. It's possible I'm over-extrapolating from anecdotal evidece, but the extent to which Trump was just maximally offensive to even older normie educated types goes underappreciated in discourse about what happened to blue tribe epistemological bubbles.
Competition in a hierarchical group can only really exist along one axis and with one winner. If the competition is social, the winner is often determined by who complies best to that standard, not who is most correct in an objective sense. See the replication crisis for example. Scientists who intentionally or unintentionally made huge errors that resulted in false findings thrived in many fields, while conscientious scientists lost. The scientific competition in many fields wasn't to produce correct scientific findings, but to produce content that make journals more interesting (so boring, unfashionable, etc correct science lost out to more entertaining, fashionable, etc incorrect science).
When people compete on ideology, only one ideology can be successful.
If your theory was right, the data would show that it is rightists who were leaving academia, while centrists remain. However, in reality, centrists were leaving/replaced just as quickly as people on the right. This is far more consistent with a competition to be the most left-wing, rather than Limbaugh and Fox anti-intellectualism being off-putting.
Besides, the left have their own absurd beliefs that are extremely off-putting to many and this is often merely palatable to the people in academia because they have intellectual rationalizations or because they pretend that those beliefs don't exist ('no enemies on the left'). There is no reason why you could not have a right wing-dominated university that is accepting of crazy right wing beliefs like the current universities accept crazy left-wing beliefs.
Many popular beliefs among the left are extremely wrong and if you look at how they behave, many people on the left may not even truly believe them, rather than want to believe them for moral reasons, social acceptance, etc). Are those beliefs really accepted because they are 'intellectual?'
Your argument is as correct, and as wrong, as arguing that social-democracy lost in the Soviet-Union because social-democracy was not appealing to the soviet party, because social-democracy was not intellectually persuasive. In reality, social-democracy wasn't competing on intellectual grounds, but all ideas were measured against communism. So social-democracy lost not because it was bad at creating prosperity, at running a country or was inherently offensive to bureaucrats, but because it was poor at being communism. Similarly, many academics are now losing in academia not because they are incorrect, but because their beliefs/work fails to measure up to ideological standards.
I think it's an exaggeration to say that the left totally dominates the social sciences today. I have been a human sciences aficionado for the last 49 years. And I haven't seen any decline in social science findings supporting my general worldview, in part because I constantly adapt to new findings, but largely because new advances have typically validated the best old research. For example, the genetic revolution of the 21st Century has largely vindicated the best human scientists of the second half of the 20th Century.
Granted, naive journalists tend to not get that tropes like "Race does not exist" are scams to keep scientists from getting persecuted by know-nothings. But if you read the scientific journals carefully, you will know what's what.
If they have to write false conclusions, doesn't that prove the point?
"The rise of Limbaugh and Fox" was an effect of left-wing antiscientific ideological competition. Marx and marxist thought has been in serious fashion *ever since* 1960, despite both him and Adam Smith having their primary economic worldviews absolutely and fully debunked.
Specifically - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardine_Dohrn
Actual unhinged leftist terrorists had no problem acquiring prestigious posts at universities.
Consider the following, that instead of the Right rejecting intellectual thought, that intellectual thought has been to lesser or greater degree captured by the Left and was (slowly at first - but increasingly now) used to provide statistical and scientific argumentation for the correct beliefs.
The parallel platforms and institutions were created because frankly, any institution that has to deal with Title IX will eventually be captured by the left - all of the things that were warned about (hiring quotas, deliberate discrimination against white people) when the CRA and Title IX were being debated are here today.
You may be able to say that "the Right has an anti-intellectualism problem" - but when the prominent intellectuals are erasing papers because they say the wrong thing and establishing ideological litmus tests for entry into the intellectual life of our country - there is no actual valid intellectual life in the country, just a class using the vestiges of old reputations to secure privileges.
""we are going to take money from the rich and give it to everyone else" I'm kind of curious to read why my preferred approach would backfire." You don't see how your socialist, and not in the "Strong safety net" sense, but in the "No one can accrue wealth without worrying whether the government will take it away" and "One's economic security is entirely dependent on who manages to take control of the government" sense, platform could backfire?
I consider myself on the right. I think the issue we have is not people getting deplatformed, but the fact that we're reliant on people on Milo Ywhatever and Alex Jones for "energy" in the first place. Both were largely just provocateurs. Jones is an outright embarrassment. Milo seemed like an okay guy at some times, I guess, at least when he was calling BS on obvious BS, but there was always a bit of juvenility to his shtick. Perhaps we could find someone semi-serious, next time, to try to red-pill earnest, intelligent young people with? I won't be holding my breath, but one can dream.
Jon Stewart was also just a clown. There's an important place in any movement for provacateurs and jesters.
Milo was only banned in mid-2016. There was no sign of the zeitgeist among young people moving right at the time.
Am I really "far right" by any rational standard?
Intellectually, I'm basically an heir to the debates in the early 1970s among data-driven social scientists, with me being closer to the neoconservatives like James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein, but carefully reading centrists like Daniel Patrick Moynihan (the four-term Democratic U.S. Senator from New York) and James Coleman and socialists like Christopher Jencks. Indeed, the first thing I ever published was a letter in National Review when I was 14 in 1973 in which I made a joke about Jencks' book-length meta-analysis of the Coleman Report, "Inequality." My role model as a statistics-driven opinion journalist has alway been Daniel Seligman, who more or less invented blogging with his "Keeping Up" column in "Fortune."
Way back then, it was not considered extremist to be well informed about basic social science data.
"...and this seemed non-fake and non-nutpicking..."
Typo?
"Nutpicking" is a real word in the blogosphere, and it means exactly what it sounds like: criticizing a movement by picking apart its nuts-est supporters. It's basically strawmanning, except the strawmen are real and just non-representative.
So another word for weakmanning, then?
Weakmanning could be built from invented weak arguments, I think. Nutpicking (or at least honest nutpicking) is based on actual nuts.
As I understand it, strawmanning is when you attribute a position to your opponents which they do not actually hold, and weakmanning is when you pick a small and nonrepresentative subset of your opponents and pretend that they are the norm. E.g. see section II here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/
Particular case of it. Not every weak representative of a position is nuts, although it's hard to find good examples in the culture war.
I think both words are of comparable age but came from different communities - weakmanning being from the rationalist community and nutpicking from the political blogosphere.
Even before dating apps got big, I didn't know many couples that met the "sitcom way" of the guy asking out the girl at random (i.e. seeing someone at a grocery store, gym, etc.). There are a few cases here and there, but it's primarily friends that are on the far, far right hand of the extraversion bell curve. The vast majority of couples I know (pre-dating apps) came about from hanging out as a part of a friend group, drunkenly hooking up one night, then going further from there.
Hmmm. I feel very bad for all of you looking right now (I'm older and missed this change). Approaching women was never easy, but if what I'm reading here is true, it's basically gone from scary and humbling to "why bother?". I'd say the apps don't sound so bad, but the men and women I know who used them didn't have a lot of positive experiences. They (we, I suppose; I used It's Just Lunch briefly, and that's sort of an app) met their spouses in more traditional ways. My wife and I went on a blind date. One of our friends got knocked up after a drunken night with a guy she went to high school with back when. Good thing he turned out to be an awesome guy. My sister asked her boss out on a date and they got hitched. Good times.
Mostly: people in my orbit met at work, got set up, or, in a distant third, met at a [thing, usually a bar]. I'm putting this here as a levee against the inevitable "oh, things don't ever actually change. Approaching a girl at a bar is unthinkable now, it must never have happened" type of comment. It happened, it went from scary to kind of depressing as you aged, and you scored once in 50.
Dunno - I think the "meet at bar" think still happens - what I virtually never ever see is the sitcom style "guy randomly approaching a stranger in a sober setting and asking them out" - that's really the "why bother" scenario.
Ah! Yeah that was never a thing, I think. :) I'm with you. TLP wrote a great piece about that exact situation: How Not To Meet Women (https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/10/how_not_to_meet_women.html)
It was never really a thing, but was for a time heavily promoted in pickup blogs. I think it started out more as shock therapy for the kind of clueless pickup-blog-reader who was afraid to talk to women at all for fear of rejection.
You do see it in sitcoms though... go rewatch Friends or Seinfeld. Half their relationships are started this way.
It does happen. I've done that quite a few times before so I know it happens for sure. A brief list of places I was able to either make out/get dates/get numbers from women where nobody was drunk: yes bars (people in bars aren't always drunk), on planes, in airports (arrivals and departures), a car rental desk, dancing lessons, coffee shops, technical conferences (multiple times). Some I've forgotten.
I do have the feeling though, that if I lived in the USA I'd have been much less likely to try this due to the prevalence of the type of feminism that Scott has talked about. Living here in central Europe I never really was scared that I'd chat up or date a woman, she'd not be interested and decide to communicate that via some sort of freak-out where she accused me of being a creep/misogynist/attempted-rapist. Asking girls for numbers felt very "safe", modulo of course the chance of rejection.
I did very strongly get that impression from one of the American girls I dated (very briefly), partly because she told me a story in which she had engaged in exactly that kind of meltdown with another guy, apparently unaware of how crazy it made her sound - she was "nearly raped" by a guy who did and said literally nothing that could have created any such fear, by her own telling of the story!
I'm not trying to brag or anything like that, I just think it's a huge shame that men are now (reasonably!) afraid to do this because positive interactions with strangers are one of the things that gives life colour. It's not a fantasy or fiction story. And although it turned out that sitcom style pickups were indeed possible, in the end I didn't meet my wife that way.
I'm in the US and fairly introverted, but I can still think of one time I sort of did this, which was at a mind-numbingly boring company orientation event where she was prepared to goof off with me (I don't really consider this meeting her through work because it was a very large organization and the people at the event were all strangers from different departments that seldom if ever interacted). It led to one not-good date.
If you weren't super-extroverted, it seems hitting up strangers was a lot easier if you frequently found yourself in situations where everyone was bored and there was nothing to do but either stare ahead blankly or make conversation with strangers (this scenario happens basically never post-iPhone).
E.g. I recall an airport security line circa 2005 that took 90 minutes to get through and I spent most of the time making very good conversation with the young woman behind me. Would have asked her out, and I got the impression she'd have accepted, but we were flying to different cities and lived on opposite coasts.
Yes, airports proved to be good places to meet women perhaps because on a plane phones don't work :) But I think there are still lots of situations where people aren't on their phones, or would rather enjoy an amusing conversation with a stranger than flick through Instagram for the 3rd time that day. So it's not quite so bad. My dating years were mostly post-smartphone.
Well very good then. I think I was single and looking for a total of 3 months in the post-iPhone world before I met my wife, but I just notice that I find myself engaging much less often in these types of conversations with strangers (as 99% of such conversations in my life were not with an attractive single woman). I suppose people might be open to them, but as an introvert I find it much easier to break the ice with someone staring at the pattern of the carpeting than someone staring at social media.
There are lots of guys on Youtube who film themselves asking girls on college campuses for their phone numbers. The girls do often seem surprised, but lots of them give their numbers. Most of them seem flattered and happy to be asked.
Were the numbers checked? Sometimes women give out fake numbers.
No, the guys tell the girls afterwards that they're just making a video, and I assume just delete the numbers. I'm sure lots of the numbers are fake, but then again there are lots of guys that did this (I watched them in 2019; I don't know if they did it during COVID or if they're going to start doing it again) and tons of videos, adding up to at least hundreds or even thousands of numbers. I'll bet that at least hundreds of the girls were sincere. :)
That's interesting, I thought the old "wiser" advice was to not meet women in bars, and instead to try to meet them in grocery stores, etc. Like this clip from Superbad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvV59uxbqgM
The whole thing being that bars have this expectation of people being there to try to pick up women, and therefore women are hyper-on-guard.
I don't know many people who asked someone out at a grocery store or gym, but I know a lot of people who don't drink, want to ask out someone in their friend group, and don't know how to do it or whether it would be socially appropriate.
The only way I've really seen that work is subtle hints communicated through other members in the friend group. It's a bit "high school", but asking out someone in friend group blindly has the potential to be even more awkward than someone at random. I've virtually never seen that. You usually send feelers through others to see if there's at least some level of reciprocation. Typing all this out just underscores the genius of dating apps btw.
That one is tough, because part of the expectation of "going out on the weekend to the pub" is "possibly meet someone", but the expectation of "going to the grocery store" is "ooh, they have two for the price of one on the new chocolate bars!" not "possibly meet someone", unless it's in the explicit context of Singles' Nights (did that ever take off as more than "article in news media about reporter went to one"?)
Not that I'm ever at risk of this happening but if I thought that when I just wanted two litres of milk and some crusty bread rolls, I'd also have the possibility of being asked out, oh God another place I have to dress up for?
Talking to women is now socially inappropriate. The messaging for the last 10 years from *women* to *women* , particularly from feminists is that "all guys are rapists, always be on your guard there are MEN around". Ergo, justified or not - women who haven't been made painfully aware that everyone is trying to sell you something have started to internalize the Inherent Danger of Men.
A friend on a different platform was saying something about having to worry about a new stalker every time they met someone - and my immediate reaction was "holy shit you need therapy", that person had significant traumas that they were working through - but the Life Experience was brought up to make a point about a perfectly normal conversation about "how much is it acceptable for a male person in the vicinity to flirt with people if eg, they're working on her house".
Instead of "you need therapy, the base rate of this thing is very low despite the astronomical consequences, and a few basic self-protection practices will basically stop this from happening in almost all but the most egregious possible cases" - the correct response is "Thank you A for educating me on HOW HORRIBLE this can be psychologically, B that man is HORRIBLE and maybe a RAPIST. You should report them to the POLICE".
When I think "getting a romantic partner the sitcom way" I think "date people at work" because so many sitcoms are set at work and need to ship their characters together.
"My concern is more about there being a culture of fear, where people who oppose whatever the wokest 10% of the population thing are scared into silence"
This is a complicated thing to try and solve, the fear isn't just made up of fear of social rejection, but also fear that speaking out might harm the good things that have come from whatever movement is in question. That's not an unfounded fear, there are a lot of countries around the world for example where gay rights are being undermined and removed. There's a big information deficit for all involved about what influence their raising their voice might have.
Also, it should be pointed out that a lot of the fear is due to propaganda designed to inspire fear in hopes of creating a backlash (which has largely worked), rather than rational fear that's proportional to actual risk.
Like, during the satanic panic, a lot of parents were legitimately scared for their children's safety, that they would be abused or murdered by satanists. But if your response to that was 'we have to search even more vigilantly for all the satanists in order to wipe them out so people can feel safe again', you probably weren't helping matters.
I wonder if someone, anyone, has actually tried mapping the actual number of incidents. I don't trust any estimation that is based on "i've seen n articles about people being cancelled". The exposure those articles get is driven by memes, not by reality.
Bonus points if you can do an historic comparison with say the red scare.
The difference being that _literally no one_ managed to summon a demon or whatever the fear was. _Some actual number of real people_ have had negative life reactions for expressing relatively innocuous opinions and beliefs. Is that number much smaller than some people think it is? Yes. But it's not zero, and the fear isn't entirely unfounded. I do _generally_ agree with you that one vector of attack is to reduce the fear. I think if fewer people were afraid and were willing to say the things they want to say, then it would be harder to enact negative repercussions. But If everyone did that _some people_, at least early on, would face real, significant backlash, so we also need to be actively fighting the impulse to punish people for expressing opinions.
> The difference being that _literally no one_ managed to summon a demon or whatever the fear was
As a kid who's mom never let me play D&D because of the media panic, I've never been particularly sympathetic to the Satanic Panic fearmongering of the 80's, but I wouldn't say there was *NO* basis whatsoever for it -- there was.
Serial killer David Berkowitz, aka, the "Son of Sam", who claimed to have been part of a Satanic cult and performed the murders as some weird ritual act:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Berkowitz
So the media definitely manufactured it, but there really *was* at least one crazy guy who killed a bunch of young people in horrible ways and at least claimed do be doing it in the name of Satan.
I'm a little skeptical that he wouldn't have killed anyone in the absence of D&D, whatever he claimed his motives were.
Pretty sure D&D specifically had nothing to do with the murders? Given it only came out 3 years before the first one I'd be surprised if Berkowitz had even heard of it.
Look, my only point was to say that as tenuous and overblown as the Satanic Panic was, it wasn't responding to *literally absolutely nothing*. This isn't to justify it or say it was a good idea or reasonable or anything like that. Just that it didn't come out of *absolutely nowhere*, because
we do indeed have this one very well documented high profile case of gruesome and terrifying murders of young people murdered by at least one guy who claimed ritual Satanism as his motivation (whether we believe him or not).
I am once again asking people to stop constructing weird fictional narratives about a dead gay comedy forum.
SA was never some even-handed centrist discussion board. Like most of the 00s internet forums it was about 75% lefties broadly construed and the remainder was mostly libertarian (not well-disposed towards McCain). Something like 50 accounts lost their McCain ban bet and only a few of those were actual regulars. It was not some great epoch-shifting exodus.
And they most likely didn't go to 4chan. By the time 2008 rolled around, 4chan had been a separate website from SA for years (and had spun off of an entirely different subforum with not much overlap to the politics boards). They mostly ended up at various spinoff forums where they accreted all the other bitter people who got banned over the next few years over things like "faggot" becoming dispreferred nomenclature and just memed themselves into fash.
4chan went right-wing because there was a coordinated effort by Stormfront to colonize it and make it right-wing. There were explicit threads about this on Stormfront, and the userbase there was much bigger than the userbase of McCain supporters on SA ever was.
I'm not sure I agree with all of this. SomethingAwful posed a problem that has overtaken a very large portion of the internet: what happens to you when you surrender totally to irony? When you lose the ability to simply understand the world around you without mental quotation marks over everything you think and do? Some people devolved into the nihilism of the altright, all of the "ironic" f-slurs and n-words congealing into an ideology, even if that ideology was really for the lulz. Some got overbearingly woke but stayed ironic about everything but injustice. They tell the same shitty Weird Twitter jokes they always have but pepper in "ACAB! BLM!" now.
My entire point here is that "some people" was not that many people. I am sure you could probably find at least, like, one guy who had the arc described by the original commenter. But it wasn't some kind of cause-and-effect with 4chan where all the McCain toxxers picked up shop to 4chan, waited several years for /news/ to be created, and concertedly tipped what was by then an entirely separate website to the right. The numbers and timeline just don't add up.
When I talk about Something Awful being the starting point for a lot of this stuff, I'm largely just pulling back to the link between that and the Shit Reddit Says community. That's the place where I think it was actually weaponized, using these issues essentially as a moral license for ironic radicalism and bullying.
That's another thing different from either of these first two things! Shit Reddit Says was GBS. 4chan was ADTRW. The McCain toxx thread was LF. If this is gibberish to you, please consider not having strong opinions about Something Awful Dot Com
People have a really hard time grasping just how different the various sub forums were/are on SA. I spent 10+ years hardly ever venturing out of AI or SHSC. I'm not sure there are many useful generalizations you can make about the SA forums as a whole.
Yeah, plus the fucking place has been around 20+ years so all three of those are also different in time as well. (4chan spun off in like 2003, the election was 2008, and reddit scolding was more of a 10s thing)
Politically it's definitely "were" at this point, all the boards now are very "woke" and have been for many years.
>and had spun off of an entirely different subforum with not much overlap to the politics boards
What forum?
I forgot how much concern there was about details of SA culture and history. I did hang out mostly in LF, so my view is skewed by that. I remember a lot of discussion about the exodus circa 2009-2010 and a lot of cross discussion about posters who used to post on SA that were posting on 4chan. How much of that happened is in my memory a lot, but it was 10+ years ago so who knows anymore.
>This captures a fear I have too. Yes, lots of people make fun of conservatives for freaking out over some proposal made half-jokingly by a tiny magazine with three subscribers, and acting like it’s the unified will of the entire Democratic establishment. But some non-zero fraction of the time, the ridiculous thing ends up taking over, and after it’s taken over it’s too omnipresent to protest. The window between “it has been seriously mooted” and “people are terrified of being seen not to whole-heartedly endorse it” is razor-thin, and it’s hard to blame people who aren’t confident of hitting that window, and sometimes that looks like arguing against it before the the mooting could be honestly described as “serious”.
At the risk of litigating a particular instance beyond the point of relevance, I think that quite a lot hinges on the specifics of what the proposal actually *is*, and judging it carefully and consistently. If the fear is that certain language will become common, showing its use throughout society is good evidence. If the fear is that it will be *compulsory*, it is poor evidence. Equivocating between the two is a huge epistemic problem - this isn't just politics, it's a concrete logical error - and leaves one in a position where one can feel threatened so long as any examples of their opposition exist. With only a little effort you can find examples of such all over the political spectrum, and I am extremely skeptical of ad-hoc proofs that the outgroup definitely does it more.
tl;dr: If you can't commit to a specific prediction, you're probably motte-and-bailey'ing yourself.
> That's the same issue, I was complaining about, though. These days, the distinction between "common" and "compulsory" is razor-thin if not nonexistent.
Says who? That's a failure of clarity and consistency, says I.
(Or alternatively: criticism is not the same as censorship.)
If a minority of people can criticize someone effectively enough that their works become inaccessible to people who would generally be receptive to them, then that criticism is indeed censorship. (Imagine, for a barely contrived example of this, a cabal of reputed movie reviewers agreeing be overly critical of a movie because they don't approve of the director's communist ideas. While technically they may be merely criticizing it, the effect as implemented is censorious.)
I reject the theory of censorship where the label is applied to anything that affects accessibility on the margin. Price tags aren't censorship. Advertising strategies aren't censorship. Search engine design isn't censorship. Distribution patterns aren't censorship. Negative reviews aren't censorship. Blocking isn't censorship. Counter-protesting isn't censorship.
An individual is not entitled to works that meet their tastes, nor is a work entitled to an audience. But there are barriers that should *not* be placed in their way.
Censorship is government action. Content restriction on the use of airwaves is censorship. Excessive public access fees are censorship. Legal barriers to publication are censorship. Age requirements are censorship. Fines and blocking and the use of the bully pulpit *can* be censorship when employed by officials, depending on more nuanced factors. Intellectual property is an edge case - actions taken by private individuals, explicitly backed by governmental enforcement.
Most societies agree that some common types of censorship are a good thing, and disagree on innumerable others. But it pays to be *extremely* skeptical when someone argues a new category of censorship is necessary to combat disfavored speech, or that a chosen category of speech is important enough to compel others to repeat it.
I find the distinction you're insisting on between government and non-government action pretty artificial. Surely if the Mafia comes in and burns your printing press, that counts as censorship?
A bit of a sidetrack, but I think that organizations which claim territory (organized crime, unions, street gangs) as proto-governments.
Right, and if the mafioso punches you in the mouth and you can't talk for a month, that's censorship too.
Or if he coughs at just the right time and nobody can hear what you are saying, that must also be censorship.
> I find the distinction you're insisting on between government and non-government action pretty artificial.
The categories are indeed made for man.
> Surely if the Mafia comes in and burns your printing press, that counts as censorship?
No. It is a criminal act that can be addressed through the standard legal process, not requiring a revisiting of speech principles. And if the Mafia cannot be realistically defeated by the legal process, then your problem *still* isn't a speech issue.
Search engine design sticks out from your list in the first paragraph.
Somebody is literally playing censor there - acting with authority to prevent you reading something, in a way you can't just refuse to accept the way you could ignore a bad review.
Not to mention that the search engine market has very few prominent players. Whereas it's almost impossible to coordinate censorship of something even by the Western governments, 2-3 search engines are being used by more than 95% of all of their combined citizens, and they can easily collude or be coerced into censoring essentially anything.
> Somebody is literally playing censor there - acting with authority to prevent you reading something, in a way you can't just refuse to accept the way you could ignore a bad review.
No, unless the search engine is itself governmental and the restrictions aren't content-blind. You *can* in fact refuse to use a given search engine, or any search engine at all. You are not entitled to an unbiased algorithm, nor is Google obligated to serve results impartially - if you wish to *create* such an entitlement, compelling specific action from an existing private entity is not the way to do it.
I think it still accords with central senses of word 'censor' in the English lexicon when I say that I censor what I say depending on context.
If the linguistic prescriptivists start hunting people down for crimes against semantics, I'm definitely not making it through the first few rounds of executions. But it behooves us not to let principles attached to one definition of a word leak into others - censorship cannot both be a terrible violation of liberty that ought to be resisted *and* a casual everyday practice for smoothing social situations. See "failure of clarity and consistency" above.
I don't think "compulsory" is a meaningful term here. Is it "compulsory" to say "postal worker" and not "mailman"? To say "black person" and not "Negro"? My impression is that the government wouldn't arrest me in either case, but that in both cases, if I used the less preferred term in formal writing, my editor would tell me to use the more preferred term (and think slightly less of me), and if I used the less preferred term on an Internet post, I'd have people commenting telling me to use the more preferred one, and getting angry if I pushed back. I think this would be much truer for the second example than the first example. So are these terms "compulsory" or not? I think all you can do is admit that there are gradations of social pressure and stigma.
My preferred pronoun (not pronouns) is 'she/he/it' (all three, with the slashes.)
But I tell people that if they prefer brevity, they may shorten this to 's/h/it'.
> I think all you can do is admit that there are gradations of social pressure and stigma.
Gradations, sure, and often distinguishable ones. This is part of the proactive argument in favor of precision rather than a defense for its lack - government action is not the same as doxxing is not the same as status games is not the same as motivated firing is not the same as being cast out by one's own support network. Conflating vastly different reactions is a serious mistake at the best of times, and there often isn't even a strict hierarchy of intensity.
(And on an object level, is why I'm deeply unsympathetic to an idea that this is something Democrats are uniquely or even disproportionately guilty of. If one hasn't noticed any government action from Republicans, one has missed quite a bit.)
Key word - "can". As in, "maybe, but maybe not."
Forget sympathy, I'm downright *hostile* to claims that government action is needed in the here and now to head off social pressures that manage a stream of anecdotes but somehow haven't resulted in those consistent measurable fears. IMO, the biggest failure of capital-L Libertarianism in the US is failure to be sufficiently skeptical of increasing government power to combat nebulous social threats.
The biggest failure?
Are you sure?
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/01/joe-biden-domestic-terrorism-bill-capitol-building
"Capital-L Libertarianism" meaning individuals who primarily identify as libertarian as an organized political force. Compare conservative v. Conservative.
Why is it a bad thing for language to evolve? Language evolution is natural and inevitable. I don't think I understand your position here.
I don't think his argument is that it's always bad for language to evolve.
I think Scott’s point regarding the language is similar to the “Whole City is the Center” concern, where we have perfectly good words for things that don’t need to be replaced.
I am not defending “mailman” because some of them are not men... that’s a good word to change. Maybe a good example is “handicapped”... which I think became “disabled” and then “differently-abled.” (?) Has this accomplished anything? No one wants to be unable to walk or thinks that’s a good thing, but we should all agree that those who can’t walk deserve respect. Maybe the intent is to encourage the (in my opinion true) belief that a variety of seemingly bad conditions can lead to a beautiful diversity of talents and perspectives, like the archetype of the blind piano virtuoso?
Those who don’t want to extend such respect - bullies come to mind - are going to hear the new word and apply the same disrespect to it, so what does it accomplish? We’ve only achieved collateral damage to people who too slowly evolved to using the new word.
The changing of the words seems to be an unnecessary symptom of what was happening anyway: an increase in respect for previously marginalized groups. But maybe the two phenomena are inseparable, or the word change is in some way causal rather than symptomatic. I’m not sure.
There's a really great point on this that Freddie deBoer made back in late April on this that I hope he won't mind if I post here (seriously, Freddie, if it's an issue please let me know and I'll delete this post):
"Social justice politics are obsessive about the linguistic, symbolic, cultural, discursive, and academic to the detriment of the material. The reasons for this are pretty plain: the parts of contemporary society that the social justice world controls are media, academia, the arts, nonprofits - in other words, the domains of ideas, the immaterial. The man with only a hammer seeing a world full of nails, etc. But this means that basic aspects of material suffering ultimately receive scant attention. I already mentioned above that Meghan Markle received vastly more press coverage in that news cycle than the Black-white wealth gap that touches the lives of every Black American. From the standpoint of promoting mass racial justice this makes no sense. But the wealth gap is a difficult problem that the cultural industries have no capacity to solve, and they don’t spend a lot of time reporting on poor Black people. Because the British royal family is sensitive to public perception they fixated on that problem which they thought they could change. Sadly for poor Black people the wealth gap does not have a public relations team, nor is entry into wealthy royal families a realistic path for most. The triumph of the linguistic overall the practical can be found all over this world. For example, consider the recent rigid policing of the term 'person suffering from homelessness' over 'homeless person.' The thinking is that the former stresses that homelessness happens to some people at some point while the latter defines them by that condition. I’m sympathetic to this reasoning; it makes sense to me. I’m also sure that if you polled a thousand homeless people you would not find a single one who would list this among their top ten problems. But when you’re a bookish arts kid language is everything, and anyway, social justice politics does not have anything substantial to offer the homeless in material terms. So language policing it is."
It also gets to me that Confederate statues get more attention than contemporary slavery.
Do you mean when a black person has to see a Confederate statue every day, that statue gets more attention from that black person than slavery in another country does?
> I think Scott’s point regarding the language is similar to the “Whole City is the Center” concern, where we have perfectly good words for things that don’t need to be replaced.
Thing is, language evolution only occurs when a bunch of people all think they newer way of talking about something is better than the previous way. So clearly, they didn't think it was "perfectly good" before. No one controls language. If you notice everyone around you is using language differently from you, they almost certainly have good reasons.
I just think your/scotts model for how lanugage evolution works is kind of ridiculous. Language is a fundementally distributed system. If you want to use "negro" instead of "African American", no one is stopping you from doing so. But this decision you have made is revealing. Sometimes, for some language choices, all it reveals is a cultural difference, perhaps as a result of age. Sometimes, it reveals a lack of concern for a specific group.
> Those who don’t want to extend such respect - bullies come to mind - are going to hear the new word and apply the same disrespect to it, so what does it accomplish?
You are mistaken. Bullies hear the new words and call them stupid. They fight the change in language. In doing so, they reveal themselves to be bullies and people can decide whether or not to subject them to social pressure.
To be perfectly clear, changing language isn't going to magically fix inequality/racism/oppression. But to think language change is arbitrary is kind of insane. If everyone around you is updating their language, they have good reasons.
"The decision you make is revealing" is exactly the kind of implicit threat that lets the powerful choose what language is and isn't allowed, and embed their own ideology and values in the very words we are allowed to write.
Oh, you're allowed to write what you will - it's just that others are allowed to write in response. What kind of system would you prefer, that would make you feel safe against such "implicit threats"?
"Thing is, language evolution only occurs when a bunch of people all think they newer way of talking about something is better than the previous way."
No, that's not at all true. There are lots of reasons why language evolution occurs. Do you seriously think that the Great Vowel Shift occurred because a bunch of people said "Gee, the English language would be a lot better if out vowels changed?"
"If you notice everyone around you is using language differently from you, they almost certainly have good reasons."
It's reasonable to conclude they have reasons. It's not reasonable to conclude that they have *good* reasons. And your argument can apply even better the other way around: if YOU think that your new way of speaking is "better", well, there's probably good reasons for why people are speaking the traditional way. You making a bizarre reverse Chesterton Fence argument.
"I just think your/scotts model for how lanugage evolution works is kind of ridiculous. Language is a fundementally distributed system."
So you believe that failing to distinguish proper nouns by capitalizing their initial letter makes the language better? You think the English language would be better if we spelled "language" as "lanugage" and "fundamentally" as "fundementally"?
"You are mistaken. Bullies hear the new words and call them stupid. They fight the change in language. In doing so, they reveal themselves to be bullies and people can decide whether or not to subject them to social pressure."
It logically follow from this that you believe that *only* bullies fail to adopt the new form, and so if someone fails to adopt the new form, it is completely legitimate to conclude that they are a bully. This is a terrible attitude, and is itself a form of bullying.
About 20 years ago, I wrote something like "the candidate's speech was schizophrenic," meaning, of course, that it displayed multiple personalities. A geneticist wrote to ask me not to use "schizophrenic" in that common but incorrect sense. At first I was going to scoff, but the more I thought about it, I realized:
A. Schizophrenics don't have multiple personalities.
B. Schizophrenics and their loved ones have enough problems as it is without pundits like me, who ought to know better, making their lives harder by helping reinforce in the public mind a misimpression about schizophrenia by using a lazy cliche.
So I haven't, to the best of my knowledge, used "schizophrenic" in the metaphorical sense in many years.
But I haven't noticed this being a terribly popular example of language reform.
I wonder why? In the past, many examples of language reform tended to come from the "euphemism treadmill," where a term has become associated with empirical tendencies toward bad things, so a new term is invented to make people forget the statistical correlations. But then they notice them anyway, so a yet another new term has to be invented.
In contrast, not using "schizophrenic" to mean "multiple personalities" would be language reform to make language more empirically realistic. Perhaps there isn't much of a constituency for that?
> I am not defending “mailman” because some of them are not men... that’s a good word to change.
I was almost agreeing with this, but... I don’t agree with the sentence “women are not part of mankind”. So... OK, I’m not sure exactly what point I’m trying to make, but I’m sort of pointing towards “word meanings are complicated, and if you just split compound words into pieces and interpret those pieces as phrases, you’re probably doing it wrong”.
I would defend “understand”, even if sometimes what it refers to happens while sitting, or it refers to things that are below the person that is understanding.
Language change is natural and inevitable. Resistance to change is also natural and inevitable. (I'd say it's more important even: if people changed the language whenever they felt like, language would change so fast people would have a hard time understanding their children or grandparents. If language didn't change at all, except inventing new terms for new concepts, it wouldn't pose any major problem.)
In any case, the objection wasn't to spontaneous language change, but to (de facto) compulsory, politicized language change. And it could also apply to all sorts of silly proposals other than language change.
I'd go so far as to say that language change is overall a bad thing, even when it's spontaneous, because it creates an unnecessary language barrier between ourselves and the massive corpus of great literary works that our ancestors have left us.
Shakespeare is mostly lost on us these days; even those of us who have spent enough time reading the footnotes to understand what all the words mean are missing a lot of the shades of meaning. Overall it would be better if we'd stuck with Latin.
Which Latin? I have a preference, but I think the Catholic Church disagrees.
More to the point, individuals change language to suit their needs - it's already a known problem in the more successful conlangs that the generation raised on it as a first language is going to deviate from the prescribed rules. There's room and rationale for a relatively static tongue for official use, but you'd fight an eternal uphill battle to keep it universal and quite a bit of valuable art is going to be generated in the vulgate... Shakespeare very much included.
I suspect there's also a loss in needing to learn the meanings of words and phrases from footnotes compared to knowing them already and then getting the impact from the play.
In 2026 when Scott Alexander gets cancelled for having used the word ""Negro"" please include me in the screenshot.
Scott won't be banned from Substack, because Substack's entire business model is about being willing to touch untouchables (a form of cartel defection).
It's more likely that Substack itself will be targetted.
If we're going full literal, I would prefer to be covered with tar than to be shot at (obviously with bullets, but even most arrows are deadly).
Unless this is about my Commonwealth spelling?
Wasn't he already cancelled for calling feminists Voldemort?
So far away? How about right now?
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/texas-places-with-negro-in-name-illegal-15803109.php
"'Negro' is an offensive term, so why has it remained in the name of at least 26 Texas places?
Texas, it's time for a change.
Despite a law passed in the state in 1991 to remove the word "Negro" from the names of places such as creeks and valleys, at least 26 Texas locations still feature the word, according to Reese Oxner with Houston Public Media. The issue seems to rest in the fact that the power to change the names of such locations lies with the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, and the federal government blocked the changes.
“Negro Creek,” “Negro Hollow”, "Dead Negro Draw", "Negro Creek" and “Negrohead Bluff” are the names of just a few of the places you'll find on a tour through the Lone Star State — and state officials are adamant about getting them renamed.
Harris County commissioner Rodney Ellis sponsored the billing banning the word's use in 1991, and he told Oxner it's time to right "a lot of wrongs that we just ignored and oftentimes perpetrated for decades, for centuries." Ellis told Houston Public Media he wanted to rename the locations after African Americans who have made significant contributions to the state.
...Texas NAACP President Gary Bledsoe didn't know the names were never changed until being contacted by NPR for their article, as reported by Oxner. He, like Ellis, was under the impression that then-Texas Governor Ann Richards signed the bill into law and fixed the problem at hand.
“Negro is still offensive. It’s outrageous,” Bledsoe said. “Offensive names have no place in the public domain.”
Now fair enough, I can see why you might want to change "Dead Negro Draw" to something a little less morbid, but seemingly this usage would get Scott's comment Banned In Texas 😁
I've always perceived such changes in the language as examples of the virtue of precision. It's indeed can be weird at first to see some new terms like "menstruators" and we can understand and empathize with people who annoyed by them. But nevertheless this term can be more precise than "woman" in some context and therefore good.
And I believe so have you as you've written about it yourself here https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ So what have changed? Am I missing some insights?
"Menstruators" is dumb, because it is taking a function and making it the definition. Would you prefer to change "human being" to "upright walker"?
Which is why it's only used in the narrow context of the function. Like on packaging for menstrual products.
It would be a mistake to consider a "menstruator" a substitute for a "woman".
"Woman" is a bundle term, a huge cluster with all different sorts of meanings and connotations. While "menstruator" refers to a person capable of concrete function. We usually include the meaning of a "menstruator" into one of the meanings of a "woman" but it's not accurate as there are both women who do not mestruate and non-women who do. Thus a new term, which can be used when we need to talk specifically about a group of people capable of menstruating.
By the same token, if we want to talk specifically about creatures that walk upright, excluding people who can't do it and including some extinct hominids - we can use a new term "upright walker" and it will be more precise and therefore good.
Are post menopausal women considered menstrautors?
No they are not.
Or "featherless biped"... but we all know the problems with these.
I've always wanted to show Plato a kangaroo...
> I've always perceived such changes in the language as examples of the virtue of precision.
Sure, but if you need to know if someone passed through menopause before knowing which term you must use to refer to them, you might be leaning too much on that particular virtue. I agree that in *some* contexts it might be useful, but you probably don’t need to use “Homo sapiens” instead of “people” most of the time.
Well that's fair. Have there been any problems in this regard?
Also the particular absurdity in this case was that the complaints were specifically about "Mothers Day" then the evidence cited was someone specifically talking about pre and post natal healthcare. Its one thing to say "a tiny number of people are doing this thing, but it could get bigger" but a significantly higher burden of proof if you are saying "people are doing a thing in an entirely different context that is similar, but they could do it in a different context and that would be bad".
As was pointed out on the subreddit there's also an asymmetric element to this. A lot of right wing commentators were talking about the "birthing people's day" thing, or Biden banning meat, and it was barely discussed on the left, and if it was it was in the context of "why are the right going on about this crazy thing". So the perception of how common something is, and therefore how likely the thing is to become prevalent is distorted.
(For balance, the left also has a distorted view of what is common belief on the right, e.g. would ban abortion tomorrow and make Trump president for life).
The incentive structure of the fractured and click based media landscape means that people are going to optimise for stories that maximise the outrage on their side, and since people are in media silos they won't notice the disconnect that the other side isn't actually talking about banning meat or whatever. So the result is that its profitable to make up things that are maximally outrage generating and ignore reality.
Well sometimes specific predictions are not possible, but unspecific predictions end up being true anyway. Consider it as a prediction that can be taken as a highly specific meta-prediction, i.e. if A occurs then something bad will occur, {W,X,Y} are in the set of bad things that conservatives are afraid of, perhaps in increasing order of "badness". Conservatives, mouths flecked with spittle, claim W will happen if you allow A, but actually Z happens. It's a far worse outcome, and those conservatives will claim they were right all along, meanwhile progressives will point and laugh and say how wrong conservatives are because they predicted X and Z actually happened.
For an example, here in the UK there was a right wing point against gay marriage that came up when that was a contentious issue, something along the lines of allowing gay marriage will allow the slippery slope to bestiality.
What instead happened was that the same advocate organisations for gay marriage switched to transgender/transsexual advocacy, with the actual material outcome being advocating for procedures and treatments that, as a material result of their application, sterilise teenagers and young adults. This is, I expect, going to trigger a lot of people and is probably unwise to do so under a non anonymous account, but when a real "definitely not a
slippery slope guy, just treat these people fairly" ends up with "we need to advocate for the sterilisation of this group of people" ('so they can be happy and disagreeing makes you a hateful evil nazi bigot') then perhaps introspection is desperately needed, as the piles of skulls lining the path have clearly not been noticed.
Or to put it another way, when the conservatives freaking out and sounding like paranoid lunatics turn out to have vastly underestimated the "badness" of the outcome, and this happens repeatedly, then it becomes *really really hard* to not start taking those paranoid lunatics seriously and start thinking that perhaps if they were right all along, what else are, and have, they been right about? It also makes those laughing about the slippery slope fallacy look like blind fools and utterly discredits them.
This pattern of behaviour, in my opinion, is nothing but a one way ratchet that functions by *repeatedly* destroying the credibility of tolerance, moderation, and reason and replacing it with a perfectly evidence justified fear that everything is just a motte and baily slippery slope being deployed by people who might, actually, *want* piles of skulls as a deliberate outcome.
To consider your tl;dr for example, If someone falls from a plane without a parachute can you commit to a specific prediction about how they will die? haha they survive, you clearly must not know anything then? Or you say blunt force trauma, well that's not specific. What trauma? which organs will be damaged? which blood vessels? what bones will break and how? etc.
Saying they will die from the force of the impact is specific enough, as anyone with any common sense will clearly see, and so I increasingly think are a lot of culture war adjacent predictions - even if a direct casual link isn't clear, the patterns and direction of movement seem overwhelmingly clear, introspection and thought are out, hate and ignorance are in.
> Consider it as a prediction that can be taken as a highly specific meta-prediction, i.e. if A occurs then something bad will occur, {W,X,Y} are in the set of bad things that conservatives are afraid of, perhaps in increasing order of "badness". Conservatives, mouths flecked with spittle, claim W will happen if you allow A, but actually Z happens. It's a far worse outcome, and those conservatives will claim they were right all along, meanwhile progressives will point and laugh and say how wrong conservatives are because they predicted X and Z actually happened.
This is a complex, but ultimately straightforward problem of Bayesian logic. If multiple predictions are being made but only one of them comes true then we can adjust the predictor's accuracy accordingly. If it turns out that the predictor can be relied on to report all and exclusively the negative outcomes, they're useful but not remarkably so.
> Or to put it another way, when the conservatives freaking out and sounding like paranoid lunatics turn out to have vastly underestimated the "badness" of the outcome, and this happens repeatedly, then it becomes really really hard to not start taking those paranoid lunatics seriously and start thinking that perhaps if they were right all along, what else are, and have, they been right about?
Begging the question - I can think of many, *many* predictions that conservative commentators came up with more serious than the downsides that came to pass and thus feel no compulsion to update in their direction. If you can't enumerate X, Y, and Z ahead of time (and don't have an א or ℶ!) then this isn't compelling.
> This pattern of behaviour, in my opinion, is nothing but a one way ratchet that functions by repeatedly destroying the credibility of tolerance, moderation, and reason and replacing it with a perfectly evidence justified fear that everything is just a motte and baily slippery slope being deployed by people who might, actually, want piles of skulls as a deliberate outcome.
This is only true if you've never heard predictions worse than what came to pass. Have you?
> To consider your tl;dr for example, If someone falls from a plane without a parachute can you commit to a specific prediction about how they will die?
Different problem. It's enough from a probabilistic sense to have predicted that they would die, and if one was foolish enough to instead have tried to predict specific cause of death, so much the worse for that predictor.
I think you're not giving quite enough credit to the difference between socialism and wokeness in terms of its being a threat. Regardless of what people say, no one is ever canceled just for being white or just for being male (except maybe in the rare case where the head of a woman's organization is a man, and they finally decide he needs to be demoted to a VP role so that a woman can be in charge - and that's not a "cancelling"). Most people don't like the idea of benefiting just from their race or sex, and so don't worry too much about losing that benefit.
But if you're rich, or a manager, socialists *do* want to cancel you for that. You might not lose your job, but you *will* have your money and/or power taken away from you. Wokeness doesn't want to take away what very many people really don't want taken away from them. Socialism does.
In fact traditional socialists and identitarians are committed enemies and most socialists I know (and I know many, many socialists) see canceling as counter-revolutionary.
if I had a penny for every time a socialist made a "first female drone pilot" joke, socialists wouldn't like me anymore
What is the joke?
Basically, it is targeted at woke capitalists who care more about diverse representation than the U.S. bombing Afghanistan or something.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/353/985/93b.jpg
Thanks. Got it.
The more salient thing (though perhaps not as funny) is that getting representation at the top doesn't do anything for people at the bottom.
> In fact traditional socialists and identitarians are committed enemies
I see this perspective consistently from members of so-called "dirtbag left" and I guess it makes sense with the weasel word of "traditional", but it clearly doesn't fit with the majority of public facing socialists. You can see the identitarians all over the DSA. You can see anti-capitalists throughout the major identitarian movements.
The identitarian movement is what you get when you apply the marxist framing of oppression to race/identity.
As I understand it, what distinguishes the trad socialists from Social Justice is that they think it's a serious mistake to make anything more important than class.
It's "workers of the world, unite" vs "workers of the world, divide into identity groups and fight against each other".
(Also, corporations as the enemy, vs corporations as the protectors of women and minorities against offensive online speech.)
Marxists tend to have a goal of race-blindness. This is very different from identitarian views which celebrate minorities' culture and emphasise awareness of "privilege".
Opinion: This is true in the same sense that it's true that, say, Christianists and Islamists are committed enemies. In that, they are indeed committed enemies, but to people outside the conflict, this is less noteworthy than the deeper similarity in thought processes between the two (and how those thought processes differ from those of other groups, from way far away in politics-space).
Hm. If a Christian or Muslim thought the concerns I had about fundamentalist and/or organized religion only applied to their enemy, I'd be very skeptical but I would hear them out. I am no theologian though.
(Also, I of course doubt I would ever embrace the entirety of Christianity or Islam in that case. But maybe some small sect makes unusually good points.)
> In fact traditional socialists and identitarians are committed enemies
I think this says far more about the people you know than the world at large.
Why do you think the people you know are more representative?
(or, if that is a loaded question, sorry and what is the actual reason you think that?)
freddie is card carrying communist who travels in very unusual circles that take people who say absurd things like "I don't believe in human deserts" seriously.
I would think that one would HAVE to travel in unusual circles to know a large number of traditional socialists.
Why is that absurd?
I mean, any consequentialist will say that too.
For what it's worth, Will Shetterly was majorly in opposition to Racefail, and I believe it was because he believed in analysis by class rather than identity.
It may not be a coincidence that two classic anti-social justice essays were by trad socialists.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/
https://www.autostraddle.com/kin-aesthetics-excommunicate-me-from-the-church-of-social-justice-386640/
"In fact traditional socialists and identitarians are committed enemies"
Where are the race realist socialists?
Hell, hwere are the cultural realist socialists?
I think there's also a difference in that a rich white male CEO might have personal issues with wokeness, its not a threat to the institution they are part of, so they can't deploy its resources in the same way. A more diverse boardroom is maybe bad for you personally, but neutral or good for the company, higher corporate taxes are bad for the company, and so you can legitimately use company resources against them. (e.g. by hiring lobbying firms)
I think what a lot of people don't get is that a more "diverse" boardroom is exactly what those who are already in power want.
Suppose you're a high-competence white man who sits on a board. There's a vacant seat. Who do you want to fill it? Another high-competence white man who might be a threat to you, or a modest-competence Diversity Hire who is acknowledged by everyone to only be there to fill a seat and look black? Obviously you'd go for the Diversity Hire.
It's the Star Trek model of diversity --
Star Trek? If there is any fictional organisation I would associate with ruthless meritocracy it is Starfleet.
I'm also unsure how a white man would be a breater threat to you as a board member than a person of color. If you want to hire people of low compentency you don't have to wait for wokeness to roll around, you can just hire a low compentency white man! Moreover, if you want people that agree with you you are better of hiring people that are more like you, they would share your perspective more.
If you really want to play the selfish maximasation game you hire the nephew of your boss, or the nephew of your client, or the nephew of your allied colleage.
"If there is any fictional organisation I would associate with ruthless meritocracy it is Starfleet."
Have you watched _Picard_ ?
No I have not. Was it overhasty to equivocate Star Trek with the version of it people actually know? (TOS, TNG)
To be fair though, *Picard* is semi-canonical at best.
That said, I've always said that in *TNG*/*DS9*, there are two types of Starfleet Admirals:
1). The type who has his head so far up his ass it will take a Class 5 probe to find it.
2). The type who is smart, efficient, competent, and utterly bent on some insanely destructive megalomaniacal project.
Both types periodically pay visits to the Enterprise/DS9, and it usually takes at least one whole episode to clean up their mess.
Anything written about old shows or works past about 2005 or so should be immediately considered suspect when it comes to sussing out the politics of the area.
The first episode of Picard shows Picard getting outright shown up by some young, woke, Female-identified recruit.
Suggesting that this is an intended message of Star Trek, the show that people know - is absurd. The deliberate revisionism in order to meet modern Hollywood sensibilities is obvious.
I think the idea is that a low competence white man will be fired or could not be hired in the first place. A low competence minority will be a difficult target to remove, as the act of firing them will be worse for PR than the benefit from having hired them in the first place.
The white man can be fired by whom? The other board members? Don't they have the same interests as you do?
No, each person is self-interested, which includes their own power but also the smooth running of the organization. If you're going to give someone power, you want something out of it. Hiring another white male provides no alternate benefits (PR, and can actually detract from it if the board is heavily white and male), while also not providing the board's function. You may want to hire a person, regardless of sex or race, for non-business reasons such as nepotism or corruption, but you wouldn't want to hire an incompetent board member without some other reason(s).
Starfleet may be ruthlessly meritocratic within the universe of the fiction. But the classic Star Trek had an extremely tokenistic cast - an All-American Midwestern white male in charge, and a crew of one black woman, one Asian man, one Russian, one Scots-Irish southerner, and one rational alien all helping him out. None of them could ever be in charge, so he is unchallenged!
it were the 60s. ST preformed far above par.
That's weird, substack had issues half way through my writing the grandfather comment and I had to close the window. I didn't realise my draft version of the comment had been posted until I got the reply notification.
Anyway I had a feeling as I was writing it that Star Trek was the wrong analogy and I should go with a different show like Community. The Community view of diversity is that you have a racially and sexually diverse set of characters, with the caveat that the straight white guy is the main character and everyone else is there in a quirky supporting role to represent their particular demographic. This is a pretty common trope in modern American entertainment.
The point is that you _can't_ hire a low-competence white man to your board, but if you nominate a low-competence black woman (and I don't really mean _low_ competence, but low competence by board standards) then you're far more likely to get them through, because hey, we need "diversity" and it's not like there's a black female equivalent of Eric Schmidt knocking on our door.
As a random example, let's look at the board of Apple, of whom I know nothing as I write. Scrolling down to the Board of Directors section here https://www.apple.com/au/leadership/ it's interesting that it has no photos so we can play this game quite effectively. There's seven directors in addition to Tim Cook, and I already know what Al Gore looks like so we've got six others whose races we need to guess. I'm going to guess that Levinson, Sugar and Wagner are white due to impressive-sounding credentials and that Jung and Lozano are very visible minorities due to their credentials at places I've never heard of. Bell is a toss-up since he's a former CFO rather than CEO at Boeing.
Results: Bell is black, Lozano is hispanic (no major points for guessing this one I suppose due to the name), Jung is Asian (also no major points, but Carl Jung wasn't Asian), and the rest appear to be white, as I predicted. So there you have it, the races of board members of a major company were pretty easy to guess based on the relative impressiveness of their credentials. And of course, the chairman of the board is white.
I literally saw this happens 2 weeks ago. Diversity hires are much more tolerant with management.
This is spot on. Management wants weaker boards. Diversity hires are all about going along to get along. They know they’ve got a great deal.
"I think there's also a difference in that a rich white male CEO might have personal issues with wokeness"
You do know its not the 1970's right? And that most rich white male CEOs, outside of particular industries like oil extraction and firearms manufacturing, are more likely to be woke than conservative, right? Kevin Smith's Green Arrow made this point *20 years ago* but we still seem to be operating under this amesiatic brain fog.
Corporations aren't because marketing is dragging angry old men kicking and screaming. They are woke because the board-level decision makers are woke.
You do understand that the person wasn't claiming that a majority of rich white male CEOs would have personal issues with wokeness - they were just claiming that some individual might, but even so, wouldn't have tools to fight it the way they would be given tools to fight socialism.
A more diverse boardroom is great for management. They love all these ESG initiatives. Anything that detracts from accountability will be cat nip to management
This does miss the terrifying implication of the slogan "When You’re Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression" being used to justify things that could easily be described as oppression in a different framing. People don't want to benefit just from their race or sex but there being a pretty big disagreement on who exactly is benefiting from their race or sex and a willingness to use crushingly huge institutions to enforce various fixes is pretty chilling when you're a member of a group deemed to be benefiting from your sex or race.
Stacked on top of this is the genuine belief that people are blind to their own privileges and you quickly get to a place where your objections are just meaningless noise to the ears of the inquisition.
We are past that point. We are seeing happening here.
I think of "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression" as putting a penny in the fuse box*, since oppression also feels like oppression.
*Is there a need for a more current** way to talk about disabling safety measures? If so, what's a good metaphor?
**Accidental pun, but I decided to let it stand.
I think this is wrong. Socialists want to transfer wealth from people who have lots of it to people who don't. The woke want to do the same thing. The only difference is socialists want the recipients to be the working class and the woke want the recipients to be people of a certain skin color. The natural tendency then, is for these two groups to team up for the taking now, then fight over the spoils later.
I don't think this is right. The woke aren't particularly interested in wealth, any more than other privilege. And they don't particularly want to eliminate privilege, so much as share it.
Seriously? Why do you think these people are so interested in group level disparities? Because they care about what other people have vs what they have, and group level disparities are a great excuse for redistributing stuff. Status and money, mostly, which, as you may have noticed, is a large component of wealth.
You can't share privilege. You can share the non-exclusive things people get from privilege, but not the higher-status part.
Only one hand can wear the Ring.
> Socialists want to transfer wealth from people who have lots of it to people who don't. The woke want to do the same thing.
For example, socialists would be on the side of a white cishet homeless guy. The woke would blame him for everything.
This is not true. Racial discrimination in hiring is already mandatory at all prestige institutions and most of their followers. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-10/blackrock-plans-to-push-companies-on-racial-diversity-in-2021
Sure - it's not *cancelling* , but racism is mandatory in corporate America.
Wokeness is absolutely taking opportunities away from the “creditor” races. I literally just saw it happen 2 weeks ago.
Trebuchet is basically restating Rod Dreher’s Law of Merited Impossibility: “That will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.”
Which I think is a lot more fair when you recognize that people are saying 'that will never happen' to 10,000 things, and the 3 of those that then do happen, might have happened for a good reason.
There's a mortality bias at play in the analysis here, is what I'm saying.
To be clear, I would say Dreher's Law of Merited Impossibility (at least, as originally proposed by Dreher) isn't trying to predict where the Woke/LGBT juggernaut will proceed next (as many rightists do, and get it very wrong), only that its victories, whatever they are, will be weaponized to attack Christians and our institutions and progressively boot us out of polite society, despite any promises to the contrary.
Reminds me of how Republicans dismissed concerns about Trump refusing to commit to a peaceful transition.
I ctrl-F'ed for "Law of Merited Impossibility" after reading that section. Makes for a good Google search if you're looking for the examples Scott declined to give.
Ctrl-F "Dreher" like I did. Quicker, fewer false-positives.
Thank you for the kind words -- but I think you melded my comment with one by walruss in the same thread? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-online-culture#comment-1936798 if I've got the right link.
I agree I was meandering from the topic -- I'm generally trying to put the culture war into a broader perspective, in part as this might make it more solvable, but mainly because I really do think that wokeness is the tip of an iceberg. I'm far from buying the Lomez/ZeroHP/Kaschuta worldviews wholesale, but I'm seeing some of the same things they are seeing: Western culture, tech *and* academia have lost their virility and are on the decline (with a few holdouts, like blockchain, biotech, SpaceX, and maybe these little bits of right-wing creativity I've mentioned; but a few swallows do not a summer make). Taking this as given, it doesn't surprise me that classically liberal ideas are losing popularity and are getting replaced by zero-sum tribalism: The Enlightenment has always been a trade where you paid your spiritual security for adventure and progress; with the latter gone, the trade is looking more and more like a scam. It's just that I'm still hoping the upside can be brought back, perhaps at the cost of inviting some unsavory characters back into the project...
Aaaak, you're right, sorry, have edited.
There's also a tiny thing of socialism already having killed tens (or maybe hundreds?) of millions in the 20th century, and wokeness, with all its disgusting totalitarian excesses, haven't yet. So maybe there's still a bright side to it - at least being banned on Twitter is not literal gulags, and however much the socialists might be salivating over those, American society can go as far as "gimme free stuff", but no further yet.
Just because I like doing this thought experiment with people who say that - how many people would you estimate capitalism has killed? And can you give a few sentences about your thought process in arriving at that number, and how it compares to the thought process you used to get the socialism number?
I would estimate none by itself, at least not intentionally (one could say that if I don't donate money to a charity and they don't give it to somebody poor who dies from a preventable disease then I killed that person - but I do not accept this conclusion, I am talking about actions which were intended or highly likely to cause death of people, and were performed because or with full knowledge and intent for such result). While people, of course, can get killed while capitalism exists, capitalism does not inherently require violence: certain people can benefit from it, but it is not a requirement, and it can perfectly exist without it. However, if we turn to socialist practices of 20th century - USSR, China, North Korea, and other smaller satellite states - we uniformly find a violent beginning, usually violently taking property from current owners, frequently murdering them in the process, and a lot of violence - in the form of mass imprisonment, forced labor, suppression of dissent, confiscation of property, frequent murderous purges, etc. The fact that it happened pretty much everywhere marxist socialist model was attempted consistenly, allows us to conclude it is an inherent quality of the model.
Now, you'd say we had forced labor - slavery - under the capitalism too - and it's true, we did. And we got rid of it, without affecting capitalism as such (while many capitalist systems didn't have it at all) - which proves it was not inherently necessary, and actually likely harmful, for the capitalist enterprise (e.g. in the US, the North was economically doing much better than the South, and slavery was one of the reasons why the South got stuck in a bad economic model). We also had totalitarian somewhat-capitalist societies - but those turned out to be very unstable. However, if you remove state violence component from a socialist country - it will collapse very soon, and it will collapse into a chaotic proto-capitalist society. Just like it happened in Russia in the 1990s.
That's like smoking vs. non-smoking. Smoking causes a variety of diseases. Those can happen to non-smoking people too. But in smoking case, we can trace it to the specific reason - the smoking. In non-smoking case, it'd be a variety of reasons, which most likely won't include "not smoking". Or, in another words, 83% of traffic accidents were caused by sober drivers. Is sobriety a major cause of traffic accidents?
For me that looks like ignoring the casualties caused by Intervention untertaken by US Governments on behalf of US companies in South and Middle America or Asia
Did socialist governments never interfere in foreign affairs? I think USSR alone should demolish this argument, but China interferes a lot too. As such, foreign interference does not seem to be inherently linked to capitalism - in fact, both capitalist and socialist regimes do it pretty much in the same manner. Of course, in capitalism systems it is done on behalf of the major companies. It's like when they asked Willie Sutton why he robs banks, he answered "because that's where the money is". Of course, under the capitalism, the money is with the large companies, so stuff is done on their behalf. Under socialism, everything is controlled by Politburo, so stuff is done on their behalf instead. But it's the same stuff, it's not specific to capitalism.
sure, you can tally those along the socialist victims.
Capitalism is not necessary to explain the colonial interventions, and capitalism survives without these interventions (re)occurring. We have plenty of colonialism in history that predates capitalism, and modern capitalism occurs without colonialism
Ok but capitalism did do those intervention. A murderer isn't let of when he says "but your honour, i didn't need to kill that guy"
"Capitalism" did no such thing. A (corrupt) intertwining of government and business did. It was neither necessary nor sufficient that the government be capitalistic, as such interventions happened without, and captialistic systems have existed without producing such interventions.
Whereas Communist systems, *without fail* have generated murderous atrocities across history.
Communist atrocities were (usually) committed in the name of Communism. Same with Nazism. The atrocities committed by capitalist countries tend to be committed in the name of Freedom or Democracy, but are usually really committed due to geopolitical reasons (spheres of influence, political alliances, natural resources). Geopolitical reasons exist regardless of ideology (USSR had them, feudal monarchies had them, etc), so it does not seem appropriate to say "Capitalism did it" in the same way as "Communism did it" or "Nazism did it".
I think most self-professed socialists (excluding the extreme ChapoTrapHouse radicals) are talking more about Nordic Model, welfare-state-with-market-economy socialism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model), not Soviet style, plannned-economy-and-gulags socialism. Conflating the two doesn't really help anyone.
the Nordic countries have some of the freest economies in the world, just high levels of social spending. If the socialists would stick to that, I wouldn't worry about them. Unfortunately, they spent a decade applauding hugo chavez:
https://twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/status/309065744954580992?lang=en
Northern countries are much less socialist than popularly believed. They played with socialist policies decades ago, and have been slowly walking them back ever since. However, while the right-moderate wing of the Dem. party could have been happy with state-owned healthcare and increased union membership (oh those sweet union campaign dollars!) - the left Marxist wing is calling for destruction of the capitalism all the time. In fact, it's not uncommon to hear that the only way a just non-racist society can be built is by destroying the capitalism, the only way climate could be fixes is by destroying capitalism, etc. etc. So I don't think there's confusion. I think the socialist wing of Dem. party wants actual marxist socialism. Most of them don't really want gulags if it can be done without it (spoiler: it can't), though some wouldn't mind it if they could guarantee only the deplorables would end up there (spoiler: they couldn't). So yes, "not all leftists" are hardcore socialists. Some are though.
I think there's a fundamental disagreement over the meaning of the word "capitalism" here.
As used by (a lot of) self-proclaimed Marxists, it means that most political and economic power is concentrated in the hands of a small number of people based on those people's possession of capital. You will note the complete absence of the word "market" in there.
If you go by that definition, then libertarianism is anti-capitalist and wants to destroy capitalism. Anarcho-capitalists are anti-capitalist if you go by that allegedly-Marxist definition of capitalism.
The way I've characterised it before is "if you mean by capitalism my ability to go into a shop and buy a sandwich of my choosing, then I'm for it; if you mean the ability of a small number of multi-billionaires to distort the entire political and economic system by spending billions of dollars, then I'm against it".
If you go by Marxist language, then you find that a bunch of words don't mean what they are generally used to mean (and, to be fair to the Marxists, Marx made a lot of this language up, so it's not ridiculous that they should be allowed to use it the way he did). For instance, a capitalist is someone with a lot of capital, not someone with an ideological belief. So Jeff Bezos is a capitalist because he owns a large fraction of the capital of Amazon. Queen Elizabeth II (who is probably richer) is not a capitalist because very little of her assets are in capital. "Capitalist", in the Marxist sense, means something very similar to "billionaire". Capitalism is the system by which Jeff Bezos has enormous political and economic power; you can have non-capitalist free markets and you can have capitalist non-free markets (Can you have capitalism without any sort of market at all? That's the sort of theoretical question that Marxist theoreticians spend years arguing about)
So, um, what does this mean? It means that concentrations of capital are the thing that is being objected to, not the existence of markets.
> The way I've characterised it before is "if you mean by capitalism my ability to go into a shop and buy a sandwich of my choosing, then I'm for it; if you mean the ability of a small number of multi-billionaires to distort the entire political and economic system by spending billions of dollars, then I'm against it".
A kindred spirit! I, too, am against mustache twilling villains!
>So, um, what does this mean? It means that concentrations of capital are the thing that is being objected to, not the existence of markets.
You can't have the one without the other. If markets are free, someone will accumulate more stuff than others. But if you're against concentrated political and economic power, the last thing you should want is to give more money and power to the state.
> most political and economic power is concentrated in the hands of a small number of people based on those people's possession of capital
That's called oligarchy. But it also a very simplistic view which no real capitalist (or even oligarchical, or totalitarian) society matches. Is the riches man the most powerful? Certainly not. Bill Gates has a ton of money, so does Elon Musk. But do thave more political power than the US Senator? Than the US President? Than the owner of the New York Times? I don't think so. Reducing everything only to capital is so hopelessly naive it can only be excused in a college freshman who just heard a lecture by a marxist professor.
> If you go by that definition, then libertarianism is anti-capitalist and wants to destroy capitalism
That's one of the reasons why this definition is silly. Of course, it's nowhere near the common and accepted definition, so I call it motte & bailey - where "capitalism must be destroyed!" turns in a pinch into "we just want to avoid oligarchy!"
> you can have non-capitalist free markets
Actually you can't. If you prohibit people from accumulating capital, then your market is not free. Unless you also have some unusual definition of "free".
> you can have capitalist non-free markets
That of course we already have.
> It means that concentrations of capital are the thing that is being objected to, not the existence of markets.
I believe you can find a marxist professor that thinks that. However, that's not what most of the socialists are objecting to, and certainly they don't object the concentration of power - because every socialist society has enormous concentration of power, socialist societies are the most power-unequal societies in existance, Politburo has pretty much 100% of the power and the rest of people have the remaining 0%. At least here we for each Bezos can have Buffett and Musk and Thiel and Koch and so on. But there's always only one Politburo.
This is the root of the problem.
Socialism is a defined ideology (several related defined ideologies, at least). We can point to policies explicitly defined by the ideology carried out by explicitly socialist states run as one party totalitarian states by explicitly socialist parties. For example, Lenin tried to change the Red Army so that officers would be elected by their troops. Soldiers are workers (as in the Workers and Peasants Red Army), workers in socialism elect their representatives, so this is a decision explicitly defined by the ideology. As anyone who has studied military history can probably tell you, this failed miserably, and so the whole idea was walked back as 'we're not ready for this yet'.
The original question that sparked this discussion was 'how many people would you estimate capitalism has killed?' This talks about capitalism as if it is an ideology similar to socialism, with explicit definition that can be used to base parties and countries off of and that can take the blame for deaths. There are political parties that include concepts like trade and free markets among their principles, but like the Scandinavian social democracies and even the US itself these principles have to compete with others that justify some level of market interference. If you're not referring to it as an ideology, then 'capitalism' is just the absence of socialism. (It also doesn't help that failed explicitly socialist states can be branded as 'state capitalism', which is even less of an internally defined concept; I don't know of anyone who brands themself as a 'state capitalist', it's only used as a way to disassociate failed socialism from theoretical socialism.)
If 'how many people would you estimate capitalism has killed?' isn't referring to an ideology but merely the absence of socialism, then it's impossible to differentiate from 'how many people would you estimate [not socialism] has killed?', and thus the questions are analogous to 'how many people has drunken driving killed?' vs 'how many people has sober (i.e. [not drunken]) driving killed?'
What about death due to inability to pay for adequate healthcare? Even if that is not intentional, it is meaningful and specific to capitalism.
(Even if communist states did not always grant sufficient access to healthcare, that would probably be for a different reason.)
spoken like someone who has never seen a soviet hospital. It's capitalism that generates the wealth to build hospitals and the medical technology that makes them useful.
Capitalism and communism can both cause people to die. They aren't mutually exclusive. I am less endorsing the USSR and more suggest economic systems that have *never* been tried be investigated.
(I can't name examples, but it seems overconfident to suggest that any fundamental improvement upon capitalism is inconceivable.)
> Capitalism and communism can both cause people to die.
A meaningless statement. Everyone dies eventually. the question is which system ends more lives sooner, and the answer is unquestionably socialism, which in its hard failure mode starves millions to death and its soft failure mode fails to deliver meaningful economic growth, which is the one thing that we know tends to extend life.
> They aren't mutually exclusive. I am less endorsing the USSR and more suggest economic systems that have *never* been tried be investigated.
Investigate them with your own money and your own lives, not mine.
> can't name examples, but it seems overconfident to suggest that any fundamental improvement upon capitalism is inconceivable.)
and yet, that's what the evidence suggests.
Right, socialist healthcare systems kill people via a lack of collective resources.
If you think socialism guarantees you quality healthcare, you're up for some major disappointment, I can tell you as somebody who spent time in the socialist healthcare system. Let me tell you how it works:
Nominally, you don't have to pay a single kopeyka for the healthcare. However, in practice there are widespread temporary shortages, as always under socialism, so if your pharmacy is our of the medicine you need, you're out of luck. Unless you have money and know people. If you want the access not to the random doctor but one that actually good at what you need, you need to know people, and you need to be grateful to these people (which usually means money and things one buys with money). And of course, if you want level of service beyond "what I can get away with without being fired" in a hospital, you need money (knowing people helps too, but just money, properly applied, usually is enough). And of course, unless you know really powerful people, the quality still only would be the socialism quality - the same one which gave you cars that need service right after getting out of the manufacturing, clothes that never fit and toilet paper than can double as sandpaper.
But yeah, in theory you don't have to pay.
'Adequate' is ill defined here. We will all someday die, and for any person and any given cost there will come a point where the kind of care adequate *to extending their life* a unit of time will cost more than that given cost.
This is not specific to capitalism.
There is room for steelmanning what you are trying to say, but it involves a hell of a lot of steel.
Isn't you being able to decide what happens with this money without responsibility to "use it for good" quite a major part of capitalism? You might argue you are not acting and therefore less responsible, but not the system that binds the use to your action or inaction, that's like saying "a planned economy not distributing food to a group of people isn't them killing the people, they just don't save them". And by focusing on intent, you are favoring systems that use less central planning, because they don't need anyone to acknowledge and act in knowledge of their bad consequences, while centrally planned ones more often do. Doesn't mean the method of distribution has or doesn't have that intent.
You can find a large number of deaths due to capitalism, or "people killed by" capitalism, if you will - nothing is without drawbacks.
Also, but that's nitpicking, because the groups you're talking about don't want to reinstate the Soviet Union or North Korea (which is my actual objection to that argument), and they don't want to follow Marx to a t, either: I wouldn't say "let's stay with this totalitarian state designed as an interim between Tzarist Russia and a classless, stateless, moneyless society" is a consistent application of "when capitalism reaches its exreme, the workers will rise and - after an interim period - create a classless, stateless, moneyless society".
Even if they just want to reinstate East Germany, that's bad enough.
Also, I'm not seeing any change in ideology which might prevent the current batch of communists from setting up totalitarian states. How is what they've got in mind different this time around?
Even the most moderate I've seen (Contrapoints and Vaush) just think it's easier to get to socialism from a democratic country than from a fascist country. That's why they strongly supported voting for Biden.
At least if you take Contrapoints and Vaush or generally the cluster vaguely described as "breadtube" as examples, "tankies" (authoritarian communists, specifically the ones who like Stalin) are utterly despised there (at least in my experience, I know youtube is a bubble generator). They are far more likely to be left-wing anarchists and similar.
And yes, even more: even if they just want to abolish capitalism entirely without changing political structure and somehow do that by getting a political majority, without any violence, it would still be bad - I am a social democrat, pretty much, I don't think you can't use capitalism for good, it just also has heavy drawbacks you have to consider, work around and work with.
(also, at least Vaush is a pragmatist: he believes Biden is less bad, so he supports voting for Biden, even if it wouldn't help or hurt the prospects of a future socialist shift)
My impression of the typical socialists is that they don't like tankies, but they like Cuba and they don't have any plans for their preferred socialism not turning into Stalinism.
Given the correlation between income per capita and life expectancy, capitalism is massively positive. Don't apologize for the socialist holocausts, its disgusting.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was explicitly founded on socialist ideological principles (or at least the RSFSR was, and it's easy to trace the USSR back to the RSFSR). It was a one party state, with that party explicitly founded on socialist ideological principles. The state was totalitarian, so anything that it did was ultimately the responsibility of the central government. The state took actions explicitly derived from the ideology they profess to follow (collectivizing farming and dekulakization). Under those circumstances, it's easy to attribute actions of the state to an ideology.
On the other hand, multi-party democracies don't have the power to compel adherence to an ideology, and I can't think of any that try at the constitutional level. Most successful parties that have to compete over time at the ballot box that aren't dominated by a single individual also can't be bogged down by ideology (the Fascists and Nazis managed to beat this one by tying themselves to a single charismatic leader, but they both explicitly scrapped democracy once they had power). The behaviors of multi-party democracies have to derive from the competing interests within the country (specifically the legislature), making it hard to attribute the actions of the government to any one individual set of beliefs.
That being said, at least some of the deaths in the Irish potato famine seem to be directly the fault of a clique of laissez-faire proponents in the British government explicitly based on the idea that further interfering with the situation in Ireland would make things worse, so we can say that market ideology isn't totally without casualties.
I don't see how the mistake of British government follows from free market principles. Free market does not preclude charities (in fact, most charity by volume is performed by capitalists) and the failure to help in the Irish case doesn't seem to be dictated by any free-market principles. It could be that some free-marketers thought that not helping was an optimal solution and were wrong - as some engineer might think that designing a bridge in certain way is solid and be wrong, and a lot of people could die because of the bridge collapsing. The critical point here is where the mistake was - and I don't think the mistake was in the free market ideas.
This argument is completely parallel to the defense of communism from the horrors wrought by the USSR and Maoist China. Some Communists erred, and millions of people starved. But anyone willing to support communism in spite of that is bound to believe their mistake was not in *communism*, but elsewhere.
Except for the part where it's completely false. Holodomor wasn't some economic calculation mistake - it was a policy specifically designed to starve people to death. Kulaks were destroyed not because somebody made a typo or calculated wrongly - they were specifically destroyed by the policy meant to destroy them. Gulag wasn't some welfare project gone wrong - it was specifically designed as a system of imprisonment, forced labor and eventually death for undesirables. Belomorkanal and such were very specifically and intentionally forced labor projects, and there were no error in that. Cambodia killing fields were specifically for killing people, nobody mistakenly thought they are making it better for them by crushing their heads with spades and hoes - they wanted those people dead. Cultural Revolution wasn't some policy gone wrong - it was designed to destroy culture and suppress people. And so on, and so forth.
So no, communists didn't "err". They did exactly what they set out to do. The results were far from what they predicted - because they either lied or were unable to correctly predict them - but their policies were murderous and violent from the start, and they executed them with full intent to commit murder and violence.
Right... the error was thinking that being horrifically murderous was a good choice. Was that belief caused by their communism and a necessary outgrowth of that? Or was it part of the general murderousness that occasionally infects despots?
And this IS completely parallel to your defense of capitalism; the Irish Potato famine was deliberately made into a genocide by the English government. They knew they were slaughtering the Irish by their decisions, and did it deliberately. They prevented free aid from being delivered, reduced foreign aid, and mandated food exports from a starving province (just as the USSR would later do in the Holodomor.)
If you're willing to contend that the horror the English perpetrated was due to something besides their belief in capitalism, you should probably entertain the argument that Stalin was horrific for reasons other than his belief in communism. (I'm not sure I buy that argument; but it's definitely worth considering.)
I would say zero, because true capitalism has never been tried.
Capitalism doesn't kill people, but it does allow them to die of their own fault.
By that logic, communism also has killed no one, since true communism also has never been tried.
that communism has failed isn't proof that it hasn't been tried.
that capitalism failed isn't proof that it hasn't been tried.
where is capitalism failing?
I think Melvin's comment was a satirical play on a common internet Marxist point
Well, with so many moronic goons lining up to suck the boot of capital around here, it's hard to tell.
Wait, are you saying socialism doesn't allow people to die, so they live forever? If that were the deal, I would look at it at entirely different light. But I'm afraid Lenin is the only one who lives forever, and even that is only in Soviet propaganda slogans.
Or, alternatively, you mean that socialist prefer to kill people for being anti-party elements before they die of their own fault? Then of course it's more true but I'm not sure how it's an advantage exactly.
Or it attributes fault to the people it kills.
For those who think capitalism doesn't kill, I think it's useful to remember that corporations are the original strong AI - they are artificial entities designed for maximizing some objective function that may or may not line up with human objective functions. They are much smarter than anything made out of silicon so far, because they're made out of humans, who each do their part according to the rules given by the corporation.
Anyone who thinks there is a risk of AI-caused disaster should be thinking about whether or not there has been corporate-caused disaster. There may be reasons why one would be worse than the other, but they should at least have relevant analogies.
Deaths caused by these corporations may or may not be attributable to "capitalism", or to the humans that make up the corporations. But they're worth thinking about.
It's all Moloch's fault.
What about this does not apply to the actions of any organized group of people? Organizations have power proportional to their size, and the largest organizations are governments (except perhaps religions, which is a whole different can of worms). Governments also have a monopoly on force.
The objective function. Corporations are intended to maximize shareholder value; governments & religion do not have corresponding singular foci.
"I’d treated it as kind of mysterious that the George Floyd protests erupted when they did, as intensely as they did; anti-racism talk was trending down, police had been killing black people in approximately equally bad ways since forever, it seemed weird that this was the spark that ignited a conflagration. I think I figured maybe it was just that everyone was on edge because of the pandemic. But several commenters pointed out that no, the George Floyd video was a new low in terms of obvious, enraging, terrifying police brutality."
I never wrote this down anywhere, but I remember thinking that I expected something major to happen. I would not have guessed at the scale of last summer's protests and riots, but I did have an intuitive sense that things had reached a breaking point. Each previous incident had garnered more and more attention and outrage but not changed much, racism was (as Scott noted) in the air, and the pandemic had people itching to get outside and do stuff. But I think primarily it was just "the straw that broke the camel's back."
The same could be said about having Rosa Parks as a central figure in civil rights demonstrations. Being intentional doesn't mean being wrong.
Are equality and power different things?
The general principle seems true. I don't see why the trend over time matters though. If, say, crime is lower today than it was five years ago, that doesn't make it unreasonable to wish there were less crime.
It doesn't make it unreasonable to wish there was less crime, but it does bear significantly on the question of how radically you should be prepared to restructure society to reduce crime.
If things are actually steadily getting better with time, then it may be a bad idea to change things at all without great care, because you might break the process which is fixing it.
I don’t think you guys are disagreeing. A marginalized groups concerns being more culturally significant is a result of its increasing power, and the possibility of change can be a positive feedback loop that creates more action to protest/solve problems, even if the problems are not necessary worse than they were in the past.
To the extent that I can parse your comment, I agree
Hm, yeah. I have never thought of BLM etc. as having the potential to radically restructure society. (That is regardless of what anyone wants to happen.)
Progressives in various local governments have tried to 'defund' the police, i.e. reduce their funding & responsibilities. This may not be very radical in itself, but given its potential effects on crime it is itself a tradeoff that may not be worth it if the issue it's meant to address is not as bad as its supporters think.
What I remember clearly about last summer was that George Floyd was at least the third in a series of heavily-promoted incidents which seemed to be angling for this kind of reaction.
The first was the "jogger" who got shot by neighbourhood watch.
The second, because it was a very slow news week, was an argument about a dog in Central Park, and I remember thinking how odd it was that this non-incident had somehow been promoted to a major international news story.
The third was George Floyd, and that one was the right combination of everything to actually get the riots started. But I would say there was definitely a pretty concerted effort to promote the sort of news stories that would lead to such a reaction, in the weeks and months leading up to that incident.
When you say "heavily-promoted" and "concerted effort", do you think that there was a group of people who had planned together to make something break through, and these people work for a variety of media organizations and internally pushed these stories?
Or do you just mean that this was an emergent property of the set of subconscious and conscious biases of many people embedded in complex systems with particular incentives?
I think it looks a lot like the former, but I'm not excluding the possibility that it could be the latter.
In reality it's some kind of combination of both, like a fire that is already starting to spread in a forest when a fleet of 747s show up to dump liquid oxygen on it. Where did the 747s come from? Did someone coordinate them for some specific reason? We'll never know.
I always thought it was weird how BLM protests mostly disappeared after Trump's election even though, if you checked, there were still black people being killed by cops. But it never occurred to me that anyone would seriously *move on*, so maybe that's why I wasn't surprised by the George Floyd protests.
Neither you nor Scott mention that there was a narrative well before the riots that the pandemic was hitting the black community extra hard. I don't know who was taking it seriously, but WaPo and NYT were definitely running with it. I imagine that had a strong effect.
> I don't feel like non-political boards like /sp/ have changed much in tone in the last +10 years.
Hard disagree, /pol/ has absolutely leaked to the other boards at this point. /tg/'s MtG threads went from reasonable-ish discussions on a trans character to multiple posters going "BLACK MAN ON CARD REEE" during spoiler seasons. The /sp/ game threads I've seen had racist shit talk about blacks and "beaners".
Is there any geek discussion space left at this point that doesn't either enforce SJ dogmas or devolves into wokeness-reeee?
I got into an Internet argument with someone over J.R. Rowling and her transgender views. I knew exactly what I was getting myself into, but I was curious what would happen. I actually bothered to read what Rowling wrote, which I interpreted as being:
"I believe in transgender rights, but I don't believe we should erase the idea of gender, because a lot of hard-fought gains for women have been made over many decades and erasing the idea of gender will destroy that. Also, I believe that the designation of being a "women" in the UK should be stronger than just a man stating they believe they are a woman. There needs to be a stronger commitment to gender reassignment before they should be allowed to be considered a woman, and consequently use a woman's bathroom."
Boy, they were having none of that. As far as the trans-supporters were concerned, she was anti-trans, even though Rowling specifically mentioned support for trans rights. And they said I was anti-trans because I dared to explain what Rowling was saying, even though I said I believed in trans rights and I didn't agree with everything Rowling wrote, I was just trying to explain what I believe Rowling meant.
Trans-activists seem to believe that if you don't check every single box in terms of supporting all the demands of trans people, then you are anti-trans. They are ironically completely binary on a topic that itself proclaims fluidity.
I privately got several messages from people that said they agreed with me and that they are getting sick of trans issues being pushed down into younger and younger education. I think a lot of moderates are getting sick of ultra-wokeness being shoved down everyone's necks, to the point where something may actually be done. In SF, the fight with the SFUSD Board of Education is coming to a head. There is growing support for the recall of several members after a disastrous push to rename dozens of schools named after "racists" around SF at the cost of $1M. It turns out they never bothered to consult with historians, they just googled names and ended up while they refused to do anything about bring kids back into the classroom. And they put their efforts into this at the expense of trying to get kids back into the classroom in a safe way. In fact, so many people have been outraged by this and other acts of wokeness that many people I know might actually muster up enough indignation to sign an Internet petition that might lead to something sometime in the future!
I'm not particularly leftist or an activist, and all I know about trans identity is what a few trans friends have told me, but I find Rowling's beliefs as paraphrased by you to be pretty bigoted. "Just a man stating they believe they are a woman" is a cheap parody of trans identity, and seems insulting to those who are genuinely living with those issues.
I think Rowling thinking that rapists would go through the trouble of declaring themselves as transgender just to be in the same bathroom as women is absurd. I think similar arguments were made in North Carolina bathroom furor several years ago.
However, I disagree that it's a bigoted statement. She's obviously fearful of this situation, and she says it's because she was a victim of sexual assaults, and that bathrooms are inherently the most vulnerable place a woman can be in. I don't think she is saying that all trans women are just men trying to get access to bathrooms so they can rape women. And I don't believe that she is saying that trans women shouldn't be allowed to use women's bathrooms. I think she is saying before a man is allowed to women's bathrooms, they should show a certain level of commitment to gender reassignment. She says that in the UK, all you need to do is say you're transgender, and you're issued a certificate which I think she says isn't enough.
I believe Rowling is also concerned with women's prisons. And it is more plausible that a male convict might say they were a woman in order to get transferred. Even if they have no ill-intent, they're a lot less likely to be violently attacked in a women's prison!
She never said rapists would go through that rigmarole, she said that women who have experienced rape or sexual assault would feel unsafe knowing biological men would be allowed in purely on the basis of self-identification, and that their rights were being trampled and ignored. She may have been vilified for it, but she won where it matters, and the British government dropped the proposed legislation that would have allowed self-identification of gender/sex.
She didn't say that per se, but what other parts about having men in women's bathrooms would make her feel unsafe? I used the term "rapist" flippantly, I really meant "a man who wants to harrass or attack women", either through sexual assault, harassment, threats, making them feel uncomfortable, etc. Obviously she thinks this is a risk, otherwise what else about the situation would make her feel unsafe?
If she is generally against trans females using women's bathrooms, which I don't think she is, then that would be bigoted.
It's not bigoted to say "Trans women are women. Some cis men pretend to be trans women in order to access women-only spaces for the sake of their sexual gratification and that should be a crime. We need to have an effective mechanism to distinguish between the two".
If Rowling had said something that could be rounded off to that, then I'd support her - there would then be a rather technical argument about whether up-front or after-the-fact mechanisms are more effective. But the things she has said tend to sound as if they might round off to that, but when you examine them closely, they don't actually concede that any trans women should be allowed into women-only spaces.
And my experience is that it typical of gender critical rhetoric. You'll get things like "male-bodied people should not be allowed into women-only spaces". That sounds pretty reasonable, but it really does depend on what "male-bodied people" means. If you believe (as gender-critical people do) that "male" and "female" refer strictly to sex and that it is impossible to change sex, then "male-bodied people" includes all trans women. Which is suddenly much less reasonable.
I haven't heard her say that trans women shouldn't be allowed in women-only spaces. I was trying to research this before engaging in the original Internet post. If you know of any passages where she is clearer about explicitly not supporting trans women, then I would appreciate it so that I can read it up.
Yes, it is bigoted to say that, because there's no evidence that these "some cis men" exist.
I’m not sure I agree with your first paragraph here. I don’t know enough about rapists, but I’ve been a high school guy, meaning it was easy to hear what the creepy high school guys were saying. I knew someone (a guy) who joined cheerleading so he could look up girl’s skirts. When he initially told people he joined, guys often treated him with disdain, until he explained his reasoning, at which point he was jokingly considered a hero.
Now thankfully, I don’t think that many guys are scumbags. But, there certainly are creepy guys out there, and if no bar is set, imo some people certainly will do this. I think there are real questions about the tradoff of “Preventing creeps from creeping” vs “inconveniencing/blocking trans people.” I’m not a member of the trans community, so I don’t know what bars would inconvenience them least, but it seems like something could be found, even if it’s a “fulfill one of the following conditions” before we treat people a different sex from their birth one.
It's one thing to join cheerleading to do this. It's another to request a change of your ID card that would ban you from all men's bathrooms and men's locker rooms for the rest of your life.
I completely agree. I think if you had to permanently change your ID, in some once in a lifetime way, that’d do it. But this is the first time I’ve heard that idea clearly articulated, that it would be once and once only.
It shouldn't be once-in-a-lifetime-- there are people who find out that transitioning doesn't work out for them, so they detransition.
I don't see why we should say something isn't bigoted just because the person is saying it out of earnest fear. I think *most* bigotry comes out of earnest fear.
She doesn't seem to be saying anything about "a certain level of commitment" - she seems to be saying that no transition *at all* should allow people once classified as men into women's bathrooms.
I'm saying Rowling isn't being bigoted in this situation. Obviously fear and hatred form bigotry. She also said that it was far too easy for people to get the UK Gender Reassignment certificate, which could then be used against women in bathrooms (as I've stated earlier, I think this argument is nonsense). As far as I've researched, she has NEVER said that trans women shouldn't get access to women's bathrooms. She said it was too easy for men to get access to women's bathrooms for the purposes of attacking, raping, harrassing, etc.
Later on she says something to the effect of "men can get these certificates without even seeing a psychologist". My interpretation is that she wants to see more of a commitment to gender reassignment than just "I'm a woman in a man's body."
"I think Rowling thinking that rapists would go through the trouble of declaring themselves as transgender just to be in the same bathroom as women is absurd."
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8303753/Transgender-inmates-carried-seven-sex-attacks-women-jail.html
These are UK cases. Yes, it's "The Daily Mail" but "The Sunday Times" article was paywalled.
There are similar US cases: https://news.wttw.com/2020/02/19/lawsuit-female-prisoner-says-she-was-raped-transgender-inmate
Now, if the defence is "Ah but these aren't *real* trans women", then what happens to the claim that "you're trans if you say you're trans, you don't need surgery or hormones or medical gate-keeping or dysphoria or anything other than how you feel?", which is certainly a view I often see pushed.
Either these really are trans women who took advantage of being placed in women's prisons to be rapists, or they are men who pretended to be women in order to get access to women's prisons and be rapists. Not looking good either way.
It could also be a statistically unremarkable fact. Women (and men) get raped far more frequently in prisons than elsewhere. If you put any population in that sort of environment, you would expect to see some of them perpetrating rape. In other words, a few anecdotal examples do little to answer the real question of “are women raped at higher rates by trans women than by cis women (proportional to their respective population sizes)”?
According to the article, trans women make up 1% of the UK prison population but accounted for 5% over the sexual assaults. Not sure how reliable the Daily Mail is for statistics though. It seems like in the US, for the most part trans criminals are jailed with their biological sex, not the sex that they identify with.
this is what I get for not doing my due diligence and reading the entire article. yes, those stats certainly are bad.
Anecdotally, I believe it’s birth gender (I knew a trans man who was sent to a female jail). Does anyone know whether trans men in US women’s jails rape rates differ significantly from the norm?
Rowling was defending Maya Forstater (a classmate of my wife) who was fired from her NGO job for saying that unlike gender, sex is a biological reality.
The part about self-declared sex identity was a debate about proposed legislation in the UK that would have allowed self-declared identity without any verification or restriction. This was eventually withdrawn by the Conservative government, but before you accuse them of being transphobic troglodytes, keep in mind it's a Conservative government (David Cameron's) that legalized gay marriage in the UK (except for Northern Ireland, which is, ahem, special).
What hilariously lacks self-awareness is people like Daniel Radcliffe mansplaining to Rowling that they know better than a woman what a woman is, even if it is rather ungrateful coming from someone whose entire career is owed to Rowling.
> What hilariously lacks self-awareness is people like Daniel Radcliffe mansplaining to Rowling that they know better than a woman what a woman is, even if it is rather ungrateful coming from someone whose entire career is owed to Rowling.
This—to me—seems like a lot of words that sound bad without any clear explanation as to why Daniel Radcliffe was lacking in self-awareness.
Why does it matter that his career is owed to her?
Maya Forstater was fired (technically her contract was not renewed, but that's still firing) for refusing to refer to a trans colleague by her name or indeed to call her "her".
She has claimed that firing her is discriminating against her philosophical belief that it is impossible to change sex.
It is not her beliefs, nor her statement of those beliefs, but the actions that followed from them that resulted in her being fired.
["Philosophical belief", in this sense, is a legal term of art; the discrimination law she is seeking to apply is the one on religion, but that includes "philosophical belief as well as "religious belief" so courts don't have to make a determination on whether a belief that doesn't involve a god is religious or not]
Also "self-declared identity without any verification or restriction" is not a correct characterisation - a person would have to state, under penalty of perjury, that they intended to live permanently in the acquired gender. That's a pretty considerable restriction - it would be a crime to claim that falsely.
A terrible violation of her fundamental human right to treat her colleagues like shit. How dare they decline to rehire her just because she went out of her way to repeatedly insult another employee?
Except that none of this is true. She didn't have any trans colleagues, and never harrassed any co-worker. She was fired (or non-renewed) for expressing gender-critical views online (not in the workplace and not aimed at any co-worker or client).
> for saying that unlike gender, sex is a biological reality.
Leaving aside that that's not why she was fired (see Richard Gadsden on that), Scott wrote a long post a while back ("The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories," 11/21/14) showing how what that sentence calls "reality" is actually an artificial construct. Yes, the X and Y chromosomes are real, and so are genitals, but the decision to identify one or another of these (they don't always match up, which is part of the difficulty) as the definition of biological reality is a purely arbitrary and artificial decision by human classifiers.
What's arbitrary and artificial is not the things themselves - I said that! - but using them as the sole defining features of the definition of sex. The fact that you're having difficulty grasping this demonstrates the problem.
2) Nope, they show up the artificiality and arbitrariness of our definitions, no matter how rare they are.
3) I didn't use "bigots" in this comment. But the way the concept is being waved around by Forstater and her defenders including Rowling - claiming to just be pointing out biological reality and being punished by some mob - tries to paint them as bigots, bigots against "biological reality," and that -is- bigoted on the part of Forstater and her defenders.
"(they don't always match up, which is part of the difficulty)"
Intersex is a real cluster of conditions, I accept that it exists, if an intersex person decides they are male or female, that is their business.
Nothing at all the same as someone with normal, functional, male biology deciding that now they are a woman because of magic brain conditioning that happened while they were in the womb, with no evidence (like MRIs) that their brain is indeed the magic hormone changed brain. You want me to accept your identified gender? Show me your MRI https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180524112351.htm or else.
As someone who came under the older school of feminism, I now find it *deeply* ironic that Science Proves! there are such things as "male" and "female" brains and this indicates you are trans:
"In addition, GD adolescent girls showed a male-typical brain activation pattern during a visual/spatial memory exercise."
The old orthodoxy on this was "there are no specially male or female brain areas, and women who are good at, or show interest in, 'male' traits are women who are good at these things which are not specifically male or female traits". Men can like sewing and cooking, women can like DIY and driving rally cars.
But now we really are back to "Barbie likes pink and math is hard!" for girls, and if you're a girl who is good at spatial exercises, you have a "man-brain". O tempora, O mores!
I take issue with the use of the word "bigoted" here.
Taking a sex-centered rather than "gender"-centered view of the world is certainly contrary to the way that trans-sexual individuals would prefer to be seen, but it's not "bigoted", it's simply a different ontology.
I'm not sure why being "simply a different ontology" makes something inherently not "bigoted". Can't there be a ontology that is bigoted?
That requires you to have an ontology of ontologies, defining which of them are or aren't bigoted. But is THAT ontology bigoted?
We got the whole lecture on "gender and sex are two different things, of course trans people are not arguing over biological sex" from the activists. But now its "gender and sex are interchangeable terms and someone who hasn't had surgery and isn't on hormones and has only grown out their hair and declared their name is now Susan is a woman, and any deviation from complete acceptance of that is bigotry".
Well, then, call me a bigot. If a woman who has fled a violent relationship where a man beat her up now is nervous and anxious and distressed because a person who sounds and looks like a man is in the place where she is supposed to get shelter is in the wrong, and the trans woman gets all the sympathy, and I'm a bigot for saying "maybe work on setting up shelters for trans people in this situation?", then I'll happily be a bigot, no matter how many tears are shed by allies.
The goalposts keep moving depending on what suits the activists at any moment.
Do you think it is insulting to women who have been physically abused by masculine-bodied individuals and are now in women's shelters, to have a masculine-bodied person demanding access to that shelter on the ground that they too are a woman, and if the cis women there feel distress or anger over that, too bad, they're the bigots?
Because that is what Rowling was arguing - in spaces for vulnerable and traumatised women, maybe having "trans woman" who still looks and has all the biology of a man in that space is not the best idea for all concerned. But she's the bigot for this.
This is interesting. This makes it sound like Rowling is not the TERF archdeacon she has been construed as, but rather what is usually known as a transmedicalist; someone who believes that although a trans woman should be allowed to *transition* if she wants to, this is to be understood as a process of "becoming" a woman; whereas the orthodox position is that a trans woman has been a woman all along, and the hormonal treatments will merely make her body "catch up".
Although there are lots of other issues bound up in this, transmedicalism is upsetting to trans people with dysphoria for I think perfectly non-ideological reasons. Transitioning is difficult and takes a long time; it could be years between a person deciding they want to transition, and successfully doing so.
A dysphoric trans person finds being referred to by their birth sex upsetting, in the same "non-physical but very much non-controllable" way that a person with arachnophobia finds it upsetting to be forced to look at a bunch of spiders. If you say "You won't be a woman until you've had the proper surgery", even with perfectly noble intentions, they will hear "I am going to continue to throw images of spiders at you for two-to-three years, but promise, afterwards I'll stop".
…All of which said, if it is true that Rowling merely espoused transmedicalist views then it is completely out of line that she has pretty much been conflated with the archetypal TERF in Internet culture. It seems a dangerous category error of akind with "Bernie is a communist" or "Trump is literally a Nazi", even if one continues to disagree with the person's *actual* views. I shall definitely be looking further into this.
I didn't read anything from Rowling that suggested that only post-surgery trans women should be considered women. The gist I got from what she wrote is that there should be some level of commitment, ex. hormones, seeing a psychologist, etc.
Oh, sorry for maybe lumping in hormones and surgery. The point is that the question is whether a transitioning person "becomes" the other gender, or if they were always the other gender and are simply taking steps to better be recognised as such.
Of course, there is also the argument that legal and social transition needn't be synonymous; perhaps we might have a system where the social norm is that a trans people "are" their stated gender as soon as they come out; the procedures to get this fact on the books take longer; and the latter can be sped up if you have reliable testimony that you've been earnestly practicing the former for a while. ("Common law gender" by analogy to "common law marriage"?)
Of course, one could still find issues with this. Some (not many, but some) trans people are happy enough with a wardrobe change and don't *want* physical alterations, either because they don't have physical dysphoria, or because the idea of medical alterations to their body creeps them out *more* than the dysphoria does. Hence, since it won't lead to any particular medical procedures, their going off to see a psychologist to sign off on a piece of paper that says "yep, trans" will boil down to just another bureaucratic formality; and then what's the point?
I do not think you are accurately portraying Rowling's beliefs.
By the standards of trans activists, many (most?) transgender people are anti-trans.
Could you expand on that?
My statement is probably only true if we conflate "trans activist" with angry trans people on the internet, and perhaps we shouldn't even consider that activism.
My real point was that the trans community has differences of opinion on a wide range of issues, and that these disputes can often get ugly and result in trans people accusing each other of being anti-trans.
Issues on which the trans community is not united include whether dysphoria is an essential part of being trans (the Transmedicalism dispute), whether trans women are actually women ("gender critical" trans people exist), whether there are more than two genders, whether you should have to announce your pronouns, whether you're allowed to call yourself transexual, whether trans women should play women's sports, and of course whether a trans person is allowed to be a Republican (we can tolerate anything except the outgroup!). I could probably argue that any position on any of these issues is anti-trans, and I'm just a cisgender amateur.
Slight terminology correction that further demonstrates how complicated and splintered this all is: transmedicalism is not *quite* the same thing as the belief that dysphoria is an essential part of being trans; the latter position is usually referred to as TRUSCUM by its opponents; I am not sure its proponents give it any specific name.
Transmedicalism is the framework where a trans person needs physical, medically-assisted transition, with hormones and surgery and whatnot, to "count"; where gender remains determined by physical characteristic, but artificially filling those characteristics can actually "count" to become "for all intents and purposes a slightly weird biological, infertile woman instead of a transvestite man" or vice-versa.
TRUSCUMmery is the belief that you're only trans if you are experiecing bodily dysphoria. Although the two are often twinned, it does not *necessarily* follow that people who do have bodily dysphoria, but still don't want surgery for unrelated reasons, shouldn't be counted as trans. Conversely, while it is rare, you can certainly imagine a transmedicalism wherein "anyone who transitions medically counts as a trans person of their chosen gender, regardless of their feelings prior to transitioning", to which dysphoria is theoretically irrelevant, even if in practice it's mostly dysphoric people who'll want reassignment surgery.
Thanks for the clarification, I did quickly look up transmedicalism and was aware of the use of the term "TRUSCUM", and saw the terms as basically interchangeable, but it seems there are subtle differences that I missed. I think the kind of people that others refer to as "TRUSCUM" would describe themselves as transmedicalists, with dysphoria being the symptom of the medical condition that they believe trans people suffer from?
Yes. Come to that, it's possible that TRUSCUMs call themselves "transmedicalists". But that'd leave us without a name for the position of "anybody can choose to transition regardless of whether they have dysphoria, but you only start being a woman once you've started hormones, much like how you're not bald until you've cut off your hair; it's not enough to have *decided* that in the abstract you'd like to cut it". I think many TRUSCUMs are of the opinion that people suffering from dysphoria should be called by their preferred names and pronouns even before they start their medical transition.
This is way harder than the 'what if men claim to be women to invade spaces because they are perverts' rapists etc' arguement.
What is a transgender person/identity?
Surprise, it's more complicated than you can fathom but the key point I'll make here is that there are clearly different types of transgender people with differing etiologies.
A non insignificant number of MTF are driven at the core by a sexual impulse. This is to say nothing about the profound emotional and philosophical attachments accrued under this type of sexual development. This group is most likely the fastest increasing group coming forward for things like HRT. This deeply misunderstood paraphilia has many flavours but I'll describe it roughly as a sexual response to the abstraction of 'femininity' however that notion manifests and is represented in their head and in society.
Knowing this should show how difficult this issue is going to remain going forward as people understand more.
Natalie Wynn seems to have thoroughly researched JK Rowling’s stance in order to make a video discussing her form of bigotry. Her take is that Rowling is a sort of crypto-bigot who promotes the views of more openly virulent transphobes while pretending to be sympathetic. Apparently Rowling also wrote a long novel about a serial killer who is trans or cross-dresses and is coded as trans. (https://youtu.be/7gDKbT_l2us)
...none of this is true.
The novel in question has *one line* in reference to a serial killer once having put on a wig to disguise himself. He is not trans or a cross-dresser or whatever; he's a person who once put on a disguise.
I prefer analyses from less biased sources.
What would you consider a non-biased source? I am not sure there is such a thing in the world anymore as someone who understands trans terminology sufficiently well to go into subtleties like "is J.K. Rowling a TERF, or a transmedicalist, or a TRUSCUM?", and yet does not have a strong opinion one way or the other.
I wrote "less-biased" not "non-biased".
"Apparently Rowling also wrote a long novel about a serial killer who is trans or cross-dresses and is coded as trans."
Yes and no. Rowling writes adult novels, detective fiction, under the name "Robert Galbraith". Her recent novel in the series had a villain who does cross-dress for disguise purposes, but it's not about them (not in the way Thomas Harris' "Silence of the Lambs" was about Buffalo Bill, and if Rowling is to be cancelled for that, then so should Harris).
Publisher's blurb for the book:
"Troubled Blood
Private Detective Cormoran Strike is visiting his family in Cornwall when he is approached by a woman asking for help finding her mother, Margot Bamborough – who went missing in mysterious circumstances in 1974.
Strike has never tackled a cold case before, let alone one forty years old. But despite the slim chance of success, he is intrigued and takes it on; adding to the long list of cases that he and his partner in the agency, Robin Ellacott, are currently working on. And Robin herself is also juggling a messy divorce and unwanted male attention, as well as battling her own feelings about Strike.
As Strike and Robin investigate Margot’s disappearance, they come up against a fiendishly complex case with leads that include tarot cards, a psychopathic serial killer and witnesses who cannot all be trusted. And they learn that even cases decades old can prove to be deadly . . ."
I don't read the Strike novels, but I was unimpressed by the reaction of those who up until the whole row had been fans, and were now saying "if you still want to read this book, here's how to pirate it so you won't be giving money to a transphobe".
It's ridiculously easy to rile up these youngsters to uncritically follow along, just so long as you use a few magic words - like "transphobe". They won't investigate for themselves, they'll automatically accept the accusation as true - rather like the #MeToo craze at its height. If an accusation is made, then it must be true, because there are no mistakes or false accusations. And if you are pro-trans rights and a good ally, you don't question or doubt the narrative, because that leaves you open to accusations yourself.
I spent a lot of time on SA for ten+ years up until a year or so ago and it had great forums about "serious" subjects. I never ventured into the "comedy" parts of the forums but I regularly participated in all sorts of threads on computer programming, cars, investing, etc. It, as of a year ago, was a shadow of it's former self, but it was so large and influential that a shadow of it's former self was still pretty large. IIRC, at any given moment it was not uncommon to see several thousand users active.
> Yes, lots of people make fun of conservatives for freaking out over some proposal made half-jokingly by a tiny magazine with three subscribers, and acting like it’s the unified will of the entire Democratic establishment. But some non-zero fraction of the time, the ridiculous thing ends up taking over, and after it’s taken over it’s too omnipresent to protest.
I just want to point out that I can specifically recall taking this sort of position years ago when some liberal person made a point about far-right conservatism and now it seems like the far right has vastly more sway than I ever thought possible.
To that anonymous liberal person I was arguing with so many years ago: you were right and I was wrong!
Just this week Liz Cheney, not exactly a leftist icon, was exiled from the Republican party for saying Trump lost the election. Maybe what we are seeing is a general phenomenon of more extreme groups getting more traction as people split into ideologically sorted media bubbles.
You narrative seems incomplete even when comparing it to the Wikipedia truth.
That's going to be tautologically the case, given the limited amount of words spent describing something. A more useful question would be what it is leaving out and why it is important
Two key differences. One, that she was saying a whole lot more than a simple "Trump lost the election." Two, she was going out of her way to publicly denounce other Republicans and the stance of Republican leadership.
You can argue, and I would support this, that she was trying to appeal directly to a subset of Republicans who are worried about the direction of the party. That doesn't mean the Republican leadership cannot make a decision that a supposed leader in the party shouldn't be throwing the Democrats fodder for attacking Republicans. The Republican base can accept or reject that approach, but it's absolutely the right of a political party to make that kind of decision. It happens all the time, just usually less publicly. I think the big difference is the media interested in making the Republican split look bad and hyping both Cheney and the fallout.
Given that Liz Cheney is being replaced with Elise Stefanik, who by voting record is much more moderate, it seems very odd to use this as an example of the GOP being taken over by "far-right conservatism" or "extreme groups getting more traction."
>far-right conservatism and now it seems like the far right has vastly more sway than I ever thought possible.
Please define "far right" and show how it has any sort of "sway" in the SU today...
Ehh, it's not worth it and it's not really relevant to my point. What the person and I were talking about was apparent to us. The point is merely that I'm not sure it's really a thing that happens exclusively to Democrats.
For the most part, yeah, it is. Or, at least, it's only a thing that people on the right are correct about. Cthulhu only swims left. other than gun control. there's no political position on which the republican party today is to the right of where it was 20 years ago, while the democratic party has galloped to the left, and dragged the republicans along in that direction.
Then we don't disagree?
Immigration suggests otherwise.
2 decades ago, democrats were saying the things on immigration that republicans say today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IrDrBs13oA
Reagan was objectively to the left of the current Republican party on Immigration. Do you disagree?
The difficult thing here is that the Republican party has *no* political position today. That makes it very hard for them to be right *or* left of *anything*. They just stand united against Democratic proposals.
The only significant Republican legislative proposal of any sort at the federal level in the past decade is the Trump tax bill.
The Republican base may have some, but they don't get to write anything.
The leadership of the Republican party has very explicitly chosen *not* to write anything (the 2020 platform was literally "the 2016 platform is probably ok, but most importantly we support Trump").
Trump has a clear set of policies of cutting the amount of people and goods that cross the border. But not much else.
It's not like a decade ago, when there were actually written party platforms, legislative proposals, and so on. The Democrats now still have that sort of thing, but the Republicans don't.
"While this makes a bit of sense, I’m sort of skeptical. Steve Sailer, Richard Spencer, and John Derbyshire are still on Twitter. Spencer has over 70K followers."
This analysis is missing something I can't quite articulate - Molineux and Milo were just enthralling in a way that Spencer et al are not. My brain is informing me that the problem is that Spencer et al are too far off the grid and Shapiro is too centrist, while Molyneux et al were in the edginess sweet spot, but I'm not sure that's right.
All I can really offer is my personal experience that if I had gotten sucked down the rabbit hole it would have been because of Molyneux and Milo. Spencer is interesting to gawk at, but he's not attractive like them. And Shapiro isn't a rabbit hole at all.
I think you're making the mistake of thinking of this as being an ideological scale.
Milo and Molyneux are much more charismatic than Richard Spencer or Ben Shapiro.
Hmmm... I'm not convinced. Milo is certainly more charismatic than anyone on the list, but Molyneux isn't obviously more charismatic than Shapiro.
I realised I've never actually seen Molyneux talk. I managed to find him on youtube (though interestingly enough youtube had "stefan molyneux" added to the autocomplete blacklist so you have to type every letter of his name).
Here he is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L0dPKpfHRA He's not charismatic as such, he's neutral. His vibe and body language remind me of any basically-competent professor I've ever seen at a lecture or symposium.
Ben Shapiro, by contrast, has anti-charisma https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3pjh4Xyl0s . He looks like a thirteen-year-old who wears a suit to class and tries to suck up to teacher. You feel embarrassed for him just watching him. You feel compelled to disagree with him even when you agree with him.
The worst part is that I think he knows this and plays into it. He knows that his career will go well if he can play the role of "the kind of right-winger that the left wants you to see".
This analysis of Molyneux strikes me as correct, but the Shapiro angle is interestingly skew. I think the video you linked is missing the fact that him reading the lyrics of WAP is supposed to be the incredibly cringe - as a counterpoint, consider the entrance reaction he gets here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIAyudtNicY You don't get a roar like from an audience if you're anti-charismatic.
Trebuchet's comment sounds a lot like Rod Dreher's Law of Merited Impossibility: “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.”
> I have a hard time feeling sorry for people who used the n-word in a tweet five years ago. I think it’s kind of silly to waste your energy trying to destroy their lives, but also kind of silly to waste your energy supporting them super-hard.
You do realize that approximately 100% of this concern has been for teenagers using the word in the friendly hip hop way and getting fired/rejected from colleges years later for this horrible crime, right? No IDW types are rising to the defense of repentant racists AFAIK, and there isn't a movement to save them. Protecting *the intent* behind language as something that matters seems like an important line to hold in the fight against wokeness, at least to me.
As for George Floyd, it *was* a particularly bad video, and the fact that only videos of black people getting killed rise to public attention means since Trayvon a whole generation of black and white people on the left thinks that unjustified police violence is pretty much just something that happens to black people and happens all the time. The concept of the media being biased *towards* coverage of white-on-black violence in our systemically racist country is so unthinkable to these people that the current climate is *proof* of an epidemic. You can show up with the Washington Post data base, FBI crime stats, similarly horrifying videos of Tony Timpa and Daniel Shaver but they are still pretty unknown and you can't say anything without raising scary Trump supporter alarms for 90% of liberals.
Indeed, people who actually use the word as a slur don’t get sympathy. Usually when such cases make the news and cause controversy it’s because they were singing along to a hiphop song, or reading from Mark Twain during a classroom assignment, or quoting someone else disapprovingly ("I think it was wrong for Alice to call Bob a ..."). Oh, and then there was the guy who got in trouble for using the word "niggardly" correctly.
Also, people have been cancelled for a lot less than that. "Give me six lines written by the most honest man and I will find something in there to hang him" and if you have any kind of on-line presence there’s a lot more than six lines that can be used against you.
See also the professor who was fired for talking about a Chinese word which sounds somewhat like the n-word.
While I agree the incident was very stupid, worth noting he wasn't fired but suspended from teaching that particular class while continuing to teach others. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/08/professor-suspended-saying-chinese-word-sounds-english-slur Though it's unclear if that's a permanent thing or just for the time of investigation.
Still stupid, but less impactful
Thank you.
Holy SHIT! The first question in that Anna Khachiyan interview is the greatest thing ever. By the time I finished reading it I was in love. There is not enough money in the world to send Niccolo I'm-typing-on-a-phone-so-I-can't-look-up-whatever-his(her?)-last-name-is for a subscription. Thanks Darij.
The introduction was great too, but it's Red Scare fan service. If you aren't already involved you're not going to get the jokes. The rest of the interview brightened my day even though I had my identity stolen and spent twelve hours when I should have been working tracking down what the hell happened and placing all kinds of traps around my finances that I'm positive won't come back and bite me on my ass
> I have a hard time feeling sorry for people who used the n-word in a tweet five years ago.
It occurs to me to wonder how soon it will be first rude and then unforgivable to say (literally) "the n-word". After all, we know what word you mean here, and all your sly euphemism doesn't excuse it. And if that time comes, current events show us that the fact that you said it back in 2021 will not buy you any understanding.
It's started already.
https://www.change.org/p/dean-dickerson-and-chancellor-michael-amiridis-insensitive-and-racist-content-on-uic-john-marshall-law-school-exam
I can’t tell for sure from that story whether the word used was the actual n-word or one of the still-acceptable euphemisms, but it sounds to me like the former; I think the bowdlerization happened in the complaint and the news item rather than in the original course material. If so, that’s not what I’m talking about.
I read that page twice and was sure he used the actual words on the exam. Nope. He said "n______", with the blanks.
https://reason.com/volokh/2021/01/15/tenured-law-prof-apparently-suspended-for-racial-harassment-lawsuit-problem-on-a-civil-procedure-exam/
Jesus. Well, Volokh makes it pretty clear. I take it back.
"The slur shocked students created a momentous distraction and caused unnecessary distress and anxiety for those taking the exam. Considering the subject matter, and the call of the question, the use of the "n____" and "b____" was certainly unwarranted as it did not serve any educational purpose. The question was culturally insensitive and tone-deaf. It lacked basic civility and respect for the student body, especially considering our social justice efforts this year."
This part takes the cake for me. These students are hoping to become lawyers. Some of them may have to deal with cases like this when they get a job. What are they going to do when taking evidence from their client - "And what did your co-worker say that was offensive?" "Well, you know - Naughty Names". Yeah, try telling the judge that "our complaint is Naughty Names". That could be anything from "You're fatter than Miss Piggy" to [Unexpurgated Terms]
Keel over in a fit of the vapours and need hartshorn to bring them round if the client uses the actual words and not even the expurgated dashes? That's not going to help you keep your job if every single time you need to rush out of the office to sob in the lavatory about "They - they - they USED DASHES! TO MY VERY FACE!"
I had no idea we were going back to the 18th century where the avid reader was pleasurably shocked and titillated by the naughty words implied in the text - "The Duke of P______, being in a tearing rage, threw his topboots at the valet and said 'D___n'd villain, get out of my sight, you ____, _______, booby!' "
And I'm pretty sure the shocked and appalled students that took a fit of weakness at reading such terms as "b___" on the exam paper have used such words and worse, unexpurgated, in ordinary speech without needing to be brought round by paramedics afterwards.
I hope nobody, in an unguarded hour, ever lets these poor fragile blossoms have access to a copy of Dickens' "Nicholas Nickleby", for they will stumble upon the character of Mr. Mantalini therein, he who uses the "D-" word with wild and unexpurgated (if softened by writing it in a particular vernacular) abandon!
"'Will she call me "Sir"?' cried Mantalini. 'Me who dote upon her with the demdest ardour! She, who coils her fascinations round me like a pure angelic rattlesnake! It will be all up with my feelings; she will throw me into a demd state.'"
Oh, oh no! The unexpurgated and not even using dashes "D-" word! We've gone back to the days of the "Lady Chatterly's Lover" obscenity trial, where "do you want your wives, or servants, or law students, reading the likes of this?" is now the watchword:
"Prosecuting, Mervyn Griffith-Jones began by urging the jury to decide if the book was obscene under section 2 of the Act and if so whether its literary merit provided for a 'public good' under section 4, and that they must judge the book as a whole. Inviting them to consider as a test of whether it would deprave or corrupt he asked "Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters—because girls can read as well as boys—reading this book? Is it a book you would have lying around your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?"
I'm reminded of The Curious Sofa by Edward Gorey.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2011/11/29/the-curious-sofa-edward-gorey/
The text is very hard to Google, but there was a wonderful one-line joke inspired by that style:
> Should I marry N_____? Not if she won't tell me her whole name.
One strange thing about the discourse around terms like "birthing persons" which may not have been obvious to you or others on the periphery is that anti-trans people routinely portray such attempts to be inclusive as attempts to be inclusive of trans women (usually with associated rhetoric about "erasing women"), when in fact they are attempts to be inclusive of transmasculine people (Ozy of Thing of Things being one such person you and older commenters may be familiar with). I'm unsure why this disconnect with the actual stated (and to me obvious if you actually think about it for 30 seconds) intent is so common and consistent across a wide variety of anti-trans groups, but it is.
By and large such inclusivity attempts are a supplement rather than a replacement (essentially, if you have a transmasculine pregnant person in front of you, maybe don't use heavily female-gendered terms for them which might make them uncomfortable), but some people do go farther in terms of trying to universalize it, and I wish they wouldn't because right now it mostly just makes people mad at us trans/non-binary people for little benefit. I like gender-neutral language, I want people to use more of it, but I also want to not start unhelpful fights and language evolution is a complicated process that doesn't respond very well to artificial pushes in a particular direction.
That's an interesting point, and makes some sense.
My preference is pretty strongly on the side of earlier generations of feminists -- to call someone who gave birth a mother regardless of how feminine or masculine they are, and try to be less soppy about motherhood. I'm a mother who's working (and had to continue going into work in person through much of the pandemic) while my husband is at home raising our toddler daughter, and I have a personal interest in society being less judgmental about gender norms. But the particular choices in this case seem pretty bad. Even birth giving parent would be better, emphasizing the relationship to the child (as mother and father do), instead of emphasizing the atomized individual (as person tends to).
Still, the amount of energy expended on this illustrates a much bigger problem with American feminism, and the reason behind the one way in which American women truly are underprivileged compared to women in almost every other country in the world -- the total absence of legally mandated paid parental leave. The problem is this -- American feminism simply has no time for or interest in women who *want* to be mothers.
They'll have your back 100% if you want to end a pregnancy, but if you want to carry the baby to term and raise it, the response is indifference or weak sympathy at best, or disgust at worst (see: the absurd Marcotte/Bruenig flareup on Twitter). If some Congressperson has used the term "birthing person" this last week, that's one more than has said "paid parental leave" in the same time period. As an immigrant from a country with an actual patriarchal society, I find the whole thing beyond absurd.
I strongly disagree that American feminism has no interest in women who want to become mothers. Most abortion funds operate follow the philosophy of reproductive justice that says that abortion and having children/being able to safely raise them should be choices women make because they want to make them, not because they are forced to by lack of resources or support . (More on that here: https://abortionfunds.org/about/) I haven't heard of a single feminist that is against maternal leave. It's just that the constant attacks on abortion access/rights in the U.S. makes abortion a priority. If abortion is not defended, it will be eroded and banned in many places!
That is literally the exact attitude I am describing. Feminists don't oppose parental leave but they are indifferent to it, because all their energy is spent on the choice to *not* have children.
Since you didn't mention the abortion landscape in the U.S. in your initial comment this seemed like an oversight. You didn't give a reason why feminist activism prioritizes abortion, just that it does, which I read as feminists not caring about access to childcare rather than prioritizing abortion because of its precarious status. Also, even though American women have many more rights than women in other parts of the world, they still very much live in a patriarchal society. The lack of abortion access and lack of child care options are clear expressions of it. When it comes to making sure that women can access the same stuff as men (access to jobs, education, property) the USA is pretty good, at least on paper. When it comes to making sure that women can access services that relate primarily/exclusively to them (abortion, maternal leave, childcare, sexual assault services, domestic violence services, research into female specific medical conditions, etc.) the U.S. seems sorely lacking compared to other countries it's usually lumped with.
"anti-trans people routinely portray such attempts to be inclusive as attempts to be inclusive of trans women (usually with associated rhetoric about "erasing women"), when in fact they are attempts to be inclusive of transmasculine people"
Possibly confusion? People not familiar with the nuances often get mixed up about which is the correct term for female-to-male or male-to-female.
There is also a tiny online minority of very weird self-proclaimed trans women who are creepily obsessed with menstruation, pregnancy, and so forth.
"transmasculine people (Ozy of Thing of Things being one such person you and older commenters may be familiar with)."
I have enough respect, even though often in disagreement with their opinions, for Ozy to do them the courtesy of referring to them as they wish. They have also described their genuine distress at being identified as female or feminine in ways unacceptable to them. So, also taking into consideration the right to privacy and not being made a political football of their small child, I'm not going to discuss the particular circumstances of their pregnancy.
I would also note that the claim Bush "was now using “birthing person” instead of 'mother'" made in this post is objectively false. Rep Bush's full comments were: "I am committed to doing the absolute most to protect black mothers, to protect black babies, to protect black birthing people, and to save lives.” There is something to be said about the absurdity of the outrage when the example supposedly demonstrating that "mother" is being replaced cited a person using *both terms*.
> The window between “it has been seriously mooted” and “people are terrified of being seen not to whole-heartedly endorse it” is razor-thin
One area I worry about regarding this is mask requirements. I think we're in a narrow window where we can say, now that everyone can get vaccinated, mask requirements are dumb and need to end. There's a medically reasonable response of "wait a few weeks for everyone who wants a vaccine to be done with theirs and rates to go down some", but I worry we have a narrow window and if we don't push back hard right now we'll be stuck with mask mandates and other covid laws forever, just like we are with the TSA.
I wonder if the liberal mainstream might give fourth-wave feminism a milder version of the "New Atheism treatment" over the trans issue. Clearly many/most feminists are ardent trans rights supporters - just as many/most New Atheists became social justice evangelists - but there's enough of a gender critical contingent that I feel as though the ideology itself - particularly the 70s-era feminist philosophy that more or less formed the basis upon which essentially all subsequent feminist thought and activism is predicated - might be in danger of coming under suspicion.
John S bringing up Rodney King to show that rioting is uncorrelated with extremity of the catalyzing incident of police misconduct totally ignores the relative scarcity of video in the 1990's. Rodney King's beating is not an extreme example of police misconduct in today's world of ubiquitous smartphone footage, but when footage was so rare this was the most extreme example of state indifference to clear misconduct audiences would be exposed to.* If anything the Rodney King example suggests that the rise of BLM is a product of the ubiquity of cell phone video, and the ease of viral streaming.
And look, I hate to say it, but framing violent riots by the urban underclass as "internet fashion, go figure"" is peak confusing twitter for real life. No one is less likely to read an essay from some lefty professor on how riots are the voice of the voiceless than someone who actually lives in the shitty part of Kenosha.
Police violence against civil rights protestors in the 1960's was similarly a shocking expose of police violence, but less an expose of police hypocrisy, as violently enforcing Jim Crow is what they were supposed to do.
> you're going to have far more serious, widespread, and long-lasting rioting if the essay-reading class of society is pro-riot, which is exactly what happened this summer.
Is there any evidence of this? While the essay-reading class of society may be more pro-riot now than they were in the '60s, we had much more serious, widespread, and long-lasting rioting in the '60s.
> This captures a fear I have too. Yes, lots of people make fun of conservatives for freaking out over some proposal made half-jokingly by a tiny magazine with three subscribers, and acting like it’s the unified will of the entire Democratic establishment. But some non-zero fraction of the time, the ridiculous thing ends up taking over, and after it’s taken over it’s too omnipresent to protest. The window between “it has been seriously mooted” and “people are terrified of being seen not to whole-heartedly endorse it” is razor-thin, and it’s hard to blame people who aren’t confident of hitting that window, and sometimes that looks like arguing against it before the the mooting could be honestly described as “serious”.
But naturally this could never, *ever* apply to racists going from Just Trying To Talk About Genetics to anywhere else, goodness me no.
I think it makes much more sense to worry about the side which is constantly winning and where the few nuts to everyone in the world pipeline keeps happening, than to worry that it might theoretically happen on the side that is constantly losing unless people crush it even harder than it is already being crushed.
Which side is it that you think is constantly winning? Because if you think it's the left, I think that's a weird read of the last forty years, or at least puts way too much emphasis on rhetorical progress for minorities.
Yes but the left is winning and overreaching within the social and professional enviornments of young educated grey tribe internet commenters and we know that's the actual most important thing.
Here's actual progress for minorities:
https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-income-households.html
Where has the left been losing other than on guns?
A lot of perception that the left is losing seems to be leftist policies failing or being perceived as failing and then being retconned into somehow being right-wing policies. See race-blindness, which used to be leftist, but which became perceived as a right-wing policy on the left.
The left is constantly winning in the urban educated online bubble you inhabit, and I'm with you that the norms in this bubble are bad and people should try to make their near environment more epistemically virtuous, but that's very different from electoral politics and state power. Republicans will likely control the house and they just kicked out Liz Cheney for bringing attention the the fact that Biden's win was legitimate. The relevant "nutcase to everyone in the world" situation for electoral politics is a Republican House refusing to certify a close D win in 2024, kicking the vote to congress and winning the majority of state delegations.
In my opinion it may be useful for you to meditate on this thought for some time.
When the Left scaremongers you write how it's bad to cry wolf. And while there is lots of truth in it and for me personally this essay was helpful to check my own political biases there is some truth to be alarmed as well. For instance, in the New Sultan book review you mentioned that "there is no fire alarm for dictatorship". Which seems false to me. Especially compared to AI fire alarm. There are lots of fire alarms for dictatorship. But if you are more worried about false positives - that you won't hear them. In failure but not of prediction you credit people who were concerned beforehand, while everyone else didn't want to create panic. Why doesn't it apply here as well? May it be due to the fact that left narrative fears are less relevant to you in particular? Or being worried about such issues is lower status in the Grey tribe?
On the other hand, when the right scaremongers you are concerned. And again I agree that total dismissal of these issues would be wrong. But is it really proportionate response? Is the right narrative is so much more true than the left? Are risks that much higher?
Is Trump or the Capitol thing a fire alarm for a dictatorship, or is it the increasing lack of ideological diversity in many places of power?
From my perspective, a lot of leftists fears completely ignore the lack of means, which makes their fears non-credible. It's similar to being worried that the US will become a Sharia state.
It is a fact that there are a bunch of extremist Muslims that want a Sharia state, but there is no credible way in which they are able to implement Sharia on a state or federal level.
Do you mean academia and journalism? I wonder how correct is it to call them places of power, but nevertheless, this seems to be a fair question.
I'm not an expert in political science so I would appreciate any input. But it seems to me that it's always works in this order: first the aspiring dictator comes to power via elections or coup and then uses it to take control over the press and other social institutes. Has It ever happened the other way around?
If the press is united in being critical towards the leader of the country it doesn't seem to be a fire alarm for a dictatorship - if the press is celebrating his every move - that's worrisome. When the government is trying to influence parts of the civil society which are supposed to be independent - that's an alarm. When the civil society affects who's going to be elected - that's just how democracy works isn't it?
I think your Sharia state metaphor can be useful here. It's indeed strange to worry about it by default in a secular country. But when the most pro-muslim candidate gets elected into the office this becomes a little more credible. When he tries to overturn the next election, spreading disinformation, and his supporters storm the capitol - that's two more points of evidence.
What your metaphor fails to catch, though, is that priors are different. American political system is historically much closer to Trumpism than to Sharia state or to Socialism, for that matter. Imagine if instead of Trump, Bernie Sanders got elected in 2016, then when he lost 2020 election to some moderate Republican candidate (Mit Romney?) he started doing what Trump did and eventually pro Bernie crowd storms capitol. Would you've said that it was still totally unreasonable to worry about socialist dictatorship for the lack of means it could be installed in the USA?
But the example described was one in which an inclusive word ("birthing person") was being used in place of a traditional word ("mother") in a context of generalities, with a worry that we would stop using the traditional word even for individuals that identify with it. Are there any instances where that has happened to any other word in the past? (I suppose there might be some magazines and newspapers that only use "Ms." and never use "Miss" or "Mrs.", but I can't think of any attempts to get rid of racial or gendered language when the individual in question wants to use racial or gendered language - just attempts to get rid of it in cases where we are talking about multiple people, some of whom might not identify with it.)
Chairman, and many similar terms.
I appreciate your acknowledgement that you're just not the interested in the pathologies on the Right in the same way that you are on the Left. It's like Claire Lehmann's acknowledgement to Tyler Cowen that cancel culture and political correctness is more of a problem on the Right, but she just wasn't interested in that. That kind of intellectual honesty is really rare.
But that's also the basic answer to your question. It's going to be hard to figure out why young people are disinterested in the Right when you're not interested in interrogating the Right.
Just read a book by Lee Kuan Yew. Coming from “multiculturalism will destroy America” to this comment section is quite jarring. When the East looks over the ashes of the West, they will wonder what compelled such a successful culture to allow itself to be destroyed from within by such degeneracy...let’s hope Scott is right that this is all just a passing phase!
The West was too successful for so long that "thrive" mindset took over from "survive", a trajectory that still goes on relatively unchallenged. The East is far from being in position to gloat about "the ashes" yet. They may have done well in catching up, but taking over the intellectual and cultural hegemony is another matter, and there aren't that many signs that it's about to happen any time soon.
In fact, peak fears of this were concerned with Japan way back in the 80s, which promptly entered into decades-long stagnation shortly after. China is now poised to be the next "threat", but nobody seems to be particularily enthused about importing their "socialism with chinese characteristics", even other dictatorships. It also remains to be seen how well will they be able to sustain their economy with the quickly aging population.
"When I was dating more, I had some success using OKCupid, where most people would write long essays about who they were and what kind of relationship they wanted. Tinder was always more of a mystery; usually just a photo plus a one-sentence cryptic description like '25, Aquarius, hit me up! <3' I sometimes considered lowering my standards enough to “swipe right” on one of these people, but was never actually able to sacrifice that amount of dignity. Then OKCupid became a much worse Tinder clone and my useful options collapsed to zero (don’t worry, I’ve since found someone great through my community). While in theory dating apps are a great solution to this problem, in practice they’re surprisingly terrible."
This roughly matches my experiences using both OKCupid and Tinder in the past, including not finding OKCupid useful after it became a Tinder clone. I'm thinking of getting back onto the dating market now that I'm vaccinated, but it will need to be mostly online since I know very few women in real life. Does anyone have suggestions for dating apps/sites that aren't surprisingly terrible?
When do you date OKCupid's demise to? When I used it in late 2018, well after its glory days, it still seemed vastly preferable to anything else, if only by a factor of 5 instead of 100. I had enough success then that I haven't had a chance to explore the dating app environment since. Is it now really as bad as Tinder? (Even if they stripped out everything else, the ability to write profiles of unlimited length would put it head and shoulders above every other option, because it lets you filter for people who bother to read and communicate any info at all about you.)
My last experience with it was 2017-2018, so it might still be the best of lots of not-great options. It felt like it got significantly worse when it moved to copying Tinder's swipe model instead of matching you based on your answers to questions, but I still thought Tinder was even worse than that. I haven't had much experience with dating apps/sites besides those two, so I was hoping to hear about others that people prefer, if there are any; if not, I'll probably try OKCupid first.
This sounds like the difference between Scruff and Grindr for gay men.
"As an academic, I'm worried about campus in particular, and things like this are making me sit on suitcases"
Is "sit on suitcases" a saying? I searched around but couldn't find anything.
Being ready to leave. You pack your suitcases and have them at hand in case you need to flee without notice.
I guessed it meant something like that, but I had never heard it before either. Is it a new idiom?
I've never heard it before, but I have heard of Holocaust survivors always having a suitcase packed.
It's an idiom in Russian.
"I had never heard this story before and it sounds just ridiculous enough to potentially be true"
Not quite true I think. It is correct that a lot of disgruntled goons (as somethingawful posters called themselves) ended up on 4chan. Disgruntled as in permanently banned, naturally, and somethingawul moderators were known for being a tad impulsive sometimes, let's put it this way.
But on the other hand making political predictions and staking your account on that prediction was a long-running tradition, this game commenced come each presidential election cycle, and I think for other elections as well, and knowing goons, probably for other stuff too - like oscars etc.
The thing is - people getting in the game knew the risks. If you predict wrong, your account gets banned, I am sure people here can appreciate this setup.
And to clarify, SA accounts were paywalled, registrering an account was like $20, and if you got banned, you could immediately re-register your username with another twenty (unless you were permabanned, which was a different form of ban, or probated for, like, 10000 days, or permaprobated)
So I doubt a significant percentage of 4channers were born out of betting against Obama. A lot of folks did get banned for posting in a right-wingy way, that's correct - SA moderation was known for its left-wing slant - but a lot of folk got banned for posting paedofilia, another big no-no, as well, so you know. Mileage may vary and all that.
My brief follow-up would be that it seems a lot like evil people start tiny movements without much membership. They aren't real groups. Disaffection and stigma pushes lost millennial boys into their orbit, most eventually get fed up/horrified and leave, but the groups are sticky and end up legitimized and enlarged by the process. Don't know if I communicated that well in my first post.
I believe the google search results for trans might be biased as opposed to feminism or racism since it would also include porn searches which would dwarf any other kind of searches. That's why lgbt, transphobia and terf are better terms to search, and as you said that shows better trending.
The question of socialism can be easily explained by not considering the ruling class to be unified. I know, ironic.
In a broadly Turchinian view, we need to distinguish an established elite from aspiring elites (and within those, regular elite aspirants from counter-elites, but counter-elites operate outside mainstream institutions, so they need not be included in this particular equation; it suffices to say they leave to create their own alternative institutions, like Substack). At present, aspiring elites can be considered roughly equivalent to urban intelligentsia. (Professional-Managerial Class in modern parlance.) Degree inflation and all, people are forced to get a diploma for regular jobs, so not everyone college-educated is in this group, but many are, and it's still very large. Way too large for the limited number of positions available to it, and they're in a constant, brutal fight for status. (They're also in a constant class war, trying to create as much demand for cushy specialist jobs as possible. I'd give HR and diversity consultants as obvious examples, but they're only a small fraction of the whole process, and as a whole it isn't culturally coded woke, job market for economists works the same way. But again, that's another story.)
And brutal means brutal. Once someone discovered moral outrages can fire people and create job/promotion opportunitiess, it was only a matter of time before they became commonplace. This required a unified, shared ideology, and the one most conductive to the task won out. Or rather, keeps winning out. Once older elite aspirants establish themselves, they're becoming a target of the next wave of challengers, and the ideological tools must change to reflect that. You don't take feminists down with misogyny, you take them down with transphobia.
So, why not socialism? First, because the aspiring elites are aspiring to be elites. Diversity quotas in elite positions are in their interest, actual egalitarianism is not. And they're taking over current institutions, which are, and have been for 200+ years, liberal, so the aspirants will themselves be liberal. (Those who dream of soviet union with themselves at the top of politburo would still need to defect to counter-elites to get there.) Second, because the elite aspirants are not actually in charge, the elites, i.e. wealthy stockholders, are. They'd very much like to be in charge instead of stockholers, and they'll make some noises to that effect, socialism-flavored or not (mostly merely etatism-flavored, some will call that socialism due to a flawed conceptual apparatus, but it's really not), but they can only go so far until the stockholers intervene, and in the meantime they're still employed to serve whatever immediate interests the stockholders currently have.
Also, as a somewhat more general comment to the recent string of culture war articles: I don't really disagree with the whole cultural part of the analysis, but I feel detaching it from wider context took away any predictive power it might have had. In particular, we socialists are simply fighting a different battle from elite aspirants, one for the souls and attention of common people. (So far, we're losing badly, though I would lie if I denied the memetic progress we made in the last few years. But even that progress is frankly irrelevant, society as a whole has recently started moving leftward, it will continue to do so with our help or not, for purely material reasons, and socialist ideas will be rediscovered, memetically proficient and fashionable or not. That post-2008 surge in interest in socialism? Is it really explained by Obama being called names, or perhaps by the biggest economic downturn in decades? I'd venture the latter.)
> Some commenters got into a subthread about a claim that transgender advocates wanted to rename “Mother’s Day” to “Birthing Person’s Day”, with the predictable response that nobody really wanted to do that and it was a fake conservative talking point / hyperbole / satire / attempt to scare people. Someone else pointed out that a Congresswoman was now using “birthing person” instead of “mother” and this seemed non-fake and non-nutpicking, and someone else pointed out that using “birthing person” was different from demanding other people use it, or changing the name of an entire holiday.
This won't happen. Not because it'd be wierd, but because this fails to make sense even from a woke perpsective. Trans advocates don't advocate renameing womens bathrooms to people-with-vaginas bathroom. They advocate for allowing transwomen to use womens bathrooms. When it comes to Mothers day, you would expect them to act analogously . They recognise that "birthing people" is a different set of people as "mothers" (and you do too if you believe adoptive mothers are a thing), but they'd much rather have mothers day celebrate all parents that happen to be female than people that happen to give birth.
The idea that they would come up with "birthing people day" is exactly how conservatives think progressivism works, not how it actually works.
I think the concern here is "constant dripping wears away the stone". Yes, things like this are extreme and silly and probably (but God alone knows, I am now at the stage of "never rule *anything* out as too stupid to happen") won't go ahead.
On the other hand, maternity hospitals in one NHS trust are now renaming the maternity wards as "perinatal wards" and have Gender Inclusion Midwives team: https://www.bsuh.nhs.uk/maternity/our-services/specialist-support/gender-inclusion/
"Please note: As part of our journey towards providing gender inclusive care for everybody we are working on updating the language on all of our resources, including our website and patient information leaflets. We will endeavour to do this as quickly as possible, and thank you for your understanding as we implement these changes.
Gender Inclusion Midwives
At BSUH we acknowledge the additional challenges that gender identity can have on pregnancy, birth and infant feeding and recognise the importance of providing inclusive, respectful care to pregnant people and their families.
We are on a journey towards gender inclusive care for everybody during pregnancy, birth and afterwards. This journey is led by members of the trans and non-binary community. We are at the beginning of this process, which will continue over the next few years.
Midwives believe pregnancy and birth are normal, healthy parts of life. The midwife’s role is to support a pregnant person’s journey through each stage of pregnancy, birth, and the early days with their new baby. Midwives believe that you know what is best for you and your baby, and will work together with you to ensure your experience of pregnancy and birth is safe and positive.
The Gender Inclusion Midwives are keen to talk to you about how we can welcome you into care that is individualised to meet the specific needs of you and your family. Contact us to discuss how we can help you feel safe and supported during your pregnancy, birth and postnatal period. You do not need to be currently pregnant to make contact. Enquiries are welcome from all, whether you are a prospective or currently pregnant trans or non-binary person, a partner or healthcare professional."
And this includes using terms such as "birthing parent" and "chestfeeding": https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-56007728
A statement from the Trust says that they are not replacing traditional language with these terms, simply adding to the terms used, but again I wonder - how long until replacement?
"Maternity services at Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals have broadened the language they use to support midwives providing care for trans and non-binary people who are giving birth.
The trust recognises the vast majority of midwifery service users are women and already has language in place women are comfortable with. This is not changing. For example, we will continue to call them pregnant women and talk about breastfeeding.
BSUH always aims to meet the needs of our local populations and provide the best possible, individually tailored care for every person. By adding to the language we use we will support more inclusive care and ensure that people who identify in a different way feel the service includes and represents them.
The additional wording is part of an ongoing, award-winning piece of work led by our midwives who have been engaging with trans and non-binary service users to gain an understanding of their unique needs.
This work does not impact on other maternity services and staff are not being asked to stop using any language relating to women.
The clinical guideline and model of care for trans and non-binary people is the first of its kind and will be made widely available to other maternity departments across the country.
BSUH Chief Nurse, Carolyn Morrice said:
“Adding to the language we use is something people who use our services have been asking for, for some time. Our aim will always be to treat everyone who uses our services as an individual, providing care that is personal to them, that meets their needs and uses language they are comfortable with.”
Amanda Clifton, head of midwifery, said:
“I am looking forward to a time when this standard of inclusive care is in fact business as usual for the whole of the NHS. That being said, improvement has to start somewhere, and I am particularly proud of all the hard work our service has put into this award winning work.”
(Examples of our use of gender inclusive language include: “pregnant women and people”, “breastfeeding and chestfeeding“, “mothers and birthing parents”.)"
I could definitely see *someone* objecting to "mothers and birthing parents" as being exclusive or discriminatory language, or making a distinction between 'mothers' and 'birthing parents' which implies that the default is 'mother' and 'birthing parent' is something unusual and abnormal, and in return then the language being trimmed to 'birthing parents' so as not to offend anyone.
Expanding on the last point in the above about replacment language, to quote their own "Protocol Poster" https://www.bsuh.nhs.uk/maternity/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2021/01/Poster-Gender-Inclusive-Perinatal-Care.pdf
"Not all birthing parents identify as women or mothers ...trans men & non-binary people can give birth too"
Do you really think it is absolutely impossible and unimaginable that in time, the term "birthing parent" will not be the one pushed as the default, because continuing to use "mother" or "pregnant woman" is discriminatory and exclusive and distressing to trans and non-binary pregnant persons?
I think that, when referring to a specific person, then "mother" will continue to be used for a woman giving birth. When referring to people in general, it does seem plausible that "birthing parent" might get used in the specific context of obstetrics.
But that isn't likely to affect "Mothers' Day" at all - because "mother" outside of the context of obstetrics doesn't refer to the person who physically gave birth, but to a female person who took on the primary parental responsibilities. Trans women who had kids (by their sperm fertilising someone else's eggs) are mothers. Female adoptive parents are mothers. The one of a lesbian couple who didn't give birth is a mother.
"You are my real father, he's just the sperm donor" is a line used so often that it's a cliché. The equivalent "you are my real mother, she just gave birth to me" is less clichéd, but the sentiment is instantly understandable.
It's not that motherhood is being opposed, it's that giving birth is being decentred from motherhood. If the central concept of mother is "person who raised the child" rather than "person who gave birth to the child" - and I think that has been the central concept in our culture for decades - then changing the language for people giving birth is not going to affect the central usages of "mother".
"Trans women who had kids (by their sperm fertilising someone else's eggs) are mothers."
Nope, they're the biological father. If they're never in the offspring's life, they are still the father. If they're trans lesbian and impregnating their female partner, legally you have two mothers and the child may call them both "Mommy" once it is capable of speech, but one of them is the mother and one of them is the father.
There are a bunch of cases where "mother" doesn't work very well.
One is when the person giving birth is a trans man, who prefers "father".
Another, though, is a lesbian couple. They are both mothers. They will object very strongly to being told that the one giving birth is the mother and the other is not (and also, what should they be called: "father" is obviously wrong here).
So, when you want to distinguish between the parent that is giving birth and the one that isn't, then "mother" and "father" are not a good choice of words.
Yes, at least 95% of the time (and probably more like 98% or 99%), there are two parents, the one that is giving birth is the mother and the other one is the father. But the rest of the time is not zero, and working out what the right language is for cases where the parents are not a cishet couple is a worthwhile exercise.
... and of course that's what any such guidance is going to centre on; everyone already knows the right language for cishet couples, it's "how do I say to a lesbian couple 'the one that's actually giving birth should go this way and the one that isn't should go that way' without pissing them off?".
"One is when the person giving birth is a trans man, who prefers "father"."
When the kid is born, and Dads One and Two, or Dad and Mom, or whatever arrangement is in place, decide who wears the trousers (so to speak), sure, fine.
You got knocked up, you still had the equipment to get knocked up, and you bore and delivered the kid because your partner was unable/unwilling to do so, you're a (biological) mother not a father. Humans are not seahorses, and until uterine transplants for cis men/trans women happen, there are no such thing as pregnant men or "I gave birth to you so I'm your father".
Social and legal recognition that you're a man? Sure, go ahead. But the person who donated the sperm is the biological father, the person who got pregnant is the biological mother, and while terms like "birthing parent" may blur this distinction to preserve the comfort of all parties involved, we still can't simply toss our heads and laugh scornfully at biology.
Haven't we come far from the days of "Heather Has Two Mommies" to "Heather Has Two Mommies, and One of Them is Her Father"!
(Damn it, Substack, GIVE ME AN EDIT FUNCTION)
To hell with it, while I'm at it - why bother with "birthing parent", why not simply expand the definition of the term "mother"?
Cut it loose from gendered expectations. After all, if gender is socially constructed, then gendered terms are also socially constructed, and it should be a lot easier to go "mother now includes 'person of whatever gender, or non-gender, status who got pregnant and delivered the child' as well as the existing meanings" than tying ourselves into knots over "birthing parent" and "chestfeeding".
Cis, trans, gay, straight, non-binary, agender, all genders, pan, bi or omnisexual, or a partridge in a pear tree: "mother" is "person who popped out baby (amongst other already assigned meanings)", "father" is "person taking opposite role to that of mother". If trans women are real women, then birthing parents are real mothers too! Male mothers, female fathers, come one, come all, just expand the definition as is being currently done on trans versus cis versus the other options!
Because that's bioessentialist and the whole point about trans is that it's opposed to bioessentialism?
"person who popped out baby" is, like all biological categories, one that is only relevant and important in a narrow biological context (in this case, in the context of the popping out of the babies).
The primary and important category is the socially constructed category of gender, ie of "woman" or "mother". The biological categories are secondary, are ones that we do not assume align (ie we don't assume that "person with XX chromosomes" and "person with vulva" and "person popping out baby" are a Venn diagram that's just a circle), and are used only narrowly.
If a trans man is arguing that he is not a mother, on the grounds that "mother means female parent", then he's the one who is the biological essentialist, not me.
The only reason to have tortured phrases like "birthing parent" is because of the confusion that these edge cases cause: "Who is the father?" "That would be me" "Ah yes, Mr. Jones, please wait here until you're allowed into the delivery room" "No, that's the *other* Mr. Jones, I'm the Mr. Jones who needs to be in the delivery room because I'm the Mr. Jones who is having the baby!"
Just keep "mother" to mean "the human being giving birth to the baby" and there need be no confusion, no changing "maternity wards" to "perinatal services", and no neologisms that cause more confusion than they solve. If ordinary people are supposed to take it on the chin and accept all the neopronouns and trans [whatever] is real [whatever], then trans and non-binary people can put up with this in exchange.
This simple action would do more to loosen associations of gender with roles than any amount of "birthing parent" silliness.
"we still can't simply toss our heads and laugh scornfully at biology."
Why not?
Because the 'men' who want to be mothers still have to deal with "okay, come off testosterone, okay start menstruating again, okay get pregnant by whatever method, okay go through nine months of the physical body changes, okay deliver the baby".
Biology can't be escaped there, not at our current level of technology. Artificial wombs and the like may be in the future, so eventually we can escape that aspect, but right now? No.
And the people who want a baby but don't go the surrogacy route, it may be that they can't afford it, it may be that they want their own biological child, but if they do get pregnant, they will be undergoing the process like women have always done the process and not like men have.
The first paragraph is something that is entirely correct. But I don't see how it's relevant. A man can do that, this doesn't make him not a man, and it doesn't mean that he's not a father - it's just a different version of fatherhood.
That's what I mean by "laughing scornfully at biology" - of course you have to deal with biology if you want to do a biological process, but gender isn't a biological process.
Richard is completely right. All the examples of "birthing parent" being used are in the context of brith specifically. Mothers day isnt about birth, it's about taking care of you.
And here we have it! We've gone from "nobody is trying to get the term 'birthing parent' accepted" to "Mother's Day isn't about birth, it's about taking care of you".
Ah, and when did this handy re-defining of the term "mother" to mean "caretaker" happen? "Taking care of you" can apply to any family member, a guardian, the paid childminder, the teachers supervising the after-school programmes. Are they all to be celebrated on "Mother's Day"?
In the very argument against definition creep, you've example definition creep.
This is why I'm arguing if the tiny minority of mentally troubled people who think they don't have a gender or that they're the opposite sex to what they biologically are are to be accommodated so that their disorders aren't triggered, I don't see why the other 99% of the population should be the ones to change terms everyone has used and understood.
Expand the definition. If a man can be pregnant, then a man can be a mother. It's only a socially constructed term after all, and we can expand it to include "women who think they're really men".
Otherwise, the trans and non-binary people are the ones who are arguing for biological essentialism on the grounds that "I can't be a mother, that means X and I am Y (or Z)!"
> Ah, and when did this handy re-defining of the term "mother" to mean "caretaker" happen?
at the dawn of the concept of "adoptive mother", which stretches back to antiquity.
> "Taking care of you" can apply to any family member, a guardian, the paid childminder, the teachers supervising the after-school programmes. Are they all to be celebrated on "Mother's Day"?
Don't be padantic. Paranting is a special kind of taking care of a kid. One that is legally and culturally entranched in our society. And also one that is not always biological (see, once again, adoptive parants).
> This is why I'm arguing if the tiny minority of mentally troubled people who think they don't have a gender or that they're the opposite sex to what they biologically are are to be accommodated so that their disorders aren't triggered, I don't see why the other 99% of the population should be the ones to change terms everyone has used and understood.
I'm the one that is arguing to maintain the definition we have always had "female parent". The only thing that has changed is the what we mean by "female"
Also, essentially nobody is confused about what their sex is. people just identify with a gender not associated with their birth sex. People don't just forget they have tits one day.
At best you could say that trans man are "biological mothers", but that's different **and has always been different** than "mothers"
You're using "adoptive mothers" the way trans activists use "intersex people" - as human shields. Adoptive mothers from antiquity to today are women, not men or men pretending to be women or men who think, thanks to a brain disorder, that they are a woman.
> Ah, and when did this handy re-defining of the term "mother" to mean "caretaker" happen? "Taking care of you" can apply to any family member, a guardian, the paid childminder, the teachers supervising the after-school programmes. Are they all to be celebrated on "Mother's Day"?
This is why I'm confused by this whole conversation - the norms I grew up with are "any parent who is female is called a mother", where "parent" is usually defined so everyone has at most two parents but is otherwise extremely loose. A parent could be a birth parent, an adoptive parent, a step-parent, a guardian who is close enough that you prefer to call them a parent, or a multitude of other situations, and any parent who happens to be female is called a mother. I know many people who have adopted children, and any of these adopted parents who happened to be female were celebrated on Mother's Day. Heck, even in my extremely conservative religious group, the Mother's Day celebrations that never would have mentioned lesbian couples still tried to make Mother's Day a celebration of womanhood in general and not just motherhood, since we didn't want to make women-who-wanted-to-have-children-but-couldn't feel hurt/left out.
That background meant that when I grew up and learned about things like lesbian couples and trans women, Mother's Day naturally expanded to celebrate things like lesbian parents and trans women who are parents, regardless of who has actually given birth and who hasn't. I haven't heard of any progressive push related to Mother's Day, and one could very well exist that I'm not aware of, but any woman who is a parent of any kind has always been someone I would call a mother, not just women who have given birth.
> I think the concern here is "constant dripping wears away the stone". Yes, things like this are extreme and silly and probably (but God alone knows, I am now at the stage of "never rule *anything* out as too stupid to happen") won't go ahead.
I agree there is nothing too wierd to happen. This precisely why I specified that the reason this won't happen is not its wierdness. I instead point out its incompatibility with progressive ideals themselves
> a bunch of medical organisation using the term burth parents
sure, im not suprised by this. I would be suprised if people started using the term birth parent in a non-medical way (birth parents day, your birth parent will pick you up at school)
I agree with Monkapp that in the specific case of Mother’s Day, it is extremely unlikely that “mother” will ever be replaced by “birthing parent” because for those who prioritize gender identity over sex, “mother” means “feminine person playing a parental role.” If we celebrate “Mother’s Day,” we get to affirm the femininity of trans women parents, while “Birthing Parent Day” would place an uncomfortable emphasis on precisely the biological realities that the people invovled do not want to think about.
However, gender-neutral language like “birthing person” and “chestfeeding” is, as Deiseach points out, increasingly common and required in contexts (like obstetrics) where biological differences must be acknowledged, and failure to use this language is increasingly punished. For example, consider the case study below—not something I went looking for, but stumbled on in the materials for a pedagogy workshop at my current university, where I was hoping to learn more about how to include first-generation and low-income college students. This case study, based on a real incident but fictionalized to preserve anonymity, was used to start discussion about inclusive teaching. The scene is set in a biology class during a unit on human reproductive disorders:
-
“For class today, let’s start off discussing menstruation issues in women,” said the professor. As she continued with the lecture, Chipepo found herself struggling with some of the terminology Dr. Clark was using. “Menstruation doesn’t only occur in women,” thought Chipepo. “It can occur in people of all genders.” Chipepo was trying to focus on the content of what Dr. Clark was saying, but she found herself repeatedly being distracted by Dr. Clark’s language and was wondering if she needed to say something. “After all,” Chipepo thought, “she probably went to school during a time when trans issues were not discussed. While she could be using this language intentionally, there’s also a good chance she’s just mistakenly using trans-exclusionary language.” Chipepo took a deep breath and raised her hand. “Yes, Chipepo?” queried Dr. Clark.. “Uh..yeah, I was wondering if it would make more sense to discuss menstruation as something that occurs in ‘people’ and not just women.” Chipepo paused, waiting for Dr. Clark to say something. When Dr. Clark didn’t, Chipepo felt like it may be better to elaborate. “Well, um, for menstruation to occur, one essentially needs a uterus, which isn’t just exclusive to women. Transmen and non-binary people can also have one, and, therefore, can menstruate.”
The professor sighed and thought for a moment. “That’s very true, Chipepo, but they were women at one point. Biologically speaking, females are the ones that menstruate. I think getting into all this language stuff is beside the point of the lecture.” Chipepo opened her mouth for a second, but decided against saying anything further. As Dr. Clark turned back to the presentation, Chipepo heard a voice behind her. “Dr. Clark? Well, they were assigned female at birth but they are not women.” Chipepo turned around to see Matt speaking. “Additionally, there are cis-women that don’t menstruate, and intersex people who, regardless of gender, may or may not menstruate. What Chipepo said -- using ‘people’ just makes more sense.”
Professor Clark paused again. “I appreciate what you both are saying, but I think we’re getting beyond the point of the lecture. For simplicity’s sake, I think it’s easiest to go with the traditional understanding of this, but the class will know we don’t mean just women.”
-
In other words, in my university, and I’m sure in many others, it is considered inappropriate and exclusionary to use the words “woman” or “female” to refer to the subset of the human population that normally deals with menstruation (and reproductive disorders related to menstruation, including the absence of menstruation in a person who would under normal conditions experience it—and I can’t think of a simple way to express that idea without recourse to “woman” or “female”). It is not an acceptable compromise to acknowledge outliers and special cases, but still choose to use easily understandable terms for the sake of simplicity and clarity. It is not acceptable to say, “This is a biology class, so let’s stay focused on biology and leave metaphysics and/or language games for other contexts.” The professor must rewrite her lecture and obfuscate her subject to center the concerns of trans people and marginalize the identity of cis women.
This incident was reported to university administration by an unhappy student. The administrators agreed that the professor had acted badly and provided an instructive example of what not to do. It is not at all farfetched to imagine that the students’ report may have led, or that similar reports might lead, to disciplinary action against the professor (especially if, like a majority of college professors today, she is non-tenure-track and can simply have her contract terminated or not renewed without any formal process). It is not farfetched to imagine the same kind of thing happening to lots of people who need to talk about reproductive biology, including primary and secondary teachers, healthcare workers, and researchers. The fact that “Birthing Parents’ Day” is unlikely to catch on, for reasons having nothing to do with how weird it sounds and everything to do with internal pressures to affirm the masculinity or femininity of trans people, does not mean that people will not be pressured into other bizarre, coercive, and obfuscatory linguistic changes.
...Chipepo? The name "Chipepo" is the most absurd part of that whole ridiculous scenario.
Men don't have breasts?
> I … have to admit that I didn’t watch the video. I heard the summary, I don’t have much of a stomach for horrible things, I figured I didn’t have to watch this poor man die.
...it had the wrong ratio of enticing-to-horrifying.
I didn't watch it for a different reason; I didn't want to develop sympathy ("this poor man") for the person involved. It's very difficult to watch someone die _without_ developing sympathy, but he doesn't deserve any.
We're looking at a convicted armed robber who took a lethal dose of hard drugs and got in a car to drive around. He could have easily killed an innocent person. His death was entirely his own fault and entirely deserved, and the world is a much better place without him in it.
Holy fuck that is perhaps the least human, least empathetic thing I have ever personally come across on the internet. There is a reason that none of the crimes you listed carry the death penalty, and there is EVEN MORE of a reason that we do not give cops the power of summary execution. You need to take a chill pill and perhaps think about the way you view your fellow humans.
You do not need to think he was a good person, or even think that the cops behaved in the wrong way, to think that the death of another human is a tragedy.
1. He wasn't ever convicted of armed robbery.
2. He didn't have a lethal level of fentanyl .
3. The immediate cause of his death was Chauvin's actions. To say it's "entirely his own fault" is absurd. And if we're tracing the chain of causality backwards, does the cop who shot Floyd have any responsibility in him being driven to take drugs, or being reluctant to get into a police car?
4. Impaired drivers do not deserve the death penalty.
5. George Floyd was a contributing member of society with a family. The world is not better off without him (other than perhaps the movement that his death helped push).
You either are repeating rumors without bothering to verify them, or are deliberately lying. I think this merits at least a 24hr ban.
> Women are not particularly oppressed when compared to groups that are more oppressed than them
Is this a joke sentence? Maybe I just missed the tone.
I've no real love for feminism, but ciswomen have had their ordinary places nuked. Even /r/2Xchromosomes, whose title is literally about 2X, can't work for ciswomen. My wife has to find tiny little places on Facebook to talk about women's issues. And I don't mean "how do we stop Handmaid's Tale," I mean just plain-jane women talking about everyday ordinary stuff. And the places get destroyed every few months and new ones need to be found, like some kind of terror cells.
I have less data on this, but I've heard from friends that lesbian spaces have also been annihilated. Lesbians are outnumbered by transwomen who want to date ciswomen, and they aren't allowed to just filter them out.
Opressed here means "denied basic rights" and "systematically discriminated against" I'd guess, not "having online forums hijacked".
It's not just their online forums. Women have lost the ability to keep men out of their physical spaces, too.
Well, men have, for the most part, lost their ability to keep women out of their physical spaces as well. Would that also qualify as oppression, according to you?
I honestly wasn't trying to get into the definition of oppression or decide who was winning the Oppression Olympics. But I found the phrase "women are less oppressed than people who are oppressed" to either be a joke that missed me (quite likely, I can be rather dense ~~sometimes~~) or trying to smuggle in a conversational victory.
You know, I think I was being uncharitable there and took this conversation in an unproductive direction. Sorry about that, I guess I was just being butthurt because what you described is something many of us have had to deal with for a while now.
If I may offer a bit of advice, cis women should start their own communities - away from the mainstream platforms. Many of the edgier internet communities have already gone through this a while back and it does appear to be fairly effective.
All fair. And if you told me who is half my age "hey, all those women-only communities are going to get destroyed just like your men-only ones did," he would have taken some small bit of comfort in it. And also been amazed that the women just surrendered to arguments from fedora-wearing men.
It's hardly effective at all.
> I have less data on this, but I've heard from friends that lesbian spaces have also been annihilated. Lesbians are outnumbered by transwomen who want to date ciswomen, and they aren't allowed to just filter them out.
This sounds a lot like my cousins in India who claim that Muslims outnumber Hindus and the government just isn't counting them right.
One of my culture-war hypothesis is that the tech companies are banning all of the non-crazy far-right people and the influential right-wing people, while still keeping around the crazies. This provides a double advantage. First, they can deflect criticism of opinion-based censorship by pointing at the remaining fringe speakers. Secondly, the only right-wing speakers which can be found are so crazy as to be generally repellant to even the moderate right.
This is why people like Alex Jones and Denis Prager needed to be taken off the platform. They were either popular (and thus influential), or moderate enough that they could result in convincing people.
I am fairly sure that this was a strategy used for at least some time. Then they started banning everybody exscept a few well known boogie-men such as Richard Spencer.
The first "white nationalist", to be banned from twitter without having broken any rules were Jared Taylor, who is a mild-mannered american gentleman, an early baby-boomer in age, who grew up in Japan with his missionary parents, learned to speak English from moveies which means he has a very pleasant and accultured sounding accent, went on to Yale and earned a BA in philosophy and spent a couple of years at one of the elite universities of france where he got a Masters degree of some kind.
He call's himself a white advocate and as far as I know nobody has found any text or video where he has said anything nasty about other races or ethnic groups although he does not shy away from established facts such as disparities in intelligence between races and ethnic groups and favors a partly genetic explanation of these things, well in line with mainstream science in intelligence research.
Of course, he has asssociated with people who has said negative and sometimes pretty nasty things about other races and by today's standard he is a white supremacist even though he openly acknowledges that east asians and jews are more intelligent than whites as well as that cerrtain black ethnic groups are far better at certain physical sports than whites. He is an antimsemite as ell, by today's standard, although he is not negative towards jews and feels they belong with whites but of course is aware of the great power Jews' hold in the US and to a large extent in Europe as well, relative to their part of the overall population, such as dominating Hollywood, Media, Wall street, certain parts of acedemia and overall being extremly overrepresented within organisations that have been active in pro-socialist or communist causes as well as organiations working for socially radical causes in the west. These are just facts, well established and one can think they are either good or bad.
CNN did a single one hour interview with him after the alt-right became a thing and he was absolutely charming to the black 40s lady who interviewed him and fairly laid out the case that every other ethnic group or race has organized representative groups who exclusively promote respective ethnic group's or race's interests and he thinks white's should have the same and also be allowed to have their own countries were they are the absolute majority and are allowed to control their own destiny, something that is completely uncontroversial when promoted for the Kurds, Tibetans and the Jews and many other minority groups.
The CNN could not pin anything negative on him and he did a brilliant interview and I believe the powers that be realized that he was impossible to make a boogieman out of.
And he was the first to be banned from Twitter without never having broken any of Twitter's rules and with no cause given.
I’m too old too understand a lot of this. I think in some sense I’m just not supposed to get it. My generation established its own identity by behaving in ways that our elders wouldn’t get - See “Don’t criticize what you can’t understand” - I would really like to understand how some of my old hippie friends are wearing red hats though. I guess I’ll reread “Kill All Normies”. Have a 50th high school reunion coming up in July. That’s not a lot of time to get a handle on this. Really, I don’t care about agreeing with it. It would be a comfort to simply understand what is going on in people’s heads.
<i>>> After 2016 (when my gf of 4 years and I broke up), I exclusively went on dates using dating apps. I have never asked out a coworker, a girl at a bar, or a girl at the gym, and I don't know a single couple in my peer group who met that way either. For some reason, portrayal of dating in the media has yet to catch up.</i>
Dating apps kind of work if you're a guy willing to date at least -2 points below where you should: https://theredquest.wordpress.com/2019/06/03/oh-i-was-wrong-about-the-tinder-thing-it-is-that-bad/. The top chicks I've dated, I've met in real life. The guys who really want to do dating well still talk to girls in real life. Online dating works poorly, but good enough for this guy.
Go read romance novels (porn for chicks). Zero of them feature a meet-cute on an app. Maybe not quite literally zero, but .0002% rounds down to zero. Top guys figure out how to date offline.
I am not one of the top guys, and I have no idea how to date offline. Are there good resources somewhere to learn about that? Importantly, I know very few women offline, and I was also raised in a highly religious culture with its own dating norms, so I have no idea how things work outside of that.
https://redpilldad.blog/2020/12/15/day-game-aka-cold-approach-for-newbies/ is a good place to start.
Neil Strauss's book _The Game_ is also a fine place to start.
I think there's a narrative here where certain people are congratulating themselves on succeeding at derailing a new extremist right-wing movement.
However, the new extremist right-wing movements, insofar as they have been "defeated", are a figment of the imagination, either in beliefs, popularity, or appeal. MRAs, for example, aren't right-wing; they're left-wing. And they have (appropriately!) increasingly faded into the background as their causes have become mainstream; think about how domestic abuse violence against men is treated today, as compared to how it was treated twenty years ago.
Deplatforming has not eroded the right-wing movement; it has created a new, much more powerful, right-wing movement. My company now includes some ordinary, fairly bright right-wing people who have beliefs that, a decade ago, would have been constrained to a few very crazy, very online people. They have lost all trust in the institutions that once could be relied upon to hold these kinds of beliefs in check; they have lost all trust that there is any objectivity in terms of what information reaches them, and thus have no constraint on what kind of beliefs about the world make sense.
This has not been a successful strategy for the illiberal left; this last election is not proof that their strategy works, it is proof of how badly it is going. They are creating a monster, which they empower more and more with each iteration of the process. And frankly, a lot of the liberal left are moving to the right; the idea that opposing this insane process is right and good has not-so-quietly entered the mainstream.
> First, how does the wokeness vs. socialism calculus in self-interested people really come out? White male executives might reasonably worry that if their companies became super-woke, they could get cancelled, or miss out on promotions that go to minorities instead. On the other hand, it’s very easy for the same white male executive to say “Oh, yeah, there should be Medicare for all and higher taxes on the rich”, knowing that all this will get abstracted over the whole country, and his own pronouncement will earn him signaling points but not really affect the chance of those things happening too much.
It's not the executives making these decisions, it's the people above them, billionaires like Jeff Bezos or Jack Dorsey. People like that have no reason to care about "missing out on promotions", but they do care about a government that would clip the wings of tech billionaires, as it would reduce their own power, wealth, and status.
"On the other hand, it’s very easy for the same white male executive to say “Oh, yeah, there should be Medicare for all and higher taxes on the rich”, knowing that all this will get abstracted over the whole country, and his own pronouncement will earn him signaling points but not really affect the chance of those things happening too much."
I'm surprised to the point of "what am I missing" that more CEO types don't already do this. Particularly the M4A thing - it'd have a very modest impact on their own personal wealth and likely improve their companies' bottom line, what's the danger of even signaling toward it?
"So maybe it was just a really moving video."
It was genuinely one of the roughest things I have ever seen, and I am very online. Other effects absolutely factor in, but I wouldn't underplay the power of a really intense video.
"But it seems more like Twitter enforces the rules somewhat harder on the right than the left for PR reasons, without having a concerted campaign to ban the right in any kind of useful/consistent way."
Evidence for this very much needed.
First of all you write:
While this makes a bit of sense, I’m sort of skeptical. Steve Sailer, Richard Spencer, and John Derbyshire are still on Twitter. Spencer has over 70K followers. I can’t deny that many far-right people have been banned. But it seems more like Twitter enforces the rules somewhat harder on the right than the left for PR reasons, without having a concerted campaign to ban the right in any kind of useful/consistent way.
Also, even if they did ban everyone to the right of Ben Shapiro, why wasn’t there a mass movement in favor of Ben Shapiro and others like him? I feel like far-right people can still find lots of far-right celebrities to follow, and Jones and Molyneux weren’t even central examples of far-rightists. Surely there are still enough unbanned rightists to satisfy almost anybody; this makes it hard for me to believe this had too big an effect.
This is not the same, Ben Shapiro is deliberately a funny, family-friendly right-wing pundit (or at least, as funny a pundit can be. Y'all may claim he's "cringe" or whatever - but Jon Stewart was a thing and basically epitomized the Smug Champagne Socialist archetype - I never hear the same complaints there , wonder why?.
The family friendly pundit is not the person who provides energy for a movement, particularly under young people. Take a look at the success of 'the Squad' - they're totally mindkilled, routinely display raw ignorance of the topics they discuss, and are generally not very respectable. However - they are *popular*, and they are popular because they have staked out an identitarian position in respect to their relationship with the established order. They are combative firebrands and not too concerned with how legitimate their ideological or technical positions are.
As a movement , whether or not you like those people - you *need* those people because they drive energy to the project as well as "create space" within the Overton window.
"Also, even if they did ban everyone to the right of Ben Shapiro, why wasn’t there a mass movement in favor of Ben Shapiro and others like him?"
Not sure if anyone said this, but maybe because Shapiro and the like forgo the strongest alternative explanation to systemic racism for racial disparities, HBD? And in terms of foreign policy and economics Shapiro is on the opposite side to the alt-right. A mass movement based on failed Bush-neocon policy?
Are conservative mass movements even a thing?
Or to put it another way: if everyone to the left of John Oliver was banned, would there be a mass movement in favor of John Oliver?
Yeah this is a good point, "Right" is not a single direction in political space, it's just a vague description for "everything that isn't left".
The Shapiro/NRO definition of "right", which comes down to "Lower taxes for the rich", "less abortions probably" and "Israel first, America second maybe" is no longer a direction that mass movements are attracted to.
Indeed. The decline of the alt-light/right on Youtube does not seem to accelerated growth of conservative channels: https://twitter.com/Sean__Last/status/1319848768750166018
In Sweden, an NHS language guideline recommends avoiding the word for "woman". Official information says things like "Pregnancy pay can be paid to a pregnant person if [...] ze is unable to work while ze is pregnant" and "This is the case whether the one giving birth is a woman or a man". On the one hand, I would think that expressions such as "people with uteruses" would be too cumbersome to become widespread, but, on the other hand, unwieldy expressions for cripples and morons have managed to become commonplace, so it is not unthinkable.
Does the language guideline recommend that no one ever use the word for "woman"? Or just that in contexts where one is describing a general population giving birth, one avoid the word for woman, and use it only when a particular individual, who identifies as female, is being talked about? Because that's the guideline that most trans people in the United States want.
(Also, I think that translating the gender-neutral third-person pronoun from Swedish as "ze" is a bit misleading - my understanding is that this pronoun is seen by Swedes as just as normal as singular "they" in English.)
The guideline is for public health information given on their website. They present the sentence "Some women who have had eating disorders relapse during pregnancy" as an example of what to avoid. They also say that when the word nevertheless has to be used in order not to make the text too incomprehensible, it needs to be hyperlinked to a page that explains that "When we write the word woman, the word is used to describe someone who has what is usually described as a female body".
The Swedish pronoun in question is a controversial neologism (in dictionaries since 2014 or so) associated with certain social movements. So I consider it closer to "ze" than to singular "they". It is less fringe than the former but nowhere near the neutrality of the latter.
If only there were a short version of "person with uterus" we could use. Like "womb-man" or something...
In all seriousness though, what if we started putting disclaimers on documents which say things like "In this document the words 'man' and 'woman' refer to biological sex, not socially-constructed gender"?
>Women are not particularly oppressed when compared to groups that are more oppressed than them. This makes it kind of hard to sustain a feminist movement; you’re selecting for people who have accepted the social justice paradigm where issues should be about how oppressed relevant groups are, but you also want to focus your energies on a less-than-maximally-oppressed group. This makes it easy for other people to chide and hijack you, and it sounds like feminism keeps getting chided and hijacked.
I would say globally speaking, the "maximally oppressed" groups would be people of the lowest caste in North Korea, citizens of Zimbabwe, factory farm animals, etc. Any way for us to accelerate a transition towards focusing on their problems?
Those are fargroups. No one on either side of the Culture War is going to be particularly concerned about fargroups, because supporting your ingroup and opposing your outgroup are going to have a much more direct impact on the things you can visibly perceive on a regular basis. Humans are not the universal utilitarians that you apparently expect them to be.
I have a couple hypotheses of the causes of the rise and fall of online culture wars.
1. Boredom. Going down a new rabbit hole is fun, but eventually you get bored of it and look for something else. (Maybe this also acts in the form of the aggregate boredom of the public reducing the virality of old topics).
2. Reaction. A movement's overreach incubates its own opposition and causes it to lose momentum. Salient examples of overreach that get widespread media coverage update the priors of naive individuals to make them harder to recruit. This sorta seemed to happen in all three of the culture war phases. This also definitely happened with communism back in the 20th century. But somehow the dallas cop murders etc didn't slow down BLM. Clearly some movements are more susceptible than others to this sort of weakmanning. Maybe it's that the media are eager to distance the movement from the overreach when the media like the movement, and eager to pin the overreach on the movement when they dislike the movement. So the one kid who panicked and hit the gas at charlottesville when someone pointed a gun at him is the fault of every white person who wants to continue to have a homeland not ruled by foreigners, but the dallas cop murders and dozens of 2020 cop murders are just a freak occurrence with absolutely nothing to do with BLM going around chanting "Pigs in a blanket, fry em like bacon".
I think you've got it nailed down pretty good. The media in the west is the most sophisticated propaganda operation that has ever existed. and it affects the perception most people have of our society and what values they tend to have more than anything with the possible perception of very unpleasant personal experiences that is in direct conflict with the established media narrative.
Regarding the idea of hitting on women being viewed as creepy, I will second the idea that this didn't fade away but rather has become entrenched as the new norm, at least in educated circles . Allow me to quote from the 2018 Atlantic article, "Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?" (Simon is a 32-year-old grad student who has recently re-entered the dating pool):
“My first instinct was go to bars,” Simon said. But each time he went to one, he struck out. He couldn’t escape the sense that hitting on someone in person had, in a short period of time, gone from normal behavior to borderline creepy.
...“I play volleyball,” he added. “I had somebody on the volleyball team two years ago who I thought was cute, and we’d been playing together for a while.” Simon wanted to ask her out, but ultimately concluded that this would be “incredibly awkward,” even “boorish.”
At first, I wondered whether Simon was being overly genteel, or a little paranoid. But the more people I talked with, the more I came to believe that he was simply describing an emerging cultural reality.
This shift seems to be accelerating amid the national reckoning with sexual assault and harassment, and a concomitant shifting of boundaries. According to a November 2017 Economist/YouGov poll, 17 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 now believe that a man inviting a woman out for a drink “always” or “usually” constitutes sexual harassment.
...quite a few [women] suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out. “Creeper! Get away from me,” one woman imagined thinking.
Environment matters. You're in an enclosed space in an elevator there's no way to easily escape. Hitting on someone here is not a smart move. Women are on guard in these places.
*Hysterical* women are on guard in such places. You can escape on literally every floor, not to mention, escape from *what*?! Having to say "no, thanks" and then stand around in awkward silence for perhaps as much as 30 seconds? Nobody's going to hear "no, thanks" and proceed directly to violent rape in the time it takes for the elevator to reach the seventh floor? This is a culture of wholly disproportionate fear, not of sensible precautions.
I think the level of fear is excessive, but I'm not going to insult people for being frightened. Considering the odds, men who are afraid of having their lives wrecked by false rape accusations are overdoing it, too. Even men who are afraid of losing all their money and their children in a bad divorce might be overdoing it, but I'm less sure of that. Anyone know what the odds are?
Back to elevators. "Escape on every floor" assumes access to the buttons.
What did Watson say? As I recall, she just said that she didn't like it, not that she was terrified.
An elevator is a small room with a door that will randomly open to a random set of eyewitnesses every minute or so even if nobody inside the elevator presses any buttons. There's a button inside the elevator that can temporarily isolate it, but that same button also sends an alert to building maintenance and/or security that there's something gone wrong with elevator X that they ought to look into. As an environment for actual rape, this is decidedly suboptimal.
As you say, some people are going to be afraid regardless. But the rest of us can't spend our lives tiptoeing around the grossly irrational risk assessments of a few. If an "elevator pitch" is a legitimate thing when you're asking someone for millions of dollars (and prepared to take no for an answer), then it ought to be equally legitimate when you're asking for a one-night stand and prepared to take no for an answer.
And if the real issue is being annoyed but not terrified because you know it's just a proposition with no threat of violence, then A: you should say so rather than claim to have been terrified and B: your supporters and allies should say so rather than claim that you were terrified and/or rationally afraid of violence.
Rape isn't feasible, lesser assault is. And there will be a lot of people saying "Pics or it didn't happen".
Let's imagine a scenario. You're alone in an elevator at 3AM and someone comes in and starts trying to sell you bitcoin. I suggest this would somewhat degrade your quality of life, even if you're able to brush it off.
Maybe more so if you've spent your life in a culture where trying to sell things to random strangers is normalized so much that people tell you that you shouldn't mind.
I've been told that men (a lot of men? most men? I don't know) reflexively evaluate whether the man they're talking with is more or less physically capable than they are. Would it matter if the bitcoin seller is likely to be more dangerous than you are?
Why would it degrade your quality of life *more* if you're wholly used to it? Getting spam email trying to sell me things is wholly normalized for me, but what that means in practice is that I barely notice it.
Having people ask me to enter into transactions I'm not interested in, whether romantic or economic, degrades my quality of life in the sense that unwanted proposals of any sort are an annoyance and my life would be trivially improved by an infallible agent who screens all such proposals before they reach my notice.
But that's not a realistic option; society doesn't work unless proposals romantic and economic are made without certainty that they will be welcome. The more money you have, the more unwanted economic propositions you will receive. The more hotness you have, the more unwanted romantic propositions you will receive. Hence the analogy to the "elevator pitch". Either "man up" and deal, or retire from society. Traditionally, women *could* retreat behind (fallible) male agents who would screen their proposals; it's a good thing that is now an option rather than a requirement, but the price for taking the free agent option is that you field the unwanted proposals yourself.
As for feeling *physically* threatened by someone e.g. trying to selling me bitcoin, no, that's not really a thing and it's not a question of how physically imposing the man is. There's not much difficulty in distinguishing between literal robbers and the lesser annoyances. And it's not reasonable to expect people to never ask me to buy things from them or invest in things with them because I might hypothetically be afraid of them assaulting me if I don't.
As for "pics or it didn't happen", I'm pretty sure the elevator is the place in a typical hotel or office that is *most* likely to have security cameras. If an elevator proposition escalates to the point of your being actually groped, call security, and if they try to brush you off then tell them to call the police or you will. There's pics, so it officially happened.
Yea, "hysterical women." Because anything short of violent rape is totally chill. Groping, lewd comments, leering, and yes, rape. Not every environment with an elevator is full of bustling, watchful people. I recommend actually thinking about why a woman might be made uncomfortable by being alone with a strange man in an isolated environment rather than acting so hysterical your self.
Mr. Schilling has ably expressed my own sentiments on most of this, better than I could have, so I'm going to content myself here with pointing out that this "no u!" attempt to accuse someone pointing out actual alarmism of being the real alarmist is a particularly weak rhetorical effort, albeit tragically common among a subset of feminists. This is not a schoolyard in the third grade, and frankly I'm unsure if even a third-grader would fall for this sort of ridiculous gambit.
In the early days of internet culture (the mid-to-late 90s), there were constant debates between Christians and atheists for three reasons: First, atheism was just starting to become a mainstream and socially acceptable position. A lot of devout Christians were quick to argument simply because they'd never actually talked to an avowed atheist before and were genuinely surprised that anyone didn't believe in God, while a lot of atheists were quick to argument because they'd spent their entire lives getting flak for their views and finally had a place where they could fight back. Second, the internet was just starting to open up to the general public; previously, it had largely been the province of tech geeks who were disproportionately atheistic compared to the rest of the population, and the sudden influx of normie Christians was a recipe for conflict. Third, and perhaps most importantly, people just didn't have anything better to talk about. After all, times were good! We were living in a time of unprecedented peace and economic prosperity. In a sense, those early internet debates on theism were a luxury afforded by the lack of real material concerns during the Pax Americana. The conflict was *casual*.
That changed in the 2000s. The core conflict of the 2001-2008 era wasn't Christianity vs. New Atheism. It was Bush's coalition of pro-Jesus, pro-America, pro-war jingoists vs. everyone else (particularly liberals and libertarians, many of whom were atheists or at least secularists themselves). After 9/11 and the Iraq War, there was a real sense that the conflict wasn't between Islamic fundamentalism and secular liberalism, but between Islamic fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism. Yes, the anti-war crowd also talked about how Cheney was dragging us into war for oil, or how Bush just wanted to avenge the hit that Saddam placed on his dad, but there was a very real sense that Christianity itself was one of the driving factors behind American foreign interventionism. The debates over God's existence became less abstract and more heated as they became a proxy for Bushism vs. an unlikely alliance of liberals, libertarians, leftists, pacifists, and tech bros. The conflict was *partisan*, and internet atheism was only one part of it.
But after Obama's election, partisan politics in the U.S. took a different turn. Obama continued the military interventionism of his predecessor, which promptly killed the narrative that we were fighting in the name of Christian crusader-imperialism (of all the things he's been accused of being, I don't think anyone ever accused Obama of being too fanatically Christian). And aside from Obamacare, things didn't change all that much domestically either. Plus, the 2008 financial crisis (which, in my opinion, actually had even more of an impact on Americans and U.S. politics than 9/11) caused the first notable decline in standards of living since the 70s. People became less inclined to focus on abstract theological issues or even the very real problems of Afghanis and Iraqis half a world away, shifting their focus to home.
Combine worsening socioeconomic conditions (which affected everyone, but were perceived as disproportionately affecting racial minorities and women), the leftover remnants of the Bush-era Culture War (especially the debates over women's rights, abortion, and gay marriage), a newfound emphasis on race as a result of having the country's first Black President, and the advent of new forms of social media that encouraged controversy and polarization and echo chambers, and you have the perfect storm of factors to result in something like the left-identitarian movement of the late 2000s and early 2010s. While feminism may have been the "big sister" in the left-identitarian alliance, this was also around the same time that critical race theory and LGBT identity movements became popularized, along with the notion of "intersectionality" (i.e. the idea that the struggles of racial minorities, women, queer people, disabled people, etc. were all actually the same struggle). The conflict was now *cultural* first and foremost.
So what happened in 2015-2016? I don't think it's as simple as racial issues replacing feminism as the topic of the day, but rather a total repudiation of the idea that making the ruling class more diverse (in terms of race or gender) was a goal worth fighting for. The earlier model of liberal identitarianism, which largely sought to secure equal success for minority groups within the existing system, was replaced by a radical form of revolutionary far-left identitarianism that sought to topple the existing system altogether. This also happened to result in feminism taking a step down and anti-racism moving to the forefront - largely because upper-middle-class White feminism was a particularly egregious example of supposed liberal hypocrisy, and because race was more easily tied into both socioeconomic concerns and the "anti-colonialist" sentiments that tied anti-capitalism, anti-liberalism, and minority activism together - but that was simply a side effect of the real change in emphasis. The modern left has no love for pro-establishment women like Hillary Clinton or for pro-establishment gays like Pete Buttigieg, but they don't have much love for pro-establishment racial minorities like Cory Booker or Kamala Harris either. Even Obama is increasingly viewed as a weak and ineffectual figure at best, and a warmongering corporate shill at worst.
It's not that revolutionary socialism tried to replace left-identitarianism and failed, it's that aspects of revolutionary socialism were incorporated into left-identitarian ideology; many left-identitarians are now socialists, communists, or anarchists themselves, and almost all of them are at least nominally opposed to capitalism, which wasn't the case back in 2012. Sure, there are still some non-identitarian socialists like Chapo Trap House and the "dirtbag left," and some non-socialist identitarians like Noah Berlatsky and Charlotte Clymer, but they've become outliers, with both groups increasingly facing mockery and disdain from their fellow leftists. The conflict is now *structural.*
This is an excellent analysis.
I think this account misses two things. First: it's all a function of the sentiment shifting leftward across the board. Which, sure, created many nominally-socialist identitarians, but all the same, many more non-identitarian socialists than there were before. Second: identitarians came first. By mid-2010s, they've essentially taken over all socialist spaces and organizations they could, and it wasn't until then that an explicit opposition to them started to arise. (Anything but an intuitive full support for minority interests, including identitarian mores, would have been unthinkable for a leftist a mere few years ago, some of it naive, some genuinely enthusiastic. The current increasingly organized opposition is really recent.)
By which I mean, It indeed is that socialism tries to replace left-identitarianism, and the only sense in which it failed is "so far". I believe Scott's take of "there's been certain memetic successes, but the opposition is institutionally entrenched" is in fact exactly right.
Socialists definitely came first, it was around long before the left-identitarians were. Socialism has been around for over 200 years, while left-identitarianism has been around for maybe 50 if we're being especially generous with the definition, and for less than 20 in its current form. There were semi-mainstream socialist and communist movements in the US back in the 1910s, but there was nothing remotely similar to the modern intersectionality movement back then.
I also don't agree that "anything but an intuitive full support for minority interests" would've been "unthinkable for leftists" until very recently. If you look at actual communist states like the USSR and China, they were incredibly nationalistic, misogynistic, and homophobic - hardly great places to be if you were an ethnic minority, a feminist, or LGBT. And that wasn't exclusive to the Eastern world either. For most of the 20th century, socialist and communist movements in the West tended to be almost entirely male-dominated, had a relationship with feminism that was mixed at best and often strained, and frequently ostracized and expelled homosexuals. McCarthy might've thought the queers and commies were on the same side, but there wasn't much truth to that notion outside of his paranoid delusions.
Different timeframes, note I was careful enough to type "a few years ago" without "until". Socialism used to be huge (and have commoner appeal, which necessitated traditionalist commoner values), but then it won so much it undermined its own existence. The developed west met workers' social needs without dismantling capitalism, the less-developed east had socialists take over and become exactly what they hated, then outside some exceptions in third-world countries by the 1990s all mainstream formerly-socialist organizations were on board with free-market liberalism and all remaining revolutionary organizations diminished to irrelevancy. Socialism as a living, inspiring idea was only preserved in academia, boheme and counterculture, this is the form in which my generation encountered it. Sure, boheme's and counterculture's irreverence is in stark contrast to the stifling conformity of identitarians, but the point is minority rights weren't associated with stifling petty-bourgeois comformity until recently either. They were associated with freedom and tolerance, and we were fully onboard.
PS: Of course there was something similar to the contemporary progressives in the US in the 1910s, the then-contemporary progressives, fixing social ills by prohibition. Thankfully, they reasonably quickly made way for actual social progress, here's hoping the history will repeat.
Prior: I am at least .65 of a leftist.
I will now give the left wing perspective on who is winning the culture war.
In leftist circles, it is accepted as true gospel that any amount wokeness and canceling people on twitter is purely symbolic.
Poor people still don't have equal access to health care or education, the wealth gap is still increasing, unions still keep not existing.
A mob of fascists invade the capitol, and three weeks later the so-called "left wing" of American politics is making nice.
All these incredibly canceled right wing figured get to be cry about it from the shelves of bookstores, or during prime time on the largest news network on the planet; and I bet ya'll can't even name one socialist as big as ben shapiro.
There has been no action on climate change. There has been no legislation on police brutality. Conservative have 6 of the 9 seats on the supreme court.
Conservatives almost won the house of reps, despite losing the popular vote for the legislature by 15%.
End Summary.
To people on the left, it looks like they are just barely hanging on by their fingernails, and anyone talking about "culture wars" and "canceling" is deploying rhetoric to hide the fact that they are on a 50 year winning streak.
I understand why the left feels like this. There has been very little movement on top rate taxation. But I think that is to miss why it's called the *culture* wars. On issues of politics, such as taxation and regulation - the left do not seem to be triumphant (nor routed, just that the battle rages)
But on issues of culture: What does TV and Film show to be valuable, who is praiseworthy, etc. I think it is hard to deny a leftward shift.
It sounds like you're saying the leftish perspective is "we don't care about the culture war, where are our practical victories" - and fair enough. But given that the left controls all of the major TV channels and newspapers, it seems that de-escalating the culture war, and focussing on policy is something that's entirely within the power of leftist actors.
I'm not the first to make this realization:
The left controls culture. But they don't control politics, and given that they control culture, they figure they *should* control politics. But from the outside, they look petty and resentful for not being happy with their current wins.
The right controls politics. But they don't control culture, and given that they control politics, they figure they *should* control culture. But from the outside, they look whiny and resentful for not being happy with their current wins.
I feel like the left would be less pissed all the time if they could get representation in proportion to the votes they turn out, even.
While I understand why you believe that, I have to tell you that it doesn't take a too long glance at European countries with fully proportional representation to see that no, they would not.
Close, but still off the mark.
It's not that the left controls culture and the right controls politics. (In fact, the actual left and the actual right control nothing.) It's that the people who control both culture and politics are right-wing on political issues (particularly when it comes to fiscal policy) and left-wing on cultural issues. That's why you have billionaire CEOs who support right-wing economic measures like lower corporate tax rates while enforcing "woke" hiring and conduct standards within their companies. Or why the Koch brothers, who were infamous for pushing a right-wing economic agenda of deregulation and privatization, were also among the strongest advocates for increased immigration, marijuana legalization, and police reform.
You're correct that the Western world and especially the US keeps moving leftward on social and cultural issues, while simultaneously moving rightward on fiscal and economic matters. But it's not because of two competing groups who keep winning in one arena and losing in the other; it's because of one group that keeps winning in both, much to the chagrin of both "pure" anti-capitalist leftists and "pure" culturally conservative rightists.
The most prominent cultural shift in recent decades was from affirmation of common people to affirmation of meritocracy, and it cannot be considered leftward by any stretch of imagination.
Unless, of course, we redefine the "left/right" division itself as two competing strains of gentry. Then, sure, they exist and control different sets of institutions. And they sure look petty and resentful for not being happy with not controlling it all. But then it also becomes patently obvious why this control never translates to any practical change for their respective nominal (and nominal only) allies among the proles.
> To people on the left, it looks like they are just barely hanging on by their fingernails, and anyone talking about "culture wars" and "canceling" is deploying rhetoric to hide the fact that they are on a 50 year winning streak.
Then why are they wasting so much time and resources on issues that benefit ever smaller minorities of the population? If the left really wanted to effect widespread change, they would focus most efforts on the most inclusive category, which is CLASS, but instead they champion identity politics which disperse efforts along ever slimmer subpopulations.
As posters say below, they are focusing efforts on culture, but that's territory they *already control* and so wins are easy. Identity politics is diverting attention from unifying and focusing efforts on taking territory they don't already occupy. The left is frankly doing this to themselves.
Leftist zeitgeist perspective again:
The left wants a list of things, A: economic inequality, B: Environmental shit , and C: Culture stuff.
They are winning 70/30 in C, but are getting blown the fuck out in A and B.
If you look at the left's entire platform, instead of just culture war shit, you'll see that they only get things that don't cost money, and don't actually change anything structural.
Conservatives get everything they want except for cosmetics, leftists get to choose the wallpaper but nothing else.
I mean, think about the 2000 elections! That shit was crazy. Donald Trump won the election with 46% of the vote! Holy shit!
And in exchange, leftists get to set a couple nono-words.
> If you look at the left's entire platform, instead of just culture war shit, you'll see that they only get things that don't cost money, and don't actually change anything structural.
Because to change anything structural, you need coalitions to move against power. Guess what prevents the formation of such coalitions? Culture war shit like identity politics where the left ends up eating itself from the inside, which is what I was trying to explain in my last post.
Those in power want people divided, that's why the culture war gets amplified and co-opted by power. The left is happily playing that game, and is getting played in turn.
Stop amplifying stupid divisive politics and intersectionality above class if you want to move the levers of power.
The left response to that (not necessarily mine):
If the left give up on intersectionality, what's left? The non-intersectional left movement failed for 50 years. If we give up on the issues of black america, or female america, what is the movement, even?
end scene.
Personally, I think that we could probably circle back around after winning some concessions vis. wealth, but who's to say they aren't correct? The wealth gap has existed for a while, it's just really bad now. If I give up on advocating for civil rights, that splits the coalition in the masses, and I somehow doubt
that the centrist neolib-politicians and the 'race realists' on the right would suddenly be onboard for green energy and wealth redistribution if I promised none of the wealth would go to black people.
> If the left give up on intersectionality, what's left? The non-intersectional left movement failed for 50 years
I have to say I'm a little puzzled by this take. How did it fail exactly? 70 years ago, socialists of any kind were pretty much crucified (McCarthyism), and now it's a reasonably popular movement with a democratic socialist who ran for President twice to great acclaim. That's a pretty dramatic turnaround, so I don't see a failure there.
Furthermore, Medicare was implemented just over 50 years ago, which was the foot in the door for a major leftist policy, universal health care.
I agree that there have also been some setbacks due to various perversions of neoliberal market ideals, but as above, democratic socialism is fairly popular now. Instead of striking while the iron is hot, people now strongly resist allying with others over comparatively trivial disagreements (that is, trivial compared to the benefits of universal health care, stronger labour rights, etc).
> If I give up on advocating for civil rights, that splits the coalition in the masses, and I somehow doubt that the centrist neolib-politicians and the 'race realists' on the right would suddenly be onboard for green energy and wealth redistribution if I promised none of the wealth would go to black people.
Well they wouldn't have a choice, black people would be well represented by unions that would stand to benefit significantly from a revival of labour power. There have even been studies that show that policies that improve class *disproportionately* benefit minorities as compared to policies that specifically target minorities. It's a no-brainer.
Furthermore, it's not even a question of giving up civil rights advocacy, it's a matter of giving issues weight proportional to their impact. Right now it's practically an inversely proportional relationship, rather than the directly proportional relationship that it should be. The petty squabbling then ensures that they alienate all the other people who normally might support them in solidarity.
Just think about a counterfactual world in which we were hit by SARS-COV-2 but identity politics did not have the purchase over the last 5 years, where national attention and political capital is spent on comparatively narrow issues. Don't you think there would have been more of a collective push for an overhaul of health care and worker rights like paid sick leave? A more unified left could have hammered these issues for over a year in the press with glaringly obvious examples everywhere, and it would have effected significant change, in my opinion.
The opportunity is pretty much lost now. Democrats will likely lose in 2022, and nothing will change for probably another 10 years.
"There have even been studies that show that policies that improve class *disproportionately* benefit minorities as compared to policies that specifically target minorities."
The weakness of class-based public policy is that it helps too many blacks AND too many whites. Any policy that boosts the wages of lazy ghetto enwords also boosts the wages of toothless inbred crackers. Middle-class voters *might* be persuaded to part with an additional $100 from their paychecks to assist poor members of the ingroup, but they know that a lot of that money goes to help poor members of the outgroup. If you want socialism, you have to accept that groups you loathe will get on the dole.
The effect of focusing on Woke politics is that popular (?) leftist economic objectives get neglected. But while that's the effect, I don't think it's the intent. I don't think there's a conversation at the top level of the Democratic party and corporate boardrooms that says "Gentlemen, we must protect Neoliberalism from Socialism. Quick, post a trans flag and a Black Power fist on Twitter so that the polloi don't vote for Bernie!" I suspect the opposite is true: Wokeness is seen as a tool to achieve leftist economic policy. It doesn't work - it does the opposite of what it is intended to do - but all that means is that a group has adopted a bad strategy.
The goal of Wokeness is to convince white people to get over their aversion to helping outgroup blacks. Wokeness involves, at its heart, a moral claim: Blacks deserve to be treated better. Their crime rates and poverty are not their fault; they are the consequence of systemic racism, which you, Whitey, uphold. Once whites understand that blacks *deserve* a $15 minimum wage and single-payer healthcare, the whites' aversion to helping blacks will be overcome.
Wokeness is not intended to compete with class-based economic policy. But it works out that way, because while some whites can be made to see that justice requires the use of Socialist economics to help blacks, Wokeness also sparks a backlash against the broad left.
Similar to Edward Scizorhands' response below, I feel like you're getting most of the details correct here, but also missing the big picture.
You claim that leftists want three things: economic equality, environmental protections, and cultural progressivism. Since the majority of environmental protections involve taxing/regulating businesses or allocating government money to green energy/infrastructure programs, we can lump that together with economic equality under the broad category of "fiscal issues" for the sake of simplicity.
Your main point seems to be that leftists in the U.S. keep getting most (but not all) of what they want on cultural issues, but almost none of what they want on fiscal issues, despite the fact that fiscal issues have a far greater material impact on most people's lives and are thus more important in the grand scheme of things. Overall, this leaves you with the impression that the left is losing on the fronts that really matter (i.e. the fight for actual structural reforms that cost money), and only winning trivial and shallow Culture War victories.
So why do right-wingers constantly feel like they're losing too? Because to them, those Culture War battles that you consider "cosmetic" are the ones that matter most! In fact, I'd wager that most of them don't give a fuck about corporate tax rates. Hell, most of them actively despise large corporations for enforcing "woke" standards in workplaces and on social media, for "virtue signaling" support of LGBT rights and BLM, for replacing blue-collar American workers with illegal immigrants who'll work for less pay, for causing mass unemployment by outsourcing jobs to India and importing goods from China. (It doesn't matter if any of that is true or not, that's what these people believe.) Do you really think Trump lowering the corporate tax rate to 21% even remotely felt like a victory for them? Hell, do you think it *was* a victory for them, in the sense that it meaningfully improved their lives or even seemed like it would do so? Of course not. At best, it was an irrelevancy they didn't care about one way or another. At worst, it felt like an actual loss to them, and an insult to boot: "Republicans couldn't get us any Culture War victories even though that's the whole reason we voted for them, but they can get tax cuts for their liberal cosmopolitan elite buddies on Wall Street?" It's no wonder the threats to McConnell and Pence's lives came from the right and not the left.
Below, you said "I somehow doubt that [right-wingers] would suddenly be onboard for green energy and wealth redistribution if I promised none of the wealth would go to black people," but that's honestly pretty close to what a lot of rural White blue-collar conservatives genuinely do want. (Well, almost. Other than the "race realists" you describe, who comprise a vanishingly small percentage of the American right, I don't think they have a problem with Black people per se, but with poor urban Black and Latino culture; it's more cultural than racial.) A world where the government prioritizes the economic interests of "real Americans" over the Wall St. and Silicon Valley megacorps OR immigrants and inner city minorities? I'd say that's exactly their goal.
The apparent contradictions of American politics make a lot more sense when you realize that a sizable chunk of Republican voters are either indifferent or actively opposed to the party's corporate backers and fiscal policies, ONLY vote red for the sake of social and cultural issues, and often utterly despise the politicians who are ostensibly on their side.
"A world where the government prioritizes the economic interests of 'real Americans' over the Wall St. and Silicon Valley megacorps OR immigrants and inner city minorities? I'd say that's exactly their goal."
Europe is running an experiment where social welfare programs that were enacted when the country was 99% Native Ethnic Group continue to run with increasingly diverse populations. I would like to see a graph of "Support for Social Welfare Programs" as a function of "Racial Diversity" for Sweden, France, the UK, Germany, etc. I believe it is taken as a given that the more diverse your country, the less support there is for social welfare programs by the dominant racial group.
Sorry, I was kinda vague. Leftist Perspective Clarification!
The left wants a list of 100 things. They get to have 25 culture war things and fight about another 15. this isn't a victory, and it's almost a crushing defeat.
The right wants a list of 100 things, and gets to have 50 free and clear, and argue about another 25. This is a clear victory, and it's just short of being a total blow out.
"In leftist circles, it is accepted as true gospel that any amount wokeness and canceling people on twitter is purely symbolic."
Wokeness and canceling are not coming from the right. Yet the wokeness and canceling keep coming. Assuming that W&C is not coming from "leftist circles" (because why would they waste resources on symbolic gestures?), who remains as the culprit? Who is pushing W&C if it's not rightists and it's not leftists?
The two possibilities that I can think of are (i) there's a third group, which has eluded being named, that keeps racking up culture war victories that neitht the leftists or rightists want, or (ii) a small subgroup of leftists is unhappy that it isn't getting its esoteric policy preferences, while the broader left marches onward to victory.
No, wokeness and canceling is coming from the left; if only because a majority of people hold left wing values. The right tries to cancel people all the time, but they can't muster up the righteous fury like the left can.
But, you might notice: For all the hue and cry and rending of garments about canceling, Jordan Peterson gets as much airtime as he wants on any news network he wants, and his books get to be front and center in every book store and library in the country.
You'd think if these people were being canceled left right and center, they wouldn't show up as bylines in major newspapers all the time.
It's weakmanning to use Jordan Peterson to demonstrate that rightists' complaints about "Cancel Culture" are overblown. Peterson has basically invincible job security (tenured professor) who intentionally joined the Culture War by becoming the Jungian prophet of disaffected young males. He wrote a conservative-ish book, and not buying his book and harshly criticizing his theses is not "Cancel Culture." Similarly, Ben Shapiro cannot be canceled, Rand Paul cannot be cancelled. Rightists who use those folks as examples of Cancel Culture are making bad arguments.
The Cancel Culture that rightists are correctly worried about is, as I explained in the original thread, the kind experienced by Justine Sacco and Memories Pizza. Roughly speaking, its elements are: (i) disproportionate punishment; (ii) of a non-public figure; (iii) who stumbled or was pushed into public view; (iv) for an essentially harmless violation of a rule (especially a taboo), especially one that emerged very recently; (v) that may not have been a violation at all once the full story comes out (see Nick Sandmann).
"(i) there's a third group, which has eluded being named, that keeps racking up culture war victories that neitht the leftists or rightists want, or (ii) a small subgroup of leftists is unhappy that it isn't getting its esoteric policy preferences, while the broader left marches onward to victory"
Your first theory is correct. The third group is cosmopolitan neoliberals, who are somewhat right-leaning on economics (at least compared to actual leftists) and left-leaning on culture, and keep winning on both fronts.
Your second theory is also mostly correct, but what you call "a small subgroup of leftists" is actually a fairly significant group in its own right: the leftists who consider actual economic leftism to be just as important, or perhaps even more important, than cultural progressivism. What you call "esoteric policy preferences" are actually the very core values and goals of traditional leftist ideology, which was focused on economic equality and class conflict long before it became associated with modern 'Social Justice Warrior' causes. And what you call the "broader left" is actually just the loose alliance of neoliberals, cultural progressives, and genuine economic leftists that comprises the current Democratic Party.
Consider also that maybe dating has gotten more civilized as time has gone on. Like maybe it's not just that people are older -- also dating, as an institution, which was not that old before, really, has matured.
I'm curious what you mean by this; what are some common dating behaviors now that you would describe as more mature than common dating behaviors before?
I feel like the Greta Thunberg/misanthropic/zero-sum/"let's go back to the stone age" type movements were on the rise between 2018-2020 or so. But that kind of ended with the pandemic. In 2019 I probably would've guessed Thunbergism would become the next culture war.
"My more intense feminist friends aren’t any less feminist, but they’re no longer interested in spending their time flogging the same points they did a decade ago. Been there, done that. And, frankly, we’re just not getting unwanted male attention at 35+ the way we did at 22. And of course if we’re still single and looking the men we encounter are older and wiser, too."
This part of the post is legitimately horrifying to me. If a woman still believes in idiotic shit with the same intensity and conviction at 35 as she did at 20, that's *terrible*. I would have hoped that at 35 any sane person would have figured out that unwanted attention is just a price you pay for liberty and complaining about it is bitchy and imbecilic. Clinging to the worst ideas of your youth instead means that you *didn't learn anything*. Likewise, the men she encounters seem in no way to have become wiser as they aged, since wisdom (or even just increased common sense) would imply no longer caring what some judgmental, nagging harridan thought about their hitting on a girl they liked. If you still think that the opinion of the worst women in society matters by age 30, you're a coward, and all you learned is to be a whipped dog.
Rather, what's being described here is our generation *hardening in its folly*, which God willing is not true outside the minuscule cohort of writers of thinkpieces about why they're still single in their 30s, but is a ghastly prospect. I hope they are wrong, and that people at large have obtained far brighter, happier fates than this.
Her statement basically boiled down to "we still hold the same core beliefs, we just mellowed out about them as we got older," which is... actually pretty fine and normal, and what happens to the vast majority of people who were very strongly and openly opinionated in their youth. The fact that you've managed to put such a grossly cynical and negative spin on it says more about you than it does about her.
No, mellowing out about them would necessarily entail becoming less feminist.
We have Scott's report of their self-report.
Basically everyone mellows out going from their 20's to their 30's. But they will say "I still believe X" to maintain a sort of continuity of identity.
Also disgusting, but admittedly plausible. Rereading, I feel like "[m]y more intense feminist friends aren’t any less feminist" is specifically intended to head off this possibility, though. The writer wants to underscore that these friends have *not* mellowed out.
Should I assume you're male?
Yesterday I was harassed rather more than normal. I was riding my bike (slowly on the sidewalk). A man came up and asked for a ride. I said no. Repeat a couple of times. He asked where I was going. I said Whole Foods. He asked to eat with me. I'm giving him polite no's. He opens his arms and asks for a hug. Or maybe said "Give me a hug". I don't see a huge difference between asking and demanding in this case.
I yell at him, saying "Go away". He says a little something and goes away and stays away.
There were a lot of people around. He was bigger than I am, but I'm not sure whether I was physically frightened. My throat is still a little sore, and maybe I should work on how to get loud without forcing it.
I was somewhat upset for the rest of the day. I've had a night's sleep, and I'm alright now, except that I'm not feeling especially patient with you, but I might have had that reaction anyway.
Right, which is a consequence of being allowed the freedom of movement: you have to deal with the outside world. The alternative in practical terms is you either being chaperoned wherever you go or just plain not being allowed to go where you want. That guy can't be stopped by badgering him, and he *certainly* can't be stopped by badgering Scott Aaronson, poor devil. He is an *ineluctable consequence of your freedom*. You either have to suck it up and deal with it like a man, or ask someone to escort you to Whole Foods. The other solutions don't exist, they're fake.
Also, I venture to point out that he did in fact go away. Whatever risk level you assigned to this guy which caused you to fear for your safety was incorrect.
Okay, now map the same thing to being confronted with an aggressive panhandler hitting you up for money, who is much bigger and stronger than you are. Most of us find that pretty damned unpleasant. Indeed, having a lot of aggressive panhandlers in an area, even where there's hardly ever any violence, is a good way to get a lot of people to just avoid that place.
I was actually thinking of the example of beggars myself, who often accost me for money, and who, likewise, cannot be forbidden without an enormous grotesquery of tyranny. This is another case of the same thing: you simply have to suck it up or stay indoors. (Personally, not being raised by parents who were crazed with fear, I also don't regularly feel threatened by beggars, even if they're pushy. And if I did, it would be a me problem, because I've never been assaulted by a beggar. The worst thing they've ever done is move me to pity.)
Well, OTOH, I recently watched a street reporter interviewing people (mostly men, though one of them was gay) about whether they still directly asked people out on the street, and they got quite a lot of people answering that they indeed still do... (though nobody seems to whistle women any more, while they also interviewed one older person reminiscing that that he did it a lot in his youth), though I suspect that the "reporting" was heavily biased in the direction of "interesting stories" ?
You're dealing with something that adheres to a model of critical mass; at some point the reaction can't be stopped and you're just going to irradiate everything. Randomly throwing "birthing people" onto the fire didn't burn down the entire forest, but it put out a lick of flame and you felt it.
I sort of agree with Richard: Alex Jones is gasoline compared to Ben Shapiro's wet newspaper; no matter how much people want Ben Shapiro to ignite and immolate them, it's not going to happen. Any social pyromaniac is going to go left currently anyway, BLM is much more flammable than whatever the Mises Institute is pushing. You're dealing with a fire, not a hydra.
Philosophy bear here. I have been meditating on Scott's critiques of what I said. There's definitely a lot of interest here, which is why I really like Scott's stuff, he's got a sharp critical faculty that stops me from getting lazy.
I flatly disagree with him on canceling people- I really do think that treating people as disposable in that way is upstream of many of the more specific problems he points to- e.g. chilling effects, and that we have to make a point to oppose the destruction of people based on what has been called "offense archaeology", even if we don't like them much. I'm increasingly starting to think that even people who have done quite terrible things shouldn't be bullied about it years after the fact. I make an exception for people who hold formal positions of power which they are still abusing in the same way.
I thought his critique of my Marxist explanation of why socialism didn't take off was interesting and insightful, but ultimately I do think entrenched interests have to be at least part of the explanation.
His first counterargument I took to be of the form "if this is true, then why didn't white men band together against liberal anti-racism and liberal feminism in the same way- weren't their interests- or at least their perceived interests- threatened there?", I would argue a number of factors distinguish the cases:
Firstly, one feature of "the powers that be" in our society is that they are all -every single one of them- wealthy. There are some women among them, and some non-white people, but zero poor people. That means the ruling clique is perfectly unified on the necessity of stopping socialism in terms of their interests, in a way they aren't unified against liberal anti-racism and liberal feminism. This could explain part of the difference in response to anti-racism/feminism on the one hand, and socialism on the other.
Secondly, there's a selection effect that means that the kind of people who become very powerful in our society with regards to media ownership and access to communications must all value money very deeply. It stands to reason that they will therefore be more likely to go on the defence against threats to their money than threats to other kinds of status because selection for the position of "large media shareholder" is based much more on concern for wealth (threatened by socialism) than, say, concern for social status (threatened by anti-racism and feminism).
Thirdly, with regards to white and male members of the middle managers the literary class etc- how were they gotten on board with liberal feminism & liberal anti-racism but not socialism? It is possible to get these types to support liberal feminism and anti-racism on the basis that "they are one of the good ones", and chivalrously supporting the weak will make them look good etc. Even men who later get, say, metood, probably in many cases believed that they had nothing to fear from feminism because they didn't recognise their own past sins. Everyone thinks they're one of the good ones, till their vices are unveiled. There's no story you can tell yourself though about how your "being one of the good ones" will protect you from higher marginal tax rates.
Now Scott raised a second point against my Marxist theory of why socialism didn't take off, which was that he hasn't seen that much anti-Marxist material in the media. I would reply that, for the most part, it's been about denying coverage than negative coverage, but if you want to see a run of negative coverage around the broad American socialist movement, look around the time of the 2016/2020 primaries. There the strategy was not so much to refute socialism, as to constantly change the topic, i.e., to the real or imagined bad behaviour of certain socialists on Twitter etc. The strategy seems to be not to give socialism the same kind of media oxygen (liberal) feminism and (liberal) anti-racism have gotten.
Anyway, I'm working on a blog post on exactly this topic. I would love to hear what others think.
I mostly agree with you, Philosophy Bear. The "one of the good ones" point is something I've thought a lot about, I can even remember doing it myself as late as ~2014. Self-deprecating humor comes naturally to high-status people, especially high-status men. There's a noblesse-oblige to taking your lumps in trivial rhetorical or symbolic ways, it signals to others that you are secure in your power & comfort.
Scott's counterexample, of the manager deciding whether to support wokeness or socialism, misstated the incentives involved. A white male executive cannot stop wokeness by opposing it; he can only make himself its next target. If all the white male executives acted in concert it might matter, but a reign of terror is a type of collective action problem in which everyone weighs the risk of catastrophic personal destruction against the possibility of marginal public benefit. The particulars of the ideology aren't nearly as important when things have already reached this stage.
As I see it the self-interested wokeness vs. socialism calculus came into play much earlier, before the monster broke out of the lab, before the feedback loop of fear & silence took on a life of its own. Imagine you're a young rich person, circa 2010, and you want to make the world a better place but you also don't want to give up any of your power or comfort; there are real, substantive issues around race, gender & sexuality; why not focus on those? It's not a question of choosing a particular ideology to remake the world -- that's not up to any individual or small group, no matter how rich they are -- it's a question of participating in interesting, status-enhancing conversations about justice & oppression without feeling like a giant hypocrite.
On an individual level this bias is surmountable, so there are plenty of counterexamples of young rich people embracing socialism or even full-blown communism. But in aggregate, over time, most of them are going to opt for the philosophy that affords greater psychological luxury, and then reaffirm those choices among their peer networks, in classrooms, and finally in mass media.
There's also a background of neoliberal trans-national cosmopolitanism that I remember becoming pronounced in the 1990s, and even moreso since. This is a good thing; it's the culmination of generations of liberal progress. It also aligns well with capitalism, which wants peaceful workers & consumers, not warring factions. But it means even before wokeness took over, 21st C elites were extremely egalitarian in terms of race, nationality, gender, etc. even as wealth & income inequality were exploding. Of course they would rather talk about race & gender than class. I mean, I can never really prove any of this, but I'm looking at all these facts like I'm looking at the mirrored coastlines of South America & Africa and thinking to myself, "this can't be just coincidence."
"Anyone’s life getting destroyed is sad, but there are many people whose lives got destroyed for other reasons beyond their control, and I don’t want to privilege the people whose lives got destroyed because they said the n-word as targets for sympathy. My concern is more about there being a culture of fear, where people who oppose whatever the wokest 10% of the population think are scared into silence"
I'm not entirely sure why, but this response rings hollow, or off, or something. You care about a macro concern but not the micro issue (not that that is always wrong or anything). I don't want to generate a lot of sympathy for KKK marchers either, but in the interest of free speech (legal version), I find it important that our legal system go to bat for them when the government oversteps. Likewise, in the interest of free speech (philosophical version) aka non-culture-of-fear, I find it important that our extralegal system have a level of tolerance for disliked expression. As the level of punishable transgression decreases and/or level of acceptable punishment increases, like a risk assessment matrix, you get closer to conditions promoting a culture of fear. Some of that movement may represent the implementation of changing societal standards, but some of that just represents the will of a minority that happens to be in charge at the time and puts us on a path dependency. Add to it prevalence-induced concept change (yes, basically just a slippery slope), and you've got a recipe for a culture sliding in a way you don't like. At the macro level, this is your (legitimate!) worry. At the micro level, you (and I) are just another example of someone saying "where my country gone" after we didn't care about someone else's micro world.
"Women are not particularly oppressed when compared to groups that are more oppressed than them."
Women can't walk alone at night. The B slur is the only universally acceptable one left. Marital rape was legal until the late 90's. *We tell girls that their sex means they are required to have certain dreams and not others.* I don't see how women's oppression is not the most ingrained, violent, and normalized one.
"Oppression" to my mind refers to a system of resource extraction from one group by another. Everything else is marginalization (just as depressing, but not oppression.) We don't have many oppressed groups in the U.S. today! Women's bodies, workers' labor, native people's land and resources. Only the latter two of these have a history of international revolutionary campaigns or laws formalizing recognition and remittance (however helpful those have actually been)